510 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



I confess that Dr. Schiirer appears to me to have seriously mis- 

 apprehended in some degree the spirit of this measure as well as 

 the facts, when he says * that it involved the abolition of whatever 

 residue of political independence had thus long remained to Pales- 

 tine, because Hyrcanus was now deprived of his temporal and 

 confined to his priestly power. If we examine the matter accord- 

 ing to the reason of the case, it was probably a great gain to the 

 population to have the Mosaic law administered at its own doors 

 by its own local leaders rather than by a priest-king sitting at a 

 distance in Jerusalem. If we test it by the general spirit of the 

 policy of this proconsul, we are led to suppose it friendly, because 

 with it there was combined the rebuilding of some cities which 

 had been overthrown. If we follow the authority of Josephus, we 

 are bound to take it as a measure altogether favorable to Jewish 

 liberties; for he says, f " thus the Jews were liberated from dy- 

 nastic rule, and remained under the government of their local 



heads " (iv apicrTOKpareia Sirjyov). 



Since the text, as it stands, entirely overthrows the doctrine 

 that Gadara was a Gentile city, the propounders of that theory 

 can only meet their difficulty by altering it, although they must 

 surely feel that the contradiction of two independent works is a 

 remedy not daring only, but rather desperate. 



But, independently of the confirmatory witness of a double 

 text, Josephus can not have written Gazara, for, if he had done 

 so, he would have committed the absurd error of contradicting 

 himself in the very sentence in which he wrote it. 



Gazara is not only " far on the other side of Jordan." "We are 

 dealing with the northeast of the country, and Gazara is in the 

 extreme southwest. Josephus says expressly that Gabinius di- 

 vided the country into five equal districts. Now the old king- 

 dom of Judsea may be taken roughly as one third of Palestine. 

 Samaria was probably excluded : even if it were not, the case is 

 not greatly altered. For the emendation thus " pointed out " en- 

 tirely overthrows the equality of the districts. It gives to Judsea 

 three out of the five Sanhedrims, and, leaving Amathus for the 

 country beyond Jordan, assigns to Sepphoris alone the Galilees 

 and Decapolis, or a territory about as large as that given to the 

 three southern centers conjointly. 



It can hardly be necessary to observe that, besides this fatal 

 objection, Gazara seems to be disqualified by its geographical re- 

 moteness near the southwestern border, and perhaps also by com- 

 parative historical insignificance. 



The emendation, then, has to be committed emendaturis igni- 

 bus for self-contradiction ; and the twice-repeated testimony of 

 Josephus stands intact, showing that, shortly after the time of 



* Gesch., i, 276. t Antiq., xiv, 5, 4. 



