349 
The appointment of Sethos, probably in the place of Boc- 
chonis, to the chief rule in Lower Egypt, at Sais, was con- 
' sidered to have been an act of the Ethiopic king or kings 
of the day. 
It was denied that Sethos could have been a priest of 
Vulcan at all; and that, where he is so called in the present 
text of Herodotus, the words are redundant, and altogether 
contradict facts stated elsewhere in Herodotus; and hence we 
are obliged to reject the title of priest ‘‘ of Vulcan,” and call 
Sethos simply a priest or a prophet of a “god,” or “gods,” 
whose proper name, if known, would not have been men- 
tioned by Pagan priests, who, by calling the prophet, Sethos, 
attributed his gifts to Typhon, or Seth, the evil genius of the 
neighbourhood of Pelusion, according to Egyptian superstition. 
The analogy in the description, by Herodotus, of the vision 
of Sethos with one of the two visions of the prophet Isaiah, 
led the author to identify the party called Sethos by the priests 
of Vulcan, at Memphis, by the diabolical title Sethos, with 
the Jewish prophet Isaiah, or E-Sais ; and adopt Herodotus’s 
statements as explanatory of the means adopted by Provi- 
dence for the fulfilment of the prophecy, that the Assyrians 
should not shoot an arrow or raise a shield at Jerusalem. It 
was also shown, that the statements in Herodotus, taken in 
connexion with the Biblical notices of Sennacherib’s defeat, and 
a quotation from Berosus preserved by Josephus, that the 
mode of the first discomfiture of Sennacherib at Pelusion was 
exactly the same in kind with that of the Midianites and their 
allies,—the different nations, Arabs, Assyrians, Medes, and 
Persians, composing Sennacherib’s army, having quarrelled 
and fought with each other with their swords, and without 
shields. To this battle Herodotus refers, when he notices the 
bones of the people he saw at Pelusion who fell on the occasion 
of thefdiscoveryjof the depredations committed by the mice on 
their bow-strings and shield-handles, during the night after 
the arrival of the army before Pelusion. 
