231 , 



supputations he appears in several instances to follow and 

 support, must be attributed to the intentional errors of the 

 transcribers, many of whom, might be willing to correct the 

 copies they preserved, by the reading they judged most con- 

 formable to Scripture. As the Septuagint was principally in 

 use, perhaps the ancient fathers had corrected his earlier 

 epochs by iis authority, and as the passage under review was 

 understood both in the Septuagint and Hebrew, to be an ex- 

 clusive interval of peace, without referring to the servitude^, 

 they amended his reading by adding the servitudes, and 

 made up the number we now read. We know that the 

 Grecian fathers attached considerable consequence to im- 

 pressing the Jewish traditions into the service of religion, and 

 as they had declared, the Messiah was to appear in the fifth 

 millenary ; the chronology of the Septuagint, as most ac- 

 cordant to this, was most agreeable to them ; in this period, 

 from the exod, finding the numbers in the book of Kings, 

 incompatible with those in the Judges, they paraphrased 

 it in the manner we have particularised — and many of 

 them who had engaged in controversies with the heathen 

 philosophers, were anxious to establish the antiquity of the 

 Hebrew books and writers, above any period to which Gre- 

 cian literature could ascend. This idea, made them too often 

 adopt calculations of rather dubious authenticity, and the 

 interpretation in general, most willingly received, would be 

 that more favourable to the antiquity of the Jewish oeconomy 

 VOL. XI. 2 H and 



