SQO PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO 1740. 



in the main, he prepares his reader to expect full satisfaction from his own, 

 which makes the subject of his second book. 



In the second book, he undertakes to reconcile the generations of men, set 

 forth in Sanchoniathon's fragment, with those which are recorded by Moses, 

 of the patriarchs before, and for some time after the flood. By the help of 

 Hebrew, Phoenician and Egyptian etymologies, he often makes the names, 

 which at first sight are almost all quite unlike, to be the same in sound, or at 

 least in .sense. And by this application of his skill in the ancient languages, 

 he readily finds out a coincidence between Moses's and Sanchoniathon's earliest 

 generations. 



But his main work, and what he appears most pleased with, is his discovery 

 of Abraham and his family, among the latter generations recorded by Sancho- 

 niathon. Having laid down, that Ouranos is Terah, the father of Abraham, 

 he undertakes to prove, that Abraham is the Chronus of Sanchoniathon, and 

 the Saturnus of the Latins ; that Sarah, his wife, is the same with the goddess 

 Rhea ; that Ishmael, Abraham's son, is the Miith of Sanchoniathon, and the 

 Dis or Pluto of the Greeks and Romans : that Isaac, Abraham's other son, is 

 the same with the Sadid of Sanchoniathon, with Jupiter among the Latins, and 

 Zjuf among the Greeks, his wife Rebecca being Juno ; that Esau, Isaac eldest 

 son, is Osiris and Bacchus ; and that Jacob, the youngest, is Typhon. And, 

 in like manner, he finds a very great part of the Grecian theology in Abraham's 

 family. 



In the mean while his readers will, perhaps, make two very material obser- 

 vations on this extraordinary discovery of his : the one, that Chronus's cha- 

 racter in Sanchoniathon's fragment, is the most immoral and tyrannous of any 

 recorded there : and how to reconcile this with the character given in scripture 

 to Abraham, as the friend of God, the father of the faithful, &c. is no easy 

 task : it requires, to be sure, more than a resemblance of two or three circum- 

 stances, common to Chronus and Abraham, when their historians in fifty other 

 circumstances make their characters essentially different. The other con- 

 sideration, which occurs, when we read this treatise, is, that Abraham had ill 

 luck indeed, if, when he left his native country because of the rise of idolatry 

 there, all the grosser idolatry of the heathen nations after his time took its rise 

 from him and his family : the very crime which he took pains to avoid, he was 

 the accidental occasion of, if he and his are to be thus placed at the head of 

 the heathen theology. 



The author, having finished this remarkable part of his work, enters into a 

 very learned detail of the particular Gods of the several heathen nations, who 

 are the most celebrated in history ; and he has shewed a great compass of 



