42 THE AUSTRALIAN NATURALIST. 
of ‘the house of the Lord, and:the treasures of the King’s house; 
he took away all;” and (II. Chron. 12,'9), “so Shishak, King 
of Egypt, came up against Jerusalem, and took ‘away the trea- 
sures of the House of the Lord,’ or about 588 B.C. as recorded 
in II. Kings 24, 13; 25, 15; II. Chron. 36, 18; Jeremiah 39, 
8; 52, 13, 19; Daniel I., 2; when Nebuchadnezzar came against 
the city, “and he carried out thence all the treasures of the 
house of the Lord . . . . and'cut in pieces all the vessels of 
gold ‘which Solomon, ‘King of Israel, had made in the temple of 
the Lord,” or later, when Ptolemy ‘Soter, Kang of Bgypt, about 
820 ‘B:C., .carried off the replica which had ‘been ‘made and 
which was ‘in ‘use at the time of the Septuagint translation, or, 
again, ‘in 198 B:C., when Antiochus the Great ‘captured the city 
and despoiled the Temple, or in 170 B.C., as related in one 
of the ‘books of the Apocrypha (1 Maccabees 1, 20-24), when 
‘Antiochus Epiphanes stormed ‘the city and plundered the Tem- 
ple, taking away all the valuable furnishings. Then in 54 B.C. 
the ‘unfortunate city met the same fate at the hands of ‘Crassus. 
In 19 B.C. the rebuilding of ‘the Temple was ‘commenced by 
Herod. 
From all this we may ‘be sure that the later breastplates 
were a series of reproductions made from time to time to re- 
place ‘those taken away at the various periods mentioned, and 
we know that a ‘breastplate was in ceremonial use at the time 
of the:capture and destruction of ‘the city ‘by Titus in 70 A.D., 
about 300 years after the translation of the Pentateuch. There 
can be no doubt that successive breastplates were not exact 
replicas of the original one made for Aaron. It would not al- 
ways be possible to get the correct gems, and so use would 
have to be made of such as were available. 
After this period Jerusalem ceased ‘to be the centre of 
Hebrew influence in Palestine, the headquarters of the religious 
life of the nation being transferred to ‘the new city of Tiberias, 
which had been ‘founded by Herod Antipas early in the ‘first 
century A.D. ‘ 
In ‘passing, it may be well to mention that the ‘Pentateuch 
or Torah was'the Jewish Bible or Book of the Law, and consisted 
of the five books, Genesis to Deuteronomy whcih are placed 
first in'our Bible. The Septuagint was ‘the translation of these 
books into Greek, the name being afterwards applied from the 
legend ‘that 70, or more correctly 72, translators -carried out the 
work,'6 foreach ofthe tribes of Israel. At a later period other 
books were translated and added to the Septuagint, but in its 
original form it contained only the five mentioned. 
