in all directions over the plain"—here it would seem that Tacitus had the book of Exodus or Josephus before him—"when a herd of wild asses was seen to retire from their pasture to a rock shaded by trees. Moyses followed them, and, guided by the appearance of a grassy spot, discovered an abundant supply of water. This furnished relief. After a continuous journey for six days, on the seventh they possessed themselves of a country from which they expelled the inhabitants, and in which they founded a city and a temple." This is, indeed, an abridgment of history!—the forty years spent in the wilderness and the conquest of Palestine compressed into a period of seven days!
Now for the rites and ceremonies observed by the Jews, according to Tacitus. Mindful of the services done them by the wild asses, they, in their holy place, consecrated an image of the animal who delivered them from death by thirst in the wilderness. Peculiar and perverse in all they do, the worship, invented by Moyses, is utterly unlike that of other nations. "Things sacred with us, with them have no sanctity, while they allow what with us is forbidden. Apis, in the form of an ox, was one of the greatest of Egyptian deities; therefore the Jews sacrifice that animal." As Tacitus in his day must have seen many hundreds of oxen sacrificed on Roman altars, it is not easy to understand why the Jews were perverse in doing the like. They abhor and abstain from swine's flesh, in remembrance of what they suffered when infected by the leprosy to which this animal is liable. They rest on the seventh day, because it brought with it an end of their toils; and "after a
