means the land will bring forth its fruits. Upon Bocchoris's
having received these oracles, he called for their priests, and
the attendants upon their altars, and ordered them to make a
collection of the impure people, and to deliver them to the
soldiers, to carry them away into the desert; but to take the
leprous people, and wrap them in sheets of lead, and let them
down into the sea. Hereupon the scabby and leprous people were
drowned, and the rest were gotten together, and sent into desert
places, in order to be exposed to destruction. In this case they
assembled themselves together, and took counsel what they should
do, and determined that, as the night was coming on, they should
kindle fires and lamps, and keep watch; that they also should
fast the next night, and propitiate the gods, in order to obtain
deliverance from them. That on the next day there was one Moses,
who advised them that they should venture upon a journey, and go
along one road till they should come to places fit for
habitation: that he charged them to have no kind regards for any
man, nor give good counsel to any, but always to advise them for
the worst; and to overturn all those temples and altars of the
gods they should meet with: that the rest commended what he had
said with one consent, and did what they had resolved on, and so
traveled over the desert. But that the difficulties of the
journey being over, they came to a country inhabited, and that
there they abused the men, and plundered and burnt their temples;
and then came into that land which is called Judea, and there
they built a city, and dwelt therein, and that their city was
named Hierosyla, from this their robbing of the temples; but that
still, upon the success they had afterwards, they in time changed
its denomination, that it might not be a reproach to them, and
called the city Hierosolyma, and themselves Hierosolymites."