(14) This number in Josephus, that Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the
temple in the eighteenth year of his reign, is a mistake in the
nicety of chronology; for it was in the nineteenth. The true
number here for the year of Darius, in which the second temple
was finished, whether the second with our present copies, or the
sixth with that of Syncellus, or the tenth with that of Eusebius,
is very uncertain; so we had best follow Josephus's own account
elsewhere, Antiq. ;B. XI. ch. 3. sect. 4, which shows us that
according to his copy of the Old Testament, after the second of
Cyrus, that work was interrupted till the second of Darius, when
in seven years it was finished in the ninth of Darius.

(15) This is a thing well known by the learned, that we are not
secure that we have any genuine writings of Pythagoras; those
Golden Verses, which are his best remains, being generally
supposed to have been written not by himself, but by some of his
scholars only, in agreement with what Josephus here affirms of
him.

(16) Whether these verses of Cherilus, the heathen poet, in the
days of Xerxes, belong to the Solymi in Pisidia, that were near a
small lake, or to the Jews that dwelt on the Solymean or
Jerusalem mountains, near the great and broad lake Asphaltitis,
that were a strange people, and spake the Phoenician tongue, is
not agreed on by the learned. If is yet certain that Josephus
here, and Eusebius, Prep. IX. 9. p. 412, took them to be Jews;
and I confess I cannot but very much incline to the same opinion.
The other Solymi were not a strange people, but heathen
idolaters, like the other parts of Xerxes's army; and that these
spake the Phoenician tongue is next to impossible, as the Jews