🚀 go-pugleaf

The book which contains this law, the first of all, is itself the most
ancient book in the world, those of Homer, Hesiod, and others, being six or
seven hundred years later.

621. The creation of the deluge being past, and God no longer requiring to
destroy the world, nor to create it anew, nor to give such great signs of
Himself, He began to establish a people on the earth, purposely formed, who
were to last until the coming of the people whom the Messiah should fashion
by His spirit.

622. The creation of the world beginning to be distant, God provided a
single contemporary historian, and appointed a whole people as guardians of
this book, in order that this history might be the most authentic in the
world, and that all men might thereby learn a fact so necessary to know, and
which could only be known through that means.

623. Japhet begins the genealogy.

Joseph folds his arms, and prefers the younger.

624. Why should Moses make the lives of men so long, and their generations
so few?

Because it is not the length of years, but the multitude of generations,
which renders things obscure. For truth is perverted only by the change of
men. And yet he puts two things, the most memorable that were ever imagined,
namely, the creation and the deluge, so near that we reach from one to the
other.

625. Shem, who saw Lamech, who saw Adam, saw also Jacob, who saw those who
saw Moses; therefore the deluge and the creation are true. This is
conclusive among certain people who understand it rightly.

626. The longevity of the patriarchs, instead of causing the loss of past
history, conduced, on the contrary, to its preservation. For the reason why
we are sometimes insufficiently instructed in the history of our ancestors
is that we have never lived long with them, and that they are often dead
before we have