Disquisitio philol. de Iudaeorum odio et abstinentia a porcina, eiusque c ausis

and that kind of human being, as hateful to the gods, was ordered to be transported to other lands. Memorable is the passage of DIODORUS SICULUS in Eclogues of Book XL, from the beginning, from the version of L. Rhodomannus: When a pestilential plague had once arisen in Egypt, most people attributed the cause of the evil to an offense against the Deity. For since many foreigners of mixed origins lived there, who used foreign rites in the ministry of sacred things and in sacrifices, it happened that the ancestral honors of the gods among them faded away. Hence, suspicion was cast upon the natives of that region that, unless they removed the aliens, it would come to pass that they would never be freed from evils, and other things worthy of note regarding the Jews and their leader Moses are related in the following. JUSTIN, Book 36, 2: His son (as he thinks, of Joseph) was Moses, a) whom, besides the inheritance of paternal knowledge, the beauty of his form also commended. But the Egyptians, when they suffered from scabies and vitiligo (that is, leprosy), warned by a response, drove him out with the sick, lest the plague creep to the many, so that he might not infect the rest. Therefore, having become the leader of the exiles, he stole the sacred things of the Egyptians, etc. PTOLEMY CHENNUS of Alexandria, son of Hephaestion, whose 6 Books of History have perished due to the injury of time, and whose few excerpts are found in PHOTIUS Bibliotheca, codex 190, reported a silly fabrication, as related by Photius from him on page 251, Hœschel edition. He says the Jewish lawgiver Moses was called ΑΛΦΑ Alpha, because he suffered from porrigo or scabies, which the Greeks call αλφος alphos: ὁ δὲ φλυαρων οὗτος ὁ μυθογραφος Μωσης φησιν, ὁ των ἑβραιων νομοθετης ΑΛΦΑ ἐκαληθε, δια το ΑΛΦΟς ἐχειν ἐπι τω σωματος This babbling mythographer says that Moses, the lawgiver of the Hebrews, was called Alpha because he had alphos on his body. HELLADIUS BESANTINUS reports the same about Moses "Alpha" in his Chrestomathia, a fragment of which work is in PHOTIUS cod. 279, but it was edited separately at Utrecht in 1686, and illustrated with the posthumous notes of John MEURSIUS; he says τον Μωσιν Αλφα καλεισθαι, διο τι ἀλφοις το σω- that Moses is called Alpha because his body was full of alphos or vitiligo.

a) Concerning the fame of Moses among the Gentiles, one can read FRID. SPANHEIM, Ecclesiastical History of the Old Testament, p. 332 sq. (major ed.), TH. GALE, The Court of the Gentiles, Vol. I, Book II, p. 28 sq., and others in J. C. WOLF, Hebrew Library, Vol. II, pp. 65, 66.