bears such internal evidence of having been falsified, that we find the assertion made of the main body of the ten tribes having remained beyond the Euphrates, and of only two being then in Asia or Europe, subject to the Romans.
The 11th book may therefore have been interpolated by some of the same sect or parties as those who composed the fables of the Apocryphal Esdras, and who introduced into it the statement of the ten tribes being still remaining in the lands of their captivity. This appears, therefore, the work of a later age, when the Rabbins, mortified at the non-appearance of their expected Messiah as a temporal prince, denied the application of the prophecies to the events that had occurred, and chose to look on them as yet unfulfilled. They would thus connect the advent of their Messiah with the return of the ten tribes, whose captivity they declared had never been loosed; and though they failed in persuading any others of the Christian writers to assent to their assertions, yet we have seen that they succeeded in drawing St. Jerome into this supposition. But St. Jerome was, more than any other of the Christian fathers, attached to the study of the Hebrew writings; and it cannot, therefore, excite any great astonishment in our minds that he gave it too easy a belief. However much it might suit the views of the rabbinical writers to put forward such opinions, it was not consistent with what the other Christian authorities understood of history, to be so ready to adopt them; and it as little, therefore, becomes us in the present day to receive them as unquestionable.
But whatever might have been the origin of this conception, I trust it has been satisfactorily shown, from the arguments adduced, that the main body of the captives, or of their descendants, must have returned to Jerusalem to become united as one nation with that still larger portion of their brethren who had escaped being carried away. At the time they returned, it is probable that some numbers might have remained behind; and, as Josephus wrote full 600 years after Cyrus, it was only to be expected that the descendants of even a small portion left behind would, in such a long space of time, and under perhaps favourable circumstances, have become what he might justly call "an immense multitude, not to be estimated by numbers." Still, according to his version of Agrippa's speech, they were under subjection to the Parthians, and were so according to St. Jerome some 400 years afterwards. When, therefore, we find Josephus writing 600 years, and St. Jerome 1000 years after the events under our consideration, we must remember that they wrote
