Whatever their origin, these rites are sanctioned by their 5 antiquity.  Their other customs are impious and abominable, and owe their prevalence to their depravity.  For all the most worthless rascals, renouncing their national cults, were always sending money to swell the sum of offerings and tribute.[479] This is one cause of Jewish prosperity.  Another is that they are obstinately loyal to each other, and always ready to show compassion, whereas they feel nothing but hatred and enmity for the rest of the world.[480] They eat and sleep separately.  Though immoderate in sexual indulgence, they refrain from all intercourse with foreign women:  among themselves anything is allowed.[481] They have introduced circumcision to distinguish themselves from other people.  Those who are converted to their customs adopt the same practice, and the first lessons they learn are to despise the gods,[482] to renounce their country, and to think nothing of their parents, children, and brethren.  However, they take steps to increase their numbers.  They count it a crime to kill any of their later-born children,[483] and they believe that the souls of those who die in battle or under persecution are immortal.[484] Thus they think much of having children and nothing of facing death.  They prefer to bury and not burn their dead.[485] In this, as in their burial rites, and in their belief in an underworld, they conform to Egyptian custom.  Their ideas of heaven are quite different.  The Egyptians worship most of their gods as animals, or in shapes half animal and half human.  The Jews acknowledge one god only, of whom they have a purely spiritual conception.  They think it impious to make images of gods in human shape out of perishable materials.  Their god is almighty and inimitable, without beginning and without end.  They therefore set up no statues in their temples, nor even in their cities, refusing this homage both to their own kings and to the Roman emperors.  However, the fact that their priests intoned to the flute and cymbals and wore wreaths of ivy, and that a golden vine was found in their temple[486] has led some people to think that they worship Bacchus,[487] who has so enthralled the East.  But their cult would be most inappropriate.  Bacchus instituted gay and cheerful rites, but the Jewish ritual is preposterous and morbid.

The country of the Jews is bounded by Arabia on the east, by Egypt 6 on the south, and on the west by Phoenicia and the sea.  On the Syrian frontier they have a distant view towards the north.[488] Physically they are healthy and hardy.  Rain is rare; the soil infertile; its products are of the same kind as ours with the addition of balsam and palms.  The palm is a tall and beautiful tree, the balsam a mere shrub.  When its branches are swollen with sap they open them with a sharp piece of stone or crockery, for the sap-vessels shrink up at the touch of iron.  The sap is used in medicine.  Lebanon,