and he gave them leave to build a temple and ordain priests for themselves.  Onias built his temple at On or Onion, a city about twenty-three miles from Memphis, once the capital of the district of Heliopolis.  It was on the site of an old Egyptian temple of the goddess Pasht, which had fallen into disuse and decay, and was built after the model of the temple of Jerusalem.  Though by the Jewish law there was to be no second temple, yet Onias defended himself by quoting, as if meant for his own times, the words of Isaiah, who says that in that day there shall be an altar to the Lord in the midst of the land of Egypt.  The building of this temple, and the celebrating the Jewish feasts there, as in rivalry to the temple of Jerusalem, were a never-failing cause of quarrel between the Hebrew and the Greek Jews.  They each altered the words of the Bible to make it speak their own opinions.  The Hebrew Bible now says that the new temple was in the City of Destruction, and the Greek Bible says that it was in the City of Righteousness; whereas, from the Arabic version and some early commentaries, it seems that Isaiah was speaking of the city of Heliopolis, where there had been of old an altar to the Lord.  The leaders of the Greek party wished the Jews to throw aside the character of strangers and foreign traders; to be at home and to become owners of the soil.  “Hate not laborious work,” says the son of Sirach; “neither husbandry, which the Most High hath ordained.”

About the same time the Jews brought before Ptolemy, as a judge, their quarrel with the Samaritans, as to whether, according to the law of Moses, the temple ought to have been built at Jerusalem, or on the green and fertile Mount Gerizim, where the Samaritans built their temple, or on the barren white crags of Mount Ebal, where the Hebrew Bible says that it should be built; and as to which nation had altered their copies of the Bible in the twenty-seventh chapter of Deuteronomy and eighth chapter of Joshua.  This dispute had lately been the cause of riots and rebellion.  Ptolemy seems to have decided the question for political reasons, and to please his own subjects, the Alexandrian Jews; and without listening to the arguments as to what the law ordered, he was content with the proof that the temple had stood at Jerusalem for about eight hundred years, and he put to death the two Samaritan pleaders, who had probably been guilty of some outrage against the Jews in zeal for Mount Gerizim, and for which they might then have been on their trial.

Onias, the high priest, was much esteemed by Philometor, and bore high offices in the government; as also did Dositheus, another Jew, who had been very useful in helping the king to crush a rebellion.  Dositheus called himself a priest and a Levite, though his title to that honour seems to have been doubted by his countrymen.  He had brought with him into Egypt the book of Esther, written in Greek, which he said had been translated out of the Hebrew in Jerusalem by Lysimachus.  It contained some additions for which the Hebrew has never been brought forward, and which are now placed among the uncanonical books in the Apocrypha.