There is no need to add that after the return from Babylon for more than five hundred years again until the birth of Christ the Jewish constitution was aristocratic, the high priests, for the time being, acting as heads of the State, none of whom came from the tribe of Judah. So from all these reasons it is proved that there is no reference here to Judah the original individual, to his descendants, nor in the oracle that said: "A prince shall not fail from Judah, (d) nor a governor from his loins," but that the only consistent interpretation of the passage is the one I have already given, that we must understand it of the tribe as a whole. The tribe most certainly was leader of the whole nation from the very beginning, from Moses' own time. And in accordance with such headship, as being designed by God from the outset, the country is even now called Judaea after the tribe, and the whole race are known as Jews. We must, therefore, understand it to mean what would be expressed more clearly, if it were said that the tribe of Judah would never lose its headship of the whole nation. So Symmachus says: "The power shall not be taken away (372) from Judah," shewing of course the authority and the royal position of what was afterwards to be the tribe of Judah. From it neither "the sceptre," as Aquila says, this being the symbol of royal rule, nor "the power," according to Symmachus, shall be taken away, the prophecy affirms, "until he come," it says, "for whom it is laid up, and he shall be the expectation of the nations." What expectation was this, but that of which Abraham and those after him had received the prophecies? First, is it not very striking that (b) though there were twelve Hebrew tribes, the race even now has its name from none but Judah? It can only be explained by the prophetic oracle, which attached the royal position to the tribe, of Judah. And it is for this same reason that their fatherland is called Judaea. For why was not the nation called after the eldest of the twelve, I mean (c) Reuben, according to the divine law of primogeniture? Why not from Levi, who was greater than Judah in order of birth, and also in receiving the priesthood? Why not, even more, was the race and the country not called after Joseph, from his acquiring rule not only over the whole of Egypt, but over his own relations, and because his descendants, long years after, were to rule as many as nine tribes of the nation, on whose account it was far more probable that the whole race and the country would have been named after their ancestor? And who would not agree (d) that they might reasonably have been called from Benjamin, since their famous mother-city and the all-holy Temple of of God was in the portion of his tribe? But yet, in spite of all, the name of the Lord and of the whole nation was . drawn from none of them but Judah, as the prophecy foretold. I have, therefore, referred the words, "A prince shall not fail from Judah," to the tribe, and only in that sense is the prediction true. For from the time of Moses there has not failed a continued line of rulers of part of the nation, drawn as I said from different tribes, but the tribe of Judah has all along stood forth as the head of the whole (373) nation. An illustration will make what I have said clear. Just as the procurators and governors appointed in the Roman Empire over nations, their praefects and military chiefs, and their highest kings, are not all drawn from Rome nor from the seed of Remus and Romulus, but from many different races, and yet all their kings and the rulers and governors below them are all called Romans, and their power is named Roman, and the rule of them all generally has this appellation, in the same way we (b) should think of the Hebrew state, where you have the name of the tribe of Judah applied generally to the whole nation, though there be kings and governors of divisions from different tribes, but all honoured with the name of Judah. We understand then that the prophet's words: "Judah, thy brethren shall praise thee," were to be applied to the whole tribe. For he knew that being marked out for precedence it would be honoured more than the other tribes, and since it was best in warfare, and the sole leader of the whole nation in operations against the enemy, he rightly continues: "Thy hands shall be on the back of thy (c) enemies." Then for its ruling and royal position he calls it, "a lion's" whelp." And as ancestor and prophet, glorying in the reputation of the tribe, he adds: "From a seed, my son, thou hast ascended"; while the words: "Falling down thou hast slept as a lion, and as a lion's whelp," shew its character of terror and bravery, its utter fearlessness of external attack, and contempt of its foes. He being such, (d) or rather, his tribe being such, who, he says, shall arouse it? He suggests that the Person who is to remove the tribe in question from its throne, and move it from its royal position, will be some one great, wonderful, unusual, and hard to imagine. Then he tells us who it is to be, telling us that it is He Who is the Expectation of nations, of Whom it is predicted that He will only appear among men, when the ruler fails, and the governor is changed, and the tribe of Judah is removed from its position of power. Who is this, but our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ?----at Whose birth, as the prophecy before us (374) predicted, the rulers and governors set over their nation from the Jews themselves would fail, the tribe of Judah lose the dominant and royal position that it had held over the nation for so long, and be subject to the Romans, their rulers from that day to this, who overcame the Jewish (b) nation together with the rest of the world, and under whom Herod, a man of alien birth apart from their race, was appointed king by Augustus and the Roman Senate. For Herod was son of Antipater, and Antipater belonged to Ascalon, and was son of some temple-server at the Temple of Apollo, who married a woman named Kuprine, of Arab race, and begat Herod. He, you will remember, being sprung from this family, got rid of and slew Hyrcanus, the last of the line of ruling high-priests, with (c) whom the government of the Jews by native rulers came to an end, Herod being, as I say, the first foreigner to be called the King of the Jews. In his time Jesus Christ was born, and at one and the same time the position of the tribe of Judah was taken away, the authority of the kingdom of the Jews destroyed, and the prophecy preceding this fulfilled: "There shall not fail a prince from Judah, nor a governor from his loins, until there come the things laid up for him," who, he says, will not only be the expectation of the Jews, but of the Gentiles. As, therefore, the expectation of the call of the Gentiles, prophesied long (d) before to Abraham, was "laid up," until the rulers and governors of the Jewish race should have ceased, and their independent government should have been changed to submission to Rome, and to the Gentile Herod, the Evangelist Luke, noting the date of the cessation of Jewish rulers, tells us that the teaching of Christ began in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judaea; and Matthew says the same in a disguised form. For having described the birth of our Lord and Saviour, he adds: "And when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judrea, in the days of Herod the king, behold wise men came from the East to Jerusalem, saying, Where is that which is born king of the Jews?" wherein he shews clearly enough both that they were under (375) foreign rule, and also the calling of the foreign nations from the East by God. For foreigners ruled over the Jews, and foreigners coming from the East recognized and worshipped the Christ of God, Who had been prophesied of old. The prophecy of Jacob is thus seen clearly to have been fulfilled, being brought to pass at the end of the national existence of the Jews, even as he predicted to his sons, saying: "Come together, that I may announce to you, what shall happen to you at the end of the days." (b) For we must understand by the end of the days the end of the national existence of the Jews. What, then, did he say they must look for? The cessation of the rule of Judah, the destruction of their whole race, the failing and ceasing of their governors, and the abolition of the dominant kingly position of the tribe of Judah, and the rule and kingdom of Christ, not over Israel but over all nations, according to the words, "This is the expectation of the nations."