Question VIII. Why are the single or several places of the tribe of Juda not handled [in detail] here?

Since, as was said above (q. 1), the usefulness of Sacred Topography is great, someone may deservedly ask why a more accurate and longer treatment of the places — whether of single [ones], or certainly of the chief and many [ones] — is not here instituted [by me]. Various [men] have various causes; and everyone knows where his own shoe pinches him. To him who was once called “the cymbal of the world” — Apion — Josephus objects (in bk. 2 against him) “ignorance of Geography.” But Calvin says this same cause [is] his own, why in the explanation of these [places] he is “an infant, and altogether nothing.” “Already,” he says (p. 55), “I premised before (I think, p. 49) [that] in delineating the site of places and sifting [their] names I would not be careful — partly because I confess [that] I am not practiced in Topographic science; partly because, of [this] great labor, only a slender fruit would return to the Readers.” But concerning the fruit, [it was] treated in q. 1. But this ignorance of Geography [is] indeed base for that teacher who despises all the ancients before himself; and it is by so much more shameful for Calvin than for Apion, by how much more he is today looked up to by so many, is preferred before all, [and] is perpetually called “the most learned Interpreter, κατ᾽ ἐξοχὴν [kat’ exochēn, ‘par excellence’].” But although other much greater and more necessary [things] repel him from the interpretation of the sacred letters — especially a bad mind, arrogance, [his] zeal of dissension and of Ecclesiastical dissection — yet [there] repels [him] too, and keeps [him] off with both hands, no small ignorance, which [was] condemned by that program [inscription] of Plato, and utterly excluded from the sacred threshold of those schools: “μηδεὶς ἀγεωμέτρητος εἰσίτω [mēdeis ageōmetrētos eisitō]” [“Let no one ignorant of geometry enter”]. But others — that they may not tarry on these [matters] — a useful hastening toward certain other more-useful [things] moves, as I touched also in q. 1. But me, from these [matters], at this time, [that] especially calls away, [which is] that I now see at hand those authors by whom excellent work [is] bestowed in digging out, explaining, delineating, and depicting these [places]. For besides the commentaries of the ancients — Eusebius, Pamphilus, and the Interpreter St. Jerome, and Bede — on the sacred places, there exists the most diligent Masius, Arias Montanus (both in the commentary on this book, and in the before-cited books “Caleb” & “Phaleg”), Christian Adrichomius in the “Theatre of the Holy Land,” [and] P. Alphonsus Salmeron (prolegomenon 41). These [things] being accomplished by these [men] — shall I rightly do [them again]? To these [authors], in the following tribes and chapters too, go, good Reader — go with lucky foot!