And all the days of Seth were nine hundred and
twelve
years, and he died.
] As his father Adam before him. Seth, according to Josephus
F12, was a very good man, and brought
up his children well, who trod in his steps, and who studied the
nature of the heavenly bodies; and that the knowledge of these
things they had acquired might not be lost, remembering a
prophecy of Adam, that the world should be destroyed both by fire
and by water, they erected two pillars, called Seth's pillars;
the one was made of brick, and the other of stone, on which they
inscribed their observations, that so if that of brick was
destroyed by a flood, that of stone might remain; and which the
above writer says continued in his time in the land of Siriad.
The Arabic writers F13 make Seth to be the inventor of the
Hebrew letters, and say, that when he was about to die he called
to him Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch, their wives and
children, and adjured them by the blood of Abel not to descend
from the mountain where they dwelt, after the death of Adam, nor
suffer any of their children to go to, or mix with any of the
seed of Cain, which were in the valley; whom he blessed, and
ordered by his will to serve the Lord, and then died in the year
of his age nine hundred and twelve, on the third day of the week
of the month Ab (which answers to part of July and part of
August), A. M. 1142, and his sons buried him in the hidden cave
in the holy mountain, and mourned for him forty days.