  While the sage fully appreciates that the Khazar king's principal concern is to learn what actions are pleasing and displeasing, he also recognizes that the king has been perplexed and preoccupied from the beginning with the claim that God created the world out of nothing in six days. The discussion of the divine order and of what the attributes of the undisputed prophet are made it clear that knowledge of hidden things in both the past and future was one such attribute. So it is that in the course of responding to a query about the reliability of the Bible's chronology, the sage addresses himself to several of the reasons for the king's perplexity about creation, and he does so in unexpected ways. First, he flatly dismisses claims about the great antiquity of certain monuments in India that allegedly refute the Bible's chronology and of certain records that name people who lived before Adam. He argues that these claims are unconfirmed and that the uneducated multitude which accepts such things is wayward and unreliable. It is precisely because the multitude lacks both well established beliefs and an agreed-upon chronology, such as the Jews possess, that they succumb so easily to credulousness.