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07
THE PENTATEUCH
IN CONTRAST WITH
THE SCIENCE AND MORAL SENSE
OF OUR AGE.
By
A
PHTSICIAN.
PART II.
“Zufallige Geschichtswahrheiten konnen der Beweis von nothwendigen
Vernunftswahrheiten nie werden ” — Contingent historical truths can never be
demonstration of necessary rational truths.—Lessing.
PUBLISHED
BY
THOMAS
SCOTT,
NO. II THE TERRACE, FARQUHAR ROAD, UPPER NORWOOD
LONDON, S.E.
1873.
Price Sixpence.
��THE BOOK OF EXODUS.
MOSES—THE FLIGHT FROM EGYPT—THE
WILDERNESS—LEGISLATION.
HE descendants of Jacob, sur named Israel,
called Israelites and children of Israel, increased
amazingly, according to the text, “ multiplying and
waxing exceeding mighty, so that the land was
filled with them,” the effect of which is said to have
been— ?
That the jealousy of the Egyptians their masters
was roused, and the Pharaoh, or king, fearing that,
in case of war with a neighbour, they might join the
enemy, fight against him, and so “ get him out of the
land,” therefore were taskmasters set over them to
afflict them, and make their lives bitter with hard
bondage in brick and mortar and service in the fields ;
the straw held needful in brick-making, among other
things, being finally withheld, whilst the tale of bricks
made was required to be the same as before.
Bricks and mortar, we may presume, from their
being particularly mentioned, were the materials
employed by the Egyptians in their buildings ?
The great structures of Egypt, nevertheless, appear
to have been invariably built of stone without mortar.
The temples and palaces of Babylon and Nineveh,
however, were uniformly built of brick and mortar.
In the hard bondage in brick and mortar of the text
we have, therefore, one of the many traits to be had,
when they are looked for, of the age and authorship
T
L
�138
The Pentateuch.
of the Pentateuch • the compiler of which was neither
Moses nor any contemporary of his, but one who
must have lived after the Babylonian Captivity, and
had had, as it seems, occasion to learn something of
the art and mystery both of brick-making and brick
laying—arts little practised either in alluvial Egypt
or rocky Palestine, but pursued as a principal industry
around Babylon and Nineveh on the clay bottoms of
the Euphrates and Tigris.
The Pharaoh of Egypt is said to have fallen on
what seems an extraordinary device to keep down
the numbers of the now obnoxious Israelites?
He speaks to the Hebrew midwives—Shiphrah
and Puah—the names of these women, strange to
say, having survived the wreck of ages ! and orders
them, when they do their office by the Hebrew
women, to kill all the male children, but to save
the females alive.
A most unkingly command; no less unkingly than
unlikely ever to have been given. In a despotic
country like Egypt, however, the midwives would have
nothing for it but to obey ?
So we should have thought; but they, according to
the text, set the king’s order at defiance: “They
feared God,” it is said, and spared the lives of both
the male and female Hebrew children.
Pharaoh would punish the midwives, as matter of
course, for their contempt of his royal commands ?
So might we also fairly have supposed that he would;
but the midwives plead in excuse that “ the Hebrew
women are lively, and are delivered ere the midwife
can come in to them.”
This needed not to have hindered them from carry
ing out the Pharaoh’s orders F
Certainly not; for the new-born child must have
come immediately into their hands—the first moment
under any circumstances at which they could have
obeyed the ruler. But, as if the tale were made to
�Exodus : Israel in Egypt.
139
bear witness to its own. absurdity, we learn that not
only did Pharaoh not punish the contumacious mid
wives, Shiphrah and Puah, but even rewarded them
by building houses for them !
Failing to enlist the two midwives—two midwives
for the service of a people who must have been mil
lions in number, if every part of the narrative be true
—what is said to have been the Pharaoh’s next move
against his obnoxious slave-subjects, the children of
Israel?
He charges them, saying : “ Every son that is born
ye shall cast into the river, and every daughter ye
shall save alive;” transferring his orders, set at
nought by the midwives, to the parents of the children
themselves.
Such an order is surely as little likely as the one that
goes before it, either to have been given by a king to
any section of his subjects as it was to be obeyed by
them ?
No command of the kind is recorded in the annals
of any other policied or even semi-savage community.
More than this, the Nile was a sacred stream, furnish
ing the sole water-supply of the country; and the
signal progress the Egyptians had made in civilisation,
even at the early date to which the records we are
discussing refer, assures us that all pollution of the
river by dead bodies and the like must have been for
bidden. The dead were not even buried in the soil
of the cultivated lands of Egypt, but, being em
balmed, were stowed away beyond the reach of the
inundation.
Looking at the Hebrew scriptures in the way we
do, as ordinary literary compositions, what might we
say was the writer’s object in the narrative before us ?
That it is contrived, all unartistic as it is, by way
of prologue to the story of the wonderful manner in
.which the life of the male child Moses was preserved.
The future leader and legislator of the chosen people
�140
The Pentateuch.
could not be left with the uneventful entrance into
the world that is the lot of ordinary men. His life
must be in danger from his birth, and miraculously
guarded; he must be the nursling and adopted son of
a queen or of a king’s daughter at the least. And so
it all falls out. Born of parents of the house of Levi,
as it is said, the mother of the future leader conceals
his birth for three months, and then exposes him in
an ark or cradle of bulrushes which she lays among
the flags by the river’s brink. The daughter of
Pharaoh comes down “ to wash herself at the river,”
and, seeing the cradle, she sends her maid to fetch it.
There she finds the infant; presumes that it is one of
the Hebrews’ children, and, instead of ordering it to
be thrown into the river, as a dutiful daughter would
have done, in obedience to her royal father’s orders,
she procures a nurse for it, who turns out to be its
own mother, and gives it the name of Moses—the
saved from the stream—because, as she says, “ I
drew him out of the water.”
With such a nurse the child was likely to do well ?
He throve, grew up, and became as a son to Pha
raoh’s daughter—no inquiry being made, we must
presume, by the princess’s father or mother how she
came by such a treasure !
The first incident recorded in the independent life
of Moses grown to man’s estate is of a somewhat
compromising nature ?
Seeing an Egyptian smiting an Hebrew, one of his
brethren, and looking this way and that, to make sure
that he himself was seen of none, he slew the Egyp
tian and hid his body in the sand.
This was surely murder, against the laws of God
and man ?
It was no less ; but it is not so characterised, and
is not meant to be so considered, in the narrative,
nor has it wanted apologists among modern writers.
Murder, however, as the saying is, will out, and the
�Exodus : Moses at Horeb.
14-1
deed must have got wind; for, seeing two of his own
people contending on the very next day, and saying
to him who began the fray: Why smitest thou thy
fellow ? he is met by the counter question: Intendest thou to kill me as thou killedst the Egyp
tian ? Learning by this that what he had done was
known, he had to seek safety in flight from the justice
of the country. He flies, therefore, and comes to the
land of Midian, where he abides, as shepherd, appa
rently, with Beuel, the priest of the country, one of
whose daughters, Zipporah by name, he by-and-by
receives to wife.
The next incident in the life of Moses that is re
corded is a very remarkable one ?
Whilst keeping the flock of his father-in-law (now
called Jethro) in the desert by Horeb, the mountain
of God, the angel of Jehovah appears to him in a
flame of fire out of the midst of a bush, which burned
yet was not consumed. Astonished at the appear
ance of a bush on fire yet not consumed, he turns
“ aside to see the great sight why the bush was not
burnt,” and is then addressed by a voice calling to
him out of the midst of the bush, saying: Moses!
Moses ! and Moses answers, “ Here am I.” Ordered
to put off his shoes from his feet, for the ground on
which he stood was holy ground, he is then informed
by the speaker that he is the God of Abraham, of Isaac,
and of Jacob; that he had seen the affliction of his
people in Egypt, and was come down to deliver them
out of the hand of the Egyptians, to bring them into
a land flowing with milk and honey, and to settle
them there in place of the Canaanites, Horites,
Hittites, Amorites, and others already in possession
of the country. “ Come, now, therefore,” proceeds
the narrative, “ I will send thee unto Pharaoh that
thou mayest bring my people the children of Israel
’ out of Egypt.”
To this extraordinary intimation, so delivered,
Moses makes answer— ?
�142
The Pentateuch.
“ Who am I,” says he, “ that I should go unto
Pharaoh, and that I should bring forth the children
of Israel out of Egypt ? When I say to them that
the God of their fathers had sent me to them and
they ask me his name, what shall I say ?”
“ Thou shalt say I am that Am hath sent me. More
over, thus shalt thou say : Jehovah, the God of your
fathers, appeared unto me, saying: I have considered
you and what is done to you in Egypt; and I will
bring you up out of the affliction of Egypt unto a
land flowing with milk and honey; and they shall
hearken to thy voice; and thou shalt come, thou and
the elders of Israel, unto the King of Egypt, and
ye shall say unto him: Jehovah Elohim, the God
of the Hebrews, hath met us; and now let us go,
we beseech thee, three days’ journey into the wilder
ness that we may sacrifice to Jehovah our God.”
How can we, with the views of our age, conceive
God addressing man in human speech, or imagine
Moses asking God for his name, and God answering
first in abstract terms, and then more definitely, as if
he were but one among a number of gods, and the
particular God of the Hebrew people ? How, indeed,
think of Moses—scion, as said, of the house of Levi—
not knowing by what name the God of his kindred and
country was called ? The designation, I am that
Am, would scarcely have got him credit with his
people; and the name Jehovah now imparted to him,
far from helping, would only have earned him mis
trust ; for El, Elohe, Chiun, or Baal, in so far as we
know, appear to have been the names by which
God or the gods were known to the times in which
Moses is reputed to have lived ; neither he nor they
who for ages came after him having ever heard of
Jehovah. How, further, imagine God dealing deceit
fully with Pharaoh and ordering his messenger to sue
for leave to go a three days’ journey into the wilder
ness to offer sacrifice, when it was his purpose that the
�Exodus : Moses and Jehovah.
143
people should escape from Egypt altogether ? How,
Still further, and to go back, bring our minds to con
template the Supersensuous Infinite Cause we call
God as limited in space and hidden in a bush that
burned yet was not consumed ? How, in fine, believe
that God bade Moses put off his shoes from his feet,
for the ground he stood on was holy, as if any one
foot-breadth of earth were holier than another ?
How, indeed I But so stands it written in the text.
Something, however, may be said for the bush that
burned yet was not consumed ?
In so far as we know that Light and Fire were the
symbols of Deity to the whole of the ancient policied
world, and the Hebrews were scions of the Semitic
stock, the Light and Star worshippers of Chaldea
and Mesopotamia.
Determining to deliver his people, Jehovah would,
of course, smooth the way for their going by dis
posing the heart of Pharaoh favourably towards
them ?
So might we reasonably have expected; on the
contrary, however, he is made to say that he is sure
the King of Egypt will not let them go.
This seems strange to modern conceptions of God’s
providential dealings with the world. What may
have been the writer’s motive in ascribing such
words to God ?
To give him an opportunity, doubtless, of showing
his God, in conformity with the notions of unenlight
ened men, setting at nought the laws we now recog
nise as constituting the very essence of the Godhead,
“smiting Egypt with the wonders he would do in
their midst, getting him honour on the Egyptians,
and giving them to know that he was the Lord.”
God get him honour by smiting the Egyptians ! Do
we read aright ?
So says the text as well here as in several other
places yet to be considered.
�144
The Pentateuch.
God is also made by the scribe to give particular
instructions as to what the people are to do when at
length they find themselves at liberty to depart F
They are not to go empty, but are to borrow of
their neighbours jewels of silver and jewels of gold
and raiment, which they are to put upon their sons
and their daughters, and so spoil the Egyptians I
This is an extraordinary injunction made to come
from God F
It is no less; and the writer must have believed
that Jehovah had no more respect for the m&mn and
tuurn than he could have had himself when he put
such an order into the mouth of his Deity.
What happens when Moses, not taking the word
of his God of the burning bush as sufficient creden
tials to his countrymen, suggests that they will not
believe him, and will say that Jehovah had not really
appeared to him ?
Jehovah asks : What is that in thy hand F And he
said, a rod. Cast it on the ground, says Jehovah ; and
he cast it on the ground and it became a serpent, to his
horror, for he fled from it; but being commanded to
take it by the tail, it forthwith became a rod as
before.
And this was to satisfy the people that the God of
their fathers had appeared to him, Moses, and given
him his commission to them ! What would be thought
nowadays of the man who should say that God had
personally appeared to him, given him an important
commission, and as guarantee for the truth of his
statement performed a feat of the kind before an
assembly of people F
He would be regarded either as a madman or a
juggling impostor, most certainly as no ambassador
from God.
There is more of this preliminary miraculous, or
rather—and not to speak it irreverently—conjuring
matter F
�Exodus : Moses and Pharaoh.
145
Much : Moses is bidden in addition, and as a further
assurance to himself that it is Jehovah-God who
speaks with him, to put his hand into his bosom, and
when he takes it out again it is “ leprous as snow; ”
but returning it to his bosom and then withdrawing
it, “ it is as his other flesh.”
Do any of the diseases known to us by the name of
leprosy come and go in such sudden fashion ?
Several diseases now pass under this name, but
they are all alike of slow growth and generally of
difficult cure when they are not altogether incurable.
These signs, however, Moses is to exhibit to the
people in case of their proving incredulous of his
mission to them; and when he returns to Egypt,
should they not be convinced by such signs and
induced to hearken to his voice, he is then to take
water from the river and pour it on the land when it
should become blood. Furthermore, being slow of
speech himself, he is to prompt Aaron his brother,
“who can speak well,” and make of him his mouth
piece in his efforts to have Pharaoh grant their
petition. “ But I will harden his heart ” says Jehovah,
“ that he shall not let the people go; ” and so all
must necessarily prove in vain.
Moses from the above showing would seem to have
been of a somewhat sceptical temper, hard of belief,
Hot easily satisfied ?
As every reasonable man ought to be when extra
ordinary courses are prescribed, to him, and contra
ventions of the common course of nature are adduced
as evidence of a divine commission or command. But
God is far more indulgent to the doubts of Moses
than men in after times have commonly shown them
selves to the misgivings and questionings of their
brothers.
Pharaoh’s heart being hardened by Jehovah so that
he must refuse to let the people go, Moses is next to
say to him— ?
�146
The Pentateuch.
“ Israel is my son, my first-born ; let my son go ;
and if thou refuse to let him go I will slay thy son,
even thy first-born.”
What! in spite of the hardening the man’s heart
has undergone at the hands of Jehovah, which must
needs make him incapable of yielding ? And is it
possible to think of God threatening retaliation in any
event—retaliation above all for non-compliance with
an order which he himself has made it impossible
should be obeyed, and upon the unoffending first-born
of the land because of its ruler’s obstinacy ?
To the simple moral sense of intelligent man it is
indeed impossible to form such incongruous and un
worthy ideas of God and his dealings with the world.
The tale as it stands is no less irreverent than absurd.
It is not God who hardens the heart of man, but man
who is faithless to his better self when he yields the
sway to his animal appetites and passions, and turns
a deaf ear to the suggestions of his reason and higher
moral nature. Neither does God, like a spiteful man,
retaliate in any human sense for non-compliance with
his behests. Pharaoh by the usage of his age and in
virtue of ordinances propounded in these ancient
writings as from Jehovah himself was entitled to exact
all he required of his slave-subjects the Israelites.—But
to proceed, we have now to note an extraordinary in
terruption of the narrative at this place by the inter
polation of a few verses, the significance of which has
sorely tried the ingenuity of bible-expositors. “ By the
way, in the Inn,” it is said, “ Jehovah came upon him
(Moses) and sought to kill him; and Zipporah took
a knife and cut off the foreskin of her son and cast it
at his feet, and said : A bloody bridegroom art thou to
me I And he let him go. She said : blood-bridegroom,
because of the circumcision.” (De Wette.)
What meaning can we possibly attach to this piece
of information. What is to be thought of Jehovah
coming upon Moses and seeking to kill him ?
�Exodus: Moses and Jehovah.
147
In any literal sense it is impossible to say,—the
words have no meaning : had God sought to kill
Moses, he would not assuredly have failed of his
purpose.
And what farther of Zipporah circumcising her son,
casting the foreskin at “ his ” feet, and calling him a
blood or bloody bridegroom to her ?
Also impossible to say ; for the reason given : “ she
called him a bloody bridegroom because of the cir
cumcision,” does not help to any solution of the diffi
culty.
What yet farther of the phrase: “ So he let
him go ” ?
Still beyond our power to conjecture ; unless it
were said that Jehovah, propitiated by Zipporah’s act,
abandoned his purpose of killing Moses.
Has any other explanation of this episode in the life
of Moses been suggested ?
A learned writer conceives that Jehovah’s seeking
to kill Moses may be significant of a serious illness
that befel him at a certain time: and farther that his
recovery was only wrung from his God by the sacri
fice of more than the foreskin of his son; whence the
passionate exclamation of Zipporah.
*
Such an interpretation seems scarcely warranted by
anything in the text as it stands ?
It is not; but the text of the old mythical tale is
obviously imperfect; made so, it may be, by its modern
editor, who, finding matter in it offensive to the ideas
of the times in which he lived and wrote, has substi
tuted circumcision for sacrifice. The interpretation of
the German writer is fully borne out by the whole of
the blood-stained ritual of the Hebrew religious
system, the sacrifice of the first-born of man and beast
which so long formed one of its most essential
* See ‘Ghillanij Ueber den Menschen Opfer der alten
Hsebraaer : On the Human Sacrifices of the Ancient Hebrews,’
p. 683.
�148
The Pentateuch.
features, and the conclusion now generally come to
in regard to the rite of circumcision as signifying a
sacrifice to the reproductive principle in nature of
a small but significant part in lieu of the holocaust
of former days. The epithet bridegroom used by
Zipporah may find its explanation in a custom said
to have prevailed among Jewish mothers in a later
age, whilst stilling their newly circumcised sons, of
speaking to them as their little bridegrooms.
*
So improper and unprofitable a tale as that of God
seeking to kill a man and failing in his purpose, and
of a woman performing a painful and needless opera
tion on her child and then rating her husband and
calling him or her son her bridegroom, cannot surely
be presumed to come by the inspiration of God for
the guidance of mankind in morals and religion ?
Most assuredly it cannot. And so we may fancy
that the tale of Moses threatened to be slain is
given as a pendant to the one in which Jacob is said
to have been met in the dark by a man, who
turns out to be Jehovah himself, with whom he has
a wrestling bout; for each succeeding hero in the early
Hebrew records is more or less a copy of one who
has gone before. But it is more difficult in the present
instance to find a satisfactory interpretation of the
story than it was to elicit a meaning in conformity
with known mythological ideas for the other.
Moses and his brother Aaron, now associated with
him and fully instructed, proceed from Midian to
Egypt on their mission to the Pharaoh, with whom
they have an interview ?
They inform him that they have met with the God
of the Hebrews and petition for leave to “go three
days’ journey into the wilderness to sacrifice to their
God, lest he should fall on them with pestilence or
the sword.”
* See Dozy, 4 Die Israelite!! zu Mekka.’
S. 99.
�Exodus: Moses and Pharaoh.
149
But their God had not threatened anything of the
kind ?
He had not; but the pretext is notable as the first
instance on record in which Religion is made the
cloak to cover an ulterior design.
Pharaoh’s heart being hardened by Jehovah, he of
course refuses the suit ?
As matter of course, and it may be said of neces
sity. “Who is Jehovah,” asks Pharaoh, “that I
should obey his voice and let the people go ? I know
not Jehovah ; neither will I let Israel go.”
Pharaoh indeed could not have known anything of
Jehovah ?
No more than Moses himself, according to the tale ;
for it is only whilst receiving his commission that
he learns from the speaker of the burning bush that
it was he who had appeared to Abraham, Isaac and
Jacob as El-Schaddai, God the mighty, but by his
name Jahveh was he not known to them. Neither
indeed could Pharaoh have spoken of his Hebrew
slave-subjects as a people and by the name of Israel,
the title being of much more modern date than the
period referred to : Pharaoh’s Hebrew subjects were
his slaves.
Pharaoh, reasonably enough, therefore does not
credit the envoys, and in pursuance of the gist of the
story proceeds to impose yet heavier tasks on the
Israelites. What does Moses on the Pharaoh’s refusal
of his petition ?
He returns into the land of Midian, we must
presume, for the Hebrew God was not ubiquitous,
and reproaches him with having sent him on an use
less errand : “ Lord,” says he, very irreverently as
it seems, “why hast thou so evil entreated this
people ? why is it that thou hast sent me ? for since I
came to Pharaoh to speak in thy name, he hath done
evil to this people ; neither hast thou delivered them
at all.”
�150
The Pentateuch.
Does not Jehovah take Moses to task for this dis
respectful and reproachful address ?
By no means; he merely says to him : “ Now shalt
thou see what I will do to Pharaoh. Through strength
of hand shall he let them go, and by strength of hand
shall he drive them out of his land; return ye there
fore to Pharaoh, and when he asks for a sign saying :
Show a miracle for you, then thou shalt say unto
Aaron : Take thy rod and cast it before Pharaoh, and
it shall become a serpent.”
Returning to Egypt and doing as directed, the sign
ordered by Jehovah will, we may presume, have a
notable effect on Pharaoh ?
Strange to say, however, it has none. He calls the
magicians of Egypt, his own wise men, and they with
their enchantments do as much as the delegates of
Jehovah ; they do more, in fact, for they every one cast
down their rods, and each rod turns into a serpent!
But the serpent of Jehovah’s men proves itself
superior to the serpents of Pharaoh’s conjurors ?
By swallowing the whole of them !
And details of such jugglery as this are presented
to us in evidence of God’s power and purpose, through
the minds of inspired men, to guide and inform us ?
The writer, no doubt, believed in magic and con
juring, and so makes his God a magician and con
juror. The serpent-feat of Moses and Aaron, how
ever, paralleled by the court magicians, is not striking
enough to induce Pharaoh to let the Israelites go;
and, indeed, how should it ? His heart is hardened
by Jehovah, and he cannot yield; neither is it in
tended that he should. Moses is therefore to address
him again; and, as it is foreseen that he will still
hold out, the envoy is to turn the water of the Nile
into blood by striking it with his magic wand, the
effect of which will be that the river shall stink, the
fish die, and the water become unfit for the people to
drink.
�Exodus : Moses and Pharaoh.
151
So formidable a visitation, unless immediately re
dressed, must have proved universally destructive,
and not to the fishes only in the stream, but to the
whole of the living creatures ou its banks—to man
and beast, oppressors and oppressed alike, and must
needs have forced the Pharaoh instantly to relent ?
We learn, nevertheless, that it does not; neither
do we discover that the water of the country turned into
blood, stinking and destructive to the fishes, has any
ill effect on the people or their cattle, as if fishes
alone of living things must have water! The Pha
raoh persists in his refusal—a course in which he is
encouraged by his magicians, who with their en
chantment do again precisely what Moses and Aaron
are said to have done; for they, too, says the narrative,
turned all the water of the country into blood;—
whence the water came on which they practised we
are not informed.
The inhabitants and animals of a country cannot,
however, live without water ; and the dilemma into
which the writer has fallen by cutting off the supply
from the river being seen by him, he makes the
people dig wells to meet their wants. But could
they have found water by their digging ?
They could not; for the river being the sole source
whence the water of Egypt is derived, if it were
turned into blood the wells which it fed must have
furnished blood also.
Can water be turned by any process, natural or
magical, into blood ?
We throw the magic overboard, and say that God,
by his eternal laws, has declared that it cannot.
Water is a simple binary compound of the two che
mical elements, oxygen and hydrogen; blood a com
plex quaternary compound of oxygen, hydrogen, car
bon, and azote—the elements, moreover, here existing
in a peculiar state of molecular arrangement not seen
in the inorganic realm of nature. But art is incom
�I52
The Pentateuch.
petent to create chemical elements, or to force such
as exist into combinations out of conformity with
natural law. Water is water in virtue of one of the
great all-pervading laws of the inorganic world, and
blood only makes its appearance when the organising
force inherent in nature comes into play and living,
sensient, self-conscious creatures rise into existence.
The turning of the waters of Egypt into blood
must therefore be an impossibility ?
It is no less, in virtue of laws consentient with the
existence and definite properties of matter.
The next move made by Moses and Aaron will
, surely induce Pharaoh, in spite of the hardening of
heart he has received at the hands of Jehovah, to
relent ?
Although the river has been turned into blood, has
become stinking, so that all the fishes have died, and
the people cannot drink of it, he still persists in his
obstinacy. Moses is then commanded by Jehovah to
say to Aaron : Stretch forth thine hand with thy rod
over the streams, the rivers, and the ponds, and cause
frogs to come up over the land of Egypt.
The writer would seem here to be drawing after
what he saw in Palestine, his native country, where
there are the Jordan and numerous smaller streams
and rivulets; in Egypt there is one great river, but
no secondary streams, though, doubtless, there were
then as now innumerable ditches for irrigation and
ponds for supply. The frogs, however, come up in
spite of the circumstances that must have made it as
impossible for them as for the fishes to live; for the
river has been turned into blood, and we have not
had it restored to its natural condition.
They come up and cover the land of Egypt, making
their way into the houses, the beds, the kneading
troughs, and even the ovens !
The feat of the frogs would surely be found to
exceed the powers of the magicians to imitate ?
�Exodus: Moses and Pharaoh.
153
It is said not; they too brought up frogs over the
land-—small thanks to them!—for by so doing they
could only have made matters worse, if worse may
be imagined.
So formidable a nuisance so increased must have
brought Pharaoh to his senses and induced him to
relent ?
For a while it seems to have had this effect; but
only for a while. “Intreat Jehovah,” says he be
seechingly to Moses and Aaron, “ that he may take
away the frogs from me and my people, and I will
let the people go, that they may sacrifice to Jehovah.”
Moses improves the occasion with this show of
relenting on the part of Pharaoh ?
He is not slow to do so, and says: Resolve me
when I shall intreat for thee and for thy people the
removal of the frogs—in the river only shall they
stay. To which Pharaoh meekly and oddly enough
replies : “ To-morrow,” instead of to-day ! “ Be it
according to thy word,” rejoins the envoy, “that
thou mayest know that there is no God like unto
Jehovah our God.”
Moses is made to speak here as if he acknowledged
the existence of other gods besides Jehovah ?
He is made to speak as, doubtless, the writer be
lieved the fact to be: Jehovah, to Moses and the
early Hebrews, was no more than one, albeit the
greatest, among the gods. He is the God of Miracle
also, opposed to the God of Law, and so assuredly
not the true God.
Intreated by Moses, Jehovah causes the frogs to
die out of the houses and fields, and they are gathered
into heaps, so that the land stank. Pharaoh, we may
presume, will now keep his word and suffer the people
to depart ?
The respite he obtains makes him give signs of
yielding; but the wonder-working powers of Jehovah
through his agents not being yet sufficiently shown
M
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The Pentateuch.
forth, he is made by the writer to relapse into his
hardness of heart. The dust of the ground, conse
quently, is now smitten, and is turned into lice
{kinnim, properly gnats), which crawl over man
and beast, and now only is it that the Egyptian
conjurors are found wanting. They cannot imitate
the Hebrew wonder-workers : they did with their
enchantments try to bring forth lice, says the text,
but they could not—very happily, we may be per
mitted to add—and they say to Pharaoh : This is the
finger of God. But Pharaoh’s heart being hardened
by Jehovah, he heeded them not. Why they should
have found it harder to turn dust into lice than
rods into serpents or water into blood, and to call up
swarms of frogs from the ditches at the word of
command, does not appear. And how the despotic
Pharaoh of Egypt should have been so indulgent as to
suffer Moses and Aaron to afflict his people with such
a succession of scourges, instead of throwing them
into prison or shortening them by the head, is surely
as much of a miracle as any of those we have had
detailed.
How are frogs and lice produced under God’s own
natural law ?
Frogs once a year, on the return of spring, from
spawn that has been maturing in the body of the female
parent from the same period of the preceding year;
lice from eggs called nits, which are attached to the
hair and clothes of the lousy, and are hatched at all
seasons of the year; frogs and lice being alike the
product of pre-existing kinds, male and female, and
alike requiring a certain time before they can be
hatched ; frogs, moreover, having to pass some weeks
in the tadpole state previous to appearing in their
proper definite shape.
Do we in the present day ever see any such pro
duction of living creatures, whether of higher or
lower type in the scale of being, as is here said to
have taken place ?
�Exodus: Moses and Pharaoh.
155
We do not; but we are privileged to see what, by
a metaphor, may be spoken of as the finger, and far
more appropriately as the mind, of God, in the har
monious and invariable sequences of nature; and
seeing so much, we are bound to acknowledge neither
interruption nor contravention of the all-pervading
laws—expressions of the Godhead—that rule the
universe in its measureless immensities as in its
individual atoms.
But Pharaoh, when he finds his wise men at their
wits’ end, and referring the production of the lice to
the finger of God, will give in and let his bonds
men go ?
Not yet; though with the plague of flies which
has now to be endured he yields so far as to say to
Moses that he and his people were at liberty to sacri
fice to their God, so as they did it in the land. But
this did not suit the views of Moses, who answers :
Lo, it is not meet to do so; for we shall sacrifice
the abomination of the Egyptians unto Jehovah
our God.
What may be understood by the objection made
by Moses ?
The text does not help us to any interpretation of
its meaning. There is no hint in any preceding
part of the book that the Hebrews were ever inter
fered with by the Egyptians in their religion—we
know nothing, indeed, of the religion of the Israelites
during the long period of their servitude in Egypt—
or that they were required to conform to the religious
system of their masters. Neither is Moses’ objection
taken so much to any sense he may have entertained
of the impropriety of the sacrifice referred to in itself,
as to the danger to the Israelites that might accom
pany its performance, for he says: Lo, shall we
sacrifice the abomination of the Egyptians before
their eyes and will they not stone us ? What the
abomination of the Egyptians may have been we are
�i$6
The Pentateuch.
not informed. Shepherds are said to have been an
abomination to the Egyptians, but not sheep; they
are reputed, indeed, to have objected to mutton as
food, but they sacrificed rams to their god Amun.
Pharaoh again shows signs of relenting. Twill let
you go, says he now, that ye may sacrifice to Jehovah
your God in the wilderness ; only ye shall not go
very far away ; intreat for me, adds the sorely-tried
and singularly submissive sovereign. So Moses
intreats Jehovah, and the plague of flies is abated.
But Jehovah, according to the record, having other
and more terrible wonders in store whereby he should
further “ proclaim his power and make his name
known throughout all the earth,” Pharaoh’s yielding
is only for a day.
_ Among the number of new plagues inflicted in this
view we find enumerated— ?
A murrain, which killed all the cattle of the Egyp
tians, but spared those of the Israelites, not one of
these being lost; an epidemy of blotches and blains
upon man and beast, to bring about which we for the
first time find certain physical means prescribed by
Jehovah : Moses is to take handfuls of ashes from the
furnace and scatter them toward heaven, the effect of
which would be that wherever the dust fell there
should follow boils and blains upon the flesh.
Would casting cart-loads of furnace ashes into the
air cause blotches and blains upon the men and cattle
of a country a thousand miles and more in length ?
It were absurd to suppose that it would; wood
ashes, used as directed, could only have caused in
flammation of the eyes among such as were somewhat
near at hand. To abrade the skin, wood-ashes must be
mixed with quicklime and applied moist to its surface.
What further plagues or calamities do we find
enumerated ?
A grievous hailstorm, such as had not been seen in
Egypt since its foundation, with thunder and light-
�Exodus: Moses and Pharaoh.
157
ning and fire that ran. along the ground and smote
everything that was in the field—man and beast, herb
and tree, flax and barley; only “ in the land of
Goshen, where the children of Israel dwelt, was there
no hail; ” next we have
of locusts that came
up with an east wind—another physical agency—and
ate up all that had been spared by the hail; and then
a thick darkness in all the land for three days, so
thick that people “ saw not one another, even dark
ness that could be felt,—but the children of Israel
had light in their dwellings.”
Jehovah, the God of Moses, as pictured by the
Jewish writer, shows himself utterly ruthless in this ?
No doubt of it; but the writer’s purpose was to
show Jehovah, as patron God of the children of Israel,
superior to the gods of Egypt. His visitations must
obviously have affected the individual Pharaoh much
less than his subjects, whose hearts had not been
hardened for the occasion, like that of the ruler. To
have punished Pharaoh at all, indeed, when he was
only exercising his prescriptive rights, and must be
presumed to have lost all power of self-control—his
heart having been expressly hardened by Jehovah—
was manifestly unjust; and to make Jehovah spread
desolation over the land of Egypt, when he was him
self the author of its ruler’s obstinacy, can only be
characterised as derogatory to the Idea of God that
must be entertained by rational man, and at variance
with the goodness and mercy always associated with
the essential nature of Deity.
Considerations these which seem satisfactorily to
dispose of the Plagues of Egypt as occurrences
founded on fact ?
Effectually. And then murrain and pestilence and
the light of the sun make no distinctions, but by pre
existent eternal ordinances affect all that live alike.
The narrative, interrupted at this point, gives us
an opportunity of asking what we, as reasonable men,
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The Pentateuch.
gifted with understanding and moral consciousness,
assured moreover of the changeless nature of God and
his laws, are to think of the long array of unavailing
miracles thus far detailed with wearisome prolixity,
and of the motive assigned for their exhibition ?
On such grounds we can but think of them as tales
of Impossibilities — Myths, Embodiments in language
of Ideas belonging to a rude and remote antiquity, and
worthy henceforth of notice only as records of erro
neous conceptions of the attributes of God and the
nature of his dealings with mankind and the world of
things. The means brought into requisition prove
inadequate to satisfy Pharaoh of the superiority of the
Hebrew wonder-workers over the magicians of his own
country, or of their God over the God whom he and
his people adore. JDid we think of God using means
to ends at all, which our philosophy forbids—purpose,
or end, mean and act being one in the nature of God,
and not distinct from one another, or sequences in
*
time —it were surely falling short of a worthy con
ception of The Supreme to imagine him making use
of any that were inadequate to the end proposed.
What is to be said of the reiterated allegation that
God so hardened the heart of Pharaoh that he would
not suffer the Israelites to be gone ?
That it is not only derogatory to the name of God,
but in contradiction with his avowed purpose, which
was from the first that the children of Israel should
quit Egypt and settle in the land of Canaan as his
peculiar people, in fulfilment of contracts entered
into with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the last of
them made some four hundred and thirty years before
the time at which Moses is believed to have appeared
on the scene ; for so long, according to the record,
was the interval between the date of Jacob’s arrival
in Egypt and that of the Israelites leaving it.
* See ‘ Dialogue by Way of Catechism,’ Part II. page 35.
�Exodus: Moses and Pharaoh.
159
Bu.t we have no information about the children of
Israel during the four hundred and thirty years of
their reputed sojourn in Egypt?
We have not a word of or concerning them through
the whole of this long time.
How then believe that we should have such par
ticular intelligence about Adam and Eve, Cain and
Abel, Noah and the flood, Lot and his daughters,
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Joseph and his brethren,
&c. &c., comprising a period of a thousand years and
more, according to the computations of our Bible
chronologists ?
How, indeed, unless we assume that it reaches us
through the imaginations of writers who lived during
and after the era of the kings, the Babylonian Cap
tivity, and still later periods in the history of Judah
and Israel.
Pitiless as he has hitherto appeared, Jehovah will
now interpose, soften the heart of Pharaoh, and so
spare the unoffending Egyptian people from further
disasters ?
Not yet. Mercy, with the object the writer has in
view, must still be made foreign to the nature of his
God. Pharaoh does indeed now call Moses, and says :
Go ye; serve Jehovah ; only let your flocks and herds
be stayed. But Moses answers that they must have
the means of sacrificing to Jehovah their God. “ Our
cattle,” continues he, in the haughtiest tone, “ shall
go with us; there shall not a hoof be left behind.”
Jehovah, however, continuing to harden Pharaoh’s
heart, he will not suffer them to go. “ Get thee from
me,” says the now indignant and sorely-tried so
vereign ; “ take heed to thyself; see my face no more ;
for in the day thou seest my face thou shalt die.”
Moses, we may presume, will be more cautious in his
communications with such a threat hanging over him ?
So we might have expected; but he is more arro
gant and outspoken than ever, for he replies : “ Thou
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The Pentateuch.
hast spoken well—I will see thy face no more.” Yet
he does ; for, as the writer now makes Jehovah say :
“Yet will I bring one plague more upon Egypt;
afterwards he will let you go,” Moses has to return
to the presence with the following message : “ Thus
saith Jehovah : About midnight will I go out into the
midst of Egypt, and all the first-born in the land of
Egypt shall die, from the first-born of Pharaoh that
sitteth on the throne even unto the first-born of the
maid-servant that is behind the mill, and all the first
born of beasts. And there shall be a great cry
throughout all the land of Egypt, such as there was
none like it nor shall be like it any more. But against
any of the children of Israel there shall not a dog
move his tongue.”
Threatened with such calamities as the death of
his own first-born son, and the death of the first-born
of man and beast throughout his dominions, taught,
moreover, by the experience of preceding plagues,
Pharaoh will now assuredly take security against the
threatened visitation by laying hands on Moses,
whom he has already doomed to die did he venture
again to come before him ?
So might we reasonably have expected; but this
would not have tallied with the end the writer has
in view. Pharaoh is therefore made to forget his
purpose of putting Moses to death, and very incon
siderately, as it seems, to treat the announcement just
made as an idle threat. The envoy, consequently, is
left at large, and even goes out from the Pharaoh’s
presence “ in a great anger.” And so it comes to
pass, as had been predicted, that at midnight Jehovah
smote all the first-born both of man and beast in the
land of Egypt.
The wholesale slaughter of the Egyptians and their
cattle accomplished—by what means we are not in
formed, unless we take the text literally as it stands,
and assume Jehovah himself to have been the agent—
�Exodus : Egyptians and Israelites.
161
we learn that against the children of Israel not even
a dog was to move his tongue. The ground for the
distinction is plain enough: the Israelites were the
cherished, the Egyptians the hated, of Jehovah; but
there is a particular reason given for the heavy visi
tation which had now befallen the Egyptians ?
The reason assigned is this: “ That it might be
known how Jehovah had put a difference between
the Egyptians and Israel.”
What difference had God —and here we add, not
the Jewish Jehovah—really put between the Egyp
tian people and the children of Israel ?
God had made the Egyptians, as the superior race,
the masters; and the Israelites, as the inferior race, the
slaves. He had given the Egyptians the valley of the
Nile for an inheritance, and the ingenuity and industry
needful to turn it into “ the garden of the Lord,”
which it was; he had further made them astronomers,
architects,, engineers, sculptors, painters, inventors of
the loom and of paper; contrivers of more than one
system of writing, and familiar, besides, with many
of the most useful and elegant arts of settled and
civilised life—workers in gold and silver and precious
stones, &c. Morally and religiously, moreover, he
had enabled them to approximate to the idea of the
Oneness of Deity though seen under various aspects
—here propitious, there adverse—and led them to
the great conception of Duty or Responsibility for
their doings in the present life to be answered for in
a life to come.
And the Hebrews or Israelites ?
God had left in the lower grades of neat-herds,
shepherds, labourers in the fields; settlers by suffer
ance if not by compulsion in an outlying district of
their masters’ territory, ignorant of astronomy,
architecture, mechanics, sculpture, and of every one
of the arts that “put a difference” between the
nomad barbarian or savage and the policied citizen of
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The Pentateuch.
the settled State : he had conferred on. them no fine
sense of the distinction between the mine and the
thine ; and to conclude, had left them without the
conception of a judgment and immortality beyond
the present state of existence.
The first-born of man and beast in the land of
Egypt, then, are smitten, and Jehovah has now,
according to the veracious writer, had sufficient
opportunity of displaying his power over the Gods of
Egypt and the Egyptians themselves. The Israelites
may therefore at length be suffered to depart ?
Brought to his senses at last, — or shall we say
taught by the terrible calamities that had befallen his
people, yielding to the pressure of circumstances and
getting the better of the hardness of heart imposed
on him by Jehovah, Pharaoh is now as urgent with
the Israelites to be gone as he had hitherto been reso
lute to keep them from going. Rising up in the
night and summoning Moses, he says: “ Get you
forth from among my people both you and the chil
dren of Israel, and go and serve Jehovah, as ye have
said ; take also your flocks and your herds and be
gone.” The Egyptians too were urgent upon the
people that they might send them out of the land in
haste, for they said: “We be all dead men.”
The Israelites on their part, though the permission
to depart must have come on them unexpectedly, are
not slow to take Pharaoh at his word or remiss in
yielding to the urgency of their masters ?
They pack up their kneading troughs at once in
their clothes with the dough that is in them; but
they do not neglect the order they had received to
borrow of their neighbours jewels of silver and jewels
of gold and raiment, with which and their own be
longings they set off immediately on their journey
towards the promised land.
Can we imagine the Egyptians ready to lend their
jewels of silver and gold and their garments to
�Exodus : The Israelites quit Egypt.
163
people—their slaves—whom they were driving out of
their country with as little prospect as wish ever to
see them again ?
It certainly is not easy under the circumstances to
imagine any such favourable disposition on the part
of the Egyptians.
When men borrow, it is still with the understand
ing that they are to make return, as when they lend
that they are to have return made ?
There appears to have been no such understanding
in the present instance, on one side at all events.
Jehovah, it is even said, “ gave the people favour in
the sight of the Egyptians, so that they lent them all
they required, and they spoiled the Egyptians.”
But this makes Jehovah an aider and abettor in
the theft ?
No doubt of it. But the Jewish writer believed it
not only lawful but meritorious to spoil the enemies
of his people, and he does not scruple to make his
God of the same mind as himself. But the tale is
libellous and false; for God, the universal father,
emphatically forbids theft through the sense of the
mine and the thine implanted in the mind of man—
not to allude to the express commandment which a
later and more conscientious writer in the Hebrew
Bible sees fit to put into the mouth of his God when
he makes him say : Thou shalt not steal!
The Israelites fly or are driven out of Egypt at
last ?
The first-born of the land both of man and beast
being dead, there was no longer any ground for delay.
What extraordinary and utterly incomprehensible
means were used to accomplish the discriminating
slaughter of the first-born of the people and their
cattle in the course of a single night we are not in
this place informed; and the reason given for the sin
gular despite in which Jehovah is presented to us as
having held the Egyptians—the hard service in brick
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The Pentateuch.
and mortar imposed on the Israelites, to wit—
does not accord with the flourishing state in which
they meet us at the moment of the Exodus, millions
as they must have been in numbers, if they could
bring six hundred thousand able-bodied men into the
field with arms in their hands, possessed besides of
flocks and herds innumerable, and enjoying such
credit with the native people that they lent them
freely of all they had.
The slaughter of the first-born of Egypt must
therefore be another of the mythical tales contrived
by the writer to exalt and glorify in his own mis
taken way the tutelary God of his people, Jehovah ?
Let the candid reader, with any conception which
he as living in this nineteenth century of the Chris
tian era can form of the nature of God, answer the
question for himself by yea or by nay.
The narrative provokingly enough and on the very
eve of the Exodus is interrupted to speak of a change
to be made in beginning the year ; and, in immediate
connection with this change, of the institution of
the Passover and the dedication to Jehovah of the
first-born of man and beast among the children of
Israel?
Jehovah, says the record, now speaks to Moses and
Aaron in the land of Egypt, saying: <l This month
shall be to you the first month of the year,” without
naming the month. But we by-and-by discover that
it is Nisan, called Abib of old, that is meant; this
being the month in which the Exodus is believed to
have taken place, as it is known to be the one in
which the vernal equinox occurred in ancient times.
The notification, however, is prefatory and subordi
nate to the order for the celebration of the Passover,
which the writers of the Hebrew scriptures show
particular anxiety to connect with the escape from
Egypt,—which they would present in fact as a feast
commemorative of this event in the legendary annals
�Exodus : The Passover.
165
of their people, the whole procedure as set forth being
made to harmonise with this intention.
The rites connected with the celebration of the
Passover were peculiar and solemn ?
On the tenth day of the first month the head of each
house, or where the families were small, the heads of
two or more houses, were to take a lamb or kid, a
male of the first year, without spot or blemish, and
sever it from the flock until the evening of the four
teenth day, when it was to be killed. With a bunch
of hyssop dipped in the blood the lintels and door
posts of the houses were to be struck, and no one was
to leave his home until the morning. The carcase was
to be eaten in the night with unleavened bread and
bitter herbs, and it is particularly ordered that the
flesh shall not be eaten raw, nor sodden with water,
but roast with fire. The meal is farther to be de
spatched in haste, the people having their loins girded,
their shoes on their feet, and their staves in their
hands.
This is plainly enough an account by a relatively
modern writer of the way in which he imagines the
feast of the Passover might have been kept by his
forefathers on the eve of their flight from Egypt, and
so of the way in which it was ever after to be observed
in memory of that event. “ And it shall come to
pass,” says the record, “ when your children say unto
you : what mean ye by this service, that ye shall say :
It is the sacrifice of Jehovah’s passover, who passed
over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt,
when he smote the Egyptians and delivered our
houses.”
The Passover, however, could not have been cele
brated in any such way by the Israelites on the eve
of their flight ?
There was no possibility of its having been so cele
brated, for they fled in such haste that they had no
time to leaven the dough that was in their kneading
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The Pentateuch.
troughs, much less to bake it. A family feast, more
over, is turned by the writer into a Sacrifice to Jehovah,
in every indispensable element of which it is wanting.
The reason for striking the lintels and door-posts
of the Israelites’ houses with the blood is not very
satisfactory ?
Being done to guide Jehovah in his visitation to
slay the first-born of Egypt, it meets us as a poor
contrivance of the writer : “ When I see the blood,”
says he in the name of his God, “ I will pass over you,
and the plague shall not be upon you to destroy you
when I smite the land of Egypt.” Jehovah must,
therefore, as he imagined, have required an outward
and visible sign to guide him in his acts of mercy as
of vengeance.
The colour of the blood may have had something
to do with the act enjoined ?
Red was the proper colour of the Sun-God, among
the ancients generally; and with the Egyptians came
into special use in the spring of the year for the
decoration of their dwellings, as well as the statues
of their Gods. The Hebrew writer would therefore
seem, after a play upon the word Pass or Passover
(Pesah in Hebrew, with which our word Transit
corresponds exactly), to be substituting red blood, for
the red paint of the Egyptians, Phoenicians, and other
cognate peoples, and using, as a safeguard for the
children of Israel, a sign which the Egyptians, from
time immemorial, had been wont to employ with a
view to ornament and propitiate their gods.
In immediate connection with this unsatisfactory
account of the institution of the Passover, we have
the dedication to Jehovah of the first-born among
the children of Israel themselves. He had slain the
first-born of the Egyptians, and must, as it appears,
have the first-born of the Israelites also ?
“ Sanctify to me all the first-born; whatsoever
openeth the womb among the children of Israel, both
�Exodus : Dedication of the First-born.
167
of man and beast, it is mine,” are the terrible words
in which Jehovah is made to announce his will.
It seems singular that the Jewish writers of the
Bible should manifest the same desire to connect the
sacrifice of their first-born with the most awful of the
incidents said to have accompanied the flight from
Egypt, as they show to associate the Passover with
this event ?
“ It shall be,” says the text, “ when thy son asketh
thee in time to come, saying : What is this F that thou
shalt say to him : By strength of hand Jehovah
brought us out from Egypt, from the house of
bondage; and it came to pass when Pharaoh would
hardly let us go that Jehovah slew all the first-born
in the land of Egypt, both the first-born of man and
the first-born of beast; therefore I sacrifice to Jehovah
all thatopeneth the matrix, being males ”—the words
being males must have been added, the requisition in
several other places being general.
Such a reason for such a sacrifice is surely neither
logical nor satisfactory. Because Jehovah slew all
the first-born of Egypt, therefore were the Israelites to
sacrifice all that opened the womb both of man and
beast among themselves ! They were to pay a much
heavier tax, in fact, than that exacted of the
Egyptians ; for the sacrifice of their children by the
Israelites was to be in perpetuity, whilst that of their
old oppressors had been required but once. How
should such an event as the escape from slavery,
only to be thought of as subject of rejoicing, be fitly
associated with the tears and heart-wringings of
parents that must needs accompany the immolation
of the first-born of their children ?
The dedication to Jehovah of the first-born of man
and beast can scarcely therefore have any connection
with the mythical slaughter of the first-born of Egypt,
the legendary flight from the country, or the feast of
the Passover ?
�i68
The Pentateuch.
There can be little question that it has none. The
consecration or making Clierem implying the neces
sary sacrifice to their God of all that opened the
womb is not so associated in other parts of the
Hebrew Scriptures. “ Sanctify to me all the first
born ; whatsoever openeth the womb among the
children of Israel, both of man and beast, it is mine,”
says the text already quoted (Exod. xiii. 2). “ The
first-born of thy sons shalt thou give to me,” says
another (Tb. xxii. 29). “All that openeth the
matrix is mine,” yet another (lb. xxxiv. 19). In
every instance, therefore, without reference to Egypt,
the Exodus, or any other event. The requirement is
absolute, unconnected with any historical or quasihistorical incident. The sacrifice of the first-born of
man and beast was in truth a custom sanctioned by
general usage among the whole of the Semitic tribes
or peoples and their colonies inhabiting Western Asia
and the shores of the Mediterranean Sea.
But the first-born of man are ordered to be re
deemed ?
Not as the ordinance stands where it is first met
and has not been tampered with, and as the custom
of child-sacrifice is repeatedly referred to in other
places, more especially by the prophetical writers.
The redemption clauses are all interpolations by later
hands; they had no place in the text even so late as
the time of Ezekiel; and then there is the positive
ordinance concerning things Cherem or devoted to
Jehovah, which puts redemption out of the question.
“None devoted, which shall be devoted of men shall
be redeemed, but shall surely be put to death ”
(Levit. xxvii. 29).
May not the Passover also have been a festival
having no connection with the Exodus from Egypt ?
There can be as little doubt of this as of the sacri
fice of the first-born of Israel having no reference to
the slaughter of the first-born of Egypt. The festival
�Exodus: The Passover.
169
galled Pesach by the Jews is a much older institu
tion than the notice we have of it in the Book of
Exodus. Its Hebrew name is exactly rendered as
said, by the English word Transit; and the transit
celebrated was no passage of Jehovah over the
Egyptians to destroy, or over the Israelites to spare,
but of the Sun over the Equator at the epoch of the
vernal equinox—a season of rejoicing that may be
said to have been universal among all the policied
peoples of antiquity, and that is still observed with
fresh accessories and under a new name in the world
of to-day; for the Easter of the present age is in
reality no other than the Pascha, Neomenia, and
Hilaria of the old world—a tribute Deo Soli Invicto.
Mounting from the inferior or wintry signs, trium
phant as it were over darkness and death, the Sun
then appears to bring back light and life to the
world; and the God he symbolized seems to have
been held entitled in return to a portion at least of
the good things so obviously and immediately de
pendent on his presence. Hence the offerings in the
spring of the year of the first fruits of the fields, the
sacrifice of the firstlings of the flocks and herds, and
at length, and as the influence of the offering on the
God was believed to rise in the ratio of its worth to
the giver, of the first-born of his sons by man—victim
of all others the most precious to him, and so thought
to be the most potent of all to propitiate the God.
The Passover may, therefore, have been truly a
solar festival, and by no means peculiar to the Israel
ites ?
The period of the year at which it was celebrated
suffices of itself to proclaim it a feast in honour of the
Sun, and the universality of its celebration over the
whole of the ancient world shows that the Israelites
only followed suit in its observance. But the great
Spring festival of the year has been obscured by the
miraculous and mythical wrappings in which it has
N
�V]O
The Pentateuch.
been presented by the Jewish post-exilic Jehovistic
writers, seeking to hide its meaning by turning this
among other Pagan observances of their age and
country into institutions appointed by their God
Jehovah through the agency of his servant Moses.
The Jewish writers, however, are not even agreed
as to the grounds they assign for the observance of
the Passover ?
In one place it is to be kept as a memorial feast
because the Israelites were spared the visit of the
destroying angel when the first-born of Egypt were
slain ; in another it is to be observed in memory of
their delivery from Egyptian bondage. But it was in
the spring time of the year that the barley harvest of
the East occurred ; and with the bringing of the first
sheaf as an offering to the Sun-God at the season of
his awakening from his death-like wintry sleep, and
the season of rejoicing’ then universally observed, was
by and by associated the legendary escape in exagge
rated numbers of the Israelites from Egypt and the
veritable sacrifice of the first-born of their sons.
The Jewish Passover is often said to have been
derived from the Egyptians ?
That the Israelites had various festivals in common
with the Egyptians and other ancient peoples is cer
tain. That they borrowed so much from Egypt as it
is often said they did is very questionable. Such a
conclusion would seem rather to be grounded on
assuming the large amount of influence which a people
so far advanced in civilisation as the Egyptians must
have had on the rude descendants of Jacob, than on
any strong resemblance between the social, political,
and religious ideas and doings of the Egyptians and
Israelites. To unprejudiced minds the Israelites, when
they meet us on the eve of the Exodus, and for ages
afterwards, appear as having profited so little by their
contact with the Egyptians that additional doubt is
thrown over the whole story of their relationship with
�Exodus: The Flight from Egypt,
171
the land of the Nile. For some ages after the reputed
epoch of the Exodus we never see the Israelites save
as a horde in quest of a settled home, at war with all
around them, and but little, if at all, removed from
utter barbarism.
Having spoiled the Egyptians to the utmost of the
borrowing and lending powers of the two parties, the
Israelites set off, a mixed multitude with flocks and
herds, “ even very much cattle.” We are not without
data from which their aggregate number may be
computed F
We have such in the “ Six hundred thousand on
foot that were men ” (Ex. xii., 87) ; “ six hundred
and three thousand five hundred and fifty from twenty
years old and upwards, all able to go forth to war in
Israel.” (Numb, i., 46.)
Such a number of able-bodied men, harnessed or
armed, as said, implies a gross population approach
ing three millions of souls ?
Something like that of the great city of London or
the whole of Scotland a few years ago !
And this vast multitude quit their homes in a single
night and betake themselves to the desert with no
other preparation iii the shape of supplies than the
dough that is in their kneading troughs ?
“ They were thrust out of Egypt, neither had they
prepared for themselves any victual.” (Ex. xii., 39.)
Without a word of the first requisite for even a
single day’s journey in the burning desert—water ?
There is nothing said about water.
What of the means of transport for the sick and
infirm, who must have numbered ten thousand at
least; for the three hundred women busy in bringing
children into the world, and something like the same
number of men and women going out of it—for so
many are ever thus engaged in a population approach
ing three millions in number during each day of the
year ?
�172
The Pentateuch.
There is nothing said of the sick and infirm, of the
parturient and the dying.
Then must the story in its proportions be a fable
involving contradictions innumerable and impossi
bilities in the nature of things. The whole population
of the valley of the Nile, from Nubia to the Mediter
ranean, did not probably at any time in its most
palmy days of old amount to so many as the Israelites
are said to have been when they fled, were driven out,
or were brought out from Egypt with a high hand, so
various are the words used in the accounts we have
of the way in which the Exodus was effected. Six
hundred thousand and odd able-bodied men with
arms in their hands needed to have asked no leave of
the Pharaoh of Egypt either to go or to stay. Instead
of fleeing to the desert on the faith of promised settle
ments in a land, even though reported to be flowing
with milk and honey, they would have been apt to
think that the fertile land of Egypt, watered by the
mysterious river which rose and fell no man knew
how, was possession preferable and enough. Instead
of consenting to the expulsion, they are allowed in more
than one place to have suffered, from the soil where
they had lived so long and grown to such a multitude,
they would most assuredly have either expelled or
enslaved where they had not slain their oppressors.
Instead of robbing them of their jewels of silver and
jewels of gold and fine raiment, anl stealing away like
thieves in the night, they would have installed them
selves in their masters’ places and taught them in
turn what it was to make mud bricks without
straw !
But this would have interfered with Jehovah’s pro
vidential arrangements for the settlement of his chosen
people in the land of Canaan ?
The providence of God is over all his works in
differently and alike. God was then as now the Father
of the Egyptian as of the Jew; more partial as parent
�Exodus: The Flight from Egypt.
173
to the Egyptian than to the Jew, indeed, were his love
to be truly tested by the Hebrew standard—the mea
sure of temporal good enjoyed.
The Jews did not think, and have not yet learned
to think, that God is verily the impartial parent of
mankind ?
No; they were, and still are, presumptuous enough
to fancy themselves the objects of their Jehovah’s
peculiar care; and the world may be said, in spite of
its persistently cruel treatment of their race, to have
been complacent enough to take them at their word.
Lately, however, there has been something like an
awakening out of this baseless dream; a suspicion has
at length got abroad in the world of the possibility of
its having been mistaken. With the recent discovery
of the Vedas and Zendavesta, the Buddhistic scrip
tures, and the Chinese moral writings, we have come to
know that other more ancient, more moral and better
policied peoples than the Israelites had also their sacred
books, though none of them presume, as do those of
this people, to make God the mouthpiece of some few
good and reasonable, yet of many bad, barbarous,
childish, objectionable, and indifferent ordinances, and
the immediate agent in innumerable cruel and un
justifiable acts.
The Israelites, however, escape or are driven out of
Egypt at last, and in such numbers, it is said, as plainly
appears impossible. Have we any clue to the way in
which the exaggerated multitude of the fugitives may
have been arrived at ?
.Curiously enough we have. In one of the latest
Midraschim—Hebrew Commentaries or Expositions of
the Law we possess (Jalkut Thora, 386), there is a
passage to this effect: “ God said to Moses : Number
the Israelites. Then said Moses: They are as the
sands of the sea ; how can I number them ? God
said : Not in the way thou thinkest of; but wouldst
thou reckon them, take the first letters of their tribes
�!74
The Pentateuch.
and thou hast their number.”* And sure enough, if
the numerical values of the initial letters of the names
of the twelve tribes be added together, the sum
that comes out is five hundred and ninety-seven
thousand ; to which if the three thousand slain on
occasion of the worship of the golden calf which
Aaron made be joined, the exact number of the men
in arms, as first given, six hundred thousand, is
obtained.
This, however, is not the only number of ablebodied men that is mentioned ?
Elsewhere (Ex. xxxviii., 26, and Numb, i., 46) it is
set down at “ six hundred and three thousand five
hundred and fifty men.”
There may perhaps be some recondite and not very
obvious way in which this number too may have been
arrived at ?
It tallies exactly with the number of bekahs or
half shekels said to have been produced by the
capitation tax imposed for erecting and furnishing the
Tabernacle. The whole amount collected is stated to
have been 100talents 1,775 shekels, = 301,775 shekels,
which x by two gives 603,550 shekels, the precise
number of the able-bodied men of the second Census.f
Once on their way, whither do the Israelites go ?
If it were towards the promised land they certainly
took a very roundabout road to reach it. Elohim,
it is said, led them not by the way through the land
of the Philistines, although that was near ; for Elohim
said : “ Lest peradventure the people repent when they
see war and they return to Egypt.” Elohim there
fore led them through the way of the Wilderness of
the Red Sea, from Rameses, whence they set out, to
Succoth and Etham in the edge of the Wilderness;
* Comp. ‘ Popper Der biblische Berichtuber die Stiftshiitte ;
ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Composition und Diaskeuse des
Pentateuch.’ S. 196. 8vo. Leipz., 1862.
f ‘ Popper.’ Op. cit. P. 196.
�Exodus : The Flight from Egypt.
17 5
Jehovah (it is no longer Elohim) going before them
as a pillar of cloud by day, as a pillar of fire by night
to guide and light them on their way. But Moses
must have thought that a native of the country would
be a good addition as a guide through the trackless
waste ; he would not trust entirely to Jehovah’s pillar
of cloud and of fire—for he says to his brother-in-law,
Hobab the Midianite : “ Come thou with us ; thou
mayest be to us instead of eyes ; and it shall come to
pass, if thou wilt go with us, that what goodness
Jehovah shall do unto us the same shall we do unto
thee.” (Numb, x., 29-32.)
Jehovah, we might have imagined, as miracles were
so much in course, would have steeled the hearts of
the Israelites and made the hearts of all opposed to
them like wax, as he is said to have done on other
and later occasions. Why he did not see fit so to do
at this time, when it would have spared so much toil
and suffering, we are not informed. But where are
the places mentioned—Barneses, Succoth, and Etham ?
Rameses, a town and district on the Nile; Succoth,
a station (now unknown), presumably northward
from Rameses, in the direction of Palestine ; Etham,
a place east from Rameses, between thirty and forty
miles away, and not far from the northern extremity
of the western head of the Red Sea. Instead of
advancing from this, however, and nearing their
final destination, the Israelites are strangely enough
now ordered to turn and encamp before Pihahiroth,
between Migdol and the sea, over against Baalzephon on the opposite coast.
What extraordinary reason is given for this diver
gent course, and, in the event of any pursuit by the
Egyptians, ill-chosen position in a strategical point
of view ?
It was, according to the text, that Jehovah might
get him honour on Pharaoh and let the Egyptians
know that he was the Lord. “ For Pharaoh will say
�iy6
The Pentateuch.
of the children of Israel: They are entangled in the
land—the wilderness hath shut them in; and I will
harden the heart of Pharaoh that he shall follow after
them, and I will be honoured upon Pharaoh and
upon all his host.”
Pharaoh pursues the fugitives, to bring them back
we must presume, though he and his had lately been
so eager to be rid of them. They are sore afraid when
they see his host behind them, and turn upon Moses
and reproach him for having led them out of their bon
dage. “ Were there no graves in Egypt, say they,that
thou hast taken us away to die in the Wilderness?
Better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in
the Wilderness.”
But Moses encourages the faint-hearted crew ?
He bids them not to fear ; for Jehovah shall fight
for them. He has but to lift up his rod and stretch
out his hand towards the neighbouring sea to have
its waters divide and part asunder, so that the people
shall go through on dry ground. “ And I will harden
the hearts of the Egyptians,” the narrative proceeds,
Jehovah himself being now brought in as speaker,
“ and they shall follow after; and I will get me
honour upon Pharaoh and his host and his chariots
and his horsemen; and the Egyptians shall know
that I am the Lord.”
The pillar of cloud which had hitherto headed the
column of fugitives is made to interpose between
them and their pursuers at this point ?
It moves most accommodatingly from the front to
the rear, coming between the camp of the Israelites
and that of the Egyptians, and as there was now an
opportunity for another miracle, or violation of a
physical law, we are told that, “ Whilst it was a
cloud of light to the fugitives, it was a cloud of dark
ness to the pursuers, so that the one came not near
the other all night.”
And Moses— ?
�Exodus: The Flight from Egypt.
177
Stretches out his hand over the sea, and it is driven
back by a strong east wind which blew all night, so
that the children of Israel advanced on dry land,
“ the waters being as a wall unto them on their right
hand and on their left.”
A wind of the sort, however, would not have piled
the waters of the Red Sea to the right and left,
but have swept them clean away ?
It would had it blown hard enough; so that the
writer had better have left all to the magic rod, and
not had recourse to any natural agency that would
have failed of the effect described.
The Egyptians pursue ?
As arranged by the narrator—“ Even all Pharaoh’s
horses, his chariots, and his horsemen into the midst
of the sea.”
Jehovah now interferes actively ?
“ Looking out through the pillar of cloud and fire
in the morning watch, he troubles their host; and
takes off their chariot wheels, so that they drave
heavily ! ” And now had the moment for the dis
comfiture and destruction of the enemy arrived:
“ Stretch out thine hand over the sea,” says the re
vengeful man speaking in the name of his God, “ that
the waters may come again upon the Egyptians 1 ”
“ And the sea,” it is said, “ returned in his strength
and covered the chariots and the horsemen and all
the host of Pharaoh: there remained not one of
them.”
The great work of immediate deliverance and de
struction thus accomplished— ?
Moses and the children of Israel sing a grand song
of triumph to Jehovah; and Miriam the Prophetess,
the sister of Aaron, and all the women, with tim
brels in their hands and with dances, answer them in
chorus : “ Sing ye to the Lord, for he hath triumphed
gloriously; the horse and his rider hath he thrown
into the sea.”
�178
The Pentateuch.
Though we miss any word of thanksgiving for
their deliverance by the Israelites in this song of
triumph, we meet with phrases that point conclu
sively to the late period of its composition ; for we
discover that the people have been already “ guided
in the strength of the Lord to his holy habitation; ”
the meaning of which is that they are dwelling in
the city of Jerusalem conquered by King David from
the Jebusites, and having the Temple on Mount
Moriah built by King Solomon as the habitation of
their God. And we see farther that the peoples
of Palestine, the Dukes of Edom, the mighty princes
of Moab, and the natives of Canaan, have all already
had cause “ for trembling and amazement,” according
to the words of the poem.
What in brief may be said of the account we have
of the Exodus from Egypt ?
That the story in so far as the accessories are
concerned—the serpent charming, the river turned
into blood, the frogs, the gnats or lice, the flies and
the locusts—must be the work of a writer who had
some acquaintance with Egypt and its natural his
tory : the river in the beginning of the inundation
coming down of a red colour; frogs abounding in a
land so thoroughly irrigated as Egypt; gnats and
flies swarming at particular seasons of the year, and
locusts invading occasionally and devouring all before
them. The thunder and lightning and hail, though
not impossible, must still have been extremely rare
in Egypt. The receding of the Red Sea from its
northern shores, moreover, by the action of the tides,
was known to the writer. At complete ebb the sea
became fordable (or was so before the cutting of
the Great Canal) for a short time, twice in the
twenty-four hours, at the new and full of the moon.
The writer used facts in the natural history of Egypt
in his narrative ; but possessed of a love of the mar
vellous and a fine spirit of exaggeration, he has turned
�Exodus : The Flight from Egypt.
179
the natural into the supernatural, and, it may be, the
actual into the impossible, for the purpose of display
ing the power of his God Jehovah, not only over the
Gods of the Egyptians, but over the domain of the
true God—the world and the laws that inhere in it,
and all to favour the escape of a party of thankless
slaves from their fetters !
Is it either reasonable or reverent to think of God
“ getting him honour” by the destruction of the
beings who can only have come into existence through
conformity with his natural laws ?
It is both against reason and reverential feeling to
entertain such thoughts of God.
Or to hold that the men were inspired by God who
formed such ideas of his nature and attributes, as the
words they presume to ascribe to him, and the acts
they make him do, proclaim them to have enter
tained ?
It is not merely unreasonable, but verily impious to
believe that they were.
Or that they could have been inspired by the holy
spirit of truth associate with knowledge, who make
God say at one time that he brought the Israelites
out of Egypt with a high hand, and at another, that
they were driven out of the land after having been
ordered by their Deity to rob the natives of their
jewels of silver and jewels of gold and fine raiment ?
Inspiration from God can only be fitly spoken of
as coming through the mind of man, and in harmony
with the right and the reasonable in his nature,
never with the irrational in thought and the repre
hensible in deed.
Or that between the dusk and the dawn, a popula
tion approaching three millions in number, with
flocks and herds innumerable, could have crossed an
arm of the sea, were it but a mile in breadth, laid dry
by the receding tide for half-an-hour or less ?
The thing is physically, andso absolutely, impossible.
�180
The Pentateuch.
Pharaoh and his host effectually disposed of, the
Israelites we must presume will now proceed on their
way towards the land reported as flowing with milk
and honey ?
Most singular to say, however, they do not; thev
even turn clean away from it, advance along the
eastern shore of the Red Sea towards the southern
extremity of the Sinaitic peninsula and come, it is
said, into the wilderness of Shur.
Where is Shur ?
Not where the Israelites could have been at this
time, if it was on the way to Shur that Hagar was
found by the Angel of Jehovah when she had been so
ruthlessly driven from his tent by Abraham, then
encamped in the land of Canaan. The desert of
Shur is on the east side of the Dead Sea towards its
northern extremity.
The first stage of the fugitive Israelites after
leaving Rameses is farther said to have been Succoth.
Succoth, we should consequently conclude, must be
within an easy march of Rameses ?
Yet the only Succoth of which we read elsewhere
in the Old Testament is the one to which Jacob came
on his way from Mahanaim after his interview
with his brother Esau, Lord of Seir, in Moab, some
hundreds of miles away from Rameses in Egypt and
the Red Sea. It is, therefore, impossible that the
children of Israel could have reached the Succoth and
Shur mentioned in the histories of Abraham and
Jacob; and as neither desert nor camping place is
known on the borders of Egypt by these names, the
only conclusion possible is, that the redactor of the
part of the Pentateuch which now engages us must
have had two documents before him, severally de
tailing incidents pertaining to different periods in the
earlier nomadic wanderings of the Hebrews in search
of better feeding grounds or more settled homes.
The confusion in the account of the Exodus as we
�Exodus: The Flight from Egypt.
181
have it, and the impossibility of following the Israel
ites in their course by the names of the stations or
camping places given, has even led to the suggestion
that the Misr, translated Egypt, from which they are
described as having escaped was not the Misr of the
Nile, but an outlying district of Phoenicia called
Goshen (see Josh, x., 41 and xi., 16), in which they
had been slaves ; and farther, that the sea they are
said to have crossed dry-shod was not the Red Sea at
all, but an inland lake characterised in the original as
the reedy, rushy, or sedgy sea (Schilf Meere, De Wette),
a title totally inapplicable to the briny Arabian Gulf
on whose shores reed or rush never grew.
*
The Israelites, however, in the account we possess,
have made great speed in reaching the east coast of
the Red Sea after quitting Rameses in Egypt ?
They seem to have spent but a few days—three
days ?—if we may judge by the narrative, in getting
thus far.
What is the distance from Rameses to Suez on the
western head of the Red Sea ?
About thirty-five English miles.
How long would it take a column of men, women,
and children, approaching three millions in number,
burthened with all their belongings in the shape of
furniture, baggage, tents for shelter, &c. &c., to say
nothing of sick and infirm, hampered besides by
numerous flocks and herds, to march in the most
perfect order—impossibility under the circumstances
indicated—from the borders of Egypt to the coast of
the Red-Sea?
A satisfactory answer will be found in the Bishop
of Natal s exhaustive work, ‘ The Pentateuch and
Book of Joshua.’ Very many days, at all events—■
if not even weeks, or, by possibility, months!
* Vide ‘ Badenhausen, Die Bibel wider die Glaube.’ 8vo.
Hamb., 1865. Also ‘ Goethe : Zum West-Ostlichen Divan •
Israel in der Wiiste,’ Bd. vi., S. 158 Stuttg. and Tubing, 1828 ’
�182
The Pentateuch.
Yet the Exodus is said to have been effected in the
course of a single night ?
Between midnight and the next morning, as we
read the account; Etham, on the coast of the Red
Sea, being reached by the following day at farthest;
how much longer it was before Pi-hahiroth, between
Migdol and the sea, was attained we do not learn.
Surely this was impossible ?
On natural grounds certainly. But the process of
evacuation is to be seen as it presented itself to, or
rather as it was elicited from, the writer’s imagina
tion—viz., as miraculous ; which, being interpreted,
means against nature, therefore against God, and so
impossible. For, with our faith in the changeless
laws of nature, expressions, as we perforce apprehend
them, of the power and attributes of God, we acknow
ledge no reported interferences with the necessities
they impose as other than fables devised by ignorance
in view of particular ends—the end in the case before
us being to show forth the superiority of the Jewish
God Jehovah over the Gods of Pharaoh and the
Egyptians, and the peculiar favour in which he held
the children of Israel.
What befals the fugitives next ?
They come to Marah, where the water is found so
bitter that it cannot be drunk, and the people murmur
against their leader.
But the bitterness of the water is said to have
been removed or remedied ?
Jehovah is said to have showed Moses a tree,
which, being cast into the water, made it sweet.
Does the knowledge we now possess of the chemical
nature of the salts which cause brackishness in water,
and of the principles which give plants their special
properties, warrant us in believing that any tree
grows, or did ever grow, capable of neutralising or
eliminating the alkaline and earthy chlorides and
sulphates which commonly embitter and make water
undrinkable ?
�Exodus: The Flight from Egypt.
183
It does not. On the contrary it enables us to
speak positively, and to say that no such tree did
ever grow or could ever have grown. Distillation
alone is competent to make bitter or brackish water
sweet and wholesome; and the art of distillation,
though it came from Arabia, could hardly have been
known in the days of Moses and Aaron, or, if it were,
it is not said, at all events, that it was called into
requisition.
The Israelites next reach Elim, where there are
said to be twelve wells, and threescore and ten
palm-trees. Suppose a mixed multitude of nearly
three millions of men, women, and children—to say
nothing of cattle—how many would there be to a
well ?
Two hundred and fifty thousand.
And if thirty of these may be supposed to have
drunk in the course of every hour of the twenty-four,
and each to have had access to the well twice a day,
how long would it be before all could have quenched
their thirst ?
A very long time—the reader who is curious to
know the exact number of hours, days, weeks, months,
and years may amuse himself by making the calcu
lation.
And reasonable men are still asked to give credit
to so impossible a tale as that of the Exodus of the
Israelites from Egypt—that some two and a-half or
three millions of men, women, and children, several
thousands of sick, infirm, parturient, dying, and dead,
besides vast herds of kine, sheep, and goats, left their
homes in a single night and subsisted for forty years
in a desert that does not furnish food for the four
thousand souls with a few camels and goats who now
possess it ?
They are, indeed, and have it propounded to them
as part of a revelation from the God of Reason for
their guidance in learning to know something of him
�184
The Pentateuch.
and the nature of his agency in the world they
inhabit.
Does not the exaggeration in regard to the num
bers of the Israelites who leave Egypt find its
corrective subsequently ?
Elsewhere we learn that the Israelites were not
chosen by Jehovah “ because they were more in
number than any people, for they were the fewest of
all people ” and truly when the history of the tribe
is perused with unbiassed mind, such an indifferent
reason is seen to be as good as, or possibly better
than, any other that could be given for the choice
—all things else considered. The population of
Palestine—Phoenicians, Syrians, Edomites, Moabites,
Israelites, &c., did not at any time of old amount to
the numbers said to have left Egypt under the
leadership of Moses in a single night.
*
The palm-trees need not detain us, for, as the
Exode is said to have taken place in the spring of
the year, their fruit could not have been ripe; and
had it been so, what would the fruit of threescoreand-ten palm-trees have been among three millions
of hungry human beings, the produce of each tree
having to be divided between 42,857 mouths ! Food,
as well as water, failing, and supplies being indis
pensable, how says the record they^were furnished ?
Flesh meat by means of a flight of quails which
* An excellent authority estimates the population of
Palestine never to have exceeded two millions (Movers ‘ Die
Phoenizier,’ B. ii,, S. 303); and the inhabitants of the Sinaitic
Peninsula, in which the children of Israel, approaching three
millions in number, are said to have wandered and found sub
sistence for themselves and flocks for forty years, do not now,
and probably never did, exceed four thousand souls, who are
not even dependent on the produce of the land for their means
of living, but on the wages they earn in forwarding merchan
dise and travellers through the desert they inhabit; food and
necessaries of every kind reaching them from Egypt and
Palestine. See Robinson’s ‘ Travels in Palestine.’
�Exodus: The Eduth.
185
covered the camp, and bread by a fall of manna from
the skies. Of the latter every man was to gather, or to
have gathered for him, an omer by measure. Did he
gather more on any working day, it was found next
day to stink and to have bred worms ; but, that
wonders might not cease, and as it was unlawful in
the writer’s mind to do any work on the Sabbath,
two omers were to be gathered on the preceding
day, and the one reserved was found to keep sweet
and good, as if there had been a preservative or
antiseptic quality in the air of the Sabbath.
There was also an omer ordered to be gathered
and kept for a memorial and a witness to coming
generations of the wonderful way in which the
chosen people had been fed in the Wilderness. This
omer of manna, like that gathered on the eve of the
Sabbath, was also miraculously preserved from stinking and breeding worms, and is ordered to be laid
up first before Jehovah—the Lord (xvi., 83), and
then before the Eduth—the Testimony (lb., 34).
What may the object be which is thus designated
indifferently Jehovah and Eduth ?
The Hebrew word Eduth, here met with for the
first time and translated Testimony with us, is com
monly understood to signify the Law or Tables of the
Law. But the Law had not yet been delivered to
Moses; the stones on which it was written were still
in the quarry, and the ark in which it was kept was
in.the tree, so that the word Eduth must mean some
thing other than the Law, though it may have the
sense of Testimony.
The literal meaning of the Hebrew word Eduth
might lead us to the sense in which it is here used ?
The word among other meanings implies brightness,
and as the type of all splendour is the Sun, and the
Sun was the chief God of all the ancient peoples, so
the Eduth has been held by some learned mythologists to signify either an Image of the Sun-God, or
0
�18 6
The Pentateuch.
a Symbol of the Deity in one of his most notable
attributes.
Is there anything in the Hebrew Scriptures that
countenances such an interpretation ?
Hadad, Hadod, or Adod was a Phoenician name for
the Sun-God; and the passage from this to Edud or
Eduth is easy. Jehovah, in the text quoted above,
is spoken of by the name of Eduth, and Eduth is
used as synonymous with Jehovah.
*
Journeying through the Wilderness of Sin there
is no water, and the people chide with Moses for
bringing them out of the land of Egypt to kill them
and their children and their cattle with thirst in the
desert. This gives occasion to another great miracle ?
To the notable one, so much made of by painters
and poets in later times, where Moses strikes the
rock with his wonder-working rod, and water flows
for the people to drink.
What are we to think of this ?
As of the report of a miracle, i.e., a statement im
plying contravention of an eternal and changeless
Law of God.
No more possible therefore than that a touch of the
same rod could have turned the water of the Nile into
blood and the dust of the ground into gnats or lice ?
Certainly not; unless we are prepared to give up
our trust in the changeless nature of God and his
Laws, and to live in a state of chaos in which, as the
poet has it: “ Function is swallowed in surmise and
nothing is but what is not.”
Does not the mention of a Wilderness of Sin and
a Meribah, or bitter well, in connection with the early
tale of the Exodus and the southern extremity of
the Sinaitic peninsula, arouse suspicions of the trust
worthiness of the record ?
* See, farther on, what is said about the contents of the
Sacred Arks or Coffers of the Ancients.
�Exodus: Encounter with Amalek.
187
It certainly does so, coming as we do by and by
upon a Wilderness of Sin and a Meribah on the
borders of Palestine, when the spies are sent out by
Moses to report on the land,—the long-looked for
goal of all the desert toils.
Passing over this difficulty, ascribable to the writer
having different documents before him and drawing
from one or other without critical tact or discrimina
tion, we find that the Israelites as they advance come
in contact with some of the desert-dwelling tribes by
whom they are met and opposed ?
And first by the Amaleks in Rephidim, against
whom Joshua as Captain is ordered out, whilst Moses
with the rod of God in his hand takes his stance on
a hill overlooking the field. “ And it came to pass,”
says the story, “ when Moses held up his hand that
Israel prevailed, and when he let down his hand
Amalek prevailed.”
Observing this, what do Aaron and Hur who have
conveniently accompanied the leader to the hill-top ?
They set him on a stone, and one on either side
stayed up his hands until the discomfiture of Amalek,
which was only completed with the going down of
the sun.
Can we conceive any connection between a rod in
the hand of a man on a hill-top and the success of
one of the parties engaged in a skirmish on the plain
below ?
It is impossible to imagine any: force is force, and
courage is courage, and the greater force and the
greater courage by the law of necessity, which is ever
the law of God, prevail over the less : the Israelites,
braver, more numerous, better armed or better led’
defeated the Amalekites.
What does Moses after the battle ?
He builds an altar and calls it by the name of
Jahveh-Nissi, notin thankfulness for his victory, how
ever, but because “Jehovah hath sworn that'he will
�i88
The Pentateuch.
have war with Amalek from generation to genera
tion.”
Is this, according to our modern notions, a seemly
oath to have been ascribed to God ?
To God, conceived of as the impartial parent of
the universe, and in the light of the ideas of our day,
it certainly is not; though it perfectly accords with
such notions of Deity as might be entertained by a
presumptuous, barbarous, cruel, and ignorant people,
or of a later writer, with a dramatic turn of mind,
throwing himself into the ideas and feelings of his
rude progenitors.
The name which Moses gives his altar has a sin
gular affinity with that of one of the principal Gods
of the ancient world ?
Jahveh-Nissi is not far from Jao-Nissi (Ja or Jao,
being the name of a Phoenician deity), nor this from
Dio-nissi or Dionysos, the God of fertility and increase
of the Greeks and other ancient peoples. The Israelites,
with all their exclusiveness, cannot be supposed to
have remained through the whole of their history
uninfluenced by surrounding nations—Phoenicians,
Egyptians, Assyrians, and Medo-Persians, their pre
decessors in civilisation and so much better policied
and more powerful than themselves.
Moses is now visited by Jethro his father-in-law,
who brings him his wife and children ?
He is ; and in the interlude here introduced we meet
with another of those simply natural and purely
human incidents artistically used which lend so many
parts of the mythical and legendary history of the
Hebrews the charm and imposing aspect of reality.
Jethro or Beuel, the priest of Midian, Moses’ fatherin-law, hearing of all that God had done for Moses
and for Israel his people, takes Zipporah, Moses’ wife,
and her two sons, and with them comes to him in the
Wilderness where he was encamped by Horeb the
Mount of God; and says to him : “I, thy father-in-
�Exodus : Jethro counsels Moses.
189
law Jethro, am come unto thee, and thy wife, and her
two sons with her.” “ And Moses went out to meet
his father-in-law, and did obeisance, and kissed him ;
and they asked each other of their welfare ; and they
came into the tent.”
Jethro tenders his son-in-law some sensible advice ?
“ Now I know,” says he, “ that Jahveh is greater
than all the Gods ; for in the thing wherein they dealt
proudly he was above them.” But Jethro sees that
no single man can do the whole of the work which
Moses has imposed on himself, sitting from morning
Until evening with the people standing about him,
judging between them and making them to know the
statutes of God and his laws. “ This thing,” says he,
*l is too heavy for thee ; thou art not able to perform
it thyself alone. Now hearken to my voice. Be thou
for the people to God-ward, that thou mayest bring
the causes unto God ; but provide out of all the people
able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating
covetousness, and place such over them, to rule them
and to judge them at all seasons ; and it shall be that
every great matter they shall bring to thee, but every
small matter they shall judge; so shall it be easier for
thyself, and thou shalt be able to endure.”
Moses hearkens to Jethro’s reasonable counsels ?
He does, and in so doing shows us that all is not
effected by immediate divine agency and miraculous
means in this legendary narrative. Jethro’s inter
ference here, however, may fairly be held to be im
pertinent. A God-commissioned man must be pre
sumed competent for every emergency and neither to
need nor to take advice from another. In hearkening
to Jethro Moses descends from his eminence as Envoy
and Agent of his God, and so brings suspicion on all
that is ascribed to him as leader of the children of
Israel. Jethro, a Midianitish priest, has a clearer
vision of human capabilities than Moses himself, the
chosen of Jehovah. But the recommendation of
�190
The Pentateuch.
Jethro is by a modern writer, and is inserted in this
place to countenance a favourite assumption of the
later Jews that their Sanhedrim dates as an Institution
from even so far back as the age of Moses !
Having now—a few weeks we must presume—after
quitting Egypt, come to the desert of Sinai and pitched
before the mountain, God, it is said, calls to Moses
therefrom, bids him remind the people of all that had
already been done for them, and say that if they will
obey the voice of Jehovah and keep his covenant, they
shall be a peculiar treasure to him above all people,
—a kingdom of priests and a holy nation ?
Promises greatly calculated to foster pride and
exclusiveness as regards themselves, contempt, hate,
and uncharitableness as regards other peoples, to give
a colour, moreover, to proceedings for which rapine
and murder are the only appropriate names.
The people on their part declare their readiness to
obey in all things ?
Of course they do; the people are ever as ready to
pledge their word as they are careless to keep it. Not
Moses only but Jahveh-Elohim himself, according to
the record, had at all times a heavy handful in trying
to keep the wayward and stiff-necked people they had
led out of Egypt in something like order, a task,
indeed, in which it may be said that neither God nor
man ever completely succeeded, as we shall find in the
course of our exposition.
A great event is now impending and an imposing
prelude is required ?
What is called the delivery of the Law from Sinai,
preceded by injunctions for the people to sanctify
themselves, to wash their clothes, and be ready
against the third day, when Jehovah will come down
in sight of all the congregation on Mount Sinai.
This great event takes place ?
Wrapt about by a thick cloud, amidst thunder
and lightning and trumpet sounds exceeding loud,
�Exodus; Delivery of the Law.
191
Jehovah comes down, as said, and Mount Sinai is
“ altogether on a smoke, and quakes greatly, because
Jehovah descends in fire.” After the trumpet has
sounded long and waxed ever louder and louder—by
whom it was blown we do not learn—Jehovah speaks
to Moses by a voice, and calls him up to the top of
the Mount. There he is ordered to go down and
charge the people that they break not through and
many of them perish; he and Aaron are alone to
come up; the people and the priests—of whom we
have heard nothing till now—are not even to set foot
on the sacred mountain, “ lest Jehovah break out on
them.”
This is a strange materialistic exhibition and
derogatory statement to be connected with the
supersensuous, ubiquitous power conceived by civi
lised man as Immanent Cause in Nature, and by us
in these parts personified and called God ?
Of whom as one and sole in any sense now under
stood, in spite of all that has been said to the con
trary, the Hebrew people until a very late period in
their history had not a notion. The representation
here is only in harmony with the jealous, irascible,
partial, and ruthless human impersonation of the
greatest among the Gods, their own peculiar God who,
until after the era of the kings and the captivities,
they continued to apprehend under various names at
different times—Chiun, Chamos, El-Schaddai, IsraEl, &c.,. to whom they gave the title of Melek-—King,
turned into Moloch, the God to whom they sacrificed
the first-born of their sons and their cattle, and who
was in truth no other than the Kronos or Saturn of
neighbouring cognate tribes and peoples.
The people and the priests, it is said, are not to set
foot on the mountain lest Jehovah break out on them
and consume them ?
We have as yet had no intimation of the existence
of priests among the Israelites. Aaron is still no
�192
The Pentateuch.
more than the subordinate of Moses, though his
brother, and no priest as the word came afterwards
to be understood. The mention of priests is conse
quently a slip of the pen of the late compiler of this
part of the Pentateuch.
The thundering, smoking, quaking, and trumpet
sounds having ceased, the delivery of the Decalogue
or Ten Commandments follows ?
Prefaced by the important announcement that
“ God spake these words saying : I am Jehovah thy
God, thou shalt have no other Gods before me.”
What is to be understood by the words: “ God
spake ? ”
“ When God is described as speaking to man,”
says a learned and pious divine, “ He does so in the
only way in which He who is a Spirit can speak to
one encompassed with flesh and blood ; not to the
outward organs of sensation, but to the intelligence
that is kindred to himself.”* Not in human
language, consequently, as if God were a man, having
the parts essential to articulate utterance, but by and
through the mind of man, whose activities, aroused
by impressions from without, and as emotions and
thoughts proceeding from within, find expression by
the instrumentality of his vocal organs in words as
various as the races that people the earth.
The Decalogue is generally associated in a more
especial manner with the name of Moses ?
It has long been customary so to connect it.
By the concurring testimony of the scholar and
critic, however, the Decalogue has of late been
recognised as an Eclectic Summary made in times
* Davidson (S.), D.D., ‘Introd, to Old Test.,’ I., 233. See
also our ‘ Dialogue by way of Catechism,’ pt. I., p. 13. It is
strange and unaccountable to us to find Spinoza saying that
he thinks it was by a “ real voice that God revealed to Moses
the Laws he desired should be given to the Jews.” Tract.
Theologico-Politicus, pp. 34 and 38, English Version.
�Exodus: The Decalogue.
193
very much, later than the age of Moses, and only
derived in part from the earlier documents that
■underlie the Pentateuch in its present form. A little
study and reflection indeed suflice to show the
ordinary reader, that the Decalogue in the compact
form in which it meets us in Exodus (xx., 1-17)
must be the work of a' relatively modern hand. Some
of the ordinances here artistically grouped have no
bearing on the concerns of a tribe but just escaped
from slavery and wandering in the Wilderness as
Nomads. Several of them again exist among a great
variety of others that are often not only objectionable,
but indecent, or positively iniquitous in character,
scattered throughout the next two or three chapters
of the Book, which have an unmistakable air of much
higher antiquity than the first seventeen verses of
the twentieth chapter, and give us glimpses of a
state of things among the early Hebrews that is
never suspected when the polished summary pre
sented under the ten heads of the Decalogue is alone
Considered.
The Decalogue being held of such high signi
ficance, everything connected with its delivery, we
are to presume, must be beyond the sphere of question
or of doubt F
Unfortunately this is not the case. The original
delivery of the Ten Commandments is not connected
with any tables of stone on which they are subse
quently said to have been written ; they are delivered
viva voce by Jehovah himself amid thunder and
lightning, and it is not until we come to the twenty
fourth chapter that we meet with a word about
Tables of the Testimony, interpreted as Tables of the
Law, which are ordered to be laid up in the Ark of
th© Covenant. By and by again, when we hear of
two Tables of Testimony having been given to Moses
(xxxi., 18), their contents are not specified; and the
account in the next succeeding chapter (xxxii., 15,16),
�194
The Pentateuch.
where two Tables of Testimony are again spoken of,
leads to the idea that it must have been some more
lengthy document than the Decalogue that was
engraved upon them ; for they are now said to have
been written on both their sides by the finger of
God,—a fact, however, if it could by possibility have
been a fact, of which the writer could by no possi
bility have known anything. It is not in fine until
we come to the thirty-fourth chapter that the
words said to have been in the first Tables are
promised to be rewritten in the second : “ Hew thee
two tables of stone like unto the first, and I will
write upon these tables the words that were in the
first which thou brakedst,” says the writer in the
name of Jehovah.
We have no absolute assurance consequently as to
the contents of these Tables of the Testimony ?
None whatever. For when we look on to the four
teenth and following verses of the thirty-fourth chap
ter, we find several of the Commandments included
among the ten side by side with a number of others,
which are not there to be found. Here the text runs
thus in brief : “ Thou shalt worship no other Gods,
for Jehovah is a jealous God ; thou shalt not make a
covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and go a
whoring after their Gods; thou shalt not take of their
daughters to thy sons ; thou shalt make thee no
molten Gods; the feast of unleavened bread shalt
thou keep ; all that openeth the matrix is mine; six
days shalt thou work, but on the seventh day thou
shalt rest; thou shalt observe the feast of weeks;
thrice in the year shall all your men children appear
before Jehovah Elohim, the Elohim of Israel; thou
shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leaven ;
the first fruits of thy land thou shalt bring into the
house of Jehovah thy God ; thou shalt not seethe a
kid in its mother’s milk.” This enumeration of acts
to be done and left undone concludes with these
�Exodus: The Decalogue.
195
words : “ And Jehovah said unto Moses, write thou
these words, for after the tenor of these words I have
made a covenant with thee and with Israel. And
he, Moses, was with Jehovah forty days and forty
nights; he did neither eat bread nor drink water ; and
he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant,
the Ten Commandments.” Besides the change in the
Tenor of the words as here delivered, we have, there
fore, Moses as the writer and not Jehovah, in oppo
sition to the statement elsewhere made. The confu
sion that reigns in connection with the delivery of the
Decalogue points not only to a variety of hands en
gaged on the text, but to much uncertainty of the
commandments that were really at different times
comprised in the summary. Each writer doubtless
followed the tradition of his day or of his ken ; and
would have his readers infer, as he himself believed,
that something in the shape of the then accredited
Decalogue was that which was engraved upon the
stone tables.
So much of the thirty-fourth chapter as refers to
the Decalogue has a marked paraphrastic and supple
mentary look about it ?
It certainly has. But it is • not the only chapter
bearing on the Decalogue that meets us in the same
way; for, turning to the nineteenth of Leviticus, we
find a repetition in varied terms of many of the old
ordinances, with sundry additions, some of them, in
all probability, from an ancient document, but others
unmistakably from one of the most modern of all the
editors of the Pentateuch.
The late writer of the Book of Deuteronomy, how
ever, says positively that the tables were inscribed
with the Ten Commandments, and the still more recent
writer of the Books of the Kings (I. Kings, viii,,
7-9) informs us that when the Ark of the Covenant
was “ brought into its place under the wings of the
Cherubim ” within the Temple of Solomon, “ the two
�196
The Pentateuch.
tables of stone which Moses put there at Horeb ”
were still to be seen. As this must have been done,
hard upon five hundred years before the writer’s day
(he having lived some time after the destruction of
Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar), and he shows himself
familiar with the Mosaic Saga, he can only be held
as giving expression to the popular belief; and else
where we learn that when the ark was examined
at a later period it was found empty; the mythical
stone tables writ by the finger of God, had they
ever been there, as well as everything else,—the
Agal/ma tou Theou, fyc., which we believe had been
there, had disappeared.
Looking narrowly into these Ten Commandments,
of which so much is made, we ask first on what
authority they rest ?
On that of the immediate spoken word of God,
says the text. “ Elohim spake these words,” is preface
to the first of the versions we have of them (Ex. xx.) ;
“ These words Jehovah spake,” is the introduction to
the second (Deut. v.). But we have determined the
sense in which these statements can alone be taken:
they are the utterances of men, not the words of God ;
for God never speaks, and never spoke in words to
man.
The two versions, we must presume, will be found
to agree ?
In every essential particular they do, save one : the
reason given for the observance of the seventh day of
the week as a Sabbath or day of rest.
The religious sense, the moral sense, and the reason
of man we may farther presume will be efficiently
met and appealed to in the ordinances of the
Decalogue ?
Inasmuch as with a single exception they are
entirely negative in their character, the important
elements in the nature of man now named may be
said to be left uncared for. The entire domain of
�Exodus : The Decalogue.
197
D#ty, or of acts to be done, is untouched in the
Decalogue, and reason and intelligence are left wholly
out of the question.
The words, “I am Jehovah thy God,” meet us at
the very outset as an announcement that could fitly
have come from the tutelary God of the Jews only ?
And never from the God of humanity at large.
The next clause again, “ Thou shalt have no other
Gods before me,” was assuredly not wanted; for
there are no other Gods, but One God only ; a truth,
however, which the writer could not have known, or
he would have guarded himself from speaking as he
does.
“ Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image
or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above
or in the earth beneath ; thou shalt not bow down to
them nor serve them, fori Jehovah am a jealous God.”
The writer makes God speak in terms of his own
apprehension, little dreaming that the heaven abooe
him now became a heaven below him by and by ! The
injunction here is obviously enough directed against
practices long familiar to the countrymen of the
writer, and still followed in the late times in which he
lived. Through by far the greater part of their his
tory the Hebrews were mere idolaters; they made
images of the sun and moon, and of their own pecu
liar star Baal-Chiun (Saturn) ; they burned incense,
and poured out drink offerings to the Queen of
Heaven (the Moon), as their fathers, their kings,
their chiefs, and they themselves had done in the
cities of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem ; and they
had had plenty to eat, and were well, and saw no
evil so long as they continued to do so. “ But since
we left off to burn incense to the Queen of Heaven,
and to pour out drink-offerings to her, we have
wanted all things, and have been consumed by the
. sword and by famine ; and as to the word that thou
hast spoken to us in the name of Jehovah, we will
�198
The Pentateuch.
not hearken unto thee,” say the people in reply to
Jeremiah’s exhortation to them to forsake the Queen
of Heaven and their other Gods for Jehovah (Comp.
Jerem. xliv., 15-19).
*
The Hebrews undoubtedly
worshipped many Gods, even into late periods of
their history, and under a variety of emblems, from
the unhewn stone block to the sculptured column ;
from figures of the Serpent and the Tree, to those
of the Bull, the Goat, and, we may safely conclude,
the nobler image in human form enthroned between
the Cherubim upon the mercy-seat, and present as
part of the furniture of every house under the title
of Teraphim or Ephod.
Observing such discrepancy between commandment
and practice, it is not easy to conceive the writings
in which the Commandments are set forth as being
in any sense inspired by God, or as dating from any
remote period, such as the age of Moses ?
God trusts his eternal ordinances neither to stone,
to parchment, nor to paper, but implants them in
the nature of things and the mind of man.
We should conclude, then, against the inspiration
of which these disjointed, mythical, legendary, and
contradictory Hebrew records are held up as evi
dence ?
And say that it had no existence out of the imagi
nation of those who proclaim it.
Moses could then have been no God-inspired man?
Had he been so, the writings ascribed to him could
be none of his. Of the life and laws of Moses we
have, in fact, but “ a few scattered and unconnected
* “ Is it not,” says Professor Dozy, “ as if we had here the
Romans speaking in times when the Empire had become the
prey of the Barbarians ? Eor to the neglect of the Old Reli
gion they, too, ascribed all the misfortunes that had come upon
them ; Christianity, in their opinion, being to blame for the
disruption of the State, which the Old Gods had so well and
truly protected.”—Dozy, ‘Die Israel, zu Mekka,’ 162.
�Exodus: The Decalogue.
199
fragments; and even these, for the most part,
obscured and altered by the tamperings of later
times.”* The idolatry that prevailed through the
period of the Judges, and for ages after this, suffices
to prove that the Commandment against making and
worshipping graven images is of relatively modern
date.
Jehovah is made to announce himself as “a jealous
God ”—and we naturally ask of what in heaven or
earth might God, body and soul of the universe in
one, be jealous ?
Of other Gods, doubtless, according to the Jehovistic writer whose work we have before us. Of
them, indeed, might the Jewish Jehovah well be
jealous, for his service was constantly deserted for
theirs,—was never popular, indeed, until more than
one of the few pious and respectable kings ever
boasted by Judah had lived and died, and the
country, at war with itself, was verging to its fall.
“Visiting the iniquities of the fathers on the
third and fourth generation”—proceeds the tale.
But God does not visit the sins of parents upon
children in any sense intended in the text, a truth
which a later writer than the compiler of the Deca
logue, and at variance with him, announced when he
said : “ The fathers shall not be put to death for the
children, neither shall the children be put to death
for the fathers : every man shall be put to death for
his own sin.” (Deut. xxiv., 16.)
“ Showing mercy to thousands of them that love
me and keep my commandments.”
Surely God is merciful to all who study to know
and faithfully obey his laws, written as they are, and
far more at large, in the great open book of Nature
* “Profecto non nisi fragmenta Vitse et Legum Mosis
supersunt pauca, dissipata disjectaque, et hsec ipsa pleraque
•temporum seriorum injuria denuo obscurata et turbata.”—
Ewald, in ‘ Comm. Soc. Gotting,' vol. viii., p. 176.
�200
The Pentateuch.
than in the Hebrew of Exodus or Deuteronomy;
even as they who know them not, or knowing who
neglect them, assuredly bring penalties upon them
selves.
“ Thou shalt not take the name of Jehovah thy
God in vain.”
The name of their God Jehovah was held of such
sanctity by the Jews in later times that they believed
it could not be spoken by man without sin. The
high priest alone was authorised to utter it aloud,
and that once only in the course of the year, on the
great day of atonement. It is to enforce this usage
that we have the story of the man born of an
Israelitish mother by an Egyptian father stoned to
death for having blasphemed the name of Jehovah—
by which we are to understand nothing more than
having dared to take the sacred name into his un
hallowed lips (Levit. xxiv., 10-14). The verses here
are plainly interpolated, and the text of verse sixteen
that follows has been tampered with. In reading
the scriptures aloud the name was at all other times
either slurred so as to be inarticulate, or a title was
substituted for it, Adonai,—Lord, being the one
that first came into use, though this, too, was by and
by esteemed so holy that it must not be pronounced
articulately. Ha Schem—the name—is the word that
is now spoken in the synagogue instead of either
Jahveh or Adonai.
“ Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy (£as
Jehovah thy God hath commanded thee,’ ” adds the
Deuteronomist, referring doubtless to the text of
Exodus) ; “ six days shalt thou labour and do all thy
work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of Jehovah
thy God, in it thou shalt not do any work, thou,
nor thy son, nor thy daughter,” &c. And here
occurs the important difference between the texts of
Exodus and Deuteronomy:—“ In six days,” says the
former, “ Jehovah made heaven and earth, the sea
�Exodus: The Decalogue.
201
and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day ;
wherefore Jehovah blessed the Sabbath day and
hallowedit.” “ Remember that thou wast a servant
in the land of Egypt, and that Jehovah thy God
brought thee out thence .... therefore Jehovah thy
God commanded thee to keep the Sabbath day,” says
the latter. The reasons given for the observance of the
seventh day as a day of rest are as plainly at variance
with one another as the writers of the several texts
are seen to be at a loss for any reason for the Sabbath
observance that might prove entirely satisfactory. The
late writer of Deuteronomy may have seen the absurdity
of having God, like a man foredone with the labour
of six days, resting on the seventh day; and so
have shifted the ground for its special observance
from God to the Exodus. A priest, he may farther
have seen that men might possibly be better kept to
the religious observances enjoined them, and so made
more submissive, by having these relegated to one
day of the week rather than spread over the seven.
The Semitic races do not appear, like the Aryans, to
have held each day of the week dedicated to a par
ticular divinity—the first to the Sun, Sunday, the
second to the Moon, Monday, &c. But their seventh
day has, nevertheless, the same significance as the
Saturn’s day of the Phcenicians, Greeks, and Romans,
even as their Chiun, El, Bel, Baal, Ja, and Jahveh
have their type in the Kronos-Saturnus so familiar
to us through our classical studies. The planet
Saturn was The Star of the Hebrew people, and to
the God it typified also belonged the seventh day of
the week. The Sabbath, however, may be said to
have lost its religious significance when God was
conceived of as One and Sole, when all days were
declared to be alike in his sight—as most assuredly
they are—and when charity between those who
thought one day holier than another and those who
looked on all days as holy alike came to be enjoined.
p
�202
The Pentateuch.
Is it not likely that neither in the Decalogue of
Exodus nor of Deuteronomy have we the Originals
of the Ten Commandments ?
It is not only likely, but may be said to be certain
that we have not. The Decalogue, as already said,
is an eclectic summary by a late writer of certain
ordinances scattered among many others over the
books of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, which he
held of the highest import and significance. The
Commandment concerning the Sabbath, in particular,
is to be met with as often as three times in different
chapters of Exodus, in close proximity with the one
which contains the Decalogue, and in what may be
safely assumed as earlier forms than that in which it
meets us there. “ Six days shalt thou work, but on
the seventh day thou shalt rest,” says the text, that
is probably the earliest of any (Exodus xxxiv., 21).
“ Six days shalt thou do thy work, and on the seventh
day thou shalt rest, that thine ox and thine ass mav
rest, and the son of thy handmaid [concubine] and
the stranger [slave] may be refreshed,” says another
version, somewhat amplified and having a purely
human motive for the observance of the day appended
(Exodus xxii., 12). “ Six days may work be done,
but the seventh is the Sabbath of rest, .... for in
six days Jehovah made heaven and earth, and on the
seventh day he rested and was refreshed,” says the one
that appears to be followed most closely in the Deca
logue (Exodus xxxi., 15-17). Such are the different
forms in which the order, as well as the reason for
observing the seventh day of the week as a day of
rest are delivered, the last quoted being in all likeli
hood from the hand that gave the Commandments
final shape in the Decalogue of Exodus.
Have we any clue to the probable composer of the
Decalogue ?
In him the lynx-eyed criticism of modern times
thinks it sees the writer to whom so much of the
�Exodus: The Decalogue.
203
Pentateuch in its present shape can be fairly ascribed
—“ Ezra the Priest, the Scribe, even a scribe of the
words of the Commandments of Jehovah and of his
statutes to Israel.”*
With the final triumph of Jehovism, the Jewish
scribes could not suffer the seventh day to continue
sacred to Baal-Saturn, the old tutelary God of the
country; neither could they have the Tabernacle and
Ark dedicated to the same Divinity. The day holy to
him and the Tent and Ark in which he dwelt had,
therefore, to be given to the modern God Jehovah.
“ In the veiled sagas of the Pentateuch,” says an able
writer, “ we discover many elements of the idolatrous
worship which prevailed so long among the Israelites.
The mass of the people honoured Saturn as their
national God; they carried about with them in a
Tent his Image in the form of a Bull, as it seems ; to
him they sacrificed the first-born of their sons, and to
his service they devoted the seventh day of the
week.”f Until the time of the exile, says another
accomplished scholar, the Jews were without a pass
able religious motive for the observance of the seventh
day of the week as a Sabbath. It was Ezra who
found for them the one that came finally to be
adopted ; for without misgivings may we assume that
it was he who wrote the Persian story of the Creation
and Paradise as it exists in the beginning of Genesis.
And who, indeed, had such opportunity of learning
something of the Persian sagas as he who lived so
long in exile in the kingdom of Persia, and was
finally sent by its king to Judea “ with the Law of
his God in his hand”—we venture to add; and
with what was not in his hand, in his head. J
The Sabbath, as a day of rest, must have been
much more a matter of necessity in times when all
* Ezra vii. 11 and 14.
f Vatke, ‘Bibl. Thcologie’ I., 201.
I Comp. Dozy, op. eit 34, 35.
�204
The Pentateuch.
below the ruler and the land-owning classes were
slaves, as they appear to have been among the
Israelites, as among the nations of antiquity
generally ?
Then, indeed, was the day of rest a most humane
and beneficent institution. Imposed m religious
grounds, it stood between the arbitrariness that so
commonly comes of wealth and irresponsible power
and the impotency that inheres in dependence. At
the present time, the Sabbath as a religious institu
tion has lost much of its significance : slavery no
longer exists in the civilised world, and, in trading
and manufacturing communities, the labouring classes
give it little heed. They no longer look forward to
one especial day of rest in the week, but make several
Sabbaths in its course ; in many cases they even
dictate the terms on which they will consent to work
at all, and make the accumulated fund of the
capitalist available for profit. Unhappily they do
not commonly use their power aright, turning the
two or three days of the week in which they
do no work into days of idleness and dissipation,
instead of using them for the cultivation of the higher
and nobler elements in their nature. But with our
faith in the possible limitless advance of man in
science and morals, and our belief in the influence of
education freed from the trammels of Churches and
the blight of dogmatic indoctrination, we have no
doubts of the brighter phase of humanity that will in
the course of ages make its appearance.
“Honour thy father and thy mother (‘ as Jehovah
thy God hath commanded thee,’ adds the Deuteronomist, referring again to the version of the
Decalogue he found in Exodus) that thy days may
be long upon the land which Jehovah thy God
giveth thee.”
�
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The Pentateuch in contrast with the science and moral sense of our age. Part II: [Exodus]
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Willis, Robert
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Thomas Scott
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1873
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Bible
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Bible. O.T. Pentateuch
Conway Tracts
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Text
THE PENTATEUCH
AND BOOK OF
JOSHUA
IN FACE OF
THE SCIENCE AND MORAL SENSE
OF OUR AGE.
By a PHYSICIAN.
“ Zufallige Geschichtswahrheiten konnen der Beweis von nothwendigen
Vernunftswahrheiten nie werden.”—“ Contingent historical statements can
never be vouchers for necessary intellectual truths.”—Lessing.
PUBLISHED BY THOMAS SCOTT,
NO. II THE TERRACE, FARQUHAR ROAD, UPPER NORWOOD,
LONDON, S.E.
1875.
Price. Sixpence.
�LONDON:
PRINTED BY C. W. REYNELL, LITTLE PULTENEY STREET,
HAYMARKET, W.
�THE
PENTATEUCH
AND BOOK OP
JOSHUA.
INTRODUCTION.
ITH every wish to find the Bible all it is
commonly said to be, against the per
suasions of earlier years, and near the end of a
long life, the writer feels bound to own that a
somewhat careful study of so much of the Hebrew
Scriptures as falls within the limits of the Penta
teuch and Book of Joshua leaves him with the
conviction that this portion of the Bible, at least,
is not any Word of God, gives no true account of
God’s dealings with the world, and enjoins little
or nothing that is calculated to edify or to raise
man in the scale of his proper humanity. On
the contrary, and passing for the moment the
incongruities, contradictions, and impossibilities
in which it abounds, Ideas of the Supreme are
everywhere encountered that were derogatory to
man, and averments made that gainsay know
ledge and reason, whilst misdeeds are commanded
and condoned that outrage humanity, and shock
�vi
Introduction.
the moral sense of our age. The Bible, however,,
is scarcely read without a foregone conclusion in
respect of its origin and import; still more
rarely is it perused with the amount of general,
scientific, historical, and archaeological lore that
are indispensable to a right understanding of its
text—truths which have led a late lamented great
biblical critic to ask: How many even of the
educated Laity understand the Bible—how many
of the Clergy understand—how many of them are
willing to understand it ?
*
I.
It is long, however, since it was definitely
shown that the Pentateuch, so persistently as
cribed to Moses, could neither have been written
by him nor by any one of his presumed age, but
must be the work of men who lived long—very
long—after the great mythical leader and legisla
tor;! and it maybe confidently maintained that all
subsequent critical inquiry by the competent and
candid, has not only substantiated, but has greatly
enlarged the scope and significance of this con
clusion. Writing, in the proper sense of the
word, appears not to have been practised by the
Jews in times so relatively recent as the days of
David. The Hebrew word for ink is of Persian
derivation, and the art of writing on prepared
sheep and goat skins among them dates from no
more remote an age than that of the Babylonian
captivity. The very character in which all the
Hebrew writing we possess has reached us, is
* Strauss, Der alte und der neue Glaube.
f Spinoza, Tract. Theologico-Politicus, 4to, Hamb., 16/0.
Eng. version, 8vo, Lond., 1868.
�Introduction.
vii
Chaldsean, and only came into use after the Exile.
A few slabs and pillars rudely cut in Intaglio,
and in a more ancient character, are all we possess
from which an idea can be formed of the kind of
writing that was practised in the earlier ages of
their existence by the Semitic tribes inhabiting
Western Asia.
How long the legends, which enter so largely
into the constitution of the Hebrew writings
proper, floated among the people before they
were reduced to writing, it is impossible to say ;
but the date at which they acquired the shape in
which they have reached us, is now hardly doubt
ful. These writings have, in fact, been brought
ever near and nearer to times concerning which
we have something like reliable records, whilst
the events of which theyspeak and the personages
who figure in them, so long regarded as historical
realities, are seen in the same measure to resolve
themselves into phantoms, with no more of sub
stance or reality than the dreams of the poet or
the visions of the Seer.
II.
Every addition of late years made to our know
ledge of the early history of mankind seems to
make it more and more certain that though we
seem to have so much, yet have we in reality
less of reliable information about the Hebrews in
the earlier periods of their existence than of
many others among the nations of antiquity.
The pious people who in person or by delegate
are at the present moment so busy excavating in
Palestine and Babylonia with a view to demon
strate the divine origin and historical truth of
�Vlll
Introduction.
the Hebrew Scriptures, seem verily to be pur
suing their work to their own discomfiture. It
is the reverse of the picture they would show
that mostly appears. All the evidences of cul
ture and civilisation brought to light of late from
the ruined cities of Asia Minor prove their
inhabitants to have been well advanced in polity,
and the arts of life, in mechanics, engineering,
and the rudiments of astronomical science, whilst
the Israelites were still wandering Nomads in
search of settled homes; nor, save in music, have
they yet distinguished themselves otherwise
than as petty traders and magnificent money
dealers. Some parts of the Hebrew Scriptures,
the most important of all in their far-reaching
after influence, lose their presumed character of
Revelations from God entirely, and appear to be
derived from the same source as the mythical
tales of the Babylonians;—source whence, in
the days of the Captivity, the sons of Israel
obtained the whole of the narratives that figure
in the earlier parts of the Book of Genesis.
The Garden in Eden, the Tree of Life, the Ser
pent, the Flood and the Ark, and much besides,
turn out to be neither history nor original
Revelation from Jehovah to the Jews, but stories
found among neighbours, their superiors in war
at all times as they were also in letters, until,
after contact with their conquerors and teachers,
the great lyrical and rhapsodical writers called
prophets,—the Isaiahs, Jeremiahs, Micahs, and
others,—appeared in the late days of the Kings.
�Introduction.
ix
III.
The Individuals, again, the personages with
whom through their names we are made so
familiar in the Bible story of patriarchal times,
turn out, under the light supplied by critical
inquiry, to be nothing more than mythical per
sonifications. Abraham, who comes from Ur of the
Chaldees, is discovered to be a NAME never borne
by any individual, but a generic Title applicable,
if applicable at all, to God, the Universal Father.
He is the Rock, as Sarah his wife is the Cavern,
whence the Hebrew people sprang. Abraham is,
in fact, a word of like significance with the
Dyaus, Zeus, and Deus of the Aryan race. He is
the Heaven-God, the active principle in nature,
as Sarah is the Heaven-Goddess, the passive
principle; the pair being parents of the laughing
Isaac (Istzack the laugher), wedded to Rebekah
(Fruitfulness), counterparts of the ’'HeXtos and
Ika of the Greeks.
Jacob, the Son of Isaac, so distinguished a
figure in the Hebrew story, like Abraham, is also
the embodiment of a name, fitted with a character
in correspondence with its import. Jacob is the
heel-holder, the tripper up, as he is made the
deceiver of his blind old father, the filcher of the
blessing and superseder of his brother. He is
another, yet a counterpart of Abraham, “ the
friend of God; ” nay, he is more than Abraham ;
for after a wrestling bout with his Deity he is
complimented with his name, and instead of Jacob
is called Israel, being thereafter always spoken of
as the Father of the Israelites.
Moses and Aaron, in like manner, are personi
fications of names in consonance with incidents
�X
Introduction.
attached to their legendary history ;—that of
Moses, which is believed to be old, being plainly
enough connected with his fabled rescue from the
water, that of Aaron, which is certainly modern,
' from the office assigned him about the Altar and
Ark of the Covenant (pns Ahrun.) The very
latest researches, however, have given us a Baby
lonian Moses, Sargon by name, who may very
possibly be the original of the Hebrew leader.
Sargon, it is said, was by his mother placed in a
cradle of rushes daubed with bitumen, and
launched on the Euphrates, but was rescued
by a water-carrier, and by him brought up as
his son.
*
IV.
What the absolute age of these names and the
personages they are assumed to represent, may
be, is questionable; but of this we are well
assured, that of the Jacob-legend there is not a
trace to be found until we come down to postDavidic times ; the latest researches of a critical
kind seeming to show that the whole series of
legends in which Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob
figure, are products of days posterior to the
secession of Israel from Judah. It was after this
disastrous event, and when the States were waging
an internecine war, that the scribes of the two
great religious as well as political parties into
which the country had split—the Elohists and
Jehovists—took to tampering with each other’s re
cords, and their poets to producing those wonderful
lyrics laudatory of their God and themselves, on
the one hand, and those libellous tales of rape
* Smith, ‘ Assyrian Discoveries,’p. 224, 8vo, Load., 1875.
I
�Introduction.
xi
snurder, and arson, in disparagement of their
■enemies on the other.
*
Then it was that El, Bel, Baal, or Isra-El—
other forms of El, chief God of the Hebrews in
the olden time—was set up under the form of the
Bull by the Israelites at Shechem and Dan, in
the kingdom of Ephraim, and Jehovah, the latest
■conception of Deity by the Jewish priesthood,
was established as Supreme God, with his sole
lawful shrine at Jerusalem, the capital of Judah.
Under what material form Jehovah was repre
sented we are left in doubt; everything that
would have satisfactorily informed us on the
subject having been expunged from the record,
although enough remains incidentally scattered
through the Scriptures, to satisfy us that neither
was this God without his similitude, and that
the interdict against making an image of their
Deity must therefore be one of the latest pro
ducts of the Jewish legislation.
V.
The exodus from Egypt under the conditions
and in the proportions specified we have shown
to be physically impossible; and, recognising no
interruption of the laws of nature, which we hold
to be the laws of God, we have referred all the
miracles in which Jehovah is made to glorify him
self, and to show how far he exceeds the Gods of
Egypt in power, together with the dramatic pas
sages between Moses and Pharaoh as prologues to
that event, to the realm of legendary myth.
* Vide Bernstein on the Origin of the Legends of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob ; one of Mr. Scott’s Series of Papers ; a
striking production, but held by competent judges to push
matters to excess. •
�xii
Introduction.
VI.
The Decalogue, still so persistently assigned to
the remote age of Moses, even by advanced
Biblical critics, we have spoken of as an eclectic
summary, the product of much more modern
times, emanating as surely from Mount Zion in
the City of Jerusalem, in the peaceful days of
Hezekiah in all likelihood, as it most certainly
did not come viva voce from God on Mount Sinai
“ all on a quake.” The accompaniments of the
assumed delivery thence, as described, suffice of
themselves to relegate the story to the limbo of
the mythical.
VII.
That the conquest and settlement of the Land
of Canaan, to conclude, were not effected at the
time and in the manner set forth in some parts of
the Book of Joshua, appears plainly enough on
the face of that incongruous and contradictory
document itself; and more and more persuaded
as we are of the relatively modern composition
of the Pentateuch, we grow more and more sus
picious that the accounts we have of the feats
of Joshua are after models found in the history
of the Babylonian Empire. The chronicles lately
deciphered of the doings of more than one of the
Kings of Babylon and Assyria; the vast numbers
slain; the extraordinary amount of the booty
collected; the tale of the woman made captive,
&c.; may very well have served as prototypes
from which the writer of Joshua drew, having
made himself master during his captivity of the
cuneiform inscriptions that still abound.
*
* Vide Smith, Op. cit.
�Introduction.
xiii
VIII.
The history of the Children of Israel, therefore,
as it is delivered in the Pentateuch, is, in truth,
nothing more than the mythical tale of a barba
rous people, steeped in sensuality, superstition,
ignorance, and cruelty; their God a demon delight
ing in blood, requiring the first-born of man and
beast to be sent to him in the smoke of the altar
as his most acceptable oblation, and having a lamb
supplied him night and morning throughout the
year by way of food ! Among a people with such
conceptions of Deity and such a Cult, with ances
tors like Abraham and Isaac, Jacob and Rebekah,
and with heroes and heroines having the stamp of
the Eleazars and Deborahs, the Samsons, Judiths,
Jaels, Jephthas, and, coming down to the really
historical times of David and Solomon, what
could have been the character of the religious,
moral and social usages and principles that pre
vailed ? The question suggests the only possible
reply. Yet, strange to say, the blood-stained
annals and barbarous lives of this extraordinary
people have been taken by the modern world as
the foundation of its religious ideas, and as fit
introduction to its moral conceptions.
IX.
But shall we, living in this nineteenth century
of the era from which we date, continue to look
to a source of the kind for such knowledge of the
Being and Attributes of God as may be attained
by man; for guidance in the service that might
be acceptable to the Supreme, and in the conduct
that were becoming in our dealings with one
another? Shall we, who think of God as All
�XIV
Introduction.
Pervading Cause, persist in viewing the Book as
his revealed word and will, which tells of the
Earth created in six days, and of its fashioner,
like a foredone workman, “resting on the seventh
day and hallowing it,” when we know most posi
tively that the Earth was not created in six days,
necessarily conclude that God never rests, and
believe that to him all days must be hallowed
alike ? Shall we, with the better knowledge
we possess, go on putting into the hands of our
children the book that narrates how God came
down from heaven to walk in his Garden in the cool
of the Evening, and at sundry other times, to ascer
tain how things were going on below; how he
cursed the creatures he had made in his own
image, as said; repented him of what he had
done in creating man at all, and brought a flood
of water on the Earth to drown all that breathed ?
Shall we, who measure our distance from the Sun
and the fixed Stars, calculate their masses, weigh
them as in a balance, analyse their light, and
thereby learn that they all are Units in One
Stupendous Whole, continue to look with respect
on tales that tell of the arrest of the Sun and
Moon in their apparent path through heaven, to
the end that a barbarous horde may have light
effectually to exterminate the unoffending people,
they have come—by God’s command, too, as said
-—to plunder and to murder ? It were surely time
to quit us of such worse than childish folly.
Reflection and candour alike compel us to say
that the teachings of the Pentateuch, in almost
every particular, have to be set aside if we would
escape erroneous conceptions of nature and of
almost all that civilised man associates with the
�Introduction.
xv
name of God and Religion. If the Bible is to be
continued as one of the instruments available in
the education of our children, it should be care
fully weeded of so much that is false and offen
sive, and be used in a negative rather than a
positive sense as a means of instruction; the un
worthy behaviour of Abraham and Isaac with
their wives, and of Jacob and Rebekah with the
father and husband, among other instances, being
pointed out as examples religiously to be shunned;
the recommendation we find in the New Tes
tament, “ Not to give heed to Jewish fables ”
(Titus i. 14), being at all times steadily kept
in view.
X.
As hitherto apprehended, Religion can be said
to have brought nothing but misery on the
world at large. Deeds of a dye that shock
humanity have been committed from first to last
in its name, and unreason has still been seen in
the seat of reason so often as aught presumed to
be due to God has come into question. Of old
it said:—“ If thy brother, thy son, or thy
daughter, the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend
that is as thine own soul, entice thee saying ;—
Let us go and serve other Gods [t.e., differ from
thee in thy creed and would have thee follow
their’s], thou shalt not consent to him nor
hearken to him; neither shalt thou spare him,
but thou shalt surely kill him; thy hand shall
be first upon him, afterwards the hands of all
the people, and thou shalt stone him with stones
that he die.” In later days it has excavated the
dungeon, built the torture-chamber and furnished
�xvi
Introduction.
it with the rack, lighted the slow fire about the
stake to consume, drenched the battle-field with
blood, and driven into exile from their home and
country the best and noblest of their kind.
XI.
Yet is the Religious Sense as certainly an
element in the constitution of man as his bodily
frame. But emotional in its nature it is Blind,
and requires association with those other emo
tional and intellectual faculties proper to man
from which it has hitherto been dissevered,
before it can conduce to good and advantageous
issues. Happily the world is slowly emerging
from its dream about the Jews being the chosen
people of God and the medium of his oracles to
mankind. The Hebrew Scriptures are now
known to be but one among many other books
to which a divine original, and sacred character
is ascribed by the peoples among whom they
took shape. The Sole Revelation which God
ever made he still makes to man; and this the
truly educated have at length begun to see lies
open for perusal by all of cultured mind in the
Book of Nature, from which alone can we, with
out fear of being led astray, know aught of what
God is, of that wherein the Providential order
of the world consists, and of that which is
required of us as agents responsible to God
through our fellow-men for our deeds. “ Ancient
creeds and time-honoured formulas,” says a great
writer, “ are yielding as much to internal pres
sure as to external assault. The expansion of
knowledge is loosening the very earth clutched
by the roots of creeds and churches. Science is
�Introduction.
xvii
penetrating everywhere, and slowly changing
men’s conceptions of the world and of man’s
destiny. Some considerable thinkers are there
fore of opinion that Religion has played its part
in the evolution of humanity, whilst others—
and I hold with these—believe that it has still a
part to play, and will continue to regulate the
evolution. To do so, however, it must express
the highest thought of the time. It must not
attempt to imprison the mind, nor force on our
acceptance, as explanations of the Universe,
dogmas which were originally the childish
guesses at truth by barbarous tribes. It must
no longer put forward principles which are
unintelligible and incredible, nor make their
unintelligibility a source of glory, and a belief
in them a higher virtue than belief in demon
stration. Instead of proclaiming the nothing
ness of this life, the worthlessness of human
love, and the impotence of the human mind, it
will proclaim the supreme importance of this
life, the supreme value of human love, and the
grandeur of the human intellect.”*
With every word of this who in the present
day will not sympathise ? But the Religious
Sense, as we have but just said, is blind, and
cannot be trusted to regulate, the evolution of
humanity. On the contrary, Religion, as com
monly understood, must itself consent to regula
tion, and descend to a lower place than it has
hitherto held in our Western civilisation. As
represented in the most powerful of all the
formulated systems in which it has yet been
G-. H. Lewes’s ‘.Problems of Life and Mind.’ Vol. I.
�xviii
Introduction.
seen, religion shows itself at the present
moment antagonistic to the peace of the State
and the Family, as well as to all Evolution—it
gives Discord a seat at the home-hearth, and
would stem the tide of human progress if it
could ; and it is more than questionable whether
there exists any other system that would not be
disposed to do as much, and to lead the evolu
tion on to some devious or narrow way ending
in a preserve of its own. But Religion is not,
in fact, as in these later ages it has been made,
the prime factor in the moral life of man.
Justice, mercy, truthfulness, integrity, reverence,
and steadfastness—the moral element in human
nature, in a word, outcome of the higher emo
tional powers in blended action with enlightened
understanding, are of far more moment in the
aggregate life of humanity than any conceivable
form of religious belief and observance. The
Idea of God is the GOAL, not the starting point,
in the evolution of mankind, and only presents
itself in a guise that can be held worthy of its
object in societies the most advanced in moral
and intellectual development. Then, but not till
then, comes the conclusion that the sole yet all
sufficing service that can be rendered to God by
man is study of his laws, which are the laws of
Nature; as obedience to their behests is the sum
of man’s duties to God, to himself, and to his
kind. It would indeed be well could an end now
be made of the folly men commit when they
personify God, endow him with feelings and
passions after the pattern of their own, and
attach significance and a literal meaning to
Eastern tales, the product of rude and ignorant
�Introduction.
xix
ages of the world. It were surely good did men
now acknowledge that God, ubiquitous essence,
in and over all, never spoke in human speech to
man ; was never jealous of other Gods, for there
be none such; never cursed the creature who had
come into being in conformity with his laws, nor
the ground that fed him ; never repented of
aught that was as it was through him, and never,
in abnegation of his universal fatherhood, elected
one among the nations that people the earth to
be his own and the medium of his oracles to the
rest of mankind.
XII.
The works of De Wette, Vatke, Von Bohlen,
Kuenen, Colenso, Davidson, and Kalisch, to name
a few among a number we have read, following
in the wake of Spinoza, Astruc, Simon, Eichhorn,
and others, have gone far to exhaust what may
be spoken of as the criticism of the letter and
structure of the Bible. That several hands have
had part in the composition of this wonderful
book ; that the text as it stands is the product
of dissimiliar minds; was written at various
times in different ages, and has been derived
from different and often discrepant sources—
mythical, legendary, and documentary,—is no
longer doubtful, but a demonstrated fact. Bern
stein, moreover, if his conclusions stand the test
of criticism, will have farther shown the very
free play the writers of the Pentateuch have
sometimes given to their inventive faculties.
In suggesting grounds for some of the tales,
and pointing to historical personages poorly
disguised under slightly altered names, he will
�XX
Introduction.
also have fixed beyond the possibility of question,
as it seems, the date at which certain parts of the
Bible commonly believed to be among the oldest,
were actually written; and this, it may almost be
needless to say, is not the mythical age of the
Patriarchs and Moses, of which so little or rather
nothing is known, but the really historical times
of Solomon and the Kings. Bernstein might
thus in a sense be said to have done for the part
of the Old Testament, to which we refer, what
F. C. Baur and the Tubingen School have done
for the New. In his hands Jehovist and Elohist
present themselves as Judahite and Ephraimite;
and even as in the Synoptic Gospels and the Acts
of the New Testament we find records of the
differences between Petrinists and Paulinists, so,
in the Old, instead of the word of God, we have
but evidence of the conflicting views and hostile
feelings of the followers of El-Elijon, Belitan or
Baal, and Jahveh.
XIII.
Among ourselves Biblical criticism, in any
acceptable sense of the term, can scarcely be said
to have existed until the present day. We had
Commentaries and Expositions of the Scrip
tures, indeed, in almost endless succession from
after the middle of the last to the middle of
the present century; but these were all more
or less alike, and after the same rigidly orthodox
and uncritical pattern : the Jews were the chosen
people of God, the vessels of his word and will
to the world; the Pentateuch was the work of
Moses, who had the Ten Commandments direct
from the mouth of God, and written besides with
�xxi
Introduction.
his finger on two tables of stone—and there an
End; Doubt was sin; Question was Atheism;
and as for criticism there was, there could be
none. But the Spirit of Time and of Progress
Sitzend am sausenden Webstuhl der Zeit
Wirkend der Gottheit lebendiges Kleid,
*
had been at work all the while, and found a voice
at length from an unexpected quarter in the able
Textual Criticism of the Pentateuch and Book
of Joshua by no less a personage than a dignitary
in the Church, the Bishop of Natal.
XIV.
Though not without something like a herald
of its coming, in the volume entitled ‘ Essays and
Reviews/ Dr. Colenso’s book fell like a thunder
bolt from a clear sky among his clerical brethren,
and took the laity at large, aroused to something
like an interest in the matters discussed, not a
little by surprise. “ Replies ” to the criticisms
of the Bishop by clergymen were not wanting, as
matter of course. But these were found less satis
factory to the more intelligent of the laity than
their authors imagined they would prove. This
element in the outside world had outgrown its
relish for the old style of Scriptural Exposition,
and was not satisfied with the assurance that the
Bishop of Natal’s objections were not new and
had all been answered long ago. They desired
to see something like a demonstration of the truth
* Sitting at Time’s murmuring loom,
Weaving the living garb of God.
C
�xxii
Introduction.
that this was so, and were minded that a work
so ably and conscientiously composed should be
met by arguments of a bettter kind than unsup
ported assertion, evasion, and abuse.
Accordingly, at the suggestion of alate Speaker
of the House of Commons, the Right Hon. J. E.
Denison, and after consultation with the Arch
bishop of York, a Committee of gentlemen,
Dignitaries and others of scholarly attainments
in the Church, was formed for the purpose of inves
tigating and satisfactorily replying to the matters
called in question,—and these amounted to
nothing less, in fact, than the Inspiration and
Historical Truth of the Sacred Scriptures of the
Old and New Testament, and their consonance
as formulated Word of God with the Word of
God as announced in the truths of Science and
the religious and moral consciousness of educated
man. Such, at all events, was the great and
worthy object which it was understood Mr.
Denison had in view when he broached the sub
ject of an exhaustive Commentary to the Clergy
of his Church. “ It seemed to him,” says Mr.
Cook, the writer of the Preface to the first
volume of ‘The Speaker’s Commentary,’ when
at length it made its appearance, “ that in the
midst of much controversy about the Bible, there
was a want of some Commentary in which the
latest information might be made accessible to
men of ordinary culture. It seemed desirable
that every educated man should have access to
some work which might enable him to under
stand what the original Scriptures really say and
mean, and in which he might find an explanation
of any difficulties which his own mind might
�Introduction.
xxiii
suggest, as well as of any new objections raised
against a particular book or passage.
“ Although the difficulties of such an under
taking were very great, it seemed right to make
the attempt to meet a want which all confessed
to exist, and the Archbishop accordingly under
took to form a Company of Divines, who, by a
judicious distribution of labour amongst them,
might expound, each, the portion of Scripture
for which his studies might best have fitted him.”
XV.
This is all clear and to the point: we were to
be furnished with a simple, truthful interpreta
tion of the Bible by able men, from the point of
view supplied by the latest and most advanced
critics and scholars of the day, in consonance with
the science and moral sense of the age. But wherein
the great difficulties hinted at, though not more
particularly specified, consisted, and whence the
long delay of seven years (!) that intervened
between the conception and the execution of the
project, the writer of the preface does not say.
A Company of learned Divines had been formed,
•ample funds had been subscribed, an eminent
publisher had been engaged, and by him carte
blanche was given to the foreign bookseller in
particular to supply the parties engaged, “ to
expound the portion of Scripture for which their
studies might best have fitted them,” with all
they required in the shape of literature. How
can we doubt that these gentlemen went to work
with a will ? They were to have liberal pay,
they had been furnished with books in abun
dance, and the opportunity to distinguish them
�xxiv
Introduction.
selves in the interesting field of Biblical criticism
lay before them. But time flew by—a year, two
years, four, six, seven years ! elapsed, and all this
while the public at large had no intimation,
through their work, of what the learned men
were about. Not a line in the shape of Note or
Comment to help men of “ ordinary culture ” to
understand the Scriptures of the Jews had seen
the light in all that time. But rumours were
rife of great and even unsurmountable difficul
ties having arisen in the course of the projected
enterprise. Nor was the nature of these kept
altogether from the public ear. The workers
specially engaged had discovered, one after
another, as was said, that the task they had
undertaken could not conscientiously be carried
out to the issue they had believed possible when
they undertook it. They had been led by the
hands of their Dutch, and German, and English
brethren, to “ the tree that grew in the midst of
the garden,” they had seen that the fruit it bore
“ was pleasant to the sight,” and was “ fruit to be
desired to make men wise.” They had “ put forth
them hands, taken of the fruit, and eaten,” and
lo ! “ their eyes were opened and they knew that
they were naked.”
When they now met one another and the “ Com
pany,” their superiors, in conclave, it was not as
Marcus Tullius tells us he thought the Haruspices
of his day could only meet, to laugh, but with
grave looks and bated breath. Colenso and
the free critics were not after all the men of straw
they had been supposed to be, and not to be slain
with lathen swords and pointless spears; they
were rather found like the “ well-greaved Greeks ”
�Introduction.
xxv
in panoply of proof, their line compact and as
little assailable as it seemed on the flanks as in
front. For awhile—a long while, therefore, there
must have appeared nothing for it but retreat
from an untenable position,—or, could it have
been the bolder and nobler alternative that pre
sented itself, and gave the pause—“ to speak
truth and shame the Devil,” as the saying goes ?
If this were ever contemplated it certainly has
not been followed. And yet there was a great
opportunity for the Clergy of the Anglican
Church to show themselves as exponents of the
Bible on at least as high a level as their con
tinental Protestant brethren. Mr. Cook in his
preface acknowledges the want of a real Commen
tary ; but he and his colleagues have not given
it. Retreat from the position forced on them,
perchance, rather than willingly assumed, must
have been the contemplated course. Silence
breaks no bones, it is said?, and the “ Speaker and
his Commentary” would perhaps pass out of
mind and be relegated to the limbo of things for
gotten. But the thought of retreat—if it ever
were a thought—was vain. The outside world
grew clamorous for its 1 Commentary,’ and some
thing must be done to satisfy it. The “ conscience
that makes cowards of us all ” had procured a
respite of seven years, indeed, but the business
must be faced at last. If the workers first en
gaged had disqualified themselves through the
pains they had taken to execute their task in the
best possible way, the way, too, that was held
desirable ; and as they in entering on it had be
lieved it could be done, but as they had been
brought to see that it could not truthfully and
�x±vi
Introduction,
without reservation be accomplished, others might
be found who took a different view of the matter.
There were orthodox as well as heterodox com
mentators in plenty—there were Hengstenbergs
as well as Hupfelds, Delitzsches as wellasColensos.
Why not take them for guides? Or if even the
least liberal of these were too outspoken for our in
sular orthodoxy, why not fall back on the good
old-fashioned English style of the Browns and
Henrys, the Doyleys and Mants, and give expla
nations by simple iteration of the text, discover
harmony amid discord, and congruity in discre
pancy ; to say nothing of so much that could
safely be referred to the inscrutable will of God7
and that passed the power of human comprehen
sion ? The workers first selected could not be
suffered to make victims of themselves, and have
their names enrolled beside those:—.
Die thoricht g’nug ihr voiles Herz nicht wahrten,—
Dem Pobel ihr Gefiihl, ihr Schauen offenbarten,
[Und die] man hat von je gekreutzigt und verbrannt.
*
They would too obviously be acting under the
segis of Hierarchs of the Church who would be
compromised with them, of Dignitaries who
had no taste for martyrdom, and who doubtless
thought “of the fish, and the leeks and the
onions, the cucumbers, the melons, and the garlick, which they did eat freely in Egypt.” Of
others, also, conscientious enough in their ortho
* Who have been fools enough not to keep their minds tc>
themselves, but to the people have revealed their hearts,
their thoughts, and for their pains have hitherto been crucified,
and burned.
�Introduction.
xxvii
doxy, having minds cast in a believing mould,
unfamiliar with the fruit of the tree that grew
in the midst of the garden, who did not see why
the sworn and salaried officers of a system should
be held bound to say aught in disparagement of
the grounds on which it rested, and who could
not be persuaded that there was not a perfectly
legitimate and even proper way of escaping from
the dilemma in which they had become involved
by the strike among their workmen.
Many and anxious, we must conceive, were the
consultations that now were held, deep and long
the discussions as to what had best be done, that
followed. It was even thought, as reported, that
Escape from the dead-lock might be found through
Counsel out of doors, as there was none within ;
a suggestion which led to an interview with a
late lamented Dean, not one of “ The Company
for he having eaten of the fruit of the marvellous
tree in years gone by, and spoken somewhat freely
of the Patriarchs, was held too /ar acZ-van ecZ for
such Society. But from this liberal writer came
little comfort. He is said rather to have en
joyed the difficulty in which his learned brethren
had become involved, he even chuckled over their
distress; but assured them he could help them
with no advice; it was their business, not his,
and they must get through the work they had
undertaken as they best could.
To proceed, indeed, was matter of necessity :
a Commentary and Exposition must be forth
coming ; but why need it be of the kind that
was contemplated by the Speaker ? It might be
of a sort that would satisfy the many and such
as had no misgivings ; and the few—the doubters
�xxviii
Introduction.
and such as were dissatisfied—might be left to
their doubts and dissatisfaction. A dangerous
course as concerns the future, though meeting
the most pressing want of the hour; for reac
tion inevitably follows, and the recoil is not
always comparable to the gentle lapping of the
summer sea, but sometimes comes like the up
heaval wave laden with destruction.
XVI.
The work, then, had to be gone on with, and
a fresh staff of workers to be found; and this,
not without difficulty nor without a second
secession in more than one instance, by report at
the time, was at length got together. But such
must have been the obstacles still encountered,
we must needs surmise, that before any real
progress could be made, seven years had passed
away! for it was at the end only of this long
period of incubation that the first instalment of
the ‘ Speaker’s Commentary ’ saw the light.
XVII.
And here we avail ourselves of the appre
ciation of the work by a distinguished conti
nental Biblical critic and scholar, Dr. A. Kuenen,
Professor of Theology in the University of
*
Leyden.
After premising that much is to be
learned from the work, especially by laymen, for
whose benefit it was written; that the composers
of it are learned men, and farther—yet hardly
•in keeping with what he goes on to say—that
* See Three Notices of the ‘Speaker’s Commentary’ from
the Dutch of A. Kuenen, by J. Muir, D.C.L., one of Mr.
Scott’s Series of Papers.
�Introduction.
xxix
they have shown an able apprehension of what
they had to do, he continues : “ But they lack
one thing; and this vitiates the whole. They
are not free. The apologetic aim of the work is
never lost sight of, and constantly operates to
disturb the course of the enquiry. It is, in one
word, Science such as serves a purpose that is
here put before us. The writers place them
selves in opposition to the Critics of the Penta
teuch, depreciate their arguments, make sport
in the well-known childish manner of their
mutual differences, and try to refute them with
reasonings which they themselves in any other
case would reject as utterly insufficient or regard
as unworthy of notice. None of them sins in
this respect so navvely and grossly (sterk) as Dr.
Harold Browne, the Bishop of Ely. But they
are miserable, far-fetched, and unnatural suppo
sitions to which he treats us...............Dogmatical
considerations have clouded the understanding
and exegetical perception of this apologist, and on
fitting occasions his fellow-labourers do not fall
short of him in this respect. If I am not deceived,
this ‘Commentary,’ entirely against the inten
tions of those who planned it, will, before all
things, have powerfully contributed to make
Biblical criticism indigenous in England.”
With the work of so thorough a critic and
accomplished scholar as Dr. Colenso, and the
excellent Introduction to the Study of the Old
Testament of such a Hebraist as Dr. Samuel
Davidson (to name but two among several others),
at command, it cannot fairly be said that Bibli
cal criticism had not already become indigenous
among us. It was, indeed, well established, though
�XXX
Introduction.
rare, but all the more firmly rooted from having
grown in the light of freedom, truthfulness, and
competence; and though ignored by the Clergy
at large, who shut their eyes to it themselves and
denounce it from their pulpits as impiety, it is by
no means without its influence among us.
“ When, after reading the Introductions to the
several Books and the Notes to the ‘Speaker’s
Commentary,’ ” continues Dr. Kuenen, “ I reflect
how much time, labour, and money have been
expended on the writing and printing of this
work, I receive a painful impression. Here
learned theologians, and such, too, as are high
dignitaries in the Church, come forward as instructors of the participators in their religious belief,
and all that these learn from them they must
afterwards unlearn. Many faults in the autho
rised version, indeed, are amended, and points of
an archaeological and geographical nature are
illustrated. But such is not the question here.
The point of importance is this : Do the contri
butors to the work make their learning subser
vient to the diffusion of a sound [i.e., a truthful
and reasonable] method of estimating the Bible ?
The reverse is the fact. They regard it as their
duty to maintain that which appears to them to
be the sound [i.e., the orthodox] view, and to reject
all more reasonable conceptions as unbelieving
and sacrilegious. Now and then, indeed, the
truth is too powerful for them, and they find
themselves forced to give up the correctness of
the Biblical narrative, but the concessions form
the exception. As a rule, the traditional view is
maintained, even in cases where it may be said
to be absolutely untenable ; and then the diffi-
�Introduction.
xxxi
culti.es are either passed over in silence or are not
recognised in their real force, or are answered
with childish arguments. But it will one day
become manifest that that which the adverse
critics already know must before long become
known to all, and that it is fearless criticism
alone which opens up the access to Israel’s sanc
tuaries. Magna est veritas et prcevalebit.”
XVIII.
So far Dr. Kuenen, the studied moderation of
whose adverse criticism is conspicuous. But the
Doctor is still a theologian, although a Liberal
one, It is habit and the prospect he enjoys from
his Professor’s Chair that enable him to speak of
fearless criticism of the Record the Israelites have
left of themselves in their Pentateuch and his
torical books as opening up the access to any
sanctuary. We who write here as Physician,
as Naturalist, cannot see the matter in the same
light as Dr. Kuenen; and do not scruple to avow
that the purpose of the Exposition which followsis to aid, in so far as this is possible, in disabusing
the public mind of the false conceptions it enter
tains of so much of the Bible as falls within the
Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua; to which
portions of the Hebrew Scriptures, we would
have it understood, is our criticism intended to
apply. We are behind none in our apprecia
tion of the beauties that abound in many
parts of the writings of the Lyrists and Rhapsodists of Israel'—though neither are we blind to
their blemishes—but we deny in toto that we have
either in these, in the so-called Five Books of
Moses, or in the historical writings that precede
�xxxii
Introduction.
the Psalms, any true account of God’s govern
ment of the world. We are even bold enough
to believe that he who accompanies us through
our exposition will scarcely fail, however reluc
tantly, to arrive at the same conclusion.
XIX.
The laity of this country, we believe, were
really looking for a perfectly truthful and autho
ritative exposition of the Bible, of the Hebrew
Scriptures especially; and a great opportunity
undoubtedly presented itself for the production of
such a work; but it has not only been neglected :
it may even be said to have been abused. The
most cursory perusal of so much of the ‘ Speaker’s
Commentary ’ as applies to the Pentateuch and
Book of Joshua, will enable any one possessed of
the mere Alphabet of Biblical criticism to see that
the writers do but “ keep their promise to the
ear and break it to the hope.” The intelligent
inquirer will gain from them none but the most
unsatisfactory responses to his most pressing
questions,—if perchance he finds response at all
—and the ignorant be only confirmed in his
ignorance, his errors, and his superstitions. The
views of the great liberal enlightened critics of
the Continent and our own country, men of
unblemished lives, the purest piety and ripest
scholarship, are scarcely noticed, the conclusions
of science ignored, and the moral blemishes
passed by unheeded, whilst nothing absolutely is
ever said that will help men of “ ordinary cul
ture ” to know more of what the “ original Scrip
tures really say and mean ” than the text itself
supplies. Iteration of a proposition in other
�Introduction.
xxxiii
terms is no demonstration of its meaning or its
truth; and where the exposition is not simply of
the old-fashioned orthodox and now untenable
character, it is hardly ever of a kind that will
enable the reader to see the matter referred to
in any more reasonable and acceptable light.
XX.
Dr. Kuenen in this notice of the first and
second volumes of the ‘New Commentary’ gives
a few examples of the perfunctory way in which
the Speaker’s Exegetes proceed in their work ;
*
and we, too, had got together some samples of the
chaff they present so carefully sifted from the grain
of truth and common sense, for illustration in this
direction. But they would be out of place here.
We, however, add below, the very First and One
among the Last of Bishop Harold Browne’s com
ments to Genesis, by way of justification of aught
we have said that seems disrespectful.f
* Vide Three Criticisms, &c., already quoted.
t Gen. i. 1. In the beginning. ‘Not “ first in order,” but
“ in the beginning of all things,” says the Bishop. ‘ The
same expression is used in John i. 1, of the existence of
the “ Word of God :” “In the beginning was the Word.”
The one passage illustrates the other, though it is partly
by the contrast of thoughts. The Word was when the
world was created.’ The reader may be left to make what
he can out of such a style of exposition ; for how the
mystical assertion of the Neo-platonic author of the Fourth
Gospel that “ In the beginning was the Word,” should be
brought in to throw light on the simple statement of the
writer of Genesis, that God in the beginning created the
heaven and the earth, passes our faculty of understanding.
Was the note introduced for any end but to give Dr.
�xxxiv
Introduction.
XXI.
The Exposition of the Pentateuch and Book of
Joshua that follows, it may be needless to say, is
conceived in a totally different spirit from that
which has guided the writers of the ‘ Speaker’s
Commentary.’ Holding that “ suppression of the
truth is near akin to assertion of the false]’ and
that truth can never be dangerous save to error,
Harold Browne an opportunity of showing at the very
cutset the out-and-out orthodox flag under which he was
enlisted I
Gen. xlvii. 8, 9. “ And Pharaoh said unto Jacob :
How old art thou? And Jacob said unto Pharaoh : The
days of the years of my pilgrimage are an hundred and
thirty years.” To the words
Pilgrimage, the Bishop
appends this gloss, 1 Literally my sojournings.’ ‘Pharaoh
asked of the days of the years of his life ; he replies by
speaking of the days of the years of his pilgrimage. Some
have thought that he called his life a pilgrimage because
he was a nomad, a wanderer in lands not his own ; but in
reality the patriarchs spoke of life as a pilgrimage or
sojourning, because they sought another country, that is
a heavenly. Earth was not their home, but their journey
homewards.’ Now the Bishop of Ely—when he wrote, the
Bishop of Winchester now (for orthodoxy unflinching
brings preferment)—knows full well that the patriarchs
never spoke of their lives in any such sense. They had
no idea of any state of existence after the present life ;
and when in later days the children of Israel, after con
tact as slaves with a people entertaining an idea of the
kind, did attain to it, the place to which they went
after death was not thought of as a heavenly home
of light and love and joy, but a dark and dismal pit
under the earth, called Scheol, whence the Hell of the
modern world, peopled by Satan and his angels, and fur
nished with its burning lake of brimstone and other
appliances as a place of punishment for the wicked. Was
it not in some sort the Bishop’s duty to inform his readers
of so much ?
�Introduction.
xxxv
we have not hesitated to give expression to the
views that are most adverse to the idea of the
Divine Original of the Hebrew Scriptures, and
of the Israelites, in the earlier periods of their
history at all events, as worthy recipients of the
oracles of God. So much progress had been
made in Comparative Mythology and the Science
of Religion of late years, that it did not appear
so difficult to us to discover what “ the original
Scriptures really say and mean,” as it seems to
have done to the writer of the Preface to the
‘ Speaker’s Commentary.’ Unfettered by foregone
conclusions, having subscribed no Articles, and
sworn allegiance to no system of doctrine, but
under the guidance of such lights as the somewhat
miscellaneous reading we have indulged in has
supplied, we have striven to give -a thoroughly
truthful exposition of so much of the Bible as
has come under our scrutiny ; the result being, as
the tenor of this Introduction will already have
made manifest, that this extraordinary Book is
but one among a number of other Books held
sacred by the followers of the several religious
systems of which they are the exponents; that
though its literary merits may be more, it has no
higher title to be held a Revelation from God
than any one of these; that its contents are not
always of a kind calculated to raise our estimate
of the people among whom it took its rise, or to
prove beneficial to ourselves, and that it enun
ciates no such Ideas of God and his providential
government of the world as can be accepted by
civilised man.
�xxxvi
Introduction.
XXII.
The world of to-day does, in truth, stand in
need of more than the ablest and most outspoken
exposition of any Book expressing the Religious
Ideas, the Social Usages, and the Guesses at
Scientific Truth of a bygone age. It is waiting for
a Bible of its Own Day,—a great Intellectual
Survey of Nature, Nature’s Laws and Nature’s
God, as Revealed in the Universe of things
apprehended by the Mind of Man. Veniat, veniat,
cito veniatI
PRINTED BY C. W. REYNELL, LITTLE PULTENEY-STREET, HAYMARKET, V>'.
�
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The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua in face of the science and moral sense of our age
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Willis, Robert
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Place of publication: London
Collation: xxxvi p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references. This is the Introduction of a work originally published in several parts. From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Printed by C.W. Reynell, Little Pulteney Street, London.
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Thomas Scott
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1875
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CT143
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Conway Tracts
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CT ftg
THE PENTATEUCH
AND BOOK OF
JOSHUA
IN FACE OF
THE SCIENCE AND MORAL SENSE
OF OUR AGE.
By a PHYSICIAN.
PART VI.
“Zufallige Geschichtswahrheiten konnen der Beweis von nothwendigen
Vemunftswahrheiten nie werden ’’—Contingent historical truths can never be
demonstration of necessary rational truths.—Lessing.
PUBLISHED BY THOMAS
SCOTT,
NO. II THE TERRACE, FARQUHAR ROAD, UPPER NORWOOD,
LONDON, S.E.
1875.
Price Sixpence.
�LONDON:
PRINTED BY C. W. REYNELL, LITTLE PULTENEY STREET,
HAYMARKET, W.
�THE BOOK OF JOSHUA.
ECAUSE of the sins of the people, or because he
has failed to sanctify Jehovah in some signal
way at Meribah, Moses, as we have seen, is not only
refused permission to enter the promised land, but is
even informed that he is to die on this (the east) side
of Jordan. The death of Moses follows hard on the
intimation given, and Jehovah then, according to our
text, addresses Joshua, saying:—“Moses my servant
is dead; now therefore arise; go over this Jordan,
thou, and all the people, unto the land which I do
give them, from the wilderness unto Lebanon, the
great river Euphrates, and the great sea toward the
going down of the sun. Be strong and of good
courage, for Jehovah thy God is with thee whither
soever thou goest.” Encouraging words as well as
commands, which, we may presume, Joshua will not
be slack to obey ?
He forthwith orders his officers to bid the people
get ready for an advance by preparing victuals ; for
*
within three days, says he, ye are to pass the Jordan
and go in to possess the land that was promised to
your fathers. He then reminds the Reubenites,
Gadites, and half-tribe of Manasseh of their engage
ment to aid in the war, until their brethren were
settled in the territories beyond, as they themselves
had been put in possession of lands on this (the east)
side of Jordan. As a preliminary to entering on the
great enterprise before him, however, Joshua, not
relying entirely on Jehovah’s promises, as it might
* Th.e writer forgets that manna is still the only food of the
people, and that it stank forthwith if more was gathered than
sufficed for each day’s consumption.
�442
Joshua.
seem, is anxious to have some information of his own
as to the state of preparedness for resistance or other
wise of the people about to be invaded ?
He sends two men across the river to spy and view
the land, “ even Jericho,” the walled town that blocks
the way, and must be taken before further advance
into the country can be made. Stealing into the
town, but not unobserved, as it by and by appears, the
spies take up their quarters with a certain Rahab, a
harlot, probably surmising that from such as she
they might obtain information of the kind they
sought. They are soon inquired after by the King
of Jericho, however, who sends to Rahab, desiring her
to bring forth the men who had entered her house,
they having come, as was believed, to spy out the
land.
Joshua’s men must have been in great peril of their
lives, needlessly exposed, surely, had Jehovah’s
assurance to Joshua, that he and his were to have
the land, been trusted home. But, engaged in the
godly business of smoothing the way for the con
quest, they will be duly cared for by Rahab the
harlot ?
By who but she; for what was to be expected of
a harlot ? Traitress to her people, as she had already
proved false to all that best becomes her sex, instead
of delivering up the spies to the ruler, like a true
woman, she makes terms with them for herself and
her kindred in case she conceals them, and favours
their escape, having given them the information they
sought, as we shall see. She therefore hides the spies
until nightfall, pledges her word to the King’s mes
sengers that the men had left her house, and putting
the searchers on a false scent as to the way they had
taken, she enables them to get back to the camp in
safety.
The writer of the story before us is at the pains to
find something like an apology for Rahab’s treason to
her townsfolk in the words he puts into her mouth ?
�Israel passes Jordan.
443
He shows her familiar with the history of the invaders,
even from the time of their Egyptian bondage, and
makes her tell the spies of the “ terror because of
these things” that had fallen on her people, “ the
hearts of all melting within them, and nothing more
of courage remaining in any man, for Jehovah your
God,” she continues, “is God in heaven above and in
earth beneath.” The writer, it would seem, could
not resist an occasion, even through the mouth of an
idolatrous harlot, to glorify Jehovah his God ; of whom,
nevertheless, the woman Rahab could never have
heard, for the all-sufficient reason that he was not
known among the Israelites themselves by the name
now used until ages after the reputed days of
Joshua.
Rahab, then, has made terms with the spies in
return for their safety and the intelligence she has
given them. Her house is to be known by a certain
sign when the invaders have become masters of
the town, and all belonging to her are to be safe
whilst the indiscriminate slaughter in preparation for
the other inhabitants is proceeding ?
As the houses of the Israelites in Egypt were to be
known to the destroying angel by the blood on the
lintels and door-posts, so is the house of Rahab to be
distinguished by a scarlet cord hung from a window,
red being a colour with which a certain mystical and
sanctifying influence was connected by many of the
peoples of antiquity. The images of their gods—
those of Dionysus in particular, as we know—were
painted red; the figures of the Chaldsean deities on the
wall were “ portrayed in vermilion ” (Ezek. xxiii. 14) ;
and we have seen a scarlet string cast into the fire as
part of the rite in preparing the water of purification
from the ashes of the red heifer.
Breaking up from Shittim, in Moab, where they
were encamped, the Israelites come to the banks of
the Jordan, the priests, the Levites, as said (—but
ages before the existence of a levitical priesthood—),
�444
Joshua.
bearing the Ark of the Covenant, leading the way.
“ And now,” says Jehovah to Joshua, “ will I begin to
magnify thee in the sight of Israel, that they may
know that as I was with Moses so I will be with thee.”
Prom such a preamble we may be prepared for some
miraculous interposition of the tutelary God ?
Which follows forthwith, and is of the same sort
as that vouchsafed to Moses, when he and his fugi
tives had the Red Sea before them, and were enabled
to pass dry-shod through its bed. Joshua and the Is
raelites are now said to cross the swollen Jordan with
out wetting their feet! “ And it came to pass,” says
the narrator, ignoringthe statical law, pre-ordained of
the true God, which makes the thing impossible, “ that
as soon as the feet of the priests which bare the Ark
were dipped in the brim of the water—for Jordan
overfloweth his banks all the time of harvest—that
the waters which came down from above stood and
rose up upon an heap, and those that went down
towards the sea of the plain, even the salt sea, failed
and were cut off, and the people passed over right
against Jericho.”
Joshua would have this remarkable incident re
corded by a memorial monument ?
He orders a man of each of the twelve tribes to
shoulder a stone from the midst of Jordan, to be “ a
memorial to the children of Israel for ever.” As to
the way in which these stones are to be disposed of,
however, there is, unhappily, discrepancy in the record.
By one text (iv. 3), they are ordered to be carried to
Gilgal, the place where the people pitched for the
night, after passing the river; by another (iv. 9),
they are to be set up in the midst of Jordan where
the feet of the priests stood that bare the Ark ; “ and
they are there,” says the record, “unto this day.”
'The stones, however, would have proved no very
•conspicuous monument plunged in the waters of the
Jordan. Set up in Gilgal, they would certainly have
better served the end proposed. Anyhow, the stones
�Records of the Passage,
445
are presumed to be visible, for the text goes on to
say : “ When your children shall ask their fathers in
time to come, saying: What mean these stones ?
Then ye shall say : Israel came over this Jordan on
dry land; for Jehovah your God dried up the waters
of Jordan, as he did the waters of the Red Sea, until
we were gone over; that all the people of the earth
might know the hand of Jehovah that it is mighty.”
Miracles—in other words, contraventions of the
order or laws of Nature—were to the Jews of old, as
they have still been to the ignorant among other
peoples, the great vouchers for the Being and Power
of God. To the man of science and liberal culture, on
the contrary, a miracle, defined as above, would now
prove an insurmountable obstacle instead of a help
to belief in the existence of God. God, to him, is
Order and Law—not discord and disarray. The tales
of miracles met with in all the writings held sacred or
inspired, whether of Jew or Gentile, are certain de
monstrations of their source in the mind of man in
his stake of ignorance and non-age : AS putting God
IN CONTRADICTION WITH HIMSELF, MIRACLES ARE AT ONCE
IMPOSSIBLE AND ABSURD.
The stones, set up in Gilgal, were “ to serve for a
memorial to the children of Israel for ever ” ?
Alas for the eternity implied in the words ! There
is now no trace of the stones, any more than there is
of the people who set them up, save as scattered rem
nants in far-away countries—the people to whom the
promise of possession in perpetuity of a land that
flowed with milk and honey was so emphatically and
so repeatedly made.
Facts from which we conclude ?
That the statements are neither from God nor from
any of the far-seeing among men, his only oracles,
but from presumptuous, short-sighted, and mistaken
priests, who lived in relatively recent times compared
with those about which they write.
More than this ?
�446
Joshua.
That the repetitions, contradictions, and confusion
so conspicuous in the Book of Joshua make it plain
that its compiler had a variety of documents before
him, from which, and doubtless also from floating
myth and oral tradition, with small amount of critical
or editorial tact, he put together the disjointed nar
rative that engages us.
Yet more ?
That the constant recurrence of the phrase, unto
this day, assures us that the writer is discoursing of
events reputed to have happened in ages long gone
by. To refer to one, and perchance to dispose of the
first of the miracles brought in to . magnify Joshua
and show the might of Jehovah’s hand, we by and
by come upon a few words which show us that the
Israelites might have crossed the Jordan without any
arrest or drying up of its waters, though not without
wetting their feet; for we learn that when the spies
escape from Jericho they take their way “to Jordan
unto the fordsand we have notices besides, in other
parts of the Hebrew history, of the river having been
repeatedly crossed in after-times in the ordinary way
by fording.
Safely over Jordan, the Israelites will, of course,
leave the enemy no time to prepare for resistance ?
So might we have imagined ; but instead of ad
vancing at once, and laying siege to Jericho, we are
told that “ at this time ” Joshua receives orders from
Jehovah to make him sharp knives, or knives of
flint, and circumcise the children of Israel—“ the
second time,” says the text—a needless and not very
feasible procedure, if the words be taken as they
stand. But they cannot be so understood. The rite
of initiation which is said to have been practised
during the Egyptian bondage—a more than question
able statement—it is now said has been utterly neg
lected since the epoch of the Exodus. All the men
born during the forty years’ wandering in the wilder
ness are therefore without the distinguishing sign of
�Orders to Joshua.
447
their election, and must by all means be furnished
with it before the business of despoiling, driving out,
and slaying the enemies of Jehovah, now in posses
sion of the promised land, can be begun. The time
chosen for the ceremony, however, seems as little
opportune as the speed with which it is accomplished
is extraordinary.
How may this be ?
The invaders are but just entered into the enemy’s
country, and have a walled town before and a deep
and swollen river behind them—a dangerous strate
gical position, which Joshua, we must presume, was
too good a soldier not to understand. He will, there
fore, we may expect, like Moses on various occasions,
remonstrate with Jehovah; show the danger to which
he is exposed by the order, and beg him to recall
it. But Joshua seems never to have felt himself on
the same familiar footing with his God as Moses, and
offers no remonstrance. Having crossed the Jordan
on the 10th of Nisan, he proceeds immediately,
according to the record, to circumcise the males
among the children of Israel who had been born
within the last forty years.
The number of able-bodied men having been found
nearly the same as when the census took place at
Sinai, the time required to do so must have been
considerable ?
The operation in question is one of some nicety,
not to be done off-hand in a hurry ; and were the
amputation the affair of a moment the subsequent
dressing would take time. A simple arithmetical
calculation shows conclusively that it could not have
been accomplished between the 10th and the 14th of
the month Nisan, when the Feast of the Passover
is said to have been kept, and the people, therefore,
are presumed to be healed, and able to move about.
Were five minutes allowed in each case, and the
operator tasked to work twelve hours every day
during six days of the week, the time required to
�448
Joshua.
operate on something over 600,000 men would be
thirteen years and more ! By miraculous interposi
tion only, therefore, could the business have been
got through in the three days between the 10th and
14th Nisan ; and even then, another miracle would
have been wanted to heal the people in so short a
space of time. The circumcising done somehow,
however, as said, Jehovah speaks to Joshua, and
says :—
“ This day have I rolled away the reproach of
Egypt from off you.”
Can we as reasonable men believe that such words
ever came from God ?
We have already had occasion to say that God
cannot be conceived as speaking save through the
mouth of man. He, therefore, we conclude, was
mistaken who said that God spoke ; as he too erred
who imagined that the Egyptians bore about them a
badge of reproach in that which has now been cut off
in Israel, or that God’s handiwork can be amended
fey any interference of man. Bar from symbolising
their superiority over other peoples, the initiatory rite
of the Jews is persistent testimony to the essentially
sensual character of the religious system they inherit
from their forefathers; worshippers as they were of
the nature God under a certain symbol, frequently
characterised as the abomination in their writings, and
against the display of which, as we apprehend it, in
the Temple, we find several of the more modern
prophets loud in their denunciations.
We have practices analogous in some sort to the
Jewish rite, though with less of meaning, among
races we characterise as savage, whilst we are wont
to think of the ancient Israelites as the elect of God,
and continue to take them for our masters in religion ?
Setting the religious aspect of circumcision aside,
we see savages in some quarters of the globe knock
ing out a front tooth or two, cutting off a joint from
one of their fingers, or slitting their nether lip, and
�Apparition to 'Joshua.
449
distending it with a bung, by way of improving them
selves, doubtless, and “ rolling away the reproach ”
of a neighbouring tribe who have no such notable
mode of showing their superiority to the rest of
barbarous humanity.
The flint knife, enjoined in the marginal reading of
our English version, is remarkable ?
And not uninteresting from an arch geological point
of view, as pointing to times when tools of bronze and
iron were still unknown; to times when a certain sanc
tity was attached to stones; when they were set up
under trees as emblems of the Generative Power, when
they were thought to be possessed of sense, and were
even worshipped as Gods, and when the only
*
cutting instruments owned by man were flints and
agates chipped or ground to an edge. The early God
of Israel would not have his altar built of dressed
stones ; it must be of unhewn blocks : “ If ye lift up
a tool upon it, ye have polluted it.”
Here we encounter another of those strange and
meaningless interruptions of the narrative, of which
we have had more than one instance already ?
Having been informed that the Passover was
observed on the 14th of Nisan, and that the manna
ceased as soon as the children of Israel began to eat
of the fruits of the land of Canaan, we are told
that “ it came to pass when Joshua was by Jericho,
that he lifted up his eyes, and behold there stood a
man over against him, with his sword drawn in his
hand; and Joshua said to him: Art thou for us or
for our adversaries ? And he said: Nay; but as
Captain of the host of Jehovah am I now come.
And Joshua fell on his face on the earth and did wor
ship, and said : What saith my Lord unto his servant ?
And the Captain of Jehovah’s host said unto Joshua :
* “And Joshua took a great stone and set it up under an
oak, and said to the people : Behold, this stone shall be a
witness unto us, for it hath heard all the words of the Lord
which he spake unto us.”—Joshua, xxiv. 26, 27.
�450
Joshua.
Loose thy shoe from off thy foot, for the place
whereon thou standest is holy. And Joshua did
so.”
This on the face of it is no very important informa
tion ; neither is the act required of such significance
as to have needed so august a presence as the Captain
of Jehovah’s host to make it ?
Surely it is not; for one foot’s breadth of earth is
as holy as another ; and the only difference between
the shod and unshod foot is that one rests on dressed
and the other on undressed hide. The mere intima
tion that the speaker was the “ Captain of Jehovah’s
host,” moreover, must have left Joshua in the dark
as to the purport of the visit paid him ; the indefinite
“ Nay ” of the visitor to his challenge leaving it
open to question which side the Captain of the host
was to take in the impending engagement before
Jericho. Gilgal, however, was one of the oldest and
for long among the most renowned of their holy places
to the children of Israel. The apparition and intima
tion may therefore have been contrived by the writer
to illustrate the antiquity and peculiar sanctity of
the site; or it may have been introduced as a parallel
to the vision vouchsafed to Moses in the burning
bush on Mount Horeb when he was ordered to take
off his shoes, the ground on which he stood being
holy. The Captain of Jehovah’s host, to conclude,
bears a highly suspicious likeness to one of the
Amschaspands of the Zoroastrian system, and may
help to confirm us in our persuasion that the writing
before us must be referred to times posterior to the
Babylonian captivity.
Resuming the thread of the story, we are informed
that Jericho is at length laid siege to and closely shut
up—none coming out, none going in—and that
Jehovah himself condescends to give certain new
and hitherto unheard-of orders for the conduct of
the siege. For six successive days the besiegers are
to compass the city once on each day, the priests bear-
�Jericho taken and Cherem.
451
ing the Ark and blowing on the sacred trumpets of
rams’ horns as they march; but on the seventh
day—violation of the Sabbath, by the way, and
giving us to know that the Commandment to keep
it holy could not yet have been known—on the
seventh day they are to compass it as many as seven
times, and the blasts on the ram’s horn trumpets are
to be louder than ever. At the proper moment
Joshua is to stretch out his hand with his spear, the
priests are to blow their best, and the people are to
shout with a loud voice, on which the walls will fall
down and the city will be won !
Such a mode of taking Jericho could hardly have
been contemplated by Joshua when he sent out the
spies and confirmed the compact made with Rahab ;
any information he may have had from her through
them being turned to no account. All, however, is
done according to superior orders ?
And the result follows: The rams’ horns are
lustily blown ; Joshua raises his spear; the people
shout; the walls tumble down; and the Israelites
walk into Jericho without striking a blow.
The inhabitants, innocent of all offence, thus
miraculously thrown on the mercy of the invaders,
will, we may presume, be ordered by Jehovah to be
mercifully dealt with ?
Coming commissioned by their God, as they im
agined, to spoil and to slay, mercy in the early
Israelitish wars was a thing unknown. On the con
trary, the city had been proclaimed Cherem to Jehovah,
and we know what that implies : Every living thing
within it must be put to death, and every lifeless
thing consumed by fire. “ The city,” says the leader,
“ shall be devoted, even it and all that are therein, to
Jehovah; only Rahab the harlot shall live, she and
those that are with her in the house, because she hid
the messengers that we sent.” “ And,” proceeds
the story, “ they utterly destroyed all that was in the
city, both men and women, young and old ; ox, sheep,
�452
'Joshua.
and ass.” All that breathed were put to the sword,
and the city, with all it contained, was burned to the
ground ; “ only the silver and the gold, and the vessels
of brass and of iron, they put into the treasury of the
house of Jehovah.”
Not content with burning Jericho to the ground,
Joshua, for no conceivable reason, would never have
it rise from its ruins. “ Cursed be the man before
Jehovah,” says he, “ that riseth up and buildeth
Jericho ; be shall lay the foundation thereof in his
first-born, and in his youngest shall he set up the
gates of it.”
But Jericho, had it ever been ruined, must by
and by have been rebuilt, notwithstanding Joshua’s
curse; for David desires the messengers he had sent
to congratulate Nahum on his accession to the throne
of Ammon, but who having been mistaken for spies
had been ill-used by the Ammonites, to tarry at
Jericho until the signs of the disgrace put upon them
had disappeared. 11 Tarry at Jericho until your
beards be grown, and then return,” are the words of
King David (II. Samuel, x. 5). At a much later
period in the history of Israel, indeed, and to make
matters tally with Joshua’s denunciation, it may be
supposed, we learn that in the reign of Ahab, more
than five centuries after the age of Joshua, “ Hiel
built Jericho, and laid the foundation thereof in
Aborim, his first-born, and set up the gate thereof
in his youngest son, Segub (I. Kings, xvi. 34).
The interdict assigned to Joshua is, therefore, from
one who lived during or after the reign of King Ahab.
Jericho is ruined, then, but faith is kept with
Rahab ?
She, her father’s household, and all that she had,
it is said, were saved alive, “because she hid the
messengers which Joshua sent to spy out Jericho; and
she dwelleth in Israel unto this day.”
Were the text to be taken quite literally, Rahab
would appear to have been very long lived ?
�Achan Transgresses.
453
Rahab may possibly be here used in a generic
sense :—Rahab and her daughters dwell among our
selves even unto tTiis- day !
When a town was declared to be Cherem, or
devoted, it was of course unlawful for individuals to
appropriate any part of the spoil ?
All then belonged exclusively to Jehovah ; in other
words, what was not put to death and burnt came to
the priesthood; and, that no one might trespass
through ignorance, Joshua has been particular in
warning the people against theft—the unpardonable
sin, in such a case :—“ Keep ye in anywise from the
thing that is devoted, lest ye make yourselves
devoted,” says he, and so implicate the camp of
Israel and trouble it. But Achan, the son of Carmi,
has been imprudent enough to take of the devoted
thing, and the anger of Jehovah is kindled against
Israel.
Achan’s transgression of the law of Cherem be
comes known in rather a roundabout way ?
Proceeding with his work of conquest, not witting
that aught has been done amiss, Joshua sends out
spies to take the measure of the next town that lay in
the way—Ai by name. The spies return and report
the place of little strength, and its defenders few ; a
body of two or three thousand men, say they, would
suffice to smite it. So a corps of three thousand is
told off for the duty. But they behave ill; they flee
before the men of Ai, six-and-thirty of them are slain,
and the rest are chased from before the gate of the
town unto Shibarim; “ wherefore the hearts of the
people melted and became as water.”
Joshua takes this much to heart ?
He rends his clothes, falls on his face before the
Ark, with the Elders of Israel puts dust upon his
head, and says :—“Alas, 0 Jehovah God ! wherefore
hast thou at all brought this people over Jordan to
deliver us into the hand of the Amorites to destroy
us ? Would to God we bad been content and dwelt
�454
'Joshua.
on the other side Jordan ! 0 Jehovah ! what shall I
say when Israel turneth their backs before their
enemies? For the Canaanites and all the inhabitants
of the land shall hear of it, and shall environ us
round and cut off our name from the earth; and what
wilt thou do for thy name, the mighty ?” (De Wette.)
This is surely not a becoming address on the part
of Joshua; reproachful as it is to Jehovah and
unworthy of himself as leader of the host. Instead of
owning that his men had been seized with a panic
fear, or that he had erred in sending an inadequate
force against Ai, he throws the blame of the defeat
upon his God, and even threatens him with the evil
constructions of the Canaanites for having led his
elect into difficulties. But Jehovah comes to the
foolish mortal’s aid, though addressing him in terms
more brusque than we have been wont to find applied
to Moses when he has ventured to ask his God what
the Egyptians would think of him did he not carry
his people triumphantly through their troubles:—
“ Get thee up,” says Jehovah ; “ wherefore liest thou
thus upon thy face ? Israel hath sinned ; they have
taken of the accursed [devoted] thing, and have also
stolen and put it among their own stuff.”
Jehovah is made by the writer to look sharply
after his interests—he will have nothing that should
be his appropriated by another; he even knows
where the things purloined have been bestowed. So
he is reported as saying farther to Joshua:—“Up,
sanctify the people; for thus saith Jehovah, the God
of Israel: There is an accursed [devoted] thing in
the midst of thee, O Israel; therefore the children of
Israel could not stand before their enemies, because
they were accursed ; neither will I be with you any
more except ye destroy the accursed from among
you. And it shall be that he that is taken with the
accursed thing shall be burned with fire, he and all
that he hath.”
A little leaven leavens the lump, indeed ; but were
�Achats Punishment.
455
one thief among thousands to make cowards of the
rest, there would, we trow, be little courage in any
army that ever took the field, whether in ancient or
modern times. The virtuous Israelites, however, who
had never, in a body, borrowed silver and gold, and
fine raiment from the Egyptians, at the instigation of
their God, as they say, must now be purged of the
offender who had taken to himself of the devoted
thing. But why Jehovah, who is cognisant of the
theft, should not also have instantly pointed out the
thief, does not appear. Lots are the means adopted
for finding him out; and though we know that the
lot is as likely to fall on the innocent as on the guilty,
inasmuch as a miracle was now required, so is it forth
coming, and Achan the son of Carmi, the delinquent,
is taken.
His guilt divulged, Joshua addresses the culprit ?
In a speech that begins in a fine fatherly spirit, but
does not so end assuredly: “My son,” says Joshua,
“ give, I pray thee, glory to Jehovah, God of Israel I
Make confession unto Him, and tell me now what
thou hast done ?” To which the unhappy Achan
replies most penitently now that he is known for the
thief: “ Indeed I have sinned, and thus have I done.
When I saw among the spoils a goodly Babylonian
garment and two hundred shekels of silver and a
wedge of gold of fifty shekels weight, then I took
them, and they are hid in the earth in the midst of my
tent.” And there, sure enough, as Jehovah had indi
cated, the stolen things are found “ among the other
stuff.” “And Joshua and all Israel with him,” continues
the record, “ took Achan and the gold, and the silver,
and the garment, and his sons and his daughters, and
his oxen and his asses and his sheep, and his tent,
and all that he had, and they brought them to the
Valley of Achor, and all Israel stoned them with
stones, and burned them with fire after they had
stoned them with stones. So Jehovah turned from
the fierceness of his anger.”
�45 6
Joshua.
The story here must surely be apocryphal,—in
vented for a purpose ?
It has every appearance of being so at all events ;
yet may it have an old tradition for its root. The
God of the early Israelites was by no means the God
of their later descendants, the Jews. He was a
jealous, revengeful, partial being, never to be ap
proached empty-handed, only to be appeased by the
sacrifice of life through the shedding of blood, and
not to be defrauded of his share of the spoil. The
tale, however, may have been invented as a pendant
to the story of Phinehas, when he slew Zimri and
Cozbi at a blow, and so stayed the pestilence that was
making such havoc in the camp. Or it may have
been devised to terrify the people against all privy
appropriation of aught especially that was held by
prescriptive right to belong to the priesthood.
Achan is the sole offender; but we find that he
alone is not made to suffer for his crime ?
In old and barbarous times, as among some savage
or half-civilised communities in the present day, all
that belonged to the house were held answerable for
the act of its head—wives, sons, daughters, cattle,
goods and chattels—all that breathed died, and all
that had value was burned or confiscated, in case the
penalty for the deed done were death.
And wholesale sacrifices of the kind were required
by Jehovah, God of Israel ?
So says the record : “ Joshua and all Israel took
Achan and all that belonged to him unto the valley of
Achor, and the leader addressing the offender, said to
him: Why hast thou troubled us ? Jehovah shall
trouble thee this day. And Israel stoned him with
stones and burned them with fire ; so Jehovah turned
from the fierceness of his anger.”
What are we in these days to think of the tales of
such horrors ?
We are to see them for what they are: libels on
humanity, blasphemies against the Supreme. Their
�Ai to be Taken.
457
writers may have thought that their God Jehovah re
quired silver and gold, and brass and iron, and the
blood of the innocent as well as the guilty to appease
his anger; but we who live in this 19th century of
the Christian era know that God, the Ineffable
Supreme, requires nothing of us but love of him and
love of our neighbour, in other words, obedience to
his laws and deed towards our neighbour as we would
have deed from him to us. Let the writings before
us therefore be seen for what they are—records of a
barbarous age, delivered by unenlightened men, and
unworthy longer to be looked on as the word of God
or as means available for the education and improve
ment of the world. The mention of the Babylo
nian garment might assure us that so much of the
tale as refers to it, must at all events be of modern
date ; for a horde escaped from slavery and but just
setting foot on the southern confines of Palestine,
after long wandering in the wilderness, could have
known nothing of Babylonian garments ; and we
may be well assured that the tents and hamlets of
the Amorites were as little familiar with shekels of
silver and wedges of gold in the days of Joshua as he
and his warriors could possibly have been. These
are all particulars added to colour a tale of late in
vention that most certainly can form no part of the
true word of God to man.
The town of Ai, however, stands in the way, and
must be taken; and Jehovah, not trusting as yet en
tirely to the military genius of Joshua, though the
Captain of his own choice, proceeds to give him par
ticular instructions as to how he is to set about the
business :—“Take all the people ofwar with thee,” says
Jehovah, “ and arise; go up to Ai; see, I have given
into thy hand the King and his people, the city and
the land; and thou shalt do to Ai and her King
as thou didst to Jericho and her King; only the
spoil thereof and the cattle thereof shall ye take for
a prey to yourselves. Lay thee an ambush for the city
�45 8
Joshua.
behind it.” And this Joshua proceeds to do; he sends
30,000 mighty men of valour away by night to lie
in ambush and attack the city from behind, whilst he
himself with 5,000 more will make a feint of attack
ing it in front. “And it shall come to pass,” says he,
“ that when they come out against us we will flee before
them, and they will follow after usseeing which
the 30,000 men in ambush are to show themselves and
seize on the city; “for Jehovah your God,” continues
the tale, “ will deliver it into your hand ; and when ye
have taken the city, ye shall set it on fire: according
to the commandment of Jehovah shall ye do.”
Jehovah, portrayed ruthless as ever, appears even
to have been on the field in person upon this occasion ?
Like the Gods of other ancient peoples, he of the
Israelites is presumed to be there to help his friends
and discomfit their enemies. Venus, in the Iliad,
shields Paris when in danger, and favours the Tro
jans ; Pallas has Achilles and the Greeks under her
protection ; and so in the Jahvehiad is Jehovah with
the Israelites in the fight before Ai. The men of the
feint on this side the city take to flight when attacked ;
the defenders pursue; and now, says Jehovah to
Joshua, “ Stretch out the spear that is in thy hand
toward Ai, and I will give it into thy hand.” Joshua
brandishes his spear, the ambush of 30,000 arise (an
ambuscade of 30,000 men !), march into Ai, set it
on fire as commanded, smite the inhabitants from
behind, as its defenders are now smitten by Joshua
and his party in front, and the day is won. “ They
let none of them escape ; Joshua drew not his hand
back wherewith he stretched out the spear until he
had utterly destroyed all the inhabitants of Ai. And
all that fell on that day, both of men and women,
were twelve thousand, even all the men of Ai, but
they took the King alive, and brought him to Joshua.”
The cattle and spoil are appropriated by Israel, and
the town is burnt and made “ a heap of desolation
unto this day.” The unoffending Chief of Ai, to con-
�Ai Destroyed.
4-59
elude the bloody business, is hanged on a tree until
sun-down (in other words, he is crucified as a sacri
fice to the sun-god), when his body is cast before the
gate of what was the city of his people, and a heap of
stones is raised over it that “ remaineth unto this
day.”
So much for Ai, its King, and its people, thus
dealt with in furtherance of Jehovah’s promise to the
forefathers of Israel to give them a laud that flowed
with milk and honey. Would not Blood and Tears, to
judge from the tales before us, have been better
■chosen words ? Let the reader refer to the sieges of
Jericho and Ai as first acts in the drama of getting
possession of the covenanted land, and answer
bravely to his own conscience whether they would or
not.
And what are we as reasonable, merciful, and
responsible men, with the details of such atrocities
before us, to think of those theologians of the present
age who persist in forcing the writings of a barbarous
people upon us as the source—sole source, moreover
—whence passably becoming ideas of God and his
dealings with the world are to be derived ?
As reasonable and not utterly benighted men we
are to think and feel assured that they are altogether
unreasonable, and are living in a state either of wilful
or unconscious blindness,
*
. After his triumphs at Jericho and Ai, Joshua builds
an altar of whole stones, as said, to Jehovah, God
of Israel—Jahveh-Elohe-Israel—on which burnt-offer
ings and peace-offerings are presented, and on the
stones of which it is composed a copy of the Law of
Moses is engraved, not a word of all that Moses com
manded being omitted in the writing, or in the reading
aloud to the people which followed ?
* Well may Strauss have said: “How many of the laity
understand the Bible ?—how many of the clergy understand
it 1—how many of them are willing to understand it ?”
�460
J
’ oshua.
This, in part at least, is somewhat extraordinaryintelligence—circumstance, matter, time, and place
considered; for the altar is set up on Mount Ebal,
and all that passes by the name of Law of Moses could
scarcely have been engraved on its twelve unhewn
stones. But Mount Ebal is in Samaria, some days
march away for an army operating in Canaan with its
base at Gilgal; and it is now quite certain that no
thing was known among the Israelites under the title
of Law of Moses until the reign of Hezekiah, seven
hundred years after the days of Joshua, according to
the usual reckoning.
Seeing the difficulty of engraving the whole of the
Pentateuch or Thora on twelve rough stones, Bible
harmonists have said that it was the abstract of theLaw comprised in the book of Deuteronomy which
Joshua carved on the stones ?
An assumption, however, by which the difficulty isnot got over ; for every competent and candid critic
now knows that Deuteronomy is among the most
modern of the five so-called books of Moses, and that
the bulk of the book, with the exception of a few
verses met with here and there copied from Exodus,
Leviticus, and Numbers, does not date from days
farther back than the reign of Josiah.
Others of the inhabitants of Canaan are now said
to take alarm at the terrible doings of the Israelites ?
The Kings of the Amorites, Hittites, Canaanites,
and other septs dwelling on this or the western side
of Jordan, hearing of what has been done to Jericho
and Ai, band themselves together and prepare to resist
the invaders. But the people of Gibeon, nearer the
scene of action, stricken with a panic fear, as it seems,
and despairing of any effectual resistance, go otherwise
to work, and succeed by guile in binding Joshua and
the princes of Israel by an oath to spare their lives.
A deputation present themselves in the camp, and
make show of having come from afar: the sacks and
wine-skins they have with them being old and rent,
�The Gibeonites.
461
their clothes patched, their shoes clouted, and the
bread they still possess, “ though taken hot from the
oven when they set out,” as they say, being now
“ dry and mouldy.” Joshua inquires of them who
they are, and from whence they come ? From a far
country, say they in reply; and having, like Rahab
the harlot, heard of the great fame of Jehovah the
<3 od of Israel, and all he had done for his people in
Egypt, against Sihon, King of Heshbon, and Og,
King of Bashan, against the Amorites beyond Jordan,
and doubtless also against the people of Jericho and
Ai, they had come their long journey to entreat the
leader of the dreaded host to enter into a league of
amity with them.
Joshua falls into the snare F
“ Because he had not asked counsel at the mouth
of Jehovah,” says the text, “ he made peace with them
and let them live, all the princes of the congregation
swearing to the league.” Had he but taken counsel
of the mouth of Jehovah, as he ought to have done,
he would have been better advised: instead of en
gaging to let them live, he would doubtless have
found himself authorised to deal with them in another
fashion. Commanded to hold them Cherem, as in
other instances, he would have been enjoined to slay
and despoil, instead of simply enslaving and putting
them to tribute. All that breathed—men and women,
old and young—would then have been put to death,
and the silver and gold, the brass and iron they pos
sessed been paid into the treasury of the God !
Joshua and the Israelites, of course, soon discover
that they have been imposed upon—that the footsore
and ragged deputation came from no far-off country,
but verily from the cities of Gibeon, Cephirah,
Beeroth, and Kirjath-Jearim, all close at hand ?
The people, therefore, murmur against Joshua and.
their chiefs : they would much have preferred putting
the Gibeonites to the sword, and appropriating their
spoil; “ but they smote them not, because of the oath
�462
'Joshua.
of the princes,” and are pacified by having them made
hewers of wood and drawers of water to the congre
gation of Israel. Joshua, we need not doubt, rates
the deputation soundly for having deceived him, thev
pleading in excuse the rumour gone abroad that
Jehovah the God of Israel had commanded his ser
vant Moses to give his people all the land for a pos
session, and to destroy all its native inhabitants from
before them. Joshua therefore keeps the hands of
the children of Israel from the throats of the Gibeonites ; but, as the story says, “ he made them hewers
of wood and drawers of water for the congregation
and for the altar of Jehovah in the place which he
should choose, even unto this day.”
How may this be interpreted ?
The hierodouli or slaves of the Temple, built by
King Solomon—if it were not perchance of the second
Temple, built by the remnant that returned from
their captivity in Babylon—on Mount Moriah, in the
city of Jerusalem, are turned by the writer into
Gibeonites subdued by Joshua.
The Gibeonites have made peace with Joshua then,
but the Kings or chiefs of the cantons, their neigh
bours, threaten them for having come to terms with
the invader ?
Five of these Kings gather their fighting men
together, and make war on Gibeon for its selfish
desertion of the common cause. But Gibeon sends
to Joshua at Gilgal, entreating for speedy succour and
assistance ; all the Kings of the Amorites that dwell
on the mountains being now gathered, as they say,
against them. Joshua is not slow to obey the
summons of his new allies. He moves at once from
Gilgal in the night; falls suddenly on the host of the
five confederates, discomfits them, and slays them
with a great slaughter. But he has not been
without a powerful ally of another kind than the
dastardly Gibeonites to aid in the work of destruc
tion, for “ Jehovah,” as we learn, “ cast down great
�Still-stand of the Sun.
463'
stones from Heaven upon them, so that there were
more that died with hail-stones than the children
of Israel slew with the sword.” More than this,
and still more marvellous, it is here we read that
Joshua, addressing Jehovah, says, in the sight of
Israel, “ Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and
thou moon in the Valley of Ajalon. And the sun
stood still in the midst of Heaven, and hasted not
his going down a whole day.” The moon, too,
although her light could not have been wanted in face
of the sun, paused, it is said, in her course, whilst the
chosen seed avenged themselves on their enemies.
“ And there was no day like that before or after it,
that Jehovah hearkened to the voice of a man ; for
Jehovah fought for Israel.” We have so often had
occasion to differ from the writer that for once we
rejoice to find ourselves in accord with him : there
certainly never was, and never will, “ until chaos come
again,” be a day like that which saw the sun stand
still in Heaven, and haste not his going down for a
whole day at the word of a man !
Had the writer been content with his hail-stones of
Jehovah—in other words, his great hail-stones—it
would not have been difficult to admit that such a
contingency as a hail-storm occurring in the course of
a skirmish in Judea was well within the limits of
possibility, but the standing still of the sun and moon
in Heaven, in other words, the arrest of the earth in
its revolution, to give Israel the better opportunity to
slaughter the Amorites, takes the tale entirely out of
the pale of belief. Such an occurrence, as against
Mature, i.e., against God, is an absolute impossibility.
The narrator himself, indeed, must have had mis
givings as to the credibility and reception of his
story, for he seeks either to bolster it up, or to shift
the responsibility for its truth from his own to
another’s shoulders, appealing as he does to an
inaccessible source as his authority. “ Is not this
written,” says he, “ in the Sepher Haijashar ? ”—the
�464
Joshua.
Book of the Just, now lost to us. Reference to such
a document shows that the writer drew from an older
source than is the text in which we have his tale,
a document, however, that certainly did not date
so far back as the days of Joshua, inasmuch as we
learn elsewhere (II. Samuel, i. 17 and seq.) that it
is from the Sepher Haijashar that the touching
lament, put into the mouth of David for Saul and
Jonathan, is derived. The Book of Joshua, conse
quently, could not have been compiled and put
together in the indifferent fashion in which it meets
us until after the reign of David, second King of
Israel.
This tale of the standing still of the sun and moon
in their apparent course must surely be one of the
parts of the Old Testament which, in face of the
science of our age, has failed to find apologists ?
So might we have expected. Nevertheless, at
tempts have not only been made to explain away but
even to defend the statement, and in the physical
impossibility implied to find an illustration of the
power—we do not know that any one has ventured to
add: of the goodness and mercy of God. But early
indoctrination still makes men incompetent to see
things as they are, and lets them of the power to dis
tinguish between what is no more than contingent
statement and that which is absolute or necessary truth.
Blind sentiment then takes the lead of open-eyed in
telligence, and blank absurdity and hideous cruelty
are seen in the disguise of wisdom and beneficence.
*
* It is not a little extraordinary that so bold a thinker
and, in matters of science, so well-informed a man as Spinoza
should have been tempted to offer a natural explanation of
the myth relating the still-stand of the sun and moon at the
word of Joshua. He says (assuming it as a fact that the day
light lasted longer than usual) that Joshua and those about
him, ignorant of the true cause of the longer continuance of
the light they witnessed, believed that the sun stood still on
the day in question. They never thought of referring it to
�Hanging before the Sun.
4.65
With the great ally he had, or thought he had, in
his God Jehovah, Joshua could not fail to put the five
Kings of the Amorites, in alliance against Gibeon, to
the rout ?
They are defeated, as matter of course, with signal
slaughter of their peoples, they themselves only
escaping immediate death by hiding in a cave at
Makkedah. This being told to Joshua, he, to make
sure of his prey yet not to interrupt the pursuit and
slaughter, orders great stones to be rolled to the
mouth of the cave, and a guard set over it. “ Pursue
after your enemies and smite them,” says he; “ suffer
them not to enter into their cities; for Jehovah your
God hath delivered them into your hand.” The
triumph complete, Joshua and the men of war return
to the camp at Makkedah, and—vce victis!—it is now
the turn of the chiefs who are hidden in the cave :—
“ Bring forth those five Kings unto me out of the
cave,” says Joshua. Calling his officers about him,
he bids them put their feet on the necks of the pros
trate chiefs, and assures them that if they continue
strong and of good courage, thus will Jehovah aid
them to do to all against whom they fight. But this
is not yet the end; for Joshua, continues the record,
inspired by Jehovah, and with his own hand, we may
presume, even as Samuel did to Agag, “ smote them
and slew them, and hanged them on five trees until
the going down of the sun.” The dead bodies were
then taken down and thrown into the cave wherein,
having sought a refuge, they now found a grave ; its
mouth, to conclude, being stopped up with great
stones, “which remain unto this day.”
Such hangings up before the sun, or until the going
down of the sun, so frequently mentioned in the Heany less obvious cause, such as the ice and hail which then filled
the air, and might have given rise to a higher refractive power in
the atmosphere than usual.—Tr. Theol. Polit., ch. it, p. 60, of
the English version.
�466
"Joshua.
brew Scriptures, must be presumed to have a special
significance ?
That they have, cannot be doubted, and that they
were sacrificial is scarcely questionable. The trees on
which the suspensions took place were crucifixes, and
the attitude of the victim was that which appears to
have been assumed by the Semitic peoples generally
in the act of adoration. At the dedication of the
Temple, for instance, Solomon, it is said, “ stood
before the altar of Jehovah and spread forth his hands
towards heaven and said: -Jehovah, God of Israel,
there is no God like thee,” &c.; and when he had
made an end of “ praying all this prayer and suppli
cation unto Jehovah, he arose from kneeling on his
knees with his hands spread up to heaven ” (1 Kings,
viii. 22 and 54). Those stretchings out of the arms,
again, with or without the Hod of God in his hand, of
which we read so frequently in connection with the
mythical history of Moses, must have had the same
significance—they implied prayer and adoration.
Moses stretches out his hand when he divides the
flood of the Red Sea and when he draws water from
the rock, but most notably of all when he gains the
victory over Amalek. Waited on by Aaron and Hur,
he has ascended the hill that overlooks the field;
“and it was seen,” says the text,-“that when Moses
held up his hands, that Israel prevailed, and when
he let down his hands, that Amalek prevailed. .But
Moses’ hands were heavy, and they took a stone and
put it under him, and he sat thereon ; and Aaron and
Hur stayed uv his hands, the one on the one side, the
other on the other side, until the going down of the sun.
And Joshua discomfited Amalek.” (Ex.xvii.) The rude
Figure in the woodcut on the next page, after a Votive
Tablet of Hicembalis, King of Massylia and Numidia,
to his Deity the Sun-God Baal—older in all likelihood
than anything we have in the Hebrew Scriptures—is
in the very attitude of the victim on the accursed
tree as well as of Moses and Solomon in the act of
�'Joshua Victorious.
467
prayer, and is surely not a little interesting when
seen in connection with the great Catholic Christian
symbol of medieeval and modern times.
*
Joshua, to whom the idea of mercy appears to have
been unknown—as, indeed, it would have been out
of season, acting as he does under orders from Jeho
vah to smite and not to spare—never pauses now in
his career of conquest over the tribes standing in the
* The rude and very ancient tablet figured above was
brought by Sir Grenville Temple, in 1833, from Magrawa,
the site of a Lybo-Phcenician settlement in the Beylik of
Tunis, and is described and figured in the Trans, of the Royal
Asiatic Society for 1834. The inscription in the Phoenician
character has been deciphered by Gesenius : Scripturse L111guaeque Phoenicia Monumenta, 4to, Lips. 1837, and is to the
following effect:—Domino Baali Solari, Rege Eterno, qui
exaudivit preces Hicembalis : “To the Sun-God Baal, Eternal
King, who heard the prayers of Hicembalis. ”
�468
Joshua.
way of the chosen seed, their enemies only because
Occupants of the soil on which they had been born,
and their title-deeds no other than indentures from
God when he gave them power to subdue and make
it fruitful ?
He advances from one victory to another, according
to the record, might his only rule of right.
And the countenance and aid of Jehovah ?
So he or the writer who uses the sacred name may
have imagined ; but enlightened humanity knows no
thing of God’s countenance or favour save with deeds
in conformity with his eternal laws—with those in
special which proclaim the sacredness of human life,
and forbid appropriation by force or fraud of aught
that is another’s.
But the Canaanites, it has been said, were a wicked
race, and so were disinherited, as they deserved ?
Of the state of civilisation and morals among the
Canaanites we know little; and that little not always
in their favour. But they were farther advanced in
the arts of life, as it seems, than the horde that in
vaded them. They were settled denizens on the land
of their birth, not wandering nomads like the Is
raelites ; they dwelt in walled towns, associated as
independent petty republics, and lived in peace or at
war with one another as interest or passion prompted.
If perchance they were not entirely moral in their
generation, and their religion was stained with what
we now look on as indecency, and with blood, what,
it is fair to ask, were the Israelites who came up
against them ? Let the reader refer to the chapters
of the book of Exodus in which so many command
ments with a social bearing find expression; and, if
he have it not already, let him thence acquire the
formation that will enable him to answer the
question.
Favour or no favour, Joshua is a daring leader, and
his warriors are braver, more numerous, better armed,
or better led than their opponents, so that he takes in
�Hazor is Cherem.
469
succession Makkeda’n, Libnah, Lachish, Gezer, Eglon,
and Hebron, and does to each and. all of them as he
had done to Jericho and Ai, putting the men, women,
and children to the sword, and appropriating their
spoil, utterly destroying all that breathed, “as Jeho
vah the God of Israel commanded” (x. 40).
So many of the cities of the level land, or land, of
Canaan, and their territories thus subdued, Joshua
turns his attention to the Perizzite, the Hittite, the
Jebusite, and the Canaanite which dwell in the more
mountainous districts. Jabin, King of Hazor, had, in
fact, allied himself with the clans just named, and
“ come up against Israel with much people, even as
the sand on the sea-shore in multitude, with horses
and chariots very many.” .But Jehovah, as on other
occasions, bids Joshua not to fear them, for “to-mor
row, about this time, I will deliver them all slain be
fore Israel, and thou shalt hough their horses and
burn their chariots with fire.”
Israel, with such assistance, prevails ?
Of course!—Jehovah delivers all into the hands
of his ruthless favourites : Jabin and his confederates
are smitten until none of them remain ; “ Joshua did
unto them as Jehovah hade him : he houghed their
horses and burnt their chariots with fire.” Hazor, the
leading place in this unsuccessful stand against the
invaders, is particularly mentioned as suffering sum
mary chastisement. Taken by assault, we may pre
sume, Jabin the King of Hazor, and all the souls
therein, are smitten with the sword, none of them
being left to breathe, and the town itself with all
within it is burnt to ashes. Hazor, in a word, had been
made Gherem; and we are already familiar with the
terrible significance of this word. The other cities
confederate with Hazor are also taken ; but they are
not burned down; the victors content themselves
with slaying their inhabitants and appropriating the
spoil. “There was not a city,” says the record, “that
made peace with the children of Israel, save the
�Joshua.
Hivites, the inhabitants of Gibeon; all the others
they took in battle for it was of Jehovah to harden
their hearts that they should come against Israel in
battle that they might have no favour, but be utterly
destroyed as Jehovah commanded Moses”—that is
to say, they were led to their destruction by Jehovah
himself.
There is the saying of a heathen writer, that God
first makes mad those he would ruin; but in the
book, every word of which is still received by so
many among the most civilised peoples of the earth
as inspired by God, we should scarcely have expected
to find the Supreme Creator presented as leading men
to their destruction. Let us think for a moment of
God hardening the hearts of the Canaanites to
oppose their invaders, and commanding the indiscri
minate slaughter of men and women, with the par
ticular houghing of horses and burning of war chariots
with fire 1
Had the book been truly inspired by God it would
most assuredly have contained no such command
ments. Do we, however, accept the definition of
inspiration given by one of the few consistently pious,
thoroughly competent, and candid biblical critics of
our day as: “ The expression of man’s religious consci
ousness;” and that of “ God’s promises of the land of
Canaan to the Israelites,” as : “ the spontaneous consci
ousness of the writer and his nation,”* we come to a
'
much better understanding of the text than when it
is seen as the result of any immediate intimation or
inspiration from God. It is, indeed, and can by no
possibility be more than a picture by the writer of
his God Jehovah, and the destinies of his people.
God, most assuredly, no more hardened the hearts of
the Canaanites to resist Israel than he hardened the
heart of Pharaoh, in older times, when refusing to let
Israel go; and he no more ordered the children of
* S. Davidson, D.D. Introd, to Study of the Old Testa
ment, I., p. 440 et seq.
�Joshua a Myth.
i
Israel to go in, slay and take possession in Canaan,
than he inspires a neighbouring people of our own
day to covet certain lands that border the Rhine, and
another to desiderate the domains of the Sultan,
whilst he inclines the hearts of the Teuton and Turk
to hold their own. It was the want of elbow-room
and the need they felt for escape from the nomad to
the settled state that drove the Hebrew of old to cast
longing eyes on the better watered and more fertile
lands of Canaan, and led him on, with arms in his
hand, prepared to slay where liberty to settle was
denied. The story of the invasion of Palestine by
the children of Israel, as we have it, is a poem, its
historical foundations, in all likelihood, no broader
than those of “ The Tale of Troy divine.” Myth and
legend, largely as they pervade every part of the
early Hebrew story, are so conspicuous in Joshua that
an astrological and allegorical meaning has even been
connected with the whole of the book. Jericho, it
has been said, may be the Moon-city, Rahab the
Moon-goddess (Rahab, increase, from the waxing of
the Moon through the first half of her orbit), and
Joshua himself another Hercules or Sun-god, point
edly referred to as a Beth-schemite or of the House of
the Sun (Ha-Schem, the Sun, a name of the Hebrew
god), of whose birth and descent, further than that he
was the son of Nun [the fish), we have no information,
though we are told that his death and burial took
place at Timnath-Heres—eclipse of the Sun, or the
obscurity that follows his setting.
*
Some considerable time, we must presume, was
spent in these wars of conquest and spoliation of
Joshua ?
Five or six years, according to the usual reckoning,
but this is merely conjectural, and though Joshua
is said to have taken “ the whole land and given it
* See Drummond, CE dipus Judaicus, 4to., London. Re
printed, 8vo., London, 1868. Higgins, Anacalepsis, 2 vols.,
4to., London; and Nork, Biblische Mythologie, II., 226.
�47 2
Joshua.
for an inheritance to Israel,” so that at length “ the
land rested from war ” (xi. 23), we by and by learn
that “ there yet remained very much land to be
possessed” (xiii. 1); a statement which, doubtless,
approaches the truth more closely than the one first
made. Many towns and districts were very certainly
never subdued in Joshua’s time, nor, indeed, for long
after: “As for the Jebusites, the children of Judah
could not drive them out; but the Jebusites dwell
with the children of Judah at Jerusalem unto this
day—a statement that must date from some con
siderable time after the reign of David. Neither
would it seem did Ephraim slay and drive out the
Canaanites from the lands allotted to them, in the
manner first described : “ They drove not out the
Canaanites that dwelt in Gezer; but the Canaanites
dwell among the Ephraimites unto this day, and
serve under tribute.”
With the land thus partially subdued, Joshua
nevertheless proceeds to the difficult task of dividing
it among the victors according to their tribes ?
To avoid dispute, apparently, and charges of par
tiality, he has recourse to lots, and gives an engage
ment as from Jehovah that the peoples still in
possession should in due season be driven out. The
tribe of Levi, alone, is to have none of the land as an
inheritance, “the sacrifices of Jehovah, God of Israel,
made by fine, are their inheritancethey are, how
ever, to have certain cities, situated in the territories
of the other tribes, for dwelling-places. The ad
mission but just made that there still remained much
land to be possessed, and that the slaying and driving
out had by no means been so complete as reported,
now finds confirmation in the statement that “ the
five Lords of the Philistines, the Canaanites north of
them—the A vites, the Gib bites, all Lebanon, and the
Sidonians”—as well as certain other tribes more cen
trally situated,—the Geshurites, Maachathites, and
Jebusites, had not only not been slain or driven out,
�Natives not Driven out.
473
but had not as yet been even molested ; they continued
to dwell among the Hebrews of old, as they did in
the days of the Jewish writer of the age of Josiah
(xiii. 13). The veni, vidi, vici of the Book of Joshua
is thus found, after all, to be an empty boast.
On the above showing there is obvious discrepancy
in the accounts we have of the doings of Joshua ?
The discrepancy is endless. The country could
■evidently have been overrun and subdued to a very
• limited extent only. Instead of being exterminated,
the native populations remained in most parts even
numerically superior to the Israelites. But the
natives, graziers here, agriculturists there, divided
among themselves doubtless, and quarrelling at times,
must still have been unused to war on any great
scale. Their assailants, the Israelites, on the con
trary, are represented as soldiers trained and armed
for battle, acting as invaders in a body under a single
leader, and superior through discipline to any oppo
sition that could be offered them. There was, there
fore, no necessity for the indiscriminate slaughter
paraded by the Jewish annalists for the purpose of
magnifying Jehovah and his people Israel.
The vast multitude said to have left Egypt and
made to toil so long in the wilderness, disappear
soon after Joshua comes upon the stage ?
After the questionable Census in the plains of
Moab, we hear no more of the six hundred thousand
and odd able-bodied men, from twenty years of age
and upwards, armed for war. The force in the field
under Joshua, though greatly exaggerated in numbers,
doubtless, is a comparatively compact body, more
easily handled than any larger mass, but still, we may
imagine, more than sufficient to make resistance use
less on the part of the Canaanites. They could, in
fact, have seen nothing for it, in the majority of
instances, but submission; a course to which they
may have been the more easily reconciled when they
found that the invaders were of their own kindred,
�474
Joshua.
spoke the same or a dialect of the same language,,
followed the same social usages, and with little
difference observed the same religious rites as them
selves. The Hebrews and Canaanites were in truth,
as we have seen, scions of the same Semitic stock,
and intermingling freely through the whole of theearlier and by much the longer period of their history
—each taking the sons and daughters of the other as
husbands and wives—they became amalgamated at
length into the people whom we finally know as the
Israelites, or, in a more restricted sense, as the Jews.
Such a conclusion, however, does not tally with
the gist of the general history ?
It must be true none the less ; for though Jehovah
is pledged by the writers of the Hebrew records to
drive out the native populations before his elect—the
children of Jacob, the wily—as the pledge was never
redeemed, so need we have no misgivings in conclud
ing that it never came from God, among whose
eternal ordinances, as we read them in the book of
Nature, it has no place.
What then becomes of the many stringent enact
ments so frequently repeated, from the mythical days
of Abraham and Sarah downwards, against taking
daughters of the soil to wife F
As we see that these were all against the customs
of the country, and were never observed by high or
low until after the Captivity, we conclude that they
are the product of the very latest legislation. They
belong, in fact, to times when the Jehovistic religious
party had got the upper hand in the state, and the
bigotry and intolerance that spring up whenever men
in power imagine themselves the favourites of heaven,
their views alone agreeable to God, and all who differ
from them as no better than accursed, had ripened
into a system.
There is particular as well as general discrepancy,
also, as regards the districts and cities said to have
been conquered by Joshua ?
�Hebron and Debir.
^7$
Hebron, for instance, is said in one place to have
been taken and smitten with the edge of the sword,
and the king and all the souls therein so utterlydestroyed that not one was left alive (x. 36). But
in another place Caleb says to Joshua, “ Now, there
fore, give me this mountain, Hebron, where Jehovah
spoke in that day, how the Anakims were there and
the cities great and fenced. If so be that Jehovah
will be with me, then I will drive them out as Jehovah
said. And Joshua blessed Caleb and gave him
Hebron for an inheritance.” Hebron consequently
had not been captured, neither had its inhabitants
been exterminated in the manner declared. By-andbye, indeed, we are told that Caleb drives out the
three Anakims, Sheshai, Ahiman, and Talmai from
Hebron (xiv. 12) ; but at a later period in the story,
we learn that “ After the death of Joshua the children
of Judah went up to Hebron, fought against the
Canaanites who dwelt there, and slew the three
Anakims, Sheshai, Ahiman, and Talmai (Judges i. 9))
who had all already been first put to the sword by
Joshua, and then driven out by Caleb !
*
Much the same story is told of Debir as of Hebron ?
Joshua and all Israel with him, it is-said, fought
against Debir; took it; smote it with the edge of
the sword, and utterly destroyed all that breathed—
“as he had done to Hebron, so did he to Debir”
(x. 38). But immediately afterwards we find that
Caleb, after clearing his possession, Hebron, of the
Anakim, goes up against Debir, and makes proclama
tion that whosoever takes the city, to him will he
give his daughter Achsah to wife ; and that Othniel,
the son of Kenaz, succeeds, and is rewarded in the
terms of the proclamation (xiv. 16-17). But then
we have Othniel as the Hero and Achsah as the prize
in connection with the city of Kirjath-Sepher—called
* Comp. De Wette: Introd, to 0. T. by Th. Parker, II.,
165, and seq.
�47 6
Joshua.
Debir of old, says the writer, in times posterior to the
death of Joshua (Judges i. 11-13).
From these and the numerous other contradictory
and obviously mythical statements of the book of
Joshua we conclude ?
First, that the book is a compilation from frag
ments, mainly traditional, and in many cases purely
mythical; and second, that we have the writings of two
—if not of three or more—different individuals jum
bled together. Besides the information proper to the
book itself, there are many allusions to particulars
with which we are already familiar in writings that
have gone before, as well as with others, in works
more sober in their tenour and more reliable as
authorities, that come after it. References to the
plagues of Egypt and the wonders done in that
country are put into the mouths of Rahab and the
Gibeonites; the passage of the Jordan is plainly a
parallel to the passage of the Red Sea, and needless,
inasmuch as the river is fordable ; Moses is the hero
of the legislation and Joshua the hero of the con
quest of the promised land; Moses had a wonder
working rod, and Joshua has a wonder-working
spear; Jehovah appears to Moses in the burning
bush, and the Captain of Jehovah’s host appears to
Joshua, and in the very words used to Moses bids
him loose his shoe from off his foot, the ground he
stands on being holy; and, to conclude, the death
and burial of Joshua at Timnath Heres in the dark
bears some analogy to the mysterious death of Moses
on Mount Nebo.
Beside the general distribution of lands to the
tribes, there are a few particular allotments to distin
guished individuals ?
We have seen Caleb put in possession of Hebron,
and we now learn that the sons of Aaron, the priests,
are handsomely endowed ; they have no fewer than
thirteen cities assigned them. But, as the sons were
only two, we are at a loss to imagine what use they
�Reuben and Gad Retire.
477
could have made of so munificent a gift : they could
not have occupied thirteen cities, and in the days
referred to there was no letting and sub-letting;
possessions were for individuals and their families,
and the transmission of property only took place by
sale or inheritance among the members of each
several tribe. Such an anachronism as the present
ment of thirteen cities to the priesthood can scarcely
be conceived possible even at a date so remote as the
age of Solomon ; the statement before us, therefore,
we must conclude, was made after the reign of that
*
sovereign.
And now, continues the text, “ Jehovah
gave unto Israel all the land which he swore to give
to their fathers; and they possessed it, and dwelt
therein, and Jehovah gave them rest round about
. . . and there failed not aught of any good thing
which Jehovah had spoken unto the house of Israel
—all came to pass ” (xxi. 43-45).
This must be a note supplied by a late hand,
ignoring much of what had been said before ?
It has every appearance of being so, standing as it
does in flagrant contradiction with the statements we
have but just had made that there still remained much
land to be taken in and possessed; that the children
of Judah could never drive the Jebusites out of their
city, nor the sons of Manasseh expel the Canaanites
from the district assigned them, &c. Neither, indeed,
were the Geshurites ever got rid of, but continued, the
text tells us, “ to dwell among the Ephraimites unto
this day,” i.e., unto the day when the writer lived,
some time assuredly, longer or shorter, after the
reign of Solomon.
The tribes of Reuben and Gad and the half-tribe
of Manasseh, which have kept their word to Moses
that they would aid the other tribes, their brethren,
in the conquest of the promised land, now take their
See Kuehnen. Hist, critique de l’ancien Testament, Tr. de
l’Hollandais, T. I., p. 330, 8vo, Paris, 1866.
�4-7 8
Joshua.
leave, and set out in return to their own territory
beyond Jordan, with the blessing of Joshua and
a, charge that they should diligently keep the com
mandments and observe the law which Moses the
servant of Jehovah had given them ?
They depart, and having come to the banks of the
Jordan in the land of Canaan they are minded, it is
said, to build an altar, “ a great altar to see to,”
according to the text.
This was piously intended, doubtless, and in thank
fulness to their God who had so marvellously
befriended them and their brethren in their great
enterprise ?
So might we conclude; but, strange to say, it is
taken as a mortal offence by the ten tribes they had
just left; “ the whole congregation of Israel, it is
said, gathered themselves together at Shiloh to go
up to war against them.”
This seems extraordinary ?
So would it be assuredly, could anything of the
kind have occurred at the Early period of Hebrew
history assumed. Then, and for long ages after,
there were numerous holy-places, with rude altars of
earth and unhewn stones, scattered over the country,
at Hebron, Beth-El, Beer-Sheba, Gilgal, Sechem,
Siloh, Lachish, Dan, &c., dedicated to the Hebrew
God or Gods—El, Elohim, Isra-El, or by whatever
other name known, under whatever form represented,
at all of which sacrifices could be duly and lawfully
offered. The ire of the congregation of Israel, how
ever, ceases to strike us as extraordinary when the
writing is referred to post-exilic times, when the only
shrine to which oblations could be lawfully brought
was the one on Mount Zion, and the only God to be
addressed without sin was Jehovah, God of the
reformed religious party in the kingdom of Judah.
The story, if it be more than a myth, if it have any
historical foundation at all, must refer to an episode
in the rivalry between Judah and Israel, in the days
�Early Religious Differences.
qyg
-of Jeroboam, or still later, but here relegated to the
remote age of Joshua and the Epoch of the Conquest.
The congregation of Israel (Judah) expostulate
with Reuben and Gad (Israel or Ephraim) before
proceeding to extremities and coming to blows with
them ?
They send Phinehas, distinguished as we already
know by the 'murder of Zimri and Cozbi, so much
approved of by Jehovah, if the record may be trusted,
and with him ten princes of the tribes. Coming up
with the sons of Reuben, Gad, and half Manasseh, at
Gilead, they say:—“What trespass is this that ye
have committed against the God of Israel ” [Jehovah,
the God of Judah, being here to be understood] “ in
that ye have builded you an altar ? If the land of
your possession be unclean, then pass ye over into
the land of the possession of Jehovah, wherein
Jehovah’s tabernacle [Temple on Mount Zion, to be
understood] dwelleth; but rebel not against us in
building you an altar beside [in addition to] the
altar of Jehovah our God.”
The Reubenites and Gadites will be much amazed
at this interference with the custom of their fathers—
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and themselves, of setting up
an altar whenever and wherever they were minded
so to do ?
That they must have been taken aback there can
be little question, and we should find them saying so,
assuredly, had we the true account of the incident
out of which, we must presume, the story of the text
to have arisen; but we have it not, we have only the
travestied Jehovistic narrative, in which the parties
inculpated are made to say:—“God, God Jehovah
[Judah’s God] knoweth, and Isra-El [Ephraim’s God]
shall know, if this has come to pass through falling
away from Jehovah or rebelling against him, may
there be no help for us this day ! If we have built
us an altar to turn from following Jehovah, or to
offer burnt-offerings or thank-offerings thereon, may
�480
Joshua.
Jehovah avenge it! And if we have not rather done
this to the end, that in time to come when your
children say to our children, ‘What have ye in
common with Jehovah, seeing that Jehovah hath
made Jordan the boundary between us and you—ye
have no part in Jehovah.’ . . . Therefore, said we,
we shall build an altar, neither for burnt-offerings
nor for sacrifice, but for a witness between us and
you, and between your generations and our genera
tions after us that we do service to Jehovah, and
come to him with our burnt-offerings, our sacrifices,
and our thank-offerings, so that your children shall
not in time to come say to our children, ‘ Ye have
no part in Jehovah.’ Far be it from us, therefore,
say we, this day to fall away from Jehovah by build
ing an altar for burnt-offerings and meat-offerings,
and sacrifices, other than the altar of Jehovah our
[the word should be your] God that stands before
his dwelling-place ” [the Temple of Jerusalem to be
understood].
The account here is not only tautological and
extremely prolix in the original, but, when closely
scanned, is seen to be at variance with other parts of
the Hebrew Scriptures ?
Hardly to be understood either without the com
ment here supplied in some small measure by the
few words within brackets. Explanation more at
large is found when note is taken of the two great
religious parties, Elohists and Jehovists, into which
the Hebrew people came to be divided subsequently
to the reign of Solomon. Of these the Elohists repre
sent the Catholics, the Jehovists the Protestants, of
modern times. The Elohists “stand fast on the
ancient ways,” have their strength in the kingdom
of Israel or Ephraim, and they possess numerous
altars or holy places ; the Jehovists, more advanced,
have their stronghold in Judah, with the Temple on
Mount Zion as the only shrine or holy place they
acknowledge. The Elohists, in a word, abide by the
�Early Religious Differences.
481
worship of the old Hebrew God El Elohe Israel, and
continue to sacrifice to him under the semblance of
the Bull. The Jehovists, again, having attained to
the conception of the Oneness and Omnipresence of
Deity, had abandoned the Idea that God could be
presented under any similitude, but inconsistently
maintained that he could only be lawfully addressed
at his Shrine on Mount Zion. Reuben and Gad, w©
see, do not deny that they had built an altar; but
they are made by the Jewish writer to belie them
selves, and say that it was not intended for burntofferings nor for sacrifice, but for a witness between
them and their brethren. Altars, however, were
never built save for sacrifice, it was the Cairn or Heap
of stones, and upon occasion the single stone pillar
under a tree or by a well, that was the proper
memorial monument. The text but just quoted, in its
inconsistencies and its statements at variance with
all we know of use and wont among the early He
brews, shows unmistakable signs of late writing and
of yet later editorial manipulation in the transparent
purpose it presents to set Jehovah above El EloheIsra-El.
The religious difference between the two sections
of the Hebrew people may possibly have lain at the
root of the fatal disruption that turned into two the
single kingdom conquered by David and ruled over
through the greater part of his life by Solomon ?
There may be some truth in this. United, Judah
and. Ephraim might, as it seems, have made head
against either Egypt or Assyria, operating so far from
home, and have even held their own, under a com
petent leader, in the hilly and easily-defended country
of Northern Palestine against Chaldea. But divided,
hating each other with the blind and deadly hate that
is .engendered of religious difference, and often at war
with one another, they became in succession the easy
prey of even the least powerful of their enemies.
If Reuben and Gad had built, or were minded to
�482
Joshua.
build, an altar at all, it could therefore only be for
sacrifice and oblation; and their offence lay in this,
that it was not to Jehovah, but to the God El-EloheIsrael, Chiun, or Chamos, whose Tabernacle, Image,
and Star had been borne by them and their fathers
in the wilderness for forty years, according to the
prophet Amos (v.), that they were about to bring
their offerings ?
In the olden time there was not only no restriction
as to the building of altars for sacrifice, but every
facility was given for their erection. Jehovah [the
name should here be Elohim] orders Moses to say to
the children of Israel, “ An altar of earth thou shalt
make unto me, and shalt offer thereon thy burntofferings.” It was only when the Temple of Jeru
salem had been built, and proclaimed by the Jehovistic
or Jewish party, the sole shrine at which their God
Jehovah could be worshipped, that the building else
where of an altar for sacrifice and oblation came to be
regarded as a trespass of such magnitude that it could
only be atoned for by bloodshed. The Hebrew people
of the age of Joshua must not be seen as the Israelites
of Jeroboam and his successors of the age of the writer,
setting up altars and bringing offerings to a Golden
Calf as the God who had brought them out of their
Egyptian bondage; they must be paraded as obser
vant of the Law of Moses, eight centuries before it
was even imagined to be in existence, and nine cen
turies before the second Temple of Jehovah, God of
Judah, had been built!
Phinehas the priest and the other delegates ex
press themselves satisfied with the disavowal they
receive from Reuben and Gad of any purpose on their
part to raise an independent altar ?
They say: “ This day we perceive that Jehovah is
among us. Because ye have not committed this
trespass, ye have delivered the children of Israel out
of the hand of Jehovah.” The children of Israel,
it is said in continuation, “blessed God, and did not
�Early Religious Differences.
483
go up in battle array to desolate the land wherein
Reuben and Gad had their possessions and they, it
ia added, called the altar they had built “ Ed—
W&ness that Jehovah is God.”*
The words which speak in this place of the “ deli
very of the children of Israel out of the hand of
Jehovah ” must have a special significance?
The writer would, doubtless, persuade his country
men and co-religionists that all departure from the
so-called Law of Moses—which had been brought to
light, we may suppose, a short while before his time
—and any sacrifice offered at a shrine other than the
Temple of Jerusalem, would bring Jehovah down upon
them with war or pestilence for their presumption.
He would have them believe that his God Jehovah
would not be slow, through the instrumentality of
such a zealot as Phinehas, or by war or pestilence to
make them smart for daring to worship God in any
but the prescribed, though it were, perchance, the an
* It is with great diffidence that we venture to differ from
so accomplished a Biblical scholar as Professor Kuehnen in
our interpretation of this curious episode in Hebrew history.
Referring to Joshua xxi., Professor Kuehnen says :—“How
we see Israel zealous for the unity of worship ! What—build
an altar outside of Shilo, the holy place I This were indeed a
sin of the gravest complexion, which the parties inculpated
make haste to explain away as they best can. The great
thing in the writer’s mind is to have the calf of Jehovah
centered at Shilo, and allowed at no other place.” But we
are persuaded that it is Judah that is here zealous against
Ephraim, after the disruption of the kingdom. The question,
in our opinion, is not about having an altar anywhere save at
Shilo, but of having an altar anywhere save at Jerusalem. The
narrative in the text Professor Kuehnen believes to be derived
from the document he styles ‘ The Book of the Origins and,
as he refers the composition of this book to no more ancient a
date than the reign of Solomon, we see that the history may
very well refer to times by no means so remote as those of
Joshua. In the shape in which we have the tale, it is pro
bably from the pen of a Jewish writer, who lived not earlier
than the reign of Josiah, and is an indifferent invention—ad
majorem Jehova gloriam! The text is confused, tautological,
�484
Joshua.
tique way, and even the way of their immediate
fathers and of most of themselves.
The Jehovists were the Iconoclasts of the days of
Josiah and a few of his successors. They were the
men who ruined the High-places, broke in pieces the
stone columns, and slew the priests of Baal, burnt the
wooden pillars of Aschera, pulled down the booths of
the infamous Kadeschim, destroyed the brazen Ser
pent—said to be that which Moses set up on a pole
in the wilderness—made a bonfire of the Chariot of the
Sun that stood in the porch of the Temple, and so on.
They present themselves in almost all things as pro
totypes of the early reformers of modern times, who
were not always content with breaking in pieces the
images and wrecking the altars, but did not hold
their hands from the solemn piles in which what they
styled The Idolatry had been carried on.
With the departure of Reuben and Grad to their
possessions beyond Jordan, “ a long time after Je
hovah had given rest to Israel,” according to the
and bears obvious marks of editorial manipulation; but the
burden of the narrative assimilates itself perfectly with the
state of things existing between Judah and Ephraim in days
subsequent to the age of Solomon. It is not uninteresting
to note that the site of the ed or witness altar spoken of
appears to have been recently discovered in the course of the
Ordnance Survey of Palestine, proceeding at this time. There
is, it seems, a remarkable lofty white peak visible from the
modern Jericho, twenty miles distant, projecting like a
bastion, and closing the valley of the Jordan. From the
summit of this peak there is a magnificent and very extensive
view. Accessible on the north side only, the surveying party
there obtained the name, Tal’at abu Ayd—the ascent leading
to Ayd. The lofty peak in question, conspicuous in days
when writing had become familiar to the Jews as it had been
from time immemorial, was probably in want of a history,
and has been supplied with one by the writer of the Book of
Joshua. The times with which we have ventured to connect
the narrative of the 22nd chapter of Joshua implies our per
suasion that the tale has reference to incidents much later
than any that can be referred to the days of the mythical suc
cessor of the still more mythical Moses.
�Joshuas Parting Address.
485
text, Joshua, now far stricken in years, calls the
Elders of Israel around him ?
And reminds them, in imitation of Moses, when he
had the notice that he was to die, of all Jehovah had
done for them. Modestly passing over his own
achievements, he speaks of the partition he had made
among them by lot, not only of the lands overrun and
possessed, but of those of the peoples which still
remained to be conquered and taken in. But he
informs them that they have only to be of good
courage, to do all that is ordained in the book of the
Law, to serve none of the gods of the native tribes
among whom they settled, and particularly to contract
no marriages with their women ; the Jewish writer
showing himself as well aware, in his day, as we are
in ours, of the power of the female propaganda in
securing outward conformity, at all events, if not
always inward assent, to the religious dogmas and
rites which are the fashion of the age.
But if they failed to follow the advice now given
them ?
Then should they smart for it: “Do ye in any
wise go back and cleave to the remnants of the
nations left among you,” says the text, “making
marriages with them and they with you; know for a
certainty that Jehovah your God will no more drive
out any of these nations from before you, but they
shall be snares and traps unto you, scourges in your
sides, and thorns in your eyes, until ye perish from
off the land. It shall come to pass that as all good
things are come upon you which were promised, so
shall Jehovah bring upon you all evil things. When
ye have transgressed the covenant of Jehovah and
have gone and served other gods, then shall the
anger of Jehovah be kindled against you, and ye
shall perish quickly from off the good land which he
hath given you” (xxiii. adfinf.
This has a great look of prophecy after the event ?
There can be little question of its being so in
�486
'Joshua.
reality. God as Immanent Cause, In All and Of All
that Is, cannot be jealous of other gods, for there are
none such; and God neither favours nor is angry, in
any human sense, with act of man or event that comes
to pass. Such language is the effect of anthropomorphosing God and supposing him possessed of
human appetites, passions, and prejudices — a sin
that must be charged against the writers of the
Hebrew Scriptures, above all others. In the texts
just quoted we see iteration of the old system of con
tract or bargain between Jehovah and his people,
upon which we have observed already; and in the
warnings against serving other gods we have fresh
assurance that Jehovah was believed by the Jews
to be but one among many gods, and not a little
j ealous of their power.
Joshua continues his parting address ?
Or rather we have another writer beginning it for
him anew and varying it in particulars here and there.
The first oration, which breaks off at the end of
chapter xxiii., is continued at the 14th verse of the
24th chapter, and in terms that are not a little
remarkable, the usual interpretation put upon the
Hebrew Scriptures considered. “Now, therefore,”
says the writer, “ fear Jehovah and serve him in sin
cerity and in truth, and put away the Gods which
your fathers served on the other side of the stream
[the JordanJ and in Egypt, and serve ye Jehovah.
And if it seem not good unto you to serve Jehovah,
then choose you this day whom ye will serve,—
whether the Gods which your fathers served on the
other side of the stream, or the Gods of the Amoritps
in whose land ye dwell; but as for me and my house
we will serve Jehovah.”
Joshua therefore gives the people their choice of
the God or Gods they would serve ; and in what is said
incidentally we now learn that Jehovah was not the God
who was served either in Egypt or beyond Jordan,
the proper boundary between the Divinities of one
�Which of the Gods will ye Serve ?
48 7
Pantheon and Those of another. We discover at
length, and at the very end of our task that Jehovah
could have had nothing to do with freeing the Israel
ites from their Egyptian bondage; but that it was verily
the God whose similitude was presented by Aaron to
the wanderers in the guise of the Bull-Calf, who had led
them out of captivity. The writer of the Book of
Joshua, plainly enough, has no idea of God as One and
One only ; he recognises a multiplicity of Gods with
Jehovah his own God among the number. All we
have had in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers,
and Deuteronomy, therefore, about Jehovah as the
God of Israel, his apparitions to Abraham, Isaac,
Jacob, and Moses, his personal communications and
immediate commandments to the chiefs of the chosen
seed, &c., &c., vanish into nothing. We have, in a
word, no Records of the distant ages and strange
doings referred to in the Pentateuch, but Poems by
writers who lived, as we believe, for the most part
after the Babylonian Captivity.
To Joshua’s proposition as to the God they would
serve the people answer and say ?
“ God forbid that we should forsake Jehovah to
serve other Gods; for Jehovah is he that brought
us up and our fathers out of the land of Egypt, and
did great wonders in our sight, and preserved us
all the way wherein we went and among all the
people through whom we passed.”
This does not tally exactly with what Joshua has
but just been made to say, and with very much
besides that we have had already; for Aaron the
priest has presented them with a Golden Calf as the
God that brought them out of Egypt, and Jehovah
has not only broken out on the people for their backslidings on numerous occasions and slain them by
thousands with the sword and pestilence, but has
inflicted forty years of wandering in the wilderness,
and, with the exception of Joshua and Caleb, has
killed off all of adult years who had left Egypt.
�4-8 8
J
’ oshua.
How, then, should we now have the people speaking
of Jehovah as their God, of the wonders they had
seen, and the care that had been taken of them in
their journeyings ?
It were very hard to say, could we not with the
most perfect assurance refer the writing we have
before us to a very late period in the history of the
Hebrew people, and even divine the motive that led
to its composition.
Joshua does not receive the people’s ready accept
ance of the new God Jehovah in place of their own
and their fathers old Gods without a warning ?
“Ye cannot serve Jehovah,” says he, “ for he is a
holy God; he is a jealous God; he will not forgive
your trangressions nor your sins. If ye forsake
Jehovah and serve other Gods he will turn and do
you hurt, and consume you after he hath done you
good.”
The people are not frightened by these somewhat
formidable assurances ?
They say: “ Nay, but we will serve Jehovah,” on
which Joshua tells them that now they are witnesses
against themselves, that they have chosen Jehovah
to serve him. So he makes a covenant with the
people and writes the words of it in a book; takes a
great stone and sets it up under a tree and says :
11 Behold this stone shall be a witness to us; for it
hath heard (/) all the words of Jehovah which he spake
unto us. It shall therefore be a witness unto you
that ye deny not your God”—Jehovah, the God just
chosen, understood.
By which procedure we see that Joshua, or the
modern writer who is using his name, had not got
beyond the old religious notions of his forefathers.
He sets up a stone pillar, symbol of the life-giving
power, under the shade of a living tree, so long an
object of worship with man escaping from the merely
animal into the more properly human or speculative
sphere of existence. It is not unimportant to observe
�Conclusion.
489
that the stone is referred to as having heard all the
words spoken. It was not only the Symbol of the
God, therefore, but the God himself—Deity at once,
and Deity’s dwelling-place. The Book in which
Joshua is said to have written what is called “ The
Law of God ” has not come down to us ?
The Book we have, which passes under the name
of Joshua, contains little or nothing that has not an
immediate bearing on the conquests and partition of
the promised land, and so cannot be that now referred
to. If it ever existed, and it may very well never
have had being out of the imagination of the histo
rian of Joshua’s deeds of spoliation and slaughter, it
has perished in the wreck of ages.
Having done his work, Joshua has now only to be
gathered to his fathers ?
He dies, it is said, at the advanced age of one hun
dred and ten years, and is buried on the borders of
his inheritance in Timnath-Heres, as we have already
had occasion to learn.
We have anticipated almost all that need be said
of the age and authorship of the Book of Joshua.
That it is of relatively modern composition, there can
be no doubt; and from the repeated references we
find to late incidents in Hebrew history, we see that
he whose name it bears could not have been its
author. It is, in fact, a sort of appendix to Deutero
nomy, and the style and peculiar forms of expression
show, almost beyond question, that the writer of
Deuteronomy was, in great part at least, the writer
of Joshua also, although it bears many marks of sub
sequent editorial manipulation. Both Elohist and
Jehovist documents appear in the text. The Book
of Judges has furnished the compiler with several of
his statements, and in this has left our modern har
monists with a crop of contradictions that have
sorely taxed their ingenuity to reconcile with the
�49°
'Joshua.
accredited idea of inspiration. A few of these we
have had occasion to notice in the course of our com
mentary. The mention of Jerusalem, which occurs
oftener than once, would of itself suffice to take the
writing out of the age whose history it details; for
Jerusalem was Jebus until the reign of David; and
the obvious reference made, in more places than one,
to the sufferings that befal a city in a state of siege,
and the miseries that wait on exile, point unequivocably to the invasion of the Chaldeans and the Baby
lonian captivity. The Book of Joshua, therefore, in
its present shape, cannot be of older date than the
age of Manasseh. Speaking of the first twelve
chapters of the Book, containing the tale of the in
vasion of the land of Canaan, Professor Kuehnen
gives it as the result of his inquiries, that “ the
author cannot be regarded as an entirely credible
historian.” Dr. Davidson, having determined the
time of the Deute ronomist as falling in the reign of
Manasseh, and ascribing, as he does, Deuteronomy
and Joshua to one and the same compiler, concludes
that the Book before us was compiled during the
reign of that monarch.
«
C. W. BEY.NELL, PBINTEB, LITTLE PULTENEY STBEET, HAYMABKET.
��
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The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua in face of the science and moral sense of our age. Part VI
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Collation: 441-490 p. : ill. ; 18 cm.
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Judaism
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Bible. O.T. Joshua
Bible. O.T. Pentateuch
Conway Tracts
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Text
CT US'
THE PENTATEUCH
IN CONTRAST WITH
THE SCIENCE AND MORAL SENSE
OF OUR AGE.
_ By
A PHYSICIAN.
“ Zufallige Geschichtswahrheiten konnen der Beweis von. nothwendigen
Vemunftswahrheiten nie werden—Contingent historical truths can never be
demonstration of necessary rational truths.”—Lessing.
PUBLISHED
BY THOMAS SCOTT,
No. 11 The Terrace, Farquhar Road, Upper Norwood,
London, S.E.
1873.
Price One Shilling and Sixpence.
�And are they in the right who, free from doubt,
Can sit in sweet abstraction from each thought
Of Earth, pondering the lives of those who fought
The battles of Jehovah ; viewing the rout
That Israel spread as God’s own act, the shout
Upraised for victory, glorious most when fraught
With deepest ruin to the foe, as taught
By the Qreator! ’T may not be! Without
The special faith that suffers me to view
In one among the multitude of creeds,
Each by its advocates alone held true,
The truth, or other than the pregnant seeds
Of discord among men, I take my flight
From blood-stained legends, Nature, to thy Light!
�THE PENTATEUCH—THORA, ‘
THE LAW.
GENESIS.
TN the beginning,” it is said, “ God created the
JL heaven and the earth.” What are we to
understand by a “ beginning ” ?
The epoch in eternity, doubtless, which the writer
of this part of the Hebrew Scriptures imagined to have
dawned when God created or fashioned, or set about
creating or fashioning, heaven and the earth, first or
oldest of things in his belief.
Is this belief borne out by what natural philoso
phers conclude as to the constitution of heaven and
the earth ?
Heaven, to the modern philosopher, is no firma
ment or solid sphere stretched above and subordi
nate in some sort to the earth, as it was to the
Hebrews, but is infinite space, only to be conceived of
as co-eternal with, and an element in the nature of,
Deity; whilst the earth is but a middle-aged member
of one of the great astral systems that stud The
Boundless, and a much more recent production, in its
compact form, than the whole of the planetary bodies
that circle round the sun in orbits outside its own.
Creation, to the modern philosopher,_ is therefore
something different from the creation, evoking, or
fashioning out of nothing of the Hebrew writer.
B
�2
The Pentateuch.
It is impossible to conceive something coming out
of nothing. But God was, and with and of God were
the elements, which, in conformity with the laws of
force and matter, also inherent in the nature of God,
took form and fashion as suns, planets, satellites, and
comets amid infinite space and in time.
Creation, as now apprehended, implies evolution—
evolution from what ?
As regards the particular aggregations in space,
whereof the solar system is one, and the earth we
dwell on among the least of its members, from a
mass of nebulous matter, extending, in the first
instance, far beyond the limits of the, outermost of
the planetary bodies which, with their satellites, now
circle round the sun.
Vast intervals of time must be presumed to have
elapsed between the epochs when the first, or outer
most, and the last, or innermost, of the planets that
attend the sun took form and fashion ?
Such is the conclusion of modern philosophers;
the planets outside the earth’s orbit being regarded
as the older, those within it as the younger members
of the family, the great sun itself being the youngest
or latest formed of all?
“The earth,” it is said, “ was without form and
' void.”
The earth, in conformity with the laws of attrac
tion, repulsion, and cohesion inherent in matter, could
never have been without form, and could not have
been void, if by void emptiness be understood. From
the moment of its acquiring, and even before it had
a The reader is referred to an admirable paper ascribed to
Mr Hennessey, headed “ Recent Astronomy and the Nebular
Hypothesis,” in the Westminster Review, July,1858. In this able
essay the Genesis of the Solar System is treated exhaustively,
though briefly, in conformity with the most advanced views of
natural philosophers.
�Genesis: The Elohist.
3
acquired, consistency it was a globe, revolving on an
axis, flattened at the poles, bulging at the equator,
and made up, in the several stages of its evolution) of
gaseous, vaporous, liquid, and solid matters, as it is
at the present hour, though these matters must all
have existed in states far different at first from, those
in which they now present themselves.
“ And darkness was upon the face of the deep.”
As yet the deep was not; and at no time, probably,
did absolute darkness prevail in the universe. Any
light that reached the earth, however, could not have
been of the bright kind that is shed from the sun as
it now exists. There must have been light, never
theless, as well from the nebulous matter which had
become compact in the older planets and in the earth,
and was still undergoing compaction into the younger
planets within the earth’s orbit and into the sun
itself, —not to speak of the nebulous and stellar masses
plunged in the depths of space, that were either in
process of condensation, and so eliciting a feebler
light, or that had already acquired the density which
fitted them as fixed stars or suns to shine more
brightly.
“Bright effluence of bright essence increate,”
light was a principle in the nature of God, and must
have existed from eternity :
“ Before the sun,
Before the heavens thou wert, and at the voice
Of God, as with a mantle, didst invest
The rising world of waters dark and deep,”
sings one of the great heroic poets, inspired by the
diviner mind he had through his more perfect organi
zation.
“ And the Spirit of God moved on the face of the
waters.”
�4
The Pentateuch.
The spirit or breath of God (ruacli Elohim) was in
the waters and moved in rhythmic harmony with
them as with all things else. It was not only on or
outside of the waters and other things, but within and
of them, even as the manifestation we call life is within
and of the organisms, vegetable and animal, wherein
and whereby it is made known to us.
“ And God said, Let there be light, and light was.”
Not called into being, however, as but just said, at
some particular moment of time, not distinct from
the Godhead :
“ [But] of the Eternal, co-eternal beam,
......................... since God is Light,
And never but in unapproached light
Dwelt from Eternity, dwelt then in thee,”
sings in lofty rhyme our own inspired Bard.
“ And God divided the light from the darkness, and
he called the light day, and the darkness he called
night.”
The writer speaks of darkness—a purely negative
state or condition,—as if it were a positive something.
But darkness is a mere consequence of the absence
of light; and it is obvious that he could not have
known by what name God called either the light or
the dark: God ordained the light and the dark, but
he left man to give them names.
“ Let there be a firmament in the midst of the
waters ; and let it divide the waters from the waters.”
The writer fancied that the over-arching canopy of
the sky was a transparent solid, in which the sun,
moon, and stars were set, somewhat perhaps after the
manner of the precious stones in the breast-plate of
the high priest; and that as there was an ocean below
or on the earth, so must there be an ocean above or
in heaven, from which at times—on certain sluices,
presumably, being opened—rain fell to moisten the
ground and fit it lor the growth of plants.
�Genesis.• The Elohist.
5
“ Let the waters on the earth be gathered together
into one place, and let the dry land appear.”
Geological facts and reasonable inferences from
them lead to the conclusion that the earth, on its
emergence from the nebulous or gaseous state in
which it first existed, appeared as an incandescent
fluid, and next as a semi-solid ball, when all that was
still vapourable in its constitution surrounded the
glowing mass as a heterogeneous atmosphere, some
thing, in all probability, like that which we now believe
to constitute the photosphere of the sun. Heat, how
ever, passing off into space, precipitation first of the
more and then of the less refractory substances took
place, and a crust of some consistency was formed.
This, shrinking on the still melted mass within, caused
it to burst through in lines and at particular points,
whereby mountains and mountain-chains were formed,
and the surface was made uneven. The temperature
continuing to fall lower and lower, the aqueous vapour
of the atmosphere was finally in great measure pre
cipitated and condensed into water, which, running
down the slopes, gathered itself into the hollows and
there formed rivers, lakes, and seas, with more or less
of dry land between ; irregularities of surface, doubt
less, exerting a paramount influence on the future dis
tribution of land and water. For with shrinkings or
subsidences here, and upheavals there, in combination
with the tremendous rainfalls that must have occurred
in the earlier geological epochs of the earth’s history,
whole continents with mountain-chains for their back
bones, were disintegrated and swept away, whilst
mighty oceans congregated here, were dissipated in
vapour and dried up there; that being made over
and over again the wet which had been the dry, and
that the dry which had been the wet.
The rainfalls in these early geological epochs we
cannot but presume must, indeed, have been tremen
dous ?
�6
The Pentateuch.
If we only consider that the whole of the water now
stored in the oceans that cover so large a portion of
the earth’s surface was once suspended first as gas
or viewless vapour and then as steam in the atmo
sphere, we may form some idea of their extent and
influence in fashioning the crust of the earth as it
now appears. The mass of the stratified rocks which
compose the proper crust of the globe is index enough
of the extent of the continents that must have been
disintegrated and ground down to supply the vast
amount of material of which they consist, and of the
combined powers of the rain and rivers that strewed
this material at the bottom of the shoreless oceans
where the strata took shape, as well as of the
degree of heat still present in the central mass
that fused or welded them into the solids they now
present.
• Disintegration of the first consolidated body of the
earth did not, however, presumably supply the whole
of the materials that now enter into the constitution
of its stratified crust ?
By no means; from all we know it seems reason
able to suppose that some very considerable propor
tion of these was furnished by the matters still sus
pended in the vaporous state amid the fiery atmosphere
that must long have surrounded the incandescent body
of the globe. It was not the water only of our pre
sent oceans, lakes, and rivers, the oxygen of our
earthy and metallic oxydes, the carbonic acid of our
mineral carbonates and coal measures that existed in
the first instance as gas or vapour about the glowing
globe; the salts, the metals, and the mineral substances
most useful to man, and most prized by him, must
probably all have been there originally in the form of
elements, and only acquired their distinctive states and
qualities when the temperature had fallen low enough
to allow the law of the elective affinities to come into
play. (See Appendix A.)
�Genesis: The Elohist.
7
“ And God called the dry land earth, and the waters
called he seas.”
It is the Hebrew poet himself who calls the dry
land Arets, and the gathered waters Imim—words
which we translate Earth and Seas. Had God called
these aggregates of solid and liquid matter by any
names—and we venture to think that he never did,
otherwise than through the mouths of men,—the
writer of the sentence quoted could very certainly no
more have known what they were than he could have
known by what names day and night were called.
° Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding
seed and the tree yielding fruit.”
The waters which at several epochs and for such
lengthened periods covered the whole or a vast pro
portion of the globe, were undoubtedly the source,
seed-bed, and nursery of the vegetable tribes which
at length, and after the lapse of countless aeons, gained
a footing on the land, and from the lowly forms of
sexless flags, lichens, mosses, ferns, horse-tails, &c.,
finally acquired sexuality, and showed themselves as
the palm and pine, the fig, orange, olive, vine and
host of other seed and fruit-bearing herbs and trees
that prepared the way for the advent of the higher
organisms, the conscious living creatures which made
their appearance on the earth at last.
_ i‘ Let there be lights in the firmament of heaven to
divide the day from the night, to be for signs and for
seasons, for days and for years, and to give light upon
the earth.”
In our modern geological cosmogony we feel
assured that a long interval elapsed between the forma
tion of the moon and the definite formation of the sun
as he now exists—if indeed the formation of the sun
can yet be said, with any propriety, to be definite or
complete. The. moon, we conclude, circled round
the earth in a period other than that she now observes,
and shed a paler light than she does at present upon
�8
'The Pentateuch.
its unpeopled surface, whilst the sun yet showed a disc
less fiery than that he now presents, but of millions
instead of hundreds of thousands of miles in diameter.
The formation of the sun and moon, however, was
simultaneous, according to the Hebrew poet, and had
reference solely to the convenience of man. But the
moon is some hundreds of thousands of years younger
than the earth, and by aeons older than the sun ; and
though man finds his advantage in the light and
other attributes of these great bodies, they certainly
took shape and had motions and qualities irrespec
tively of him, but in harmony with the laws which
inhere in matter and bring about phenomena. The
phases of the moon give man the week, and her period
about the earth the month, as the course of the earth
about the sun—of the sun about the earth in the
olden belief—gives him the seasons and the year.
“ Let the waters bring forth the moving creature
that hath life, , and fowl that may fly above the
earth.”
The waters were doubtless the womb in which the
germs took shape that finally and in virtue of inherent
powers eventuated not only in senseless vegetable
forms, but in those gelatinous atoms with implanted
sensibilities and aptitudes which by evolutionary
efforts turned at length into radiates, molluscs, arti
culates, insects, fishes, amphibians, mammalians, and
man. The absolutely dry is the absolutely barren;
the moist is the source of life ; hence the rise, in the
heathen mythology, of Aphrodite, emblem of the
generative power, from the sea.
“ Let the earth bring forth the living creature after
his kind, cattle and creeping thing, and beast of the
earth.” ■
The Hebrew poet thought that the tenants of the
dry land must have had their origin thereon, as he
believed the tenants of the waters had theirs therein.
Regarding the whale as a fish, he referred his birth to
�Genesis: 'The Elohist.
9
the wr ters—and truly, in one respect, for his forma
tion fhs him for life in these alone ; but the whale
and his congeners the porpoises are not fishes anymore
than their allied kinds the walruses, dugongs and
seals ; for they all have warm blood, breathe by means
of lungs, bring forth living young and suckle them
precisely as do the mammalians that live on the land.
“And God said : Let us make men in our image,
after our likeness. And God created man in his
image, in the image of God created he him ; male and
female created he them.” (Eng. Vers, and De Wette.)
Man, the Hebrew poet necessarily saw as the crown
and consummation of the creative energy. But we
may be permitted to regret that he should have ima
gined and should have said that man was made in the
image of God ; for God as all-pervading Spirit or
Force, Essence or Cause, is without parts or propor
tions, and so is without figure—a truth subsequently
acknowledged in more than one part of the Hebrew
Scriptures by other writers. God fills the universe,
and is necessarily impersonal and unimaginable in any
shape. It is the converse of the writer’s statement
that is true : it is man who has fashioned God like
himself. In harmony with the law of sexual dis
tinction in all the higher classes of animals, man on
his appearance on Earth is here fitly presented as
cognate male and female, from the first.
And God gave the herb bearing seed, and the tree
bearing fruit for meat, to the conscious creatures
evolved, we venture to assume, in virtue of aptitudes
inherent in certain of the inorganic natural elements,
prime instruments of God, and possessed of powers
which finally formed flesh and blood and nerve
and brain, with the wonderful appanages of feeling,
the moral sense, the religious sense, understanding
and reason ; faculties by which man comes at length
to conceive a Supreme Being to whom reverence
and obedience are due, to arrogate rights for him
�IO
The Pentateuch.
self, and to own obligations to his fellow-men. It
is to be regretted that the Hebrew writer should not
have noted that God had also given the flesh of
animals as well as vegetables for food to man and
other creatures,—flesh to be supplied by the sacrifice
of the weaker by the stronger and more highly
organised among animals, man, as the most highly
organised and most intelligent of any, sacrificing
every other living thing that is fit for food to satisfy
his appetite, and only attaining to the highest per
fection of his powers where he diets on a mixture of
vegetable and animal substances.
“ Thus were finished the Heavens and the Earth
and all the host of them.”
The writer gives his Elohim—God or Gods—much
less time in which to complete the marvellous work
than from its constitution and self-revealed history
we now feel assured was necessarily employed.' He
had Eternity to draw on ; but he has not used his
privilege beyond the scanty measure of a few days.
Any term, however, of any conceivable length he
could have fixed on, would still have fallen short of
that which God may have used in fashioning the vast
assemblage of systems of which the Earth, in so far
as mass is concerned, is so insignificant a part.
“And God rested the seventh day from all the
work which he had made.”
The writer here obviously fancies Elohim like him
self. Weary with six days’ work, he gladly rests on
the seventh day, and so fancies that God must have
done so too. But God never rests • for God is not to
be thought of as prime or inceptive Cause only, but
as persistent, ever-active Cause of all that is and of all
that comes to pass. Were God to rest for an instant
of time, the fair fabric of harmonious nature would be
the Chaos out of which the Hebrew writer presumed
it to have arisen.
Thus far we have a connected account of the
�Genesis: The Elohist.
TI
creation of heaven and the earth and its inhabitants—
what is to be thought of the tale ? .
As of a simple, beautiful poem, the work of a man
of thoughtful and imaginative mind, having the
culture of the age in which he lived, and writing the
language of his country in the highest state of purity
to which it ever attained; a writer, therefore, of rela
tively recent times in the history of the Jewish people
—one, moreover, who drew little or nothing from
either oral or written tradition or legend, but gave
shape in words to the ideas and fancies that spring
up in minds of thoughtful and poetic mould. The
account of Creation, as contained in the first chapter
of Genesis, must be the work of a writer who lived
during or immediately after the reign of Solomon,
before the Hebrew tongue had begun to decline from
its purity and become mixed with Aramaic words—
one of the Isaiahs or Lyrists who penned the finest of
the Psalms, the glory of the Hebrew literature, and
that cannot be said to have their like in the letters of
any other people.
The narrative of the first chapter of Genesis is not,
however, the only account we have in the Hebrew
Scriptures of the early history of the world, and more
especially of the circumstances under which man
began his career on earth ?
There is a second account, commencing with the
fourth veyse of the second chapter of the Book of
Genesis, which differs notably from the first, and
begins abruptly in these words : “ These are the
generations of the heavens and of the earth when
they were created.”
It might almost be presumed that there was some
thing wanting here ?
So much of the document, seemingly, as gave the
generations referred to. The verse, however, has every
appearance of an interpolation, intended to connect
the narrative that is to follow with that which has
�I2
The Pentateuch.
gone before. But so little affinity have the two
acconnts, in fact, that a new hand is at once sus
pected by the critical reader, who soon finds his sus
picion turned into certainty by the diversity of treat
ment he observes and the different name by which he
finds the Deity now designated, the title in the first
account being always Elohim—translated God in the
English version, and in the second Jahveh or JahvehElohim—translated Lord and Lord-God with us.
Nor is this all. A multitude of minor differences
in the style and kind of information given, meet the
critica 1 eye, which proclaim not two but four writers,
who must have lived at times remote from one
another, and had access to legendary and documen
tary matter that did not always agree in its terms.
The first account we have, however, is characterised
by biblical scholars and critics as being from the pen
of one of the Hebrew writers called Eloliists, the
second from that of one or more of those entitled
Jehovists, all of them apparently belonging to the
priestly caste, but deriving their information from
different and often discrepant sources.
What is the first particular we have from the new
writer—the Jehovist—in his account of th^ early
world ?
Passing by all the particulars connected with the
formation of the heavens and the earth as we have
them from the Elohist, he begins by informing us that
Jahveh-Elohim, the Lord-God, besides the heavens
and the earth, had also created “ every plant of the
field before it was in the earth, and every herb before
it grew.” He appears to have imagined that trees
and herbs were made by God much in the way that
artificial flowers are made in the present day, and
then planted in the ground, as he himself was wont
to see husbandmen at work planting pot-herbs round
Jerusalem.
What reason is assigned for God’s procedure in
�Genesis: The Jehovist.
13
thus making herbs and trees, instead of evoking them
from the ground like the Elohist ?
It is because “ the Lord-God had not yet caused it
to rain on the earth, and there was not a man to till
the ground.”
The writer of these words could not, it is obvious,
have known of the Elohist’s account of Creation, in
which there was not only water enough and conse
quently rain, but herbs and trees growing and yield
ing their seed and fruit, and both man and woman to
tend the plants and till the ground, supposing that to
have been needful to the growth of vegetables in a
state of nature, which it is not. The vast and vigorous
growths that gave rise to the carboniferous strata of
the earth all took place myriads of years before there
was a man to till the ground, though there must have
been rain enough and to spare, and carbonic acid in
the air in such excess as was probably incompatible
with the existence of any but the lower forms of ani
mal life,—certain it is that none of the higher forms
had as yet made their appearance when the mighty
morasses spread and the forests grew that now lie
buried in our coal measures.
Have we not evidence in geological records of rain
having fallen on the earth not only before the appear
ance of man on its face, but even before that of any
of the higher forms of animal life ?
Yes, ample; on sand-stone slabs deposited during
the tertiary period of the earth’s existence we not
only find pit-marks like those made on sand and mud
by falling showers at the present day, but even learn
the quarter whence the wind blew when the showers
fell! More than this, we find the foot-prints of a
frog or toad-like creature with a heavy tail, indicated
by the trail or smoothed line obliterating the rain-pits
in the wake of the footsteps I Yet more, and in
strata much older than those to which the sand-stone
slabs belong that preserve these interesting records,
�14
The Pentateuch.
we find abundance not only of vegetable, but of ani
mal remains. So that we are enabled positively to
say that plants grew, that animals lived on them, and
on one another too, and that rain fell hundreds of
thousands—it may be millions of years before there
was a man to till the ground.
The Lord-God—Jahveh-Elohim—we are then in
formed, caused a mist to go up from the earth to
water it, and make the plants he had fashioned to
grow; further, that he made man of the dust of the
ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of
life and he became a living creature (not soul, as in
the English translation, the word soul leading to
metaphysical conclusions not contemplated in the
text) ; finally, that he planted a garden in Eden, and
therein put the man whom he had made.
This is according to the text; but the physics of
the writer are at fault, for if the earth had the water
necessary to supply the mist which was to fall in
rain, it had already the moisture needful to make
plants grow. And then he makes his deity fashion
the man as a statuary fashions his statue, and only
put life into him at last by breathing into his nostrils;
he knew nothing of the law of evolution which the
science of our modern world discovers in nature’s
acts, which we are still to look on as the acts of God
in his quality of Cause, and so of Creator.
The garden in Eden is carefully planted ?
With every tree that is pleasant to the sight and
good for food ; the tree of life in the midst of the gar
den, and.the tree of knowledge of good and evil; per
mission being given to the man freely to eat of the fruit
of every tree in the garden save and except of that of
the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Of this tree
he is not to eat; for in the day he does he is told that
he shall surely die.
What is the next step in the proceedings of JahvehElohim, according to the writer ?
�Genesis: 'The 'Jeho'uist.
15
He is made to say, as if it were a discovery or
afterthought, that it is not good for the man to be
alone, and that he would therefore make a help-meet
for him. Before proceeding with this kindly purpose,
however, the writer makes Jahveh-Elohim turn off
to form the beasts of the field and the fowls of the
air, which he brings to the man, who is now named
Adam, “ to see what he would call them, and whatso
ever Adam called every living creature, that was the
name thereof.”
Adam’s nomenclature has not reached us ?
It has not, though it might as well have been pre
served as many of the particulars given by the writer.
It was probably simpler if less copious than that of his
successors, the modern naturalists. Still, “ for Adam,”
it is now said, and despairingly as it were, “ there
was not found an help-meet for him.”
Jahveh-Elohim is made by the writer to proceed in
a very roundabout way to supply the deficiency ?
He causes a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, from
whose side a rib is taken, out of which a woman is
, made and brought to the man, who styles her Isha,
feminine of Ish, man.
This seems a poor conceit in face of the omnipotence
of God and is in palpable contradiction with the state
ment in the Elohistic account of Creation, according
to which and in harmony with the great law of sexual
distinction, God is said to have made man male and
female from the first. May we not, therefore, with
out irreverence, say that if the Elohist’s account be
correct, that of the Jehovist cannot be true ?
Surely it is a puerile contrivance as prelude and
pretext for what the man is immediately made to say :
—“ This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my
flesh; she shall be called woman, because she was
taken out of man.” But God took no rib from the
side of man to form his counterpart, woman : “ Man
like, but different sex,” Isha needed not to be taken
�16
The Pentateuch.
in this childish and inconceivable way from the side
of Ish to be of one flesh with him ; she was so by
God’s fiat when simultaneously with him she came
into, being, and long before he and she together had
attained to the higher state of conscious life, worthy
of their noble collective Aryan designation Man,
from the reason (manu skr.) wherewith they were
endowed.
Adam is charmed with his helpmate ?
Of course he is:—
“ So lovely fair was she,
That what seemed fair in all the world seemed now
Mean, or in her summed up, in hei- contained,
And in her looks. * *
Grace was in all her steps, heaven in her eye,
In every gesture dignity and love,”
according to the version of our own great king of
song.
The man and the woman do not, however, accord
ing to the narrative, long enjoy the happy state of
innocence and bliss in which they were placed at
first ?
The serpent, says the story, was more subtil than
any beast of the field, and said to the woman : “Yea,
hath God said ye shall not eat of every tree of the
garden F ”
And the woman ?
Said to the serpent: “We may eat of the fruit of
the trees of the garden; but of the fruit of the tree
which is in the midst of the garden God hath said :
Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it lest ye
die.”
The serpent answers ?
“Ye shall not surely die; for God doth know that
in the day ye eat thereof your eyes shall be opened,
and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”
The serpent shows himself a subtil beast indeed,
�17
Genesis: The Jehovist.
apt in using as in understanding human speech, and
excelling in persuasive power! The Elohist, in his
account, gave man the dominion over the beasts of
the field and the fowls of the air; but the Jehovist
reverses' the picture and makes man dominated by
the reptile that creeps upon his belly, and, in popular
belief, lives upon dust!
The woman yields to the suggestion of the insidi
ously friendly and familiar serpent ?
She sees that the tree is good for food, pleasant to
the eye, a tree to be desired to make one wise ; and
so she takes of the fruit and eats, and gives to her
husband also, and he eats.
With the result ?
(
That the eyes of both are opened—not, however, in
any intellectual and. moral sense, as might have been
presumed, but in a sense purely physical, for they
only now discover, it is said, that they are naked,
and to hide their nakedness that they sew fig-leaves
together to make them aprons—-scanty covering
enough, but which Jahveh-Elohim, according to the
writer, improves on subsequently by making them
“coats of skins.” The fig-leaves were at hand ; but
it has been made a question as to whence came the
skins, and as to who it was who slew and flayed the
animals that bore them, and shaped and sewed
together the garments ! And thus do men land
themselves among the absurdities that crop up when
they are guilty of the folly of anthropomorphosing
the Infinite Supreme ; and of giving a literal meaning
to Eastern tales, the product of early and ignorant
ages of the world !
The discovery of their nakedness was but a slight
initiation for the man and woman into the knowledge
of good and evil that was to follow on eating the
forbidden fruit. Having senses, indeed, they needed
not to have partaken of it to learn that they were
naked. But is it in the nature of things, that aught
C
�i8
Phe Pentateuch.
taken into the mouth could have given man first to
know whether he were naked or clothed ?
It is not; knowledge of the kind comes through
the senses of sight and feeling, not of taste, and where
these senses exist such knowledge is already pos
sessed.
Or that fruit of any kind eaten should teach man
kind the difference between good and evil ?
In so far as sweet, sour, bitter, and other savours
are concerned, and as wholesome or unwholesome
qualities are good and evil—Yes ; but as regards the
moral good and evil implied though not expressed
—No. God has connected the knowledge of what is
good and evil from a moral point of view with certain
parts of the brain, the functions of which are facul
ties of the mind, and it is by means of these that man
knows and makes distinction between moral good and
evil; even as it is by the nerves of the tongue that he
distinguishes between sweet, sour, and bitter, the
sapid and insipid, &c., by those of touch and sight
that he knows the difference between the rough and
the smooth, the nude and the clothed, &c., and by
those of the stomach and body at large that he is
made aware of what is wholesome or deleterious.
The discovery of their nakedness by the man and
the woman is sometimes interpreted otherwise than
literally ?
But as it seems by a somewhat forced construction;
the effect of eating the forbidden fruit being said to
have been to engender concupiscence, carnal' desire,—
as if that had been a sin ! But God had created man
male and female, and put desire for one another into
their minds ; blessed them, too ; said to them, Increase,
multiply, and replenish the earth, and furnished them
forth for the work. Neither, if we may trust our own
Poet of Paradise, was Eve
“ Uninformed
Of nuptial sanctity and marriage rites;
�Genesis : The Jehovist.
19
Nature herself wrought so in her that she,
Seeing her husband, turned,
And with obsequious majesty approved
His pleaded reason.”
The feeling that leads man to cover certain parts of
his body in lands where he has no need of clothing,
may be said to be an element in his nature, almost
as much his peculiar heritage as his religious sense,
and must have made itself felt in the very prime of his
emergence from mere brutality into properly human
though still savage life. There seems, therefore, no
occasion to see any recondite meaning as underlying
Adam’s discovery that he was naked. Such know
ledge he certainly never had from eating any even
such fruit as is said to have grown in the garden of
Eden.
What interpretation is commonly put on the
appearance and part played by the serpent ?
That it was the impersonation of Evil, designated
Satan or Devil, who in guise of a serpent was the
spokesman and tempter.
Is there any warrant in the text for such an
assumption ?
There is none. The words are explicit: “ The
serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field.”
Is there anything else against the vulgar interpre
tation ?
Yes; the dualism implied in the recognition of a
Principle of Evil apart or distinct from a Principle of
Good—a recognition entirely foreign to the concep
tion of Deity and the religious system of the Jewish
people. If we constantly meet in the sacred writings
of the Jews with Deity in the two aspects of Good
and Evil, their God, whether called El or Jahveh, is
still one only. Though no more than the greatest
among the Gods, he is ever to them the Supreme,
Lord of the Dark as of the Light, source himself of the
�20
The Pentateuch.
Evil as of the Good thatbefals. “ Shall there be evil
4n a city and I have not done it, sayeth Jehovah.”
Amos iii. 6. “ I form the light and create darkness ;
I -'make peace and create evil; I the Lord do all
these things.” Isaiah xlv. 7. We say nothing here
of the absurdity of Evil personified and called Satan
or Devil; for that is one of the earliest errors of man
kind, as it still continues among the unworthy super
stitions of the present day.
The prominence given to the Serpent and the Tree
—the whole idea of the garden in Eden, indeed, ap
pears foreign to the Jewish theocratic system ?
Most obviously; and so must the idea have been
derived by the writer from what he or his coun
trymen had learned through intercourse, commercial
or otherwise at some earlier period, through exile in
later times, with the Medes and Persians, in whose
religious system the dualism of Deity is an essential
element; the beneficent principle in nature, typified
by Light, being called Ormuzd, and the adverse
principle, symbolized by the serpent, named Ahriman.
It is not unimportant to observe that nowhere else in
the Hebrew Scriptures save in this early part of the
Book of Genesis do the serpent g,nd Satan appear as
counteracting the benevolent purposes of Jehovah.
On the contrary, the image of the reptile, as in the
instance of the brazen serpent which Moses lifted up
in the Wilderness, is rather assumed as the emblem
of healing :—propitiated by worship and sacrifice the
death-dealing principle in nature stays the pestilence;
and Satan, once admitted into the celestial hierarchy
of the Hebrews, is seen but as one among the other
ministers or agents of Jehovah—tempting and trying
the faith of mankind, it may be, but never appearing
as the adversary of the Supreme (Job passim).
What, according to the narrative, follows on the
discovery of their nakedness by the man and woman ?
Hearing the voice of Jehovah-Elohim “ walking in
�Genesis : 'The 'Jehovist.
21
the garden in the cool of the day I” they hide them
selves among the trees. Jehovah-Elohim, not meet
ing them as usual, it might seem, calls Adam and
says, “ Where art thou ? ”
Adam answers: “ I heard thy voice in the garden
and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid
myself.”
Adam does not, therefore, honestly and at once
acknowledge his disobedience of the commandment
he had received, but lays the fear he feels to face the
Lord-God to the score of his nakedness.
So says the record; and Jahveh-Elohim, as if he
needed the information, asks : “ Who told thee that
thou wast naked ? Elast thou eaten of the tree
whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldst not
eat?”
To which Adam, shifting the blame of disobedience
from his own shoulders in a regretable and somewhat
cowardly way, makes answer: “ The woman thou
gavest to be with me gave me of the tree and I did
pof. ”
What next ?
Turning to the woman, Jahveh-Elohim says :
“ What is this that thou hast done ? ” And on her
meek reply, “ The serpent beguiled me, and I did
eat; ” addressing the serpent, he proceeds : “ Because
thou hast done this thou art accursed above all cattle
and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly
shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of
thy life.”
The serpent, as he had shown himself familiar with
human speech, could scarcely be supposed to be igno
rant of that which was divine, and so the writer felt
himself at liberty to make his God inform the serpent
of the penalty he was to pay for his interference.
But is the serpent really cursed above all other
creatures, or does God truly curse any of his handi
works ?
�22
The Pentateuch.
The serpent, like all other creatures, is fitted for
his state in every particular. He never progressed
save upon his belly, and is no more cursed than any
creature else that, in the course of nature, has come
into life. He is even more agile in his movements
than many other animals much higher in the scale of
organisation than himself, glancing through the
herbage and striking his prey or throwing his deadly
coil about it with the rapidity of lightning. Neither
does he eat dust, but lives on animal food like other
carnivorous creatures, which he also has the skill to
secure alive for himself. Far from being cursed, in
deed, the serpent, in many of his kinds, is favoured
with such an instrument of destruction in his poison
fangs as gives him superiority over every other crea
ture, no matter how much larger, stronger, and more
knowing than himself, man, the lord of creation him
self, not excepted.
There is something said about especial enmity put
between the woman and the serpent ?
“ I will put enmity between thee and the woman,
says the story, “ and between thy seed and her seed,
it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise its heel.”
What may be the meaning of this ?
It must be allegorical, like so much else that has
already been commented on; it certainly can have no
such meaning as is usually put on it by theologians.
A reasonable interpretation of the enigmatic words,
however, may be found by a reference to certain an
cient Indian sculptures, where the Sun-God, Krishna,
source of life, is seen with one foot on the head of
the snake, Kaliga, emblem or source of darkness and
death; or to the modern planisphere; where the
kneeling Hercules, one of the Sun-Gods, is repre
sented with uplifted club treading on the head of the
mighty snake that coils about the pole, emblem of
winter and the surcease of life. The reference, there
fore, is probably astrological, and the meaning of the
�Genesis: The Jehovist.
23
myth scarcely doubtful:—The sun, escaping from the
inferior or wintry to the superior or summer signs of
the zodiac at the vernal equinox, triumphs over winter,
and awakens the earth from the sleep of death to
renovated life. Feigned to have died and lain buried
for a season, and mourned over as Osiris, Adonis,
Tammuz, &c., he is hailed anon with acclamations
and rejoicings as newly risen from the dead.
So much for the serpent. What is said to the
woman ?
“ I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy con
ception ; in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children,
and thou shalt be subject to thy husband and he shall
rule over thee.”
And to the man— ?
“ Because thou hast hearkened to the voice of thy
wife, and hast eaten of the tree of which I commanded,
thee, saying, thou shalt not eat of it; cursed is the
ground for thy sake ; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it
all the days of thy life ; thorns also and thistles shall
it bring forth to thee. In the sweat of thy face shalt
thou eat bread till thou return unto the ground; for
out of it wast thou taken—dust thou art, and unto
dust shalt thou return.”
Can we conceive God multiplying sorrow on man
as a penalty for yielding to such an impulse as the
desire to know good from evil; an impulse, more
over, implanted by himself ?
It were surely impious to think of anything of the
kind in connection with the idea of God.
Or of God inflicting pain on woman in particular, as
a penalty for putting forth her hand and tasting of
fruit within easy reach, fair to look on, pleasant to the
taste, enlarging the scope of her mental vision, and
not injurious to her body ?
It is absurd to speak of God as dealing in any
such way with any of his creatures.
What were man, did he not know good from evil ?
�24
The Pentateuch.
He were then no better than the beasts—more
helpless, indeed, than they ; for in their finer senses
of sight, touch, smell, and taste, they discriminate
more nicely than man in many cases between the
good and the bad, in so far as their bodily state is
concerned.
The desire to know is even a primary impulse, one
of the great gifts of God to man ?
It is so, indeed ; and is the one desire which man in
his most advanced state sees it of the highest moment
to cultivate ; source, as it proves to be, of all the plea
sures he has in his higher-intellectual existence ; of so
much, therefore, that gives him his true title to be
looked on as lord of the creation.
But man was threatened with death did he eat of
the forbidden tree : “ In the day thou eatest thereof
thou shall surely die,” says the record. Yet not only
did Adam not suffer bodily death at the time of his
eating, but he may be said to have then awakened to
his higher intellectual and responsible life.
Theologians cannot therefore be warranted in their
assumption that man became obnoxious to death
through disobeying the arbitrary commandment said
to have been given him ?
•
What follows immediately shows that the writer
believed man to have been created mortal from the
first: He is driven out of the garden in Eden lest he
should take also of the tree of life, eat, and so like
the Elohim—the Gods, live for ever. It is not true,
therefore, according to the Hebrew tale itself, that
death was brought into the world through man’s in
fringement of an order not to eat of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil. Immortality was no
item in the original charter either of man or any
other creature or thing; and it is even impious to
speak of the natural and inevitable surcease of life as
a penalty : a necessity in the nature of things, it can
be no penalty. It has been well and truly said that
�Genesis: The Jehovist.
25
the natural term of man’s life is about three score
and ten years. The few who reach extreme old age,
between four score and four score and ten, mostly
find the length of the way more than wearisome long
before its end ; the load of years grows heavy to be
borne, and there are few who are not well content
to lay down the burthen at last.
Death being regarded as the greatest of evils that
could befall mankind, and as a punishment for diso
bedience, by the Hebrew writer, can he be warranted
in speaking of the pain connected with child-bearing
as imposed on the woman by way of peculiar penalty
for the active part she took in aspiring after other
, knowledge than that which she had through her mere '
senses ?
Pain under any circumstances is first and in the
natural fitness of things an admonition to beware of
influences injurious to the bodily state, and, in the case
of the woman about to become a mother, of the great
. event in her life that is imminent, putting her on her
guard and bidding her make provision for the safety
of herself and the fruit of her womb. And then it
would seem that the effort necessary to bring forth
children cannot, in the nature of things as they are
(and so as they could best be), be dissevered from
more or less of suffering.
Might not the woman, however, have been so framed
by the Mighty Workman as to have brought forth
without suffering ?
No ; if pain be suffered in the process, we may feel
assured that it was inseparable from it. Constituted
as she is, we may be certain that she could have been
advantageously constituted no otherwise than as she
is.. All things are precisely as they could be. The
pain inevitably connected with child-bearing is brief,
the joy of motherhood is for life.
Is the ground truly cursed because of the man’s
participation in the woman’s desire to know and
�i6
The Pentateuch.
become as one of the Gods ; or, like a school-boy, for
having eaten an apple fair to view and on proof made
found savoury and not unwholesome, though forbidden
to put forth his hand by the owner of the garden ?
God curses nothing that by his fiat is or comes to
pass in conformity with his laws. If the ground
bears thorns and thistles it also yields spontaneously
the herbage on which so many creatures live, and on
the flesh of which in turn man and other carnivorous
tribes subsist. It supports the luxuriant vegetation
of the tropics unsolicited, and in the warmer latitudes
yields with little care the cereals, roots and fruits
that minister to man’s most pressing wants; under
less favourable aspects of clime and site, it still grate
fully responds to forethought and ingenuity when
brought to bear upon it:—Anticipating results and
using means to ends in harmony with nature’s laws,
the barren heath under man’s fostering care puts on
a smile, and waving harvests look up to the sun
where scarce a blade of grass had grown, and the
harsh or sapless wilding is turned into the melting
pulp of our summer fruits. To speak of the ground
as cursed of God is to libel the Supreme—if that
indeed were possible. At the price of labour man
has all his most necessary wants supplied by the
kindly ground. One of God’s best gifts to man,
indeed, has been said to be the necessity to work, by
one who was himself among the busiest of workers
whilst he lived, and who has done so much through
the work he did to free the world from superstition
and the base idea that idleness is a boon.
What can be said for the information Adam re
ceives that he is dust and shall to dust return ?
That the body of man is made up in but small
measure of the dust of the ground ; it is in fact much
more the creature of water and the air than of any
kind of earth. And as to the interpretation put on
the text that instead of the eternal life intended for
�Genesis : I’he ‘ ehovist.
J
27
him at first he is henceforth to have a merely tem
porary existence, this is readily disposed of by
acknowledging God’s purposes as they are from
eternity so are they eternal; and man, as he has a de
termined existence in time, to have been from the first
precluded from the possibility of living for ever.
That death came not into the world because of any
transgression by man of a commandment of God is
certain ; for that the earth was peopled by myriads
of animals which lived and died aeons before man
appeared upon the scene is certified to us by the
remains of these we find entombed in such profusion
in the strata that compose the crust of the globe.
The law of evolution, of birth and death, instituted
as it undoubtedly was from the beginning of life on
the earth, may without irreverence be spoken of as
a necessity in the nature of things : were this not so,
the law would not now exist; for neither God nor the
revelation he makes of himself in his laws suffers
essential change.
Would immortality on earth be verily a boon ?
As it is not given, so the divine wisdom proclaims
that it would not. In the Pagan mythology Heracles
penetrates to the garden of the Hesperides, slays the
dragon that guards the tree of life, gathers the fruit,
and brings it forth for the use of man ; but Pallas
Athene meets him on the way and takes the fruit
from his hand, knowing that it were not good for
man to eat of it and gain, like the Gods, immortal life.
Progress were, indeed, impossible did not one genera
tion of men succeed another. Succession is the law,
which, as it now obtains, so did it ever obtain. Kinds,
indeed, only continue to appear so long as the condi
tions necessary to their existence prevail; when these
cease the living things that depend on them—
plants or animals—die out and are seen no more. Time
was when man was not; and the time may come—
will in all likelihood necessarily come—when, with.
�28
The Pentateuch.
change in the cosmical, telluric, atmospheric, and other
conditions wherewith his life is bound up, he, like the
mammoth and megatherium, will have disappeared
from the face of the earth.
Man, however, to return to our text, had disobeyed
the commandment said to have been given by God;
but he was still in the garden in Eden, and could not
be suffered to remain therein ?
The Lord-God, according to the story, is made to
say : “ Behold the man is become as one of us to
know good from evil; and now lest he put forth his
hand and take also of the tree of life and eat and live
for ever ; therefore the Lord-God sent him forth from
the garden of Eden, and placed cherubims and a
flaming sword which turned every way to keep the
tree of life.”
The qualities of things eaten, we have seen, consist
in such as affect the palate and the bodily health—
how, then, conceive a tree bearing fruit possessed of
the power to confer everlasting life ?
How, indeed ! Everlasting life belongs to God and
the manifestation he makes of his Being in the Uni
verse ; to nothing else.
The tale must, therefore, be an allegory—a myth,
an Idea clothed in words, possibly transmitted by
legendary tradition through long ages before it
reached the Hebrew] writer who moulded it into
the indifferent shape in which it meets us now.
Several interpretations have been given of the alle
gory ?
Several; among others one of an astronomical cha
racter. By turning to a celestial globe it will be seen
that as Virgo (Eve) with the ears of corn or fruit
bearing bough in her hand, followed by Arcturus
(Adam) sinks in the West, Perseus (the Cherub
armed with the flaming sword) rises in the East and
seems to drive the woman and the man from the sky.
There are other interpretations, however, on legen
�Genesis: The'Jeho'uist.
29
dary grounds, that better consort perhaps with
Hebrew history than this, which implies a knowledge
of the constellations and of celestial phenomena of
which we find few traces in the Book of Genesis?
The first account of Creation ended as we saw
with God’s resting from his labours and seeing that
all was very good. The second has a less satisfactory
conclusion ■ for here, as we have just seen, we find God
cursing the ground, inflicting pains and penalties for
the transgression of an arbitrary commandment, and
expelling the man and the woman from the garden
of delight he had planted for their happy dwelling
place, thwarted in all his benevolent purposes by the
serpent!
These two accounts differ so essentially that it
seems impossible to conceive them as emanating from
the same individual or delivered through inspiration,
as said, from one source ?
They differ so entirely and deal with such dis
similar elements that they must be held to have
proceeded not only from different individuals of the
same family of mankind, but even to have originated
among different races of men. The first or Elohistic
account may be spoken of as purely Semitic; the
second as essentially Aryan in its character. The
Elohistic narrative in its rhythmical and balanced
proportions is obviously the product of a single
mind, creating in conformity with the rules of
Hebrew poetical composition:—it is a connected
history of Creation by a Poet. The Jehovistic
account cannot be seen from the same point of view.
It has every character of a compilation from tradition
and legend, and assimilates in many leading par
ticulars with the myths and beliefs of the western
branch of the great Aryan family of mankind which
find expression in its Sacred Scriptures, the Zendb See Dr Kalisch’s learned Commentary on Genesis.
�30
The Pentateuch.
Avesta, as the views of the Eastern branch of the
same race are comprised in the Vedas. The Elohistic
account might have originated among any of the
ancient peoples somewhat advancedin civilisation and
possessed of the leisure needful for speculation and
literary labour. The Jehovistic account, on thecontrary,
without poetic verve or semblance of constructive
talent, is a kind of chronicle of imaginary doings, it
is the work of an archaeologist or antiquary and
cherisher of mythical and legendary lore,—a cha
racter we miss entirely in the Elohist, in whose brief
and grand summary we note no reference either to
myth or legend, and no statement on which a single
dogmatic conclusion could be hung—no word that does
not accord with a pure and simple sense of the power
and goodness of God as Creator of the world. In
the incoherent narrative of the Jehovist, on the con
trary, we meet with nothing that cannot be referred
to myth or legend, derived moreover, for the most
part, from sources beyond the boundaries of Judea,
pertaining to peoples other than the children of Israel,
and supplying foundations for the entire superstructure
of Christian Dogma. The Jehovistic account may
even be said to sin in transferring essentials of the
religious system of the Medo-Persian people to that of
the children of Israel.
Which of these two accounts is believed to be the
more ancient ?
The Elohistic; although this is questionable, for
both accounts can be said with great certainty to
date from relatively recent times—the Elohistic being
clearly enough shown, by the finished character of
the work and the purity of the diction in the original,
to be the product of an age not earlier nor yet much
later than that of Solomon ; the Jehovistic being as
safely assignable to a time subsequent to the Baby
lonian captivity, when the Jews had been brought
into contact with a people entertaining dualistic ideas
�Genesis : The Jehovist.
31
of Deity, and in their ritual addicted to Light or
Dire, Tree and Serpent worship—Light or Dire,
having Ormuzd, representative of the Good or
Creative principle in nature, symbolised by the Sun
and the Tree; Darkness, Destruction and Death,
having Ahriman, in eternal antagonism to Ormuzd,
with the serpent as his emblem.
This would account for the prominent places occu
pied in the Jehovist’s story by the Tree and the
Serpent ?
The worship of the Tree and the Serpent was
among the earliest and widest spread of all the ways
in which man sought to show his sense of dependence
on a something, a Power, beyond and stronger than
himself. Unless it be the rising of the sun—“ Great
eye of God, ” no phenomenon in nature is so notable
in temperate lands as the awakening of the vegetable
world from death to life on the return of Spring ;
and save the lightning’s flash, nothing is seen so
deadly as the serpent’s fang. No marvel, therefore,
that the tree was chosen by man awakened to reflec
tion as symbol of the Life-giving power, or the
serpent selected as type of the death-dealing influence
around him. These symbols personified and called
by names became Brahma and S^iva, Ormuzd and
Ahriman, Osiris and Typhon, Jehovah and Satan,
God and the Devil. Detached from the Nature in
which they inhere, and thought of as causes of the
good and evil that befals, they were then sought to
be communed with in thankfulness or in fear, and,
approached with praises, prayers, and offerings, all
the elements of the religious ideas and ritual obser
vances of mankind make their appearance.
The history of the garden in Eden, of the Tree of
Life and the subtil serpent continue, we may presume,
to occupy a prominent place in the religious annals
of the Jewish people ?
It is very notable, nevertheless, that the tale is not
�32
The Pentateuch.
even once referred to by any of the succeeding Old
Testament writers; nor indeed until we pass the
epoch of the Christian sera do we find it exerting the
slightest influence on the religious opinions of the
Jewish people. Neither Jesus of Nazareth nor his im
mediate friends and followers appear to have known
anything of the garden of Eden, or
“ Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe.”
It was not until Paul of Tarsus1 came upon the scene
that the tale, taken in its most literal sense, began to
bear fruit. Connecting the myth of man’s disobedience
with the Messianic Idea, in the modified shape it had
assumed in his day, with the moral and religious
teaching, the beautiful life and cruel death of Jesus
of Nazareth as they were orally related to him, Paul,
the one man of culture, seemingly, among the dissi
dents of his day from the religion of his country,
made it the foundation of the New Dogmatic Religion
he taught with such unwearied zeal, which has so
long exerted so vast an influence in the world, and is
only now beginning to lose its hold* on the minds and
imaginations of mankind.
Returning to our story, we find the man and the
woman after their expulsion from Paradise knowing
each other in the way ordained of God and bringing
children into the world—Cain and Abel, according to
the unhappy tale of the Jehovistic writer, earliest
record of dissension between man and man, of the
first murder done in time, of the parties to the differ
ence Brothers, and its ground Religion !
True—according to the story:—Cain the husband
man’s offering of “ the fruits of the earth ” was not
respected of Jehovah, whilst Abel the shepherd’s
sacrifice of “ the firstlings of his flock and the fat
thereof” was accepted.
�Genesis : Cain and Abel.
'
33
We might have imagined that the laborious hus
bandman’s offering of the products of his industry
and skill would have been at least as well received by
Jehovah as the idle herdsman’s lamb and kid ?
Certainly, and with good reason we might. But
as Jehovah in the later Jewish ritual, of which alone
we have the record somewhat complete, is only to be
approached with blood-offerings, it would not
have suited the modern priestly compiler of these
mythical tales of early times to have had the fruits
and flowers of the earth—God accursed, as said—as
grateful to his God Jehovah as the blood or Life,
and the fat and flesh, of his daily and periodical
sacrifices.
Cain is described as dissatisfied with the rejection
of his offering and the preference shown to that of
his brother ?
So it is said—his countenance fell; and turning his
anger against his brother, they had words,—they had
a quarrel; and as they were in the field Cain rose up
against Abel his brother, and slew him. The blow
therefore could not have been of malice prepense,—
nor meant to be fatal, as unhappily it proved.
Cain is not informed why his offering of fruit and
flowers was not respected ?
He is not; he is only told that “ if he does well he
will be accepted, and if not well that sin lies at the
door; ” but where he had done amiss, and so had his
offering rejected, is not set forth in this enigmatical
sentence. With the Jewish ritual as subsequently
instituted before us, however, we are at no loss to in
terpret it. To the Hebrew mind there could be no
remission of sins without the shedding of blood—the
terrible, idea that forms the foun dation of the domi
nant Christian faith, though it certainly has no part
in the religion of Jesus of Nazareth. •
Jehovah is wroth with Cain for his foul deed,
and tells the criminal that he is now cursed from the
D
�34
The Pentateuch.
earth ; that when he tills the ground it will not yield
its strength, and that henceforth he should be a fugi
tive and a vagabond in the earth.
Does not the writer here make physical results de
pend on moral conditions ?
He does ; but if Cain, with his hands all embrued
in his brother’s blood, tilled a fertile soil with the
requisite skill and care, the land, by a prior fiat of
God, would not fail to yield its increase; and the
most pious and moral man who settled on a desert,
or who brought neither skill nor care to bear on his
work even under circumstances favourable in them
selves, would have failure for his portion. He who
conforms to the laws of nature in their several do
mains, whatever his moral or religious character, will
not fail of his return; as he who. does not so conform
himself, no matter what his pious disposition, will
necessarily go without reward.
Cain, however, is to be protected from violence ?
Jehovah, it is said, set a mark on him, lest any
one meeting him should slay him.
Such a precaution would imply that there were
other people in the earth besides Adam and Eve and
their son Cain ?
It would so; but the book is full of like incon
sistencies, as in this place it is very notably, with the
commandment elsewhere delivered, that he who
knowingly took life should surely himself be put to
death.
Cain and Abel are the first children of the first
man, Adam, and his wife, Eve, according to the
Jehovistic narrative. Does this agree with the
Elohist ?
It does not. The Elohist’s story, interrupted after
the third verse of the second chapter of Genesis, is
resumed at the first verse of the fifth chapter in these
words: “ This is the book of the generations of
Adam; ” and Adams first son is not Cain, neither is
�Genesis
Cain and Abel.
35
the second Abel; but the first and only son he has
whose name is mentioned is Seth, and though Adam
is reported to have lived hundreds of years afterwards'
and begotten sons and daughters, neither they nor
their descendants are named. The genealogy of Seth
alone is continued, he begetting Enos, Enos Cainan,
Cainan Mahalaleel, and so on, till we come to Lamech,
who begets Noah, the next personage who plays an
important part in the mythical tale in the study of
which we are engaged.
The terrible tale of the murder of Abel by his
brother Cain may therefore be the work of one of
the later Jehovistic writers ?
It has every appearance of being so ; and if we may
imagine the writer thinking it desirable to have the
earliest possible authority for the blood-stained altars
of his day, we can divine his motive for inventing
the story of the offerings and of the preference shown
by Jehovah for the bloody over the bloodless sacri
fice, inserting it where it stands, and adding the mur
der of the one brother by the other by way of giving
colour and force to his picture. No man in his senses,
freed from prejudice and possessed of the requisite
information, can believe for a moment that the
Jehovistic writer could have known that Cain killed
Abel, or that the three sons of Noah were Shem,
Ham, and Japhet.e
e Subsequently to the time when Nehemiah was Governor
of Judea under Cyrus, says M. Albert Reville, the office of
High-Priest, as conferring the chief authority in the country,
became an object of ambition, not only between one priestly
family and another, but between different members of the
same family; and in a certain instance in which two brothers
were aspirants to the office, so high did the rivalry run, that
the one killed the other. It were not presuming too far, per
haps, as all fiction has a foundation in fact, and as we are now
so well assured of the relatively modern date of by far the
greater portion of the Pentateuch, to find in this recent in
stance of fratricide the source of the story of the murder in
�36
The Pentateuch.
God, in calling men and women into the world,
had endowed them, as well as all other conscious
living creatures, with the wonderful faculty of pro
ducing their like, and continuing themselves in their
kind ?
He had virtually said, in the power bestowed, but
not in words : “ Increase and multiply and replenish
the earth,” a commandment they were no more loth
to obey in times gone by than they are in the present
day. But Jehovah, as it appears by the record, had
been less careful than might have been expected in
selecting the race by which the world was to be
peopled; for, to say nothing of the murder of Abel
by Cain, no more than ten generations of men had
•lived on the earth before their wickedness was found
so great, the imaginations of their heart so con
tinually evil, that, according to the record, it even
“repented Jehovah that he had made men upon the
earth.”
This is extraordinary language in connection with
the name of God ?
With the idea of God, as we entertain it, certainly,
but not with that of the Jehovah of the Hebrew
Scriptures, who was but a powerful man of the early,
jealous, revengeful, arbitrary, variable, and often
savage type. The statement, nevertheless, stands
part of the sacred writings of the Jews, still held in
spired not only in their precepts and ordinances, but
in every word and letter, and believed by iflore than
they are denied among Christians to be the word of
God to man.
Can we, however, presume that God ever repents
of anything he has done, or changes his mind as to
aught he had intended to do ?
Man may repent and change; God cannot do so.
the olden time of Abel by his brother Cain.—(Comp. Revue des
Deux Mondes, lier Mars, 1872.)
�Genesis ; 7 he Flood.
37
- Is there any reason given for the great wickedness
charged upon mankind ?
There is none.
Is not the disobedience in eating the forbidden
fruit assigned as its cause ?
It is not once referred to ; and if it had been so, the
disobedience as consequence of an untoward disposi
tion could not be its cause.
Is there anything else in the text that may be held
adequate to bring about the evil imaginations im
puted ?
There is absolutely nothing. The sons of God, in
deed, are said to have seen the daughters of men that
they were fair, and to have taken them wives of all
they chose ; and this incomprehensible statement has
been laid hold of as a means of accounting for the
prevailing wickedness. But the sons of God, who
ever they were, must be presumed, from their title,
to have been of higher nature than the daughters of
earth, and to have improved, not deteriorated, the
breed.
And. this, indeed, in so far as we can judge by
what is said, appears to have been the case; for we
learn. that the children born to the sons of God co
habiting with the daughters of men became mighty
men, which were of old men of renown ?
So runs the tale; and the myth or legend helps to
no solution of the matter. The wickedness of men,
however, was great in the earth, and every imagina
tion of man was evil continually, so that Jehovah
said at length; “I will destroy man whom I have
created from the face of the earth, both man and
beast and creeping thing, and the fowls of the air;
for it repenteth me that I have made them.”
. The beasts and creeping things and fowls of the
air had done nothing to deserve extermination ?
Nevertheless they were to share in the doom of
man and be destroyed.
�38
The Pentateuch.
Certain reservations, however, are to be made to
the general portentbus resolution come to by Jehovah ?
Addressing Noah, who is characterised as “ a just
man and perfect in his generations,” Jehovah in
forms him that the end of all flesh had come before
him, and that he had resolved to destroy them, and
all wherein is the breath of life, by means of a flood
of water which he will bring upon the earth. With
Noah, however, he will establish his covenant. Him.
and his family, of all mankind, he will save alive by
means of an ark, or great ship, which he is ordered
to construct of certain materials, of certain dimen
sions, and in certain ways, in which he and his family,
and two and two, male and female, of every living
thing, are to be housed whilst the whole earth is laid
under water.
Noah does all he is ordered ?
He does, and with his wife, his sons and daughters,
their sons and daughters, and the pairs to be saved
alive, is safely housed in the ark. Then, it is said,
are the foundations of the great deep broken up, and
the windows of heaven opened, and rain falls for
forty days and forty nights, and the waters prevail
exceedingly, covering the higher hills fifteen cubits
and upwards, so that all in whose nostrils was the
breath of life are destroyed from the face of the
earth, Noah alone and they that were with him in the
ark remaining alive.
How long is the flood of waters said to have pre
vailed ?
After increasing for a hundred and fifty days, the
fountains of the deep, it is said, are stopped, and the
rain from heaven is restrained. The waters then
begin to assuage; but it is not until the first day of
the tenth month that the tops of the highest lands
are seen, when the ark grounds on the mountains of
Ararat; and only after the lapse of a whole year of
imprisonment that Noah, finding the ground dry,
�Genesis : The Flood.
39
takes off the covering of the ark and goes forth, he
and his family, and all that had been saved alive,
with the blessing of God upon him and them, and a
renewed injunction to be fruitful and to multiply upon
the earth.
Noah was ordered to take into the ark pairs of
every living thing. Every living thing would include
whales, seals, fishes, and the inhabitants of the waters
generally—crustaceans, molluscs, radiates, &c.—yet
we find no mention made of them.
There is none; but if they were to be saved, some
provision was as necessary for them as for the other
air-breathing land animals. With the obvious diffi
culty of providing in the ark for the inhabitants of
the water, however, they are left to take their chance
in the Tohu-Bohu of the flood. Every inhabitant of
the water, nevertheless, has a definite sphere assigned
it, for which it is fitted, and out of which it cannot
live. Natives of the salt water cannot, for the most
part, live in the fresh, nor can those of the fresh
generally live in the salt. The whalebone and
spermaceti whales, among many others, would have
proved especially awkward occupants of the great
ship!
. There is provision made for feeding the host of
living creatures there gathered together ?
There is, but for the vegetable feeders only.
How, then, were the flesh feeders to be kept alive ?
By accommodating themselves, say the apologists
for every untenable statement within the lids of the
Bible, to the dry fodder of the phytivorous kinds—by
feeding with, not on them.
. The lion, tiger, wolf, and weazel eat hay and straw
like the ox and sheep ?
So most of our authoritative exponents of the diffi
cult Bible passages say. But the structure of the
teeth and jaws of the carnivorous tribes incapacitates
them from doing as our learned exegetists would have
�40
Phe Pentateuch.
them, for they can only cut and tear their food in
pieces, not grind, it into pulp like the ox and sheep.
The structure of their stomach and intestines, more
over, is not of the kind that fits them to digest and
assimilate vegetable food.
Was not some provision also necessary for saving
the members of the vegetable world alive ?
As indispensably necessary as it was in regard to
those of the animal kingdom, yet none is made, pro
bably because the writer had overlooked the fact that
plants held under water for any length of time are
as surely drowned as animals. Scarcely any land
growing plant can be kept for days, weeks, or months
submerged without being killed; neither will the
plants that live naturally in fresh water exist in salt
water, nor will salt-water plants survive in fresh
water. The pretty incident of the olive leaf with
which the dove sent forth from the ark returned
as a sign that the waters were abated, was an im
possibility ; after steeping in brine for twelve months
all the olive trees must have been long dead and
their leaves rotten.
And in what state could the Earth have been left,
after a flood that covered the highest mountains
fifteen cubits and upwards ?
What could it have been but a bank and shoal of
desolation, bare of herbage of every kind ; so that
the vegetable feeders saved alive in the Ark must
have died forthwith of hunger when released from
their temporary shelter.
Had the flesh-feeders been thought of in the Ark,
they too must now have starved like the phytivorous
kinds when dispersed over the bare, stony, muddy,
and depopulated flats ?
They would but have been saved from sudden
death by drowning to fall victims to a lingering death
by starvation.
There are two accounts of the flood, as of so many
�Genesis: The Flood.
41
other incidents in the Hebrew Scriptures, one as
usual by the Elohist, the other by the Jehovist ?
There are certainly two different accounts, much
intermingled, indeed, yet separable for the most part
by careful sifting from one another.
Do they agree ?
No ; they differ in several important particulars,
especially in a distinction made by the Jehovist between
what are called clean and unclean animals. Whilst
two and two of the unclean are ordered to be taken
into the Ark, the clean are to be received by sevens—
three pairs and an odd one.
The odd one would have been of little use in help
ing out Jehovah’s final admonition to the pairs on
leaving the Ark ?
But was necessary to avoid breaking the sets and
making the survivor of any pair useless ; for a victim
must be available for the religious service which Noah
is made to perform immediately on quitting his long
imprisonment, his first act having been to build an
altar to Jehovah and to offer burnt offerings thereon
of every clean beast and clean fowl he had had with
him in the Ark.
Jehovah is gratified by Noah’s pious acknowledg
ment of the favour shown to him and his ?
.Jehovah, it is said, smelled a sweet savour, and
said in his heart: I will not again curse the ground
for man’s sake ; for the imagination of man’s heart is
evil from his youth; neither will I again smite every
living thing as I have done.
This is surely very strange language to be set down
as proceeding from his God by the writer!—But if
the imaginations of the heart of man were seen in
this way by Jehovah after the terrible catastrophe
that had taken place, it is obvious that nothing had
been done to better the Earth by drowning it ?
The almost despairing tones in which the narrative
proceeds might fairly lead us to conclude that as little
�42
'The Pentateuch.
had been done by the flood to amend matters in the
past as to leave them with a chance of improvement
in the future. But we are to be careful to assign the
account given of what Jehovah said in his heart to
its only possible author—the Hebrew writer; for it
is very certain that he could know nothing of the
purposes of the True God, and that the words
ascribed to the Supreme are not his, but the man’s.
Jehovah is now made by the writer to appear as
though he were even sorry for what he had done, for he
makes him go onto say : While the Earth remaineth,
seedtime and harvest, and heat and cold, and summer
and winter, and day and night, shall not cease. And
I will establish my covenant with you, and for a
token I set my bow in the cloud ; and it shall come
to pass that when I bring a cloud over the earth that
the bow shall be seen in the cloud, and I will remem
ber my covenant which is between me and you and
every living creature of all flesh.
All this is purely human; meaningless in con
nection with the name of God; but the Hebrew
writer had evidently no other conception of God than
as a supernaturally powerful, irascible, revengeful,
and yet upon occasion pitiful human being, thwarted
continually in his kindly purposes by the wayward
ness and wickedness of the creature he had called
into existence.
What is to be concluded in regard to the covenant
which Jehovah is stated to have entered into with
Noah, whereof the bow in the heavens is the token ?
God’s covenants were all made with man when he
commenced his career on earth, their conditions im
plemented in the organisation of his body and its
aptitudes, all co-ordinate with and in the most perfect
possible harmony with the nature of things and the
circumstances amid which he began, as he still con
tinues, to be.
' What are we to think of the writer’s imagining
�Genesis: The Flood.
43
that God required a remembrancer of aught he meant
to do or to leave undone ?
Whatever the writer may have imagined, we are to
think that God, who is in and of all that is and that
comes to pass, needs no remembrancer. The rain
bow is a natural and necessary effect of the refraction
or breaking up of the difform rays of which light is
composed, by the globular drops of water that consti
tute rain, in virtue of laws inherent in and co-eternal with the nature of God and the qualities of matter.
Rainbows necessarily spanned the sky countless ages
before there was a Noah to observe them; it may
have been that one appeared when the several showers
fell that have left their records in the sandstone slabs
now preserved in our museums !
Looked somewhat closely into, therefore, with an
eye couched of prejudice, the story of the Deluge
(the Noachian Deluge as it is called to distinguish it
from other deluges of which shadowy records are
preserved in the legendary annals of several ancient
nations) appears to be wanting in every particular
that could give it the semblance not merely of pro
bability but even of possibility ?
There can be no question of this. The motive
assigned for its occurrence, in the first place, is
absurd—utterly incompatible with the Idea of the
God of reason and humanity. The saving instrument,
the ark itself-—speaking seriously of the matter for
a moment,—was utterly incompetent to the end pro
posed,—it was not of half the tonnage of our Great
Eastern steam-ship! And how conceive all the
animals that people the globe packed into any defi
nite space, were it even ten or twenty times the area
of the mighty ship ! How, again, conceive Noah and
his three sons competent even in the course of their
reputed long lives to have prepared and put together
the materials of such a vessel as the one described.
They were assisted by the wicked people about them,
�44
'
The Pentateuch.
it may be and has of course been said : true, and these
were at the end to stand complacently by whilst Noah,
his family, and selected pairs from either pole to the
equator filed into the ark, and left them outside to
drown!
Shut up in the ark pitched with pitch without and
within, with a single window in the roof—and no
more is mentioned, whatever apologists in face of the
difficulty may say—a cubit each way in its dimensions,
what must have been the inevitable fate of the in
cluded company ?
The door could scarcely have been closed, supposing
the window to have been left open—and Jehovah
himself is made to shut it, as shut it must needs be
to keep out the rain—before the whole assembly
would necessarily have been stifled. Man, the higher
mammalia, and most birds, can live for hours, even for
days, without food, but they cannot exist for five
minutes deprived of air; and the ark, with its win
dow of a cubit, or eighteen inches, square in the roof,
would have proved as inevitably fatal by stifling to
the creatures within it intended to be saved, as the
waters would be found deadly to those outside
destined to be drowned.
So deadly an agent as vitiated air operating imme
diately would have made any further provision for the
maintenance and comfort of the inhabitants of the
ark unnecessary ; but supposing such a possibility as
asphyxia not to have occurred—and it is obviously
never contemplated by the narrator—how could Noah
and his three sons have distributed their appropriate
rations to the several pairs or sevens of all the ani
mals that peopled the earth, now gathered together
around them; how have supplied them with the in
dispensable water, how have got rid of the inevitable
excrements ?
How indeed!
Why, then, dwell on such childish, impossible, and
�Genesis: The Flood.
45
even impious tales as those in the Old Testament of
the Jews concerning the flood and Noah’s ark ?
Because they still obtain currency and credence in
the world, although they undoubtedly deserve all
these epithets, and are in very truth not only childish,
impious, and impossible, but misleading, and calculated
to give false notions of the God of Nature’s dealings
with mankind and the world. The tale of the Deluge
and the ark is never presented in its true light by the
ministers of religion, though as men of culture their
eyes must have been opened to its absurdity, and the
most imperative of all their duties is surely to speak
truth, and to show God’s providence in acts harmo
nious with the great eternal changeless laws, elements
in his own nature, whereby he rules the world.
The Deluge and the favour shown to Noah and his
family are still advanced as illustrations not only of
God s displeasure and justice in dealing with the
wicked, but of his goodness and mercy also, and the
special favour in which he has the exceptionally good
and pious ?
This is certainly the case. But God’s displeasure
and justice are shown by the punishment or reward’
which men bring on themselves through the violation
or observance of his laws. Neither do his goodness
and mercy appear any more in the lives saved from
flood and tempest, than is his vengeance proclaimed in
the lives that are lost. As we proceed in the narrative,
indeed, suspicions arise that all the members of the
family exceptionally saved were not so worthy of the
favour shown them as it seems easy to imagine they
might have been. The mythical tale of Noah and the
Deluge, with all the unreason attached to it, is never
theless made to enter as a prominent feature into the
Christian system. The infant of parents belonging
to several of its churches, and these the most influen
tial of all, does not undergo the initiatory rite of bap
tism by sprinkling with water, without allusion being
�46
Phe Pentateuch,
made to Noah and his family, “whom God of his
great mercy saved in the ark from perishing by
waterthough the connection between a world
drowned, with Noah saved, and the sprinkling of a
little water on the face of an unconscious infant
escapes both common sense and unsophisticated
reason.
The tale of the Deluge is one of the incidents re
corded in the Hebrew scriptures that rivets itself on
the mind and imagination of the young, and, with the
further reference made to it in connection with a
solemn religious rite, scarcely fails to exercise an ad
verse influence on the judgment of men and women
in riper years ?
There can be little doubt of this. The ship-like
ark with the nicely-formed figures of its multitudi
nous tenants, headed by Noah, his wife, and their
sons, Ham, Shem, and Japhet, which is presented to
almost every child among us when its intelligence
begins to dawn, fixes the myth as a positive occur
rence in the mind of the vast majority of children
born into the world of Christian parents, and it is
not every one who can free himself in after life from
the absurd and indefensible conclusions to which it
leads.
To refer to the goodness and mercy of God in con
nection with the world he has drowned, is surely
beside the mark ?
It appears so to the unprejudiced who venture to
use the reason and moral sense which God has given
them for their guidance, and to see things in conso
nance with the knowledge of their age. If the earth
was filled with wickedness, as said, and it were con
ceded that wickedness deserved punishment, still
drowning does not seem either the reasonable or mer
ciful way of bringing about the amendment which we
must presume to be the object of all castigation—
the castigation of God in especial. And if Noah and
�Genesis; 'The Flood,
47
his family were worthy to be saved alive, they could
not have been alone in their worthiness ;—there were
new-born babes, for instance, helpless infants, and
young children, who could not have deserved drown
ing on the ground that their fathers and mothers
were wicked. The hapless animals, also, which
perished, had been guilty of none of the disobedience
and wickedness alleged against the human kind, and
could no more have' merited their untimely fate
through obeying their natural instincts, than the pairs
saved could have merited the preference shown them
through fulfilling theirs.
So much for the moral aspects, or some of the
moral aspects, of the Noachian Deluge. Can the de
bacle referred to be comprehended and accounted for
on simple physical grounds ?
As an universal over-swimming of the earth within
the period when man became its denizen, the Deluge
of the Bible is incomprehensible; and had it even been
possible, yet may we feel confident that it did never
occur. The dry land of the earth, indeed, has in
every part known to us been at different and gene
rally far remote epochs oftener than once at the bot
tom of deep seas and vast fresh-water lakes. So
much we know for certain ; and we further feel assured
that the bottoms of many of our present seas and lakes
must once have been dry land. The islets that stud
the vast Pacific Ocean rest for the most part on the
peaks of lofty mountains now submerged. Upon and
around these the coral insect, building its own habita
tion for ages, spreads itself abroad level with the wash
of the sea, and furnishes man with resting places
amid depths he tries in vain to fathom with the com
mon plummet line. Arctic and Antarctic lands, again,
now overlaid with thick-ribbed ice, thousands of feet
inBthickness, where lichens and mosses are the only
vegetable productions sparsely seen, once possessed a
luxuriant growth of the trees and shrubs of temperate
�48
The Pentateuch.
lands, and teemed with insect and higher animal life.
The temperate regions, again, where nature now
smiles for half the year at least, and the soil yields
corn and wine and oil to the industry of man, were
overlapped in former ages of the world by glaciers
hundreds of feet in thickness, pouring down from
northern heights, and putting as effectual an end to
the life that had been upon them as ever Noah’s
Deluge could have done; telling the tale of their
source and leaving records of their course in the pon
derous blocks or boulders they have carried and left
among us, as well as by the groovings and abraded
surfaces of our hills, on which the eye of science reads
the history of another state of things than that which
now prevails.
Are there any traces of the presence of man on the
earth discoverable among the records of those earlv
ages ?
In so far as we yet know it is only in the latest
drift—the gravel, sand, and clay of the quaternary
period, and in the caves of limestone rocks, that we
find evidences in his remains, of man’s existence on
the earth. Associated as these are with the teeth and
bones of animals fitted to live in cold or temperate
climates,—the cave bear, the hyeena, the hairy mam
moth and woolly rhinoceros, we infer that man as
man was present in these northern temperate lati
tudes in times not exceedingly remote, geologically
speaking, from the last great glacial epoch in the
earth’s history, but still some hundreds of thousands
of years ago—how many it is impossible to say.
There may have been—doubtless there was—some
foundation in fact for the tale of the Noachian
Deluge ?
Many regions of the globe are still exposed to dis
astrous floods that sweep away the inhabitants and
their cattle by thousands, and we are therefore war
ranted in saying that in the story of the Noachian
�Genesis: Noah.
49
Deluge we have the legendary record of some great
flood which occurred in far off times, when the high
lands of Armenia and Mesopotamia, whence appear
to have come the Hebrews and others of the cognate
tribes that peopled Palestine, were other than they
are at the present day, or than they were fifty, a hun
dred, a thousand, or ten hundred thousand years ago.
Tn the earlier ages of the world there must have oc
curred floodings of extensive districts of country, at
tended with disastrous consequences to life and pos
sessions, of which we have the shadowy records in
the tales of the Noachian, Dencalian, and other
deluges. In our own day, indeed, we know that
floods as terrible, it may be, as any that ever occurred
in pre-historic times, and probably even more destruc
tive to human life, have happened in regions watered
by such mighty rivers as the Indus and the Ganges.
These, however, we now interpret as having come to
pass through no repentant mood or revengeful pur
pose on the part of God to drown the hapless people
for their sins, but in consonance with natural inci
dents and natural laws, such as the giving way of a
mountain harrier that had penned up a mighty lake,
disintegrated by frost, and sapped by long-continued
rain ; the melting of a glacier which stretched across
a gorge in the hills, and held back an ocean behind
it; excessive rainfalls, accompanied by gales of wind
that heaped up the waters of great draining streams
at their outlets to the ocean, &c.
So much for the flood; what is said of Noah’s
doings after it ?
He became a husbandman, planted a vine, drank
of the wine it produced, and was drunken.
Some years must have elapsed before Noah could
have indulged in such an improper way; and whence
he had the vines, after all the plants on the face of
the earth had been drowned, like its animal inhabi
tants, does not appear.
E
�5°
The Pentateuch.
What happened next ?
Noah’s son Ham happening to come into the tent,
and seeing his father in an unseemly state of naked
ness, and probably asleep after his debauch, was
cursed in his posterity by his parent, whilst Shem
and Japhet, who covered him over, are blessed.
“ Cursed be Canaan (one of Ham’s sons), a servant
of servants shall he be unto his brethren,” is the form
of the malediction pronounced on the son by his
father for having had the use of his eyes.
What may be the meaning of this ?
Canaan, according to the mythical story, was an
cestor of the tribe that peopled the country called
after him, which the Jews ravaged with fire and
sword, appropriating the territory, and reducing the
inhabitants whom they did not slaughter to the state
of slaves. The curse of the innocent son—cursing in
the Hebrew scriptures not always going by demerit,
any more than blessing by desert—may have been
contrived as an excuse for the murder and robbery
perpetrated in after years by the sept which had
Shem for its progenitor.
What is the next remarkable incident recorded in
these mythical tales of prehistoric times ?
The building of a city on a plain in the land of
Shinar, and of a tower in especial whose top was to
reach to heaven, all the people being still of one
language.
What follows ?
“Jehovah,” it is said, “came down (!) to seethe
city and the tower.” Not approving of the builders’
proceedings, apprehensive it might seem that, united
by the bond of a common language, their work would
be carried to a successful issue, and heaven, his own
peculiar dwelling-place, be stormed, he is reported to
say further: “ Go to ! let us go down and there con
found the language of the people that they may not
understand one another’s speech.” This being done
�Genesis; The T^ower of Babel.
$i
—Jehovah coming down and confounding their
speech—the inhabitants of the city on the plain of
Shinar left off their building, became scattered abroad
over the face of the earth, and heaven was not as
sailed.
The purpose for which this childish story was de
vised is plain ?
It was doubtless contrived as a means of accounting
for the diversities of language which the Jewish
writer, even in his restricted intercourse with the
rest of the world, could not fail to observe. As to
God’s “ coming down to see,” and “ the tower whose
top should reach to heaven,” all this is mere childish
ness, though not unimportant, as enabling us to
measure the conception of the nature of Deity enter
tained by the writer, whoever he was—one of Nebu
chadnezzar’s captives in all probability, who had had
reluctant occasion to see the lofty temple of Babylon,
on whose summit, as the metropolitan “ High place,”
the rites of Baal and Mylitta were celebrated.f
Have we not two accounts of the Tower of Babel
and the confusion of tongues, as of so many others of
the mythical tales of the Old Testament ?
We have but one account of this particular inci
dent, and that by the Jehovist. It is not even alluded
to by the more sensible Elohist. Both writers, how
ever, give genealogies of Noah’s descendants ; but
these do not agree, the Jehovist stopping short at the
name of a certain Joktan, not mentioned by the
Elohist, who carries on the stock to Terah, the father
of Abram, the next most important personage met
with in the story of the Hebrew people ?
Terah, we are informed, removes with his family
from Ur of the Chaldees to Haran—what happens to
Abram his son ?
Commanded to leave his father’s house and kindred,
f See Herodotus, Clio, 199, and Appendix B.
�5*
Phe Pentateuch.
under a promise of being made a great nation, Abram
departs and comes into the land of Canaan; but a
famine prevailing, he goes on, still southward, and
reaches Egypt, where he abides.
What particular orders did Abram give his wife
Sarai as they neared the land of Egypt ?
He ordered her to report falsely of their relation
ship—to say she was his sister, not his wife, lest the
Egyptians, to obtain possession of her, should make
away with him.
What came of this ?
Sarai, being fair to look on, was taken into the
Pharaoh’s house—as a concubine, of course, and
Abram was well entreated. But Jehovah,' it is said,
“ plagued Pharaoh because of Sarai, Abram’s wife,”
though, to our modern sense of fairness, the parties
who most deserved plaguing were Abram and Sarai
themselves. Brought by the plagues he suffered—■
what they were we are not informed, of the kind
perhaps which the Scottish poet hints at when he
speaks
“ Of the best wark-loom in a’ house,
No worth a prin just at the pinch ”—
and led to suspect that he had been imposed on,
Pharaoh now summons Abram to his presence, and
reproaches him with the falsehood he had suggested;
but, only anxious to be quit of the strangers, he sent
Abram away with his wife and all that he had.
There is a repetition of this story in another part of
these Old Testament writings still held sacred ?
There is. Abiding at a later period in Gerar (in
Phoenicia), and again “ lest they should slay him for
his wife’s sake,” Abram himself reports Sarai his wife
as his sister to Abimelech, king of the country, who,
like the Egyptian Pharaoh, had taken her to himself.
But Elohim (for the story in its present shape, if the
title of his God is to guide us, is from the Elohist, as
�Genesis: Abram.
53
in its first form it was from the pen of the Jehovist)
now threatens Abimelech in a dream with death to
himself and disaster to his kingdom,—not because of
his concupiscence, however, but by reason of his re
lations with Sarai, into which he may be said to have
been led by the lie that was told him.
To what shift is the writer now driven to save
Sarai from dishonour and to help Abram out of the
disgrace of telling a falsehood ?
He appends a number of particulars to his tale,
which may fairly be taken for what they are worth,
and then speaks of a more intimate blood-relationship
between Abram and Sarai than any that had been
hinted at before. But to make Abram the husband
of his own father’s child—his sister, therefore,—
seems on every moral mode of computation a sorry
means of helping him out of his difficulty—better to
have left him with the lie than laden him with incest.
But criticism is thrown away upon the unreason and
incongruity of the twentieth chapter of Genesis.
To make confusion worse confounded, is there
not another story, the same in almost every particular,
connected with the history of Isaac and Rebekah ?
There is, and strangely enough, and to puzzle us
the more, it is the same, or it may be another Abime
lech, King of the Philistines, who now takes the place
of the King of Gerar and the Pharaoh of Egypt.
Abimelech, King of the Philistines, however, is
neither plagued like the Pharaoh nor threatened like
his namesake ; for, happening to look out of a window
“he saw and behold Isaac was sporting with Rebekah
his wife.” On this discovery, and inferring the true
relationship between Isaac and Rebekah, he challenges
the husband with having spoken falsely.
Is Abimelech, King of the Philistines, wroth with
Isaac and Rebekah because of the falsehood they had
told him ?
By no means. On the contrary, he sends Isaac
�54
The Pentateuch.
away,, with his wife ; “ having done him nothing but
good. Sarai would seem to have been a singularly
attractive person; for when the encounter with
Abimelech took place she must have been not less
than ninety years old 1 And this and other such
unhallowed tales comprised in these old writings of
the Jewish people are still paraded in this nineteenth
century of the Christian era as parts of the inspired
word of God given for the edification of mankind!
Resuming the history of Abram, who now returns
from Egypt, in company with Lot his brother, to
Beth-el in Palestine, where, on his southward journey,
he had already built an altar to Jehovah,—what
happens ?
The herdsmen of the brothers having quarrelled,
they agree to separate; and Lot, having the first
choice, selects the plain of the Jordan, which was well
watered “ even as that Garden of Jehovah the land
of Egypt,” before the calamity that befel Sodom and
Gomorrah ; whilst Abram, for his part, resolves to
abide in the land of Canaan, which is again formally
promised to him and his posterity as a possession for
ever ; though it is now many centuries since it was
lost to them, and won by the Saracen and Turk.
The history of the Patriarch is interrupted at this
point ?
By the ill-digested account we find of a great battle
fought between four kings against five; of the capture
of Lot by Chederlaomer, one of the kings engaged,
and his confederates; of the rescue of Lot by Abram
and his retainers, and the recovery of all the booty
that had been carried off; of the appearance on the
scene of a certain Melchizedek, King of Salem, who is
also styled Priest of the most high God, who blesses
Abram, and in return receives a tithe of all the spoil
recovered.
Various interpretations, it is-to be presumed, have
been given of this episode ?
�Genesis: Abram.
55
Besides having been seen for that which in all
likelihood it is—the legendary record of a raid by
one party of petty chiefs against another—a more
recondite meaning has been connected with it; the
personages brought upon the scene having been re
ferred to the figures still to be seen on our celestial
globes, which have all been derived from planispheres of
ancient Indian and Egyptian descent, whilst the par
ticulars spoken of and the numbers given are held to be
significant of an attempt to reform the calendar. This,
owing to the true length of the year, 365 days six
hours fifty-six minutes and as many seconds, not being
known, was found in ancient times to require frequent
adjustments in order to bring the seasons, or the
solsticial and equinoctial points into conformity with
astronomical data and the computations of the old
astrologers.?
“ After these things,” says the text, “the word of
Jehovah came unto Abram in a vision, saying: Fear
not, Abram, I am thy shield and thy exceeding great
reward.” Does the Patriarch express himself grateful
for this assurance of the Divine favour ?
On the contrary, he complains that he is childless,
and that the steward of his house is his heir. He is
assured, however, that this shall not be so, but that
his heir shall be a son who shall come out of his own
bowels. Meantime he is bidden to look abroad on the
stars of heaven and say if he can number them, and
is further assured that so many should be his
posterity.
What more ?
Abram is now ordered to make a sacrifice of a
heifer, a she-goat, a ram, a turtle dove, and a young
pigeon. This he does ; slaying the victims, he divides
s The reader who is curious will find the subject now hinted
at discussed at length by Sir W. Drummond in his (Edipus
Judaicus ; and by a German writer of great erudition, Nork, in
his Biblische Mythologie.
�56
"The- Pentateuch.
them in the middle and lays the halves one against
another, but he does not proceed to consume them
with fire as usual upon the altar which we must pre
sume he had built. As the sun was going down a
deep sleep fell upon Abram, in which he had a second
vision, and was informed that his seed should be
strangers in a land that was not theirs ; that they
should there be afflicted for four hundred years, but
should afterwards come out with great substance and
possess the land where he then was from the river
of Egypt to the great river Euphrates.
What interpretation is to be put on the informa
tion thus and at this time delivered ?
That it is all information given after the event, and
assures us definitively that so much of the text at
least as conveys it was written long after the Israelites
had been settled in Palestine, and had subjugated the
Amorites, Hittites, Kenites, Jebusites, &c. Further,
and more particularly, as the Jebusites were only sub
dued and their city Jebus taken by King David, who
changed its name to Jerusalem, we learn that the
writer lived subsequently to the reign of that poten
tate.11
By what extraordinary agency were the carcases
prepared by Abram consumed ?
“ When the sun went down and it was dark, a
smoking furnace and a burning lamp passed between
the pieces.” But Jehovah, the titular God of the
Jews, is repeatedly spoken of in the Hebrew scrip
tures as “a consuming fire;” the smoking furnace
and burning lamp are therefore to be understood as
figurative expressions for the fire which Abram made
use of to sublimate the bodies of his victims and make
them meet food for his God.
h The Bishop of Natal has shown satisfactorily that this
passage is by the writer of Deuteronomy,—a very late writer
consequently.
�Genesis: Abram.
SI
Abram, we have seen, has been promised a son of
his own; but Sarai his wife bore him no children.
She, however, had a handmaid, an Egyptian, Hagar
by name, whom she gave to Abram her husband as a
second wife or concubine, saying to him: “ Go in
unto my maid, I pray thee, that I may obtain children
by her.”
This was a somewhat extraordinary and hazardous
proceeding on the part of Sarai ?
To modern notions, but not, it would seem, to such
as prevailed among the ancient Hebrews. Sarai may,
perhaps, have been curious to know whether the
“ effect defective ” lay with her or with her husband.
Abram, however, consents to the proposal F
He is nothing loth ; and Hagar conceives by him.
But when Hagar knew that she was with child by
Abram she despised and probably was insolent to her
barren mistress Sarai, who complains to Abram of
her handmaid’s behaviour.
Abram interposes manfully, of course, between the
barren Sarai and the fruitful Hagar, who has now his
own child under her heart ?
He does nothing of the kind. As he has already
shown himself cowardly and untruthful in presence
of Pharaoh and Abimelech, Abram now shows him
self both unjust and without natural compassion for
his concubine, for he says to the envious Sarai:
“ Behold thy maid is in thy hand ; do with her as it
pleaseth thee.” In her spite, although all had come
to.be as it was through her own suggestion, Sarai, as
said, “ dealt hardly with Hagar
who, terrified,
flees from her face into the wilderness.
What befalls her there ?
She is speedily reduced to extremity, of course, but
is found by a well of water in the desert by the angel
of Jehovah (who here, as in so many other places of
the Old Testament, turns out to be Jehovah himself),
and is admonished to return and submit herself to
�58
The Pentateuch.
her mistress. By way of inducement to do so (and
persuaded, doubtless, also by the strait in which she
found herself), she receives most liberal promises of
an ample posterity through the son whom she is in
formed she will bear. She therefore returns, and in
due season is delivered of a son, whom Abram calls
Ishmael, the name which Hagar had received for him
from the angel of Jehovah in the wilderness.
What is the next remarkable incident recorded in
this extraordinary history ?
When Abram is. ninety-nine years old, Jehovah
appears to him and announces himself as El-Schaddai—
the mighty El or God; orders him to change his
name from Abram to Abraham—father of many
nations, and his wife’s name Sarai to Sarah—Prin
cess ; “for,” says the narrative, “ I will make nations
of thee, and kings shall come out of thee.”
The covenant already made with Abram is thus
again, but with additions and more solemnly, renewed
with Abraham ?
It is, and as its seal and testimony for ever the rite
of circumcision is commanded : “ Every male child
among you,” says the text, “ shall be circumcised ; he
among you that is born in the house or is bought
with money of the stranger, that is eight days old,
shall be circumcised; the uncircumcised man-child
shall be cut off from his people—-he hath broken my
covenant.”
. What may be the meaning of the rite of circum
cision thus formally and forcibly announced ?
To think of it for a moment as ordered of God
were absurd : God sends his work fit for its end into
the world; it needs no interference of man to make
it so. Among the Semitic tribes, of whom the
Hebrews were one, human sacrifices appear to have
prevailed universally in early times : the first-born
of man and beast—or as the Old Testament scrip
tures have it, all that opened the womb—belonged to
�Genesis: Abraham.
59
the God of the tribe, however named—El, Bel, Baal, or
Molech—and through countless ages was undoubtedlysacrificed to him by fire. But as time ran on, as
civilisation advanced and more humane ideas were
engendered, the barbarous practice was seen in its
true light, and a substitute for the sacrifice of the
whole was sought for, and believed to have been
found, in the sacrifice of a part.
The rite of circumcision has significance in another,
though closely allied, direction ?
It has. Besides its symbolical character of sub
stitute, it is intimately connected with the worship
paid to the reproductive principle in nature, of which
the symbol was the Phallus. The Egyptian priests,
priests of the gods of increase—Osiris, Isis—were
necessarily circumcised, as the priests of the deities of
decay among other peoples—Attys, Cybele, &c. were
emasculated. In Egypt the priest appears to have
been consecrated to his office by circumcision,—the
commonalty of the country were not as a rule sub
jected to the rite. The Israelites, however, as a people
holy to Jehovah, were as matter of course and neces
sity circumcised : on the eighth day instead of being
presented as a burnt offering on the altar of his God,
as in the olden time he would have been had he hap
pened to be the first-born, every son of Israel in later
days had, and still has, the foreskin of his private
member solemnly resected by the priest and con
sumed in the fire, an offering, disguise it as they may,
to the fire-king Melek or Moloch whom their fathers
worshipped, and on whose altars they had been used
to offer up the first-born of their sons and daughters,
of their flocks and herds.
How does Abraham receive the intimation that a
son will be born to him by his wife Sarah, that she
shall yet be the mother of nations and that kings of
peoples shall be of her ?
Not so reverently as might have been expected.
�6°
The Pentateuch.
He fell on his.face, indeed, but he laughed incredulous,
and said in his heart: Shall a child be born unto him
that is an hundred years old; and shall Sarah that
is ninety years old bear ! He therefore entreats God
for his son Ishmael. But God says to him : “ Sarah
thy wife shall bear thee a son indeed, and thou shalt
call his name Isaac, and with him and his seed after
him will I establish my covenant everlastingly. And
as for Ishmael, him I have blessed, and he shall be
fruitful;. twelve princes shall he beget, and I will
make , him a great nation ; but my covenant will I
establish with Isaac which Sarah shall bear unto thee
at this set time of the year.”
There is as usual a second account of this mira
culous engendering of a son by persons respectively
one hundred and ninety years old ?
There is, and from the Jehovist, as that which pre
cedes is in great part from the storehouse of the
Elohist in great part, we say, for interpolations in
its course are readily detected by the attentive
reader. In the second account “ three men ” appear
to Abraham in the plains of Mamre, as he sat in the
tent door in the heat of the day. Abraham addresses
them as “My Lord,” invites them into his tent, has
water fetched to wash their feet, entertains them with
the flesh of a calf “tender and good,” with cakes
baked on the hearth by Sarah, and with butter and
milk a sumptuous Arab shiek’s repast, in short, and
himself stands by them under the tree as they eat.
What say the three men thus hospitably enter
tained ?
They ask after Sarah, and “ he ” (the singular
now taking the place of the plural) informs Abraham
that Sarah his wife shall bear him a son. Sarah,
‘ old and well stricken in years, with whom it had
ceased to be after the manner of women,” hears the
announcement and laughs at the notion of her and her
lord being old also ” having a child between them.
�Genesis: Abraham.
61
Sarah’s laugh and implied incredulousness does
not pass unobserved ?
No. “ Jehovah (the name now changed from
Elohim) said unto Abraham, Wherefore did Sarah
laugh, saying : Shall I of a surety bear a child which
am old I Is anything too hard for Jehovah ” ?
What answer makes Sarah when challenged with
her incredulous laughter ?
Not being of a perfectly truthful disposition, as we
know already, we are not surprised when we find her
denying that she had laughed : “ I laughed not,”
says she, “ for she was afraid. But Jehovah said :
Nay, but thou didst laugh.”
What are we to think of such tales, and of such
conceptions of the Deity as are implied in them ?
That the tales are the conceits of men with the
minds of children, and the preservers of them, and
above all the believers in them as records of veritable
events, involving matter either interesting or edifying,
are to be held as ignorant, credulous, superstitious,
and incompetent persons.
To the query : Is anything too hard for Jehovah,
what answer must be given ?
That God the Lord, Supreme Cause, Rule and Ruler
of the Universe, never contravenes the laws which are
his essence—cannot be in contradiction with himself.
Having ordained that when it ceases with a woman
to be after the manner of women she shall no longer
bear children, we may safely and with all reverence
say that God had verily made it too hard for him to
have Sarah become a mother. But the Jews had no
conception of a universe ruled by General, Invariable,
Necessary Law, nor any other idea of Jehovah than
as a sovereign prince and ruler, doing and undoing at
his arbitrary will and pleasure, having the earth alone
of all his works, and the children of Israel alone of all
the people upon it, as objects of his fatherly care and
consideration.
�62
The Pentateuch.
The , narrative proceeds, informing us that the
men
(the plural again) rise up and look towards
Sodom, Abraham going with them to bring them on
their way. As they go, Jehovah (now it is the sin
gular) is represented as deliberating with himself
whether he ought not to impart to Abraham the pur
pose he had conceived of destroying Sodom and
Gomorrah because of the wickedness of their inha
bitants, and is here made by the writer to say :
Because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great
and their sin is very grievous, I will go down now and
see whether they have done altogether according to
the cry of it which is come unto me; and if not I
will know.” The Jews evidently thought of their
Jehovah as we think of a person in authority who
needs to make inquiry as to the truth or falsehood of
the reports that reach him : he came down to look
after the builders of the Tower of Babel and confound
their language, and he comes down again to take the
measure of the sinners of Sodom and Gomorrah? and
punish them according to their demerits.
The men turn their faces towards Sodom, but
Abraham, it is said, “stood yet before Jehovah.”
The use now of the plural and then of the singular in
this extraordinary narrative will give the candid
reader a sufficient hint of the composite character of
the Pentateuch. The narrator must have had more
than one of the legendary tales that were still floating
in his day before him when he wrote (and he could
not have written until after the times of more than
one of the Jewish kings), and has here, as in so many
other places, performed his task of editor indifferently.
Abraham left alone with Jehovah, what takes place
between them ?
The notable parley in which the man Abraham
tries to turn his God Jehovah from his purpose of de
stroying Sodom and Gomorrah. “ Wiltjthou destroy
the righteous with the wicked ?” asks the Patriarch
�Genesis : Abraham.
6J
of the Lord. “Peradventure there be fifty righteous
within the city ; far be it from thee to slay the right
eous with the wicked,—and shall not the judge of all
the earth do right ?” “ If I find fifty righteous in
Sodom, then will I spare all the place for their sake,”
replies Jehovah, according to the Hebrew scribe.
. Abraham would make still better terms for the
city, and continues perseveringly, saying :
“ Peradventure there shall lack five—ten—twenty
forty of the fifty and Jehovah says : “ I will not
destroy it for ten’s sake.” “ And Jehovah went his
way as soon as he had left communing with^Abra
ham.”
What are we in the present day, with our ideas of
the immanent ubiquity and necessarily impersonal
nature of God, to think of such a tale as this, and of
words bandied in such a way between man and the
Deity ?
The tale is doubtless another of the myths or legends
transmitted orally from remote antiquity and pre
served by an over-scrupulous editor from the oblivion
it so well deserved, if by its means it were intended
to convey any true or possible idea of God’s proce
dure in his dealings with mankind and the world.
Man does not bandy words with God ; neither does
he attempt to fix the Supreme on the horns of a
dilemma by a series of Socratic questions, each reply
to each succeeding query leaving the respondent more
m the wrong than he had been before. God’s acts
are not in time, but from eternity; they are not con
sequences, whether in advance or in recall of ante
cedent purposes. . God, moreover, does never in any
human sense punish, neither by condoning misdeed
does he ever forgive the guilty. [Are there ten
guilty persons in a great city, they suffer for them
selves, if their guiltiness be through violation of anv of
God s laws ; and ten thousand guiltless persons, their
fellow-citizens, would not save them from paying the
�64
The Pentateuch.
penalty of their sin. Unhappily the opposite does
not hold; for one reckless and guilty person violating
a natural law may cause the death of many,—a truth
of which terrible illustrations are offered in the explo
sions that so frequently occur in coal mines and
powder mills.
Proceeding with the tale as delivered, we now find
“ two angels,” two of the “three men” presumably
who had been entertained by Abraham, going on to
Sodom, where they are met and waited on by Lot
much in the same way as they had been by his
brother Abraham. What next befals ?
The narrator, as if to show how well the doomed
city deserved its impending fate, presents us with
such a picture of the state of morals and customs pre
vailing among its inhabitants as it seems impossible
in these our days even to imagine; Lot and his
family, the parties excepted from the ruin hanging
over their homes, by their after-doings appearing in
scarcely a more favourable light than their detestable
fellow-townsmen.
Must not the nineteenth chapter of the Book of
Genesis be regarded by us as a most extraordinary
element in a volume said by ecclesiastics, and gene
rally believed, to be given by God to the world for
its edification in morals and furtherance in religious
knowledge ?
Looked at with the eye of reason, it can be seen in
no other light. So gross and offensive ar e most of
the particulars it contains, that they cannot here be
mentioned openly. But to proceed: Lot and his
family forewarned, escape from Sodom and flee to
Zoar, and then, the sun being risen upon the earth,
Jehovah rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone
and fire from Jehovah out of heaven, and overthrew
these cities, and the plain, and all their inhabitants,
and all that grew upon the ground—the innocent with
the guilty consequently—infants and young children,
�Genesis: Sodom and Gomorrah.
6$
as well as the grown men and women, all wicked
alike, for among them, from what is said, there conld
not have been found ten that were innocent, else had
the cities been saved. The destruction was indiscri
minate, and the Jewish God Jehovah himself its
agent! Lot, however, has escaped with his family to
Zoar, where he did not long remain, but quitting the
little town, he went and dwelt with his daughters in
a cave—hard by, we may presume.
What happened there ?
That of which it shames us to speak. The daugh
ters, as though the destruction of Sodom and Gomor
rah had been attended with effects as far reaching as
the flood of Noah, are made to speak as if their father
were the only man left alive in the world. To satisfy
a brutal appetite, they are said in this book of the
Jewish law, accepted by Christian men and women
as inspired by God, to have made their father drunk
with wine, and to have sought his bed in succession,
the consequence of which is that they both conceive
and bear sons, who respectively become in after years
the progenitors of the Moabites and Ammonites,
What may be the possible meaning of this foul tale ?
The Moabites and Ammonites — cognate Semitic
tribes, speaking the same, or dialects of the same, lan
guage as the Hebrews, were among the number of
those whom the Israelites dispossessed of their lands
and reduced to slavery, when they did not take their
lives. A vile and unnatural origin had to be devised
in after times by way of excuse for the ills which
these unfortunate peoples were made to suffer in an
age gone by. The daughters of Lot were little worthy
of the favour shown them in their escape from Sodom
reduced to ashes; but they were wanted by the writer
as parts in the machinery of his story.
The wife of Lot escaped with her husband and
daughters from the burning, but came to an extraor
dinary end nevertheless ?
�66
The Pentateuch.
She, according to the veracious historian, for having
looked back upon the burning town, was turned into
a pillar of salt upon the plain, where, if we may be
lieve the traveller who has an eye for the marvellous,
she is still to be seen I The transformation, inflicted
for a natural and innocent impulse, was as severe as
it was extraordinary, no parallel to which, we may
believe, has since occurred ; though men do still look
fondly back upon the homes they are leaving, when
sad necessity or prescriptive tyranny—worse than
fire from heaven—devotes them to destruction. But
the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah is a myth—an idea
furnished with accessories and embodied in language.
Were such towns ever in existence, as they may well
have been, and destroyed in the manner described, it
could only have happened by the eruption of a volcano
now extinct, like those outbursts of Vesuvius which
desolated Pompeii and Herculaneum in more recent
times, and of other burning mountains which still
bring desolation and loss of life over many parts of
the earth’s surface. But the Jews, as we have already
had occasion to observe, ascribed every event in both
natural and human history to the immediate agency
of their God Jehovah, believing as they did that all
the calamities which befel nations as well as indivi
duals were punishments for acts displeasing to him.
Assuming Sodom and Gomorrah to have been over
whelmed by a volcanic eruption in very remote times,
therefore, was it said, must their inhabitants have been
a wicked and abominable race; and further, as the
lands of the Moabites and Ammonites were usurped
by the children of Israel, so were the Moabites and
Ammonites the spawn of the incestuous intercourse
detailed.
We have additional evidence of this Jewish view of
the special providential ordering of things by Jehovah,
immediately after the story about Sodom and Gomor
rah, and about Lot and his daughters, have we not ?
�Genesis: Abraham and Isaac.
67
It is now that we meet with the tale of Abraham’s
second denial of Sarah as his wife,—on this occasion
to Abimelech, King of Gerar ; and we learn that
Jehovah “ visited Sarah, as he had said, and did unto
her as he had spoken,” Jehovah being thus made, as
it were, the immediate agent in the matter, for now
it was that Sarah “ conceived and bare a son to Abra
ham in his old age.”
Abraham was mindful of the terms of the covenant
entered into with him by Jehovah ?
He was : when his son was eight days old he was
duly circumcised and named Isaac by his father,
on the day on which all that opened the womb
according to more ancient custom were sacrificed on
the altar of burnt offering. Seven days was the first
born, whether of man or beast, to be with the mother
or dam ; on the eighth it must be given, as his due for
the increase and as the price of future favours of the
like kind, to the Reproductive Principle in Nature
conceived as Deity.
Circumcision was not all that was required in the
case of mankind in after times, when the religious
system of the Israelites came to be formulated, and a
priesthood established ?
Then had the first-born of man, besides parting
with his foreskin, to be further redeemed by a certain
price in money. The first-born of beasts might be
sacrificed or redeemed at the option of those into
whose herds or flocks they were born, with the single
exception of the ass, which was on no account to be
offered on the altar, but in case it was not redeemed,
was to be put to death by having its neck broken,—
that is, by being thrown from a height and killed.
The single exception of the ass as unavailable for
sacrifice on the altar of the Hebrew God, and the
peculiar mode in which it is ordered to be put to
death, seem to require explanation ?
Which may be found in the fact that the ass, both
�68
The Pentateuch.
in Ancient Egypt and Palestine, was looked on in the
light of an animal at once sacred and accursed. In.
Palestine he long supplied the place of the horse, and
was in regular use for the saddle as well as beast
of burthen ; but in Egypt he was sacred to Typhon,
the brother and enemy of Osiris, and was the victim
especially devoted to him, the mode of his sacrifice
being that which is commanded in the Hebrew Scrip
tures. Typhon himself, generally figured in Egyp
tian sculptures with the head of the swine, is some
times also met with having the head of the ass ; and
among the Egyptian drawings there is a very singular
one in which Horus has Typhon with the ass’s head
by the ear, and is belabouring him with the staff he
has in his hand—z.e., the early Spring or Summer Sun
has vanquished his enemy Winter.1
The system of redeeming by money instead of con
suming by fire was certainly a mighty step in advance,
and, once entered on, was likely to be vigorously en
forced in view of the revenue it brought to the priest
hood. But there must have been a certain reluctance
on the part of Abraham’s God to forego his ancient
right to the first-born of the patriarch’s posterity ?
It would seem so by the record, at all events. Isaac
had certainly a narrow escape from sublimation by
fire, and being sent in the way of a sweet savour as
food to the God of his father.
What says the tale ?
After his departure from Abimelech of Gerar,
Elohe, it is said, did tempt Abraham, saying: “Take
now thy son, thine Only (Jahid, Hebrew, used as a
noun), whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land
of Moriah, and offer him there for a burnt-offering
upon one of the mountains which I shall tell thee of.”
1 See Moyers: Die Phoenizier, B. I. See also a Paper by
Herr Hirt in Abhand. der Histor-Philolog. Klasse der Acad,
d. Wissensch. zu Berlin aus den Jahren, 1820—21. S. 165.
�Genesis : Abraham and Isaac.
6g
Does Abraham express surprise at this extraordi
nary command of his God Elohe ?
. Not any; he rises up early in the morning, saddles
his ass, cleaves wood for the burnt-offering, and sets
out on the journey. After three days’ travel he sees
the place of the sacrifice afar off, bids the attendants
he had with him remain with the ass where they
were, whilst he and the lad should “go yonder and
worship, and come again to them.” Abraham then
lays the wood for the burnt-offering on his son ; takes
fire in his hand and a knife, and they go on together.
Is Isaac passive whilst all this is done ?
Not entirely: he sees the fire and the wood and
the knife, but not the lamb for the sacrifice. His
father assures him, however, that Elohe will provide
himself a lamb for the burnt-offering. Arrived at
Mount Moriah, Abraham builds an altar, lays the
wood in order upon it, binds his son Isaac, lays him
on the pile, and raises the knife to complete the
sacrifice. But the angel of Jehovah (it is no longer
Elohe) calls to him out of heaven, and bids him
not to lay his hand upon the lad; “ for now,”
proceeds the angel, who,.as in other instances, is
seen to be Jehovah himself, “I know that thou
fearest. Elohe, seeing thou hast not withheld thy
son, thine only son from me.” Lifting up his eyes,
Abraham discovers a ram caught by the horns in a
thicket behind him, which he takes, slays, and pre
sents as a burnt-offering in the stead of his son.
This is an extraordinary story ! Can we, as reason
able and passably pious men, believe that God ever
tempts mankind,—ever commanded a father to make
a burnt-offering of his son ?
God? in bestowing on man the wonderful power of
paternity, has also put such feelings of tenderness
into his heart as makes the entertainment of such an
idea abhorrent to his nature. He who should now—
and, it is not unfair to presume, in the day also when
�7o
The Pentateuch.
the tale was written—imagine that he had received
an order from God to slay and make a burnt-offering
of his son would be treated as a madman, and merci
fully taken care of by his friends. Possessed of our
faculties and masters of ourselves, we are not mas
tered by distressing dreams and phantoms of the
night.
Isaac, however, as we see, was not sacrified, although
Abraham had received the express commands of his
God to make a burnt-offering of his son ?
No ; and this putting God in contradiction with himself, and the angel of Jehovah calling out of heaven,
relegates the story of the Temptation of Abraham to
its proper place among the myths and legends of hoar
antiquity. Our advanced conceptions of the nature of
Deity forbid us to think of God as tempting mankind,
as commanding and countermanding in a breath, as
calling out of heaven in any sense, or using human
speech otherwise than mediately through the mouth
of man.
What farther comment may be made on this tale ?
Had child-sacrifice lain outside the sphere of Hebrew
religious rites, as the modern Jews and bible-commen
tators all show themselves so eager to show that it
did, in face of Jehovah’s express order to sanctify to
him all that opened the womb both of man and beast,
such a commandment as that said to have been given
by God to Abraham could never have been imagined.
Had not human sacrifice been familiar to the Jewish
mind, as it undoubtedly was up to the time of the
Captivity, the Patriarch would have been depicted
rejecting the order to slay his son as the command
ment of a lying spirit.^
May not the tale have been contrived in relatively
modern times—after the Babylonian Captivity, for
instance—to declare that God had ceased to require
k Vide Vatke, Biblische Theologie, § 22, S. 276.
�Genesis: Abraham and Sarah.
71
the human victims as burnt-offerings to which he
had been so long accustomed, and that the will might
henceforth without offence be substituted for the
deed ?
The story of the temptation of Abraham has many
unquestionable marks of recent composition. It cer
tainly does not date from the period to which the
incidents among which it appears are referred; and
could indeed only have been invented in times when
the better spirits among the Jews had made the dis
covery that God delighted not in the blood of bulls
and rams, and still less in that of human beings.
Much has been made by modern theologians, in
connection with the Christian system, of the accre
dited command of God to Abraham to make a
sacrifice of his son ?
Very much. But God, as we have said, never com
mands his creatures to do aught that is not for their
own good, or the good of others; and the dogma
(entirely foreign to the spirit of the theistic morality
taught by Jesus of Nazareth) which makes of this
holy personage a sacrifice to satisfy Divine Justice,
assimilates the great God of Nature, the father of all
flesh, with the Phoenician El-Saturnus, Chronos, or
Molech, who was said himself actually to have sacri
ficed Jeud his only son—Jeud or Jehud—another
form of Jahid, Only.
Returning to the family affairs of the Patriarch,
we do not find that Sarah, blessed with a son of her
own, shows herself any way better disposed towards
Hagar, her handmaid, than she had been when she
was barren and childless ?
It is Sarah’s turn now to mock Hagar, the
Egyptian. “ Cast out this bond-woman and her
son,” she says to Abraham, “ for her son shall not
be heir with my son, even with Isaac.”
Abraham does not surely yield to this cruel sug
gestion of the spiteful and ungrateful woman ?
�72
The Pentateuch.
Although the thing, as said, was very grievous in
his sight, because of the lad, and because of the bond
woman, nevertheless, and as the story goes, having
God’s sanction for what he did, he yields to Sarah;
and charging Hagar with some bread and a bottle of
water, he turns her and her son—his own son, too—
Ishmael, out into the wilderness to perish, as he must
have known, and. where, but for the discovery of a
well of water when she and her child were reduced
to extremity, she must inevitably have died.
Hagar, however, is again succoured in time,
although how or by whom—unless it were by the
mythical angel of Jehovah as before, we are not in
formed. But Ishmael and his mother, after this,
disappear from the scene, and the whole interest is
concentrated on the Patriarch of the Hebrew people
and his son Isaac. There is an incident now men
tioned, which enables us, with the lights we possess,
to see Abraham as no more the exclusive worshipper
of the God El or El-schaddai of his forefathers than
he is of the more recently introduced Jehovah ?
He plants a tree by the well Beer-sheba, and there
calls on the name of Jehovah.
What may be the meaning of this ?
The word usually translated Grove in our English
version of the Hebrew Scriptures mostly signifies a
tree or a pillar of wood, when it does not mean the
divinity of whom the tree or pillar was the symbol—
the Aschera, Astarte, or Ashtaroth of Phoenicia, the
Mylitta of Babylonia, the Aphrodite of Greece, the
Venus of Rome, the Syria Dea of Lucan, personifica
tion of the passive element in the reproductive
principle of nature, usually associated with Baal the
Sun-God or active generative principle and object of
adoration with all the peoples of the ancient world.
Abraham, in planting a tree by the well of Beer-sheba,
the well itself significant of fertility, made an offering
to the God of Increase; and meets us here, as he must
�Genesis : Isaac and Rebekah.
73
have been in fact, if hot wholly mythical, as the Arab
Shiek, the worshipper of the Gods of his Fathers, not of
the Jehovah of post-Davidic times, when the Thora or
Code of Law ascribed to Moses had been compiled,
and the Temple of Jerusalem declared the only shrine
at which offerings acceptable to the Deity could be
brought.
-Sarah dies when she is a hundred and twenty-seven
years old, according to the record; and Abraham
buys of Ephron the son of Zohar, one of the sons
of Heth, the cave of Machpelah as a burying place
in the land of Canaan where he is sojourning. Well
stricken in years himself, Abraham is now anxious to
see his son Isaac settled with a wife; but, unwilling
to have a daughter of the land of Canaan advanced to
this honour, he despatches a trusty servant, whom he
binds by an oath, to Mesopotamia, his native country,
there, from among the number of his own kindred,
to find a helpmate for his son. The servant departs
with a handsome retinue of camels and attendants.
He entreats Jehovah-Elohim, the God of his master
Abraham, for good speed in his mission, and asks him
to let it come to pass that the one among the maidens
■who comes to draw water from the well, outside the
city of Nahor, by which he might halt, and to whom he
should say : “ Let down thy pitcher, I pray thee, that
I may drink,” and who should reply: “Drink, and I
will give thy camels drink also,” should be she whom
he—Jahveh-Elohim—had appointed for his servant
Isaac, “and thereby,” adds the envoy, ‘‘shall I know
that thou hast showed kindness to my master.” What
happens ?
Among others who come out to draw from the well
is Rebekah, daughter of JBethuel, son of Milcab,
Abraham’s brother Nahor’s wife, blood relation of
Isaac, consequently twice removed; and on Rebekah
it is that the choice falls ; for, asked for a draught
from her pitcher, she immediately repeats the words
�74
The Pentateuch.
which the envoy had resolved should be a sign from
Jehovah of his approval,—the Jews imagining that
their God interested himself even in the selection of
their wives !
The messenger enquires of Rebekah whose daughter
she is, and if there were room in her father’s house
where he and his troop might be lodged. Being in
formed that she is the daughter of Bethuel, and
assured that there was straw and provender and
lodging-room in her father’s house, he presents her
with the mystical gold ring, prototype of the gold
ring of the marriage ceremony among ourselves, and
having a significance then which it has no longer;
and beside the ring, he also presents her with brace
lets of price for her arms. What does Rebekah, on
the unexpected address of the stranger and the
presents she receives ?
She hastens home, informs the family of what has
passed, shows the ring and the bracelets, and
despatches her brother Laban to bid the stranger
welcome, and lead him • to the house. In short, the
parties speedily come to an understanding, and matters
are forthwith satisfactorily arranged, as though they
had been subject of anxious discussion long time
before. Rebekah by and by departs with the messen
ger as bride elect of Isaac, who meets her as with
her escort she draws near his father Abraham’s
tents, brings her to his late mother’s tent, where he
instals her; makes her his wife, loves her, and is com
forted after his mother Sarah’s death. What infor
mation have we now that seems to remove Abraham
out of the category of possible historical personages ?
He is said to have taken a second wife, Keturah
by name, and by her to have had a family of five
sons—of daughters, who may have been as many, no
mention is made—and only to have given up the ghost
when he was a hundred and seventy-five years old!
Is this credible ?
�Genesis : The Age of Man.
75
If we acknowledge the laws of nature, which are
the unimpeachable ordinances of God, to be changeless
as their author, we answer without misgiving : No,
it is not possible, and so is not credible.
What may be said of the extreme ages to which
men are said to have attained in these prehistoric
times—in these long by-gone ages of the world?
That the tales which transmit them are myths
which never had any foundation out of the imagina
tion of their inventors. Instead of getting shorter
and shorter as we come down the stream of time, it is
certain that human life has become longer and longer.
Savages and barbarous tribes are surrounded by num
berless conditions and circumstances adverse to life
that are mitigated in almost every instance, and in
many entirely removed, as progress is made in civili
sation and as appliances are discovered that minister
to the comfort and security of existence. There is
not only no prima facie likelihood that primaeval and
prehistoric man lived longer than the men of the
present day, but every presumption that life in by
gone ages of the world was much shorter on the
whole than it is now.
Have not certain recent scientific enquiries of un
questionable weight, resting on no fond imaginations
of poets, but on physiological grounds, definitively
settled the question, not only of the age that may
possibly be attained, but of the age that has ever been
attained, by man ?
We can now speak positively and say that, whilst
the life of man may possibly extend in rare and ex
ceptional instances to a hundred years, and even to
one, two, or three years beyond that term, the few of
all the millions born into the world who attain to
what all now agree in calling extreme old age, finish
their career between the limits of three-score and ten
and four-score and ten years.
So much for the men and women of the present
�The Pentateuch.
age, but what of those who lived in ages gone
by?
Neither are we without reliable records of the ages
at which they who flourished in these finished their
course on earth. The skulls of individuals taken
from the tombs of Sakara in Egypt, who died and
were buried some sixteen centuries before the date
assigned to the Deluge, or about the time when,
according to the Jewish accounts, the world was
created, show the same conditions of bone-structure
and dentition as the skulls of the men and women
who die at ages familiar to us at the present time.
The sutures of these old Egyptian crania are found to
approach obliteration in different degrees and to pre
sent other marks of age in exact conformity with
what is seen in the crania of persons who are known
to have died at certain ages among ourselves:—in
the younger heads the sutures are distinct, in the
older they are obliterated more or less completely,
and in the very old they are effaced. In the younger
heads, again, the teeth are more or less perfect, in the
older they are decayed or gone, precisely as among
ourselves in persons who die at every age between
childhood and seventy, eighty, or ninety years.
Have we not authentic information on this subject,
of even much higher antiquity than any imparted, by
Egyptian tombs, though their mummified occupants
lived so long ago as the second Dynasty of the
Pharaohs, or some centuries before the flood ?
We have; in the skulls that have of late years
been recovered from the drift, and dug out of caves
from under loads of stalagmite and breccia, whose
owners trapped and contended with the woolly rhino
ceros and mammoth, and disputed possession of their
sorry dwelling places with the cave bear and hysena—
all extinct at the present time. Carefully examined
and compared with recent crania, these skulls of indi
viduals who lived during the quaternary and towards
�Genesis : Esau and Jacob.
77
the close of the last great glacial period in the earth’s
history, so marvellously preserved through so many
thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, present
the same essential characters as those of the men and
women who die at the usual ages in the present day ;
and assure us that if they lived as long, they certainly
lived no longer than their descendants, the miners and
iron-workers of Belgium, who now people the soil
which once they trod.1
Returning to our story,-—what comes of the mar
riage of Isaac and Rebekah ?
As many of the incidents in the sacred writings of
the Hebrews are so commonly repeated in connection
with each new personage who comes upon the scene,
we might almost have anticipated that Rebekah, like
Sarah, would prove barren at first, but fruitful after
wards ; and so it falls out. Isaac, it is said, “ entreated
the Lord for his wife Rebekah,” so that she conceived
at last, and in due season brought forth twins—Esau
and Jacob.
What is there notable about these ?
Esau, the first born, it is said, was “ a red and
hairy man and became a cunning hunter; ” Jacob,
again, was “ a plain man, a dweller in tents, or living
much at home; ” and whilst Esau was loved of his
father, because of the venison he found him in the
chase, Jacob was loved of his mother.
What came of this unlike disposition in the youths^
and different likings of their parents ?
Returning faint and weary from hunting on a
certain occasion, Esau begged some of the pottage of
lentils which Jacob had sod and now got ready. But
the selfish Jacob, instead of sharing with his brother
and ministering to his wants, will only part with his
mess in return for Esau’s birthright as the elder born.
“Behold,” says Esau, “lam at the point to die, and
1 See Professor Owen’s admirable essay on Longevity in
Fraser s Magazine for February, 1872.
�78
The Pentateuch.
what profit shall this birthright do to me.” So he
bartered his birthright to Jacob for the lentil broth.
It was surely neither kind nor brotherly in Jacob
to profit by his brother’s state, faint for want, and
weary from the field ?
It certainly was not, but was of a piece with the
rest of Jacob’s character and procedure, as we
shall see.
What happens next ?
Isaac, grown old and his eyesight dim, calls his
eldest son Esau and bids him go into the field and
take him some venison, that he may have savoury
meat once more and find fitting occasion to give him
his blessing before he dies.
Whilst he is gone on this filial errand, what does
Rebekah, and to what iniquity does Jacob lend him
self?
Rebekah conspires with her favourite Jacob to
cheat the blind old man, her husband, and to rob
Esau, her first-born, of his father’s blessing. “ Go
now to the flock,” says Rebekah to her son Jacob,
“,and fetch me two good kids of the goats, and I will
make them savoury meat for thy father, such as he
loveth; and thou shall bring it to thy father that he
may eat and that he may bless thee before his
death.”
Does Jacob consent to this unfair suggestion of his
mother, or does he not rather object ?
He makes no objection, and is only fearful that the
plot may miscarry : “Behold,” says he, “Esau my
brother is a hairy man, and I a smooth man ; my
father peradventure will feel me, and I shall seem to
him as a deceiver, and I shall bring a curse upon me
and not a blessing.”
What answer makes Rebekah to this ?
She says: “ Upon me be the curse, my son, only
obey my voice and fetch me the kids.” This he does
forthwith, and she makes the savoury mess of the
�Genesis : Isaac and "Jacob.
79
kid’s meat such as old Isaac loved. She then takes
the goodly raiment of her elder son Esau and puts it
on Jacob, covers his hands and the exposed part of
his neck with the skins of the kids, and gives the
mess of meat and the bread she had prepared into his
hand. Thus disguised and furnished forth, Jacob
comes to his father and says : “ My father ! ” and he
says : “ Here am I, who art thou, my son ? ”
Jacob, conscience-stricken because of the unworthy
part he is playing, must surely answer truly now, and
say he is Jacob his father’s youngest son ?
No such thing. On the contrary, he lies egregiously,
and says: “ I am Esau, thy first-born; I have done
according as thou badest me. Arise, I pray thee;
sit and eat of my venison that thy soul may bless me.”
What answer makes Isaac ?
How is it, he asks, that thou hast found it so
quickly, my son ?
Jacob, for very shame, must needs now own the
imposition so far carried on successfully ?
By no means ; he plays the hypocrite now, as he is
playing the deceiver and has already proved himself
the liar, and answers his father’s question in these
solemn words : “ Jehovah, thy God, brought it to me.”
This is shocking ! Old blind Isaac, nevertheless,
seems to have had some misgivings about the party
who is addressing him, for he says: “ Come near me,
that I may feel thee, my son, whether thou be my
very son Esau or not. And Jacob went near to his
father, and he felt him and said : The voice is Jacob’s
voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau; and he
discerned him not, and so he blessed him.”
In spite of having gone so far, Isaac cannot yet
have been altogether satisfied of the identity of the
son before him ?
No; for he asks again: “Art thou my very son
Esau ?” and he (Jacob) said, “ I am.”
This reiteration of the lie seems to satisfy all the
�8o
Phe Pentateuch.
misgivings of the old man, for he now eats of the
mess prepared for him, and drinks of the wine set
before him, does he not ?
_ He does ; and bidding his son come near, he blesses
him saying: God give thee of the dew of heaven,
and the fulness of the earth, and plenty of corn and
wine; and let people serve thee, and nations bow
down to thee; be Lord over thy brethren, and let thy
mother s sons bow down to thee; cursed be every
one that curseth thee, and blessed be he who blesseth
thee.”
How fares it with Isaac when Esau returns from
the chase, brings his savory mess of venison to his
father, bids him arise and eat, and asks for his
blessing p
Isaac, it is said, trembled with a great trembling
and said : “ Who is he that hath taken venison, and
brought it to me, and I have eaten of -all before thou
earnest, and have blessed him ? ”
And Esau P
When he heard the words of his father he cried
with a great and exceeding bitter cry, and said—
“ Bless me, even me also, 0 my father! ”
Isaac yields to this passionate and natural appeal ?
Nay, indeed! Blessing in the olden time seems to
have been restricted to one ; for the old man replies :
“Thy brother came with subtilty, and hath taken
away thy blessing.”
Is Esau content ?
How should he! he says: “ Hast thou but one
blessing, my father ? bless me, even me, 0 my father,
and he lifted up his voice and wept.”
Esau was surely unfairly and cruelly dealt with in
all this ?
According to modern moral notions he was cheated
of his right; and common sense and justice alike
would now have required the thief to restore what
he had stolen. What motive can we imagine for
�Genesis : Isaac and 'Jacob.
8i
the story as it is told ? A mythological meaning, as
with many other parts of the Old Testament, has been
connected with the repeated supercession we encoun
ter of the elder by the younger born. As Night,
esteemed the eldest born of things, gave place to Day,
so it has been surmised is Cain superseded in his
sacrifice by Abel, Esau by Jacob in his birthright
and blessing, Ephraim by Manasseh, Aaron by Moses
in command, &c.
But Esau is said further to have been the progenitor
of the Edomites, a cognate tribe, and enemies of long
standing of the Jews; the poet or fabulist therefore
makes Esau sell his birthright for the mess of pottage
when he was hungry as a prelude to letting him of
his father’s blessing, in order that it might fall on
Jacob, from whom the Israelites themselves were
reputed to have sprung. The preliminary barter of
the birthright was doubtless held by the narrator,
as it has since been held by apologists for all the right
and wrong, the good and evil, that lie within the lids
of the Bible, as adequate to cover the subsequent
villanous artifices by which the blessing is filched
away; for it seems impossible, on simple moral apart
from prescriptive religious grounds, to conceive the
most consummate impersonation, whether of Jewish,
Christian, or Pagan selfishness and dishonesty, ap
proving the act of Jacob, or condoning the means
by which his object was accomplished.
The Jews would seem to have held that something
of a preternatural character pertained to a blessing,
which was not nullified by the means, however dis
honest, employed to obtain it ?
It appears so. Old Isaac himself, when he dis
covers that he has been imposed on, speaks not of
recalling his blessing, but says : “ I have blessed him
(Jacob), yea, and he shall be blessed.” But the
Jews believed, as we have already had occasion to
observe, that their God took a particular interest,
G
�82
Phe Pentateuch.
not only in them as a people at large, but in every
individual, and in the acts of every notable indi
vidual more especially, among them. They did
nothing, never entered on any undertaking, or came
to any conclusion, without “asking Jehovah,” -i.e.,
without drawing lots, consulting the Ephod or
Teraph im—domestic idols of which every household
appears to have had one or move, and receiving an
answer in approval. On the most solemn occasions
of all they seem to have referred the case to the High
Priest, who then had recourse to the Urim and Thummim he carried on his breast, and to the Sevenbranched Candlestick which was so important a part
of the furniture of the Altar, and in constant requisi
tion in casting nativities and other kinds of divi
nation.
Is not he who deceives his blind old father and filches
his brother’s birthright and blessing a villain, deserv
ing of present punishment and failure in his after
enterprises, rather than worthy of God’s peculiar
favour, of man’s approval, and of success in all he
purposes or puts his hand to ?
Morally judged he is so undoubtedly, but men
judge mostly by the success or failure that follows
action; and God is not truly, as he is commonly
thought to be, a kind of celestial potentate or chief
magistrate, with powers of prison and gibbet at com
mand. Jacob himself puts the legitimacy of the con
spiracy in which he engages with his mother on the
sole footing of its success, “ Peradventure,” says he,
“ my father will feel me, and I shall seem to him a
deceiver, and I shall bring a curse upon me and not
a blessing.” But he who acquires or gains his end,
no matter what it is, does so by conforming to the
natural law of acquisition, which has no bearing on
moral principles. The accumulator may be the most
heartless and unprincipled of mortals; but if he
steadily pursue his selfish ends and his purpose of
�Genesis: Jacob.
83
gathering to himself regardless of others, God will
not only not interfere to hinder him of success, but,
it may be said, will assuredly favour him in his ob
ject ; neither will his fellow-men say aught against
him if he but grow rich and keep on the safe side of
the statute law ; nay, they will not only say nothing
against, but will even fawn on and flatter him; per
chance even speak of raising a statue to him.
The Jews, far from seeing anything dishonourable
in the conduct of Jacob, even vaunt themselves on
their descent from the unbrotherly, untruthful, and
deceitful man ?
They do ; and making God a party to their ap
proval, they have always spoken of their tutelary
Deity Jehovah as the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and
of Jacob; so that successful selfishness and untruth
have sanctified to them the unrighteous means by
which the headship of the family was obtained.
Esau, wroth with his brother, hates him in his
heart, and old Isaac having now been gathered to his
people, he says : “ When the days of mourning for my
father are over, I will slay my brother Jacob.” Does
he take any steps to make good his threat ?
We have no information of any. But Rebekah has
overheard the rash words, and sends her darling Jacob
to Padan-Aram out of the way, until the easy Esau’s
anger should be abated, and he had forgotten, or shall
we say forgiven, the wrong that had been done him.
What befals Jacob on his way to Padan-Aram ?
He has a wonderful dream.
About his unbrotherly and unfilial conduct, doubt
less ; and the bad part he has played being brought
home to him, he resolves to make amends and restitut on to the extent in his power ?
Nothing of the kind! The sun having set, and the
night coming on, he makes a pillow of one of the
stones where he is, and lays him down to sleep.
And he dreams that he sees a ladder set on the earth
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’The Pentateuch,
■with its top reaching to heaven, up and down which
the angels of Elohim come and go, Jehovah himself
standing above and over all.
What then ?
Jehovah speaks and informs the dreaming man
that he is Jehovah, the God of Abraham and of Isaac
his father; that he will give the land on which he
lies to him and to his seed, which should be as the
dust of the earth, and prove a blessing to all the
families of the earth ; “ and,” continues the narrative,
“I am with thee and will keep thee in all the places
whither thou goest, and I will bring thee again into
this land, and will not leave thee until I have done
that which I have spoken to thee of.”
Jacob awakes ?
And says : “ Surely Jehovah is in this place and I
knew it not. This is none other but the house of
God, and this is the gate of heaven.” He then sets
up the stone on which he had pillowed his head as a
pillar, pours oil on its top by way of consecrating it
and calls the spot Beth-El—House of God, the name
of the place having at first been Luz (Lux, Light).
What may be the meaning of Jacob’s act ?
Stones, as enduring things, appear to have been
almost universally objects of reverence and worship
with men in the long-continued infancy of the human
mind. As pillars they had a special significance, and
were then looked on as typical of the instrument
efficient in the wonderful faculty possessed by living
creatures of reproducing their kind. The stone
column or token set up by Jacob was neither more
nor less than the Phallic emblem, before which he
and his forefathers were wont to prostrate themselves.m
And the oil he poured on its top was a further offerm Et verisimiliter semen eorum Numini sub symbolo phallico
culto proferre, sicut mos adhuc hodie est apud indigenos Ter
rarum Bengalensium.—Conf. Levit. xviii. 21, and xx. 2.
�Genesis: Jacob.
85
ing to the divine power it represented for fertility and
increase.
Has this respect or reverence for the stone pillar
as symbol of the reproductive principle in nature yet
died out from among men ?
By no means. The Jews through the whole of their
history, even to the time when the Temple of Solomon
was built, erected pillars of wood and stone to the
gods they worshipped—to Baal and Aschera in espe
cial, before which they presented their sacrifices, and
at the feet of whose altars they poured the blood of their
victims and their drink offerings. Nor can it be said
that the sacred stone, disguised as column, obelisk, or
steeple, has yet gone out of date, though its meaning
is no longer understood. The obelisk in front of St
Peter’s at Home and the spires of our churches are
emblematic of the same thing as the stone which
Jacob set up, as the columns erected on the “ high
places ” to Baal and Aschera, and as those that stood
before Solomon’s Temple. In certain districts of India
—the country that gave birth to so many of the reli
gious ideas and to all the philosophy of the world—
at the present time every village has its sacred stone
usually set up under the shade of'a Tree, upon which
newly-married and barren women come and seat them
selves after pouring a libation of ghee or oil on its
top. Neither was the sacred stone left out of the
reckoning by our own forefathers in the olden time.
The King was not held as duly installed in his office
unless he were seated on a stone, hence our Saxon
King's-stone still to be seen railed about in the town
of Kingston-on-Thames; the Scotch King’s-stone car
ried away from Scone by Edward III., and now
preserved in Westminster Abbey under the rude chair
which served for a throne; London-stone still notable
in Gannon Street; and, to go farther afield, the black
stone of the Gaaba of Mecca, to prostrate themselves
before which come the thousands of Moslems annually
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The Pentateuch.
from their distant homes, there to have the seal affixed
as it were to their title-deed to heaven. Nor is the
anointing in many instances omitted; the consecra
tion of the king and priest is not held complete with
out the application of the chrism or holy oil; and the
poorest adherent of the Church of Rome has extreme
unction at last by way of passport for the journey from
which there is no returning. These are all plainly
lingering remnants of a symbolical worship that was
once universal in the world, and of which the mean
ingless traces might now, as it seems, advantageously
disappear from among us.
Having set up and consecrated his token, Jacob
vows a vow ?
Saying : “ If Elohe will be with me, and keep me
in the way I go, and give me bread and raiment so
that I come again to my father’s house, then shall
Jehovah be my God, and this stone which I have set
up for a token shall be God’s house.” Jacob’s God,
we are therefore to conclude, had heretofore been El,
Elohe or El-shaddai; but, were his prayer granted,
he would then take Jehovah in his stead. Here it is
impossible to overlook the hand of the late Jehovistic
writer. Jehovah was the peculiar Deity of the postexilic reforming party among the Jews, and it could
not but be of the highest moment to him and to them
to exhibit their chief patriarch as a worshipper of their
God. But Jacob, if there ever really lived such a
personage, could never have heard of the Jewish
Jehovah; El, El-Shaddai, or some other of the El
compounds was the name of the God he worshipped.
Jacob, in fact, bargains with the Supreme Being as
he had bargained with Esau for the mess of pottage
in lieu of the birthright ?
He is made to do so, at all events. If God will do
so and so, then will he, Jacob, on his part do so and
so in return. To conciliate Jehovah, the God of the
writer, Jacob is presented to us as ready to give up
�Genesis; Jacob.
87
his own old familiar God or Gods, El or Elohim.
Jacob always meets us as a dealer or bargain-maker;
but shows himself ready in the present instance to
give an equivalent, or what he seems to have thought
was an equivalent, for the benefits he expected him
self to receive. “ Of all that thou shalt give me I
will surely give the tenth unto thee,” is the con
cluding item in the compact he enters into with his
God—a clause added, we cannot doubt, by a still later
hand, one of a brotherhood who never lose sight of
their own interest.
The terms do not seem over liberal ?
As regards God the giver of AU they have no
meaning; as regards the priesthood, who here stand
for the Thou and the Thee, they are even more than
liberal.
Do tithes, of which so much has since been made,
appear to have been originally bestowed for the pecu
liar benefit of the priesthood, or the church they
represented ?
By no means. The tithe of the corn and oil and
wine which the land produced, and of the flocks and
herds of the year, was to be solemnly eaten by the
people themselves in the holy place, that they might
learn to fear Jehovah. Tithe was, in fact, to be dedi
cated to rejoicing and merry-making. Were the place
too far off which J ehovah should choose for the festive
occasion, the tithe of all was then to be turned into
money, and the money spent “on whatsoever their
souls lusted after.” (Deut. xiv. 22, et seq.) The
widow, the fatherless, and the stranger also were to
share, and the Levite, as having no possessions, was
not to be forgotten. But none of the tithe was to be
expended on occasions of mourning, nor was aught of
it to be given for the dead (Deut. xxvi. 14); i.e., it
was not to be spent on the articles of meat and drink
with which the dead among so many peoples in the
olden time were provided for the journey to the dis-
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Phe Pentateuch.
taut land, the place of disembodied spirits. Taking
the last quoted text for a guide, the clergy of the
Church of Rome might possibly see the impropriety
of levying contributions on their flocks for masses
and prayers for the dead.
Jacob proceeds on his journey and comes to Haran,
where he makes acquaintance with his kinsfolk on
the mother’s side, having halted by a well, precisely
as Isaac’s messenger had done. As with Rebekah,
so now with Rachel, the younger of Laban’s two
daughters, who comes to the well to water her father’s
sheep. Jacob is smitten with the damsel, falls in
love with her as matter of course, is presented to
Laban her father, and agrees (another bargain) to
serve seven years with him for Rachel as his wife.
This he does fairly and truly, but he is deceived by
Laban at the end of the term, he substituting his
elder daughter Leah for Rachel the younger, the be
trothed, on the bridal night. What happens when
Jacob discovers that he has been imposed on ?
He complains to Laban of the trick that has been
played him, and says : “ Did not I serve with thee for
Rachel ; wherefore then hast thou beguiled me ? ”
What says Laban to this ?
He replies that the younger must not be given in
marriage before the first-born ; but he adds : “ Fulfil
her (Leah’s) week and we will give thee this (Rachel)
for the service which thou shalt serve with me for
yet seven years.”
Jacob accepts the terms ?
He does ; fulfils his week manfully with Leah, and
Laban then gives him his second daughter to wife
also.
The Jews of old must have been less fastidious in
such matters than folks of the present day ; where in
all civilised communities a man may not only not have
two wives, and still less two sisters as wives, living
with him at the same time—which the Jews them-
�Genesis: Jacob.
89
selves in later days did not allow,—conditions all of
them reasonable enough; but a man may not now
marry the sister of a deceased wife,—a prohibition
altogether unreasonable; for not only is there no
consanguinity between the man and the woman
here which might prove a legitimate bar to their
union, but there is the strong and natural tie between
the living sister and the children—if children there
be—of her who has prematurely passed away. What
is the upshot of the double marriage ?
Leah, who has been imposed on Jacob, naturally
enough is not loved by him as he loves Rachel; but
“when Jehovah,” according to the text, “ saw that
Leah was hated, he (in requital) opened her womb ; ”
but Rachel, like Sarah, the mother of Isaac, and
Jacob’s mother Rebekah, is barren at first—for there
is incessant iteration of like incidents in these
mythical and legendary tales—and only, like the re
markable women referred to, fruitful at length.
Rachel, barren herself for a time, and envious of
her fruitful sister, in imitation of Sarah with Hagar,
doubtless, gives her handmaid Bilhah to her hus
band as a concubine or third wife, and she conceives
and bears Jacob two sons in succession.
There is more of this, is there not ?
. Plenty; Leah having ceased bearing, as she ima
gined, after having given Jacob four sons, follows her
sister’s example, and gives her handmaid Zilpah as
a second concubine or fourth wife to her husband;
and she too, like Bilhah, presents the Patriarch with
two sons one after- the other.
What farther ?
It were neither edifying nor seemly to proceed with
particulars; for the tale is now of Jacob cohabiting
with one and then with another of his wives or con
cubines, and next of Leah—fruitful again through
eating mandrakes, it is said, found for her in the
wheat-field by her son Reuben, so that she adds a
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The Pentateuch.
fifth and a sixth son. and a daughter to the four she
had already presented to her lord.
And Rachel F
All in good time ! As Jehovah by our text had seen
that Leah was hated and had opened her womb by
way of return, so does he now remember Rachel in
her yearnings for offspring: “ Give me children or else
I die,” she had said to Jacob in her passion; and
though Jacob’s anger is kindled against her, and he
has said : “ Am I in God’s stead who hath withheld
from thee the fruit of thy womb F ” he continues to
cohabit with her, and she, having partaken of her
sister’s mandrakes, becomes a mother at last, bears a
son whom she calls Joseph, and exclaims in her joy :
“ God hath taken away my reproach ; ” for the Jews
held barrenness in woman to be a sign of imperfection
and incapacity, if not even of the divine displeasure.
What is the mandrake which Reuben found for his
mother Leah, and to which such virtue is ascribed F
The Hebrew word translated mandrake in our ver
sion, is rendered “Mele mandragora” by the Greeks,
and is commonly said to be the love apple or tomato ;
but this is probably a mistake. The mandrake was a
tap-root plant of some sort; and the name is still
given by our unlettered herbalists to the root of the
white bryony—a drastic purgative, however, not cal
culated, as it might seem, to provoke appetite or aid
conception, as the Jews believed.
Jacob having now secured his wives and concubines,
and with a numerous offspring rising about him,
grows weary of his servitude to Laban and notifies
his desire to be gone—what says Laban to this F
Laban would have him tarry, and bids him name
his own terms if he will consent to do so.
What says Jacob to the offer F
He boasts of the advantage his service has already
proved to Laban : “It was little thou hadst when I
came, and now it is increased into a multitude,” is the
�Genesis : Jacob.
gi
prelude io his proposition for payment not in money
but in kind : those among the goats that were already
or that should be born ring-streaked, speckled or
spotted, and those among the sheep that were brown,
were to be for his hire.
Laban consents ?
He does : the flocks are shed and Jacob’s parti
coloured lots are driven off under the care of his sons,
three days’ journey from Laban’s white or self
coloured cattle.
What device does the artful Jacob practise now ?
He peels him white streaks in green rods of poplar,
hazel and chesnut, which he sets up in the watering
troughs of the sheep and goats; and so arranges
matters that the females shall only conceive when
they come to drink, the consequence of which is, as
said, that the young produced are mostly ringstreaked, spotted and speckled.
Jacob, the wily, does yet more than this ?
He does; and always with an especial eye to his
own advantage and something like his father-in-law
Laban’s disadvantage : he only puts his peeled rods
in the watering-troughs when the strongest of the
cattle are about to become pregnant; “ when the
cattle were feeble he put them not in,” says the text,
which continues : “ and so the feebler were Laban’s,
and the stronger Jacob’s.”
This does not seem over and above honest in Jacob ?
It is everything but honest; it is shamefully and
barefacedly dishonest. It may be condoned, indeed,
by referring to the old Jewish law of an eye for an
eye, a tooth for a tooth, for Laban had unquestionably
imposed on Jacob, and Jacob may be said to have but
paid him back in his own coin: “If my father cheat
me, I shall cheat my father,” said, or is said to have
said,, a distinguished member of the Jewish com
munity among ourselves, dealing largely in foreign
securities, in days not long gone by.
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The Pentateuch.
There is another version of this notable story, as
of so many more in the Hebrew Scriptures ?
There is, and with different, circumstances; for
Jacob is now absolved of any need to have recourse
to craft or to play the part of dishonest herdsman.
Here Jacob complains to his wives Leah and Rachel,
the sisters, that their father Laban had withdrawn
his countenance from him, had changed his wages
ten times, saying now that the speckled, and then,
that the ring-streaked cattle should be his portion;
“ but the God of my father,” he proceeds, “ has been
with me, and suffered him not to hurt me ; for if he
said : the speckled shall be thy wages, then all the
cattle bare speckled ; and if he said thus : the ringstreaked shall be thy share, then bare all the cattle
ring-streaked; and thus God hath taken away the
cattle of your father and given them to me.”
This is surely making too familiar a use of God’s
presumed interference in the affairs of men ?
It is in strict conformity, however, with antique
Jewish notions that God took immediate part in even
the most minute and intimate relations of their lives;
and, farther, that the Supreme had favourites, irre
spective of merit, among the children of men. The
old J ewish writers had no conception of a world, and
of man as one of its elements, ruled by great universal,
eternal, and necessary laws, expression to the culti
vated mind of to-day of the power and true providence
Jacob has a dream besides, that may have put him
on the natural way of securing ring-streaked and
speckled cattle for himself without having recourse
to the questionable procedure of the peeled rods ?
The angel of Jehovah, he tells his sister-wives,
spake with him in a dream, saying : “ Jacob ! and I
said : Here am I. And he said: See, all the rams
which leap the cattle are ring-streaked, speckled and
griseled, and I have seen all that Laban doeth unto
�Genesis• Jacob.
93
thee ; I am the God of Beth-El, where thou anointedst
the pillar and vowedst a vow unto me. Now, arise ;
get thee out from this land, and return into the land
of thy kindred.”
Eave we any fact that might help to explain the
myth of the peeled rods used by Jacob in securing
the increase of his part among the flocks ?
It is not uninteresting to observe that the figure
of the man who holds the scales with one hand in
the sign of Libra on some of the oldest of the Zodiacs
has a streaked rod or rule in the other. Now, Sep
tember, the month in which the sun entered Libra in
former times, is that also in which the ewes begin to
conceive; whence it has been conjectured that the
Hebrew writer was taking hints from the pictorial
calendar for the composition of his story.
What say the wives to the communication of
Jehovah, which may, nevertheless, very well reflect
Jacob’s own waking thoughts and aspirations ?
Seeing, as they say, that they “ have no longer any
portion or inheritance in their father’s house and are
counted of him as strangers, for he hath sold us and
quite devoured also our money; for all the riches
which God hath taken from our father is ours and our
children’s ; therefore whatsoever God hath said unto
thee, do.”
Laban certainly has not shown himself a strictly
honest man in his dealings with the husband of his
daughters ; but they in turn seem to show little of the
love and devotion naturally to be looked for in chil
dren to their parent ?
This is true: they forget the long years' through
which their father fed and housed and clothed them.
In conformity with the notions of their age, however,
they are made to ascribe the increasing poverty of
their father to the displeasure, and the growing
wealth of their husband to the favour of their God.
The device of the rods, were God like the impar-
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The Pentateuch.
tial judge we look for among ourselves, would have
brought punishment on Jacob, not yielded him re
ward ?
Premeditated and deliberate dishonesty is the
worst of dishonesties, and selfishness is a mean and
sorry vice ; but the punishment and the reward are
with man, not with God, save as he is represented by
man.
Jacob hearkens to the counsel of his wives ?
He does forthwith: setting his family on camels
and stealing away without a word to his father-inlaw Laban, who has gone sheep-shearing and hears
nothing of the flight for several days, he turns his
face towards Gilead with all he has, and there arrived
he pitches his tents.
Beside what might be called her own, has not
Rachel taken some things that did not rightfully
belong to her ?
She has “ stolen the Images that were her
father’s.”
Images in the possession of Laban, descendant in
the direct line from Nahor Abraham’s brother, father
of Leah and Rachel the wives of Jacob, the son of
Isaac, the son of Abraham ! This is unlooked for in
formation. The man must have been an Idolater ?
The story seems plainly to say as much. But were
ever the Hebrews, either then or for centuries after
wards, anything but Fetish worshippers ?
They declared emphatically in later times that they
were the chosen people of Jehovah, their God; and
their descendants, exiles from the land that was pro
mised to them as an inheritance for ever, and scattered
over the face of the habitable globe, still believe them
selves to be so. This is wonderful enough, all things
considered; but still more wonderful is the fact, that
the European communities have continued so long to
take them at their word, and to look on them as wor
shippers of the One God.
�Genesis: Jacob.
95
Laban, absent from home, hears nothing of the flight
of Jacob and his wives for three days ; but informed
of it at length, and missing his property and his house
hold gods, he sets out in pursuit seven days’
journey, intending recovery doubtless of the things
abstracted, if not more serious reprisals. Before
coming up with the fugitives on Mount Gilead, how
ever, he has a communication from Elohim—God.
God, it is said, visited Laban the Aramaean in a
dream by night, and admonished him to speak neither
good nor bad to Jacob, so that when he overtook him
at length, heonly ventured to reproach him with having
stolen away with his daughters as captives taken with
the sword, and adds : Though thou wouldst be gone,
because thou sore longedst for thy father’s house, yet
wherefore hast thou stolen my gods ?
Jacob, unaware of this particular theft, denies it:
“With whomsoever thou findest thy gods,” he says,
“ let him not live.” So Laban searches for his gods
throughout the encampment, but in vain; for Rachel,
the thief, has secreted them in the camels’ furniture
and sat down upon them ; and as she excuses herself
from rising because of a certain natural visitation—
the nature of which she is not so delicate as not to
explain—the gods cannot be found.
This gives Jacob an opportunity to turn round on
Laban, and to be wroth with him ?
An opportunity he is not slow to improve : “ What
is my trespass,” says he, “ what is my sin that thou
hast so hotly pursued after me.” Boasting of his long
and faithful service, he says roundly to his father-inlaw : “ Except the God of my father, the God of
Abraham and the fear of Isaac had been with me,
thou hadst surely sent me now empty away. God
hath seen my affliction and the labour of my hands,
and rebuked thee yester-night.”
How could Jacob know this ?
There is no difficulty, the familiar terms considered
�96
The Pentateuch.
upon which the Patriarchs were with their God, who
may have informed him !
Laban is appeased, and says to Jacob: Now there
fore, let us make a covenant, I and thou, and let it be
for a witness between me and thee. What does
Jacob ?
He takes a stone and sets it up for a pillar, and the
two parties, heaping stones about it, call it Galeed
and Mizpah, for it is to be at once a witness and a
landmark between them, Laban stipulating for good
treatment for his daughters, and that no other wives
should be taken by Jacob to afflict them, and both
agreeing that neither he nor Jacob should pass
beyond the heap to do each other harm. Laban then
kisses his sons and his daughters, blesses them, and
returns to his place, whilst Jacob offers sacrifice upon
the mount where he is encamped.
What is the next interesting incident in the history
of the patriarch Jacob ?
Proceeding on his way and meeting “ the angels
of_, God ” in a place he calls Mahanai'm, he thence
dispatches messengers to his brother Esau whom he
had so grievously wronged, then dwelling in Seir in
the land of Edom, and bids them say “ unto my Lord
Esau” that “ his servant Jacob ” is in his territory
and hopes to find grace in his sight.
Well ?
S
The messengers return to Jacob and report to him
that . his brother Esau, informed of his coming, is
on his way to meet him with a great retinue of men,
four hundred in number.
And Jacob ?
Conscience-stricken and fearing his brother’s anger,
when he hears of the great attendance, he divides his
people and his flocks into two ; lest Esau coming with
hostile purpose smite the one company, then the other
should escape.
What more ?
�Genesis : Jacob and Esau.
gj
He prays to his God, as men mostly do in straits
and difficulties ; reminds him of the promises already
made and of the order to return into his own country
now in course of being obeyed, and owns himself un
worthy of all the favour shown him. “ With my
staff,” says he, “ I passed over this Jordan, and now
I am become two bands; deliver me, I pray thee,
from the hand of my brother Esau, for I fear him,
lest he come and smite me and the mother with
the children. And thou saidst I will surely do thee
good, and make thy seed as the sand of the sea which
cannot be numbered for multitude.”
Jacob must needs think that his God required to
be reminded of his promises ?
It plainly enough appears so ; but Jacob’s idea of
God was very different from that of the enlightened
of the present day ; although not very different per
haps from that still entertained by the vulgar and
uninformed.
To conciliate his brother Esau, Jacob makes ready
a handsome present in conformity with oriental
usage ?
A very handsome present, indeed, which he sends
on before, he himself following at the head of the
train with the handmaids and their children
in the van, Leah and her children next, Rachel
and Joseph last of all—the least cherished there
fore in front, the dearest in the rear, lest Esau
should prove hostile.
How does Jacob comport himself in presence of his
brother ?
Lifting up his eyes and seeing Esau coming on
with his numerous escort, be advances and “ bows
himself seven times to the ground as he draws neai’
his brother.”
And Esau ?
“Esau ran to meet his brother Jacob” who had
bargained away from him his birthright and stolen
H
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The Pentateuch.
from him his father’s blessing, “ and embraced him,
and fell upon his neck and kissed him, and they
wept.”
Esau must have been of a kindly and forgiving
nature ?
Surely he was so, or he is made to appear so by
the writer who tells the tale ; generous too, was Esau,
and open and honourable. “ Who are all these
belonging to thee,” he inquires of his brother ; and
his brother answers : “ The children which God hath
graciously given thy servantand they all bowed
themselves ; and after came Rachel and Joseph, and
they bowed themselves. And he inquired further :
“ What meanest thou by all this drove which I met ?”
And Jacob answered : “ These are to find grace in the
sight of my lord.”
And Esau, to the cringing and fair-faced show of
his brother ?
Answers : “ I have enough, my brother, keep that
thou hast unto thyself.”
To which Jacob ?
Replies : “ Nay, I pray thee ; if now I have found
grace in thy sight then receive my present at my
hand ; for I have seen thy face as though I had seen
the face of God, and thou wast pleased with me—
take, I pray thee my present (not blessing as in our
English version) that is brought to thee ; God hath
dealt graciously with me, and I have all things. And
he urged him, and he took it.”
Jacob belords his brother still further, does he not?
After putting his brother on a level with his God
there was little room for' further flattery, yet he uses
such phrases as these : “ My lord knoweth ; ” “ Let
my lord, I pray“ Let me find grace in the sight
of my lord.”
The brothers part good friends and reconciled ?
They do; Esau returns to Seir ; and Jacob wending
on his way comes to Shalem in the land of Canaan,
�Genesis: 'Jacob wrestles with Elohe.
99
■where he buys part of a field and erects a Pillar
which he calls El-Elohe-Israel—a compound of the
names by which the God of the primitive Semitic
tribes possessing Palestine was known.
There is a notable and most extraordinary incident
met with in the middle of the narrative of the meeting
between Jacob and Esau, but connected with the
name of Israel, which we have just seen applied to
the pillar erected by Jacob ?
A very notable and to modern apprehension extra
ordinary incident indeed. As Jacob is journeying
towards Seir to meet his brother, he is “ left alone ;
and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking
of the day; and when the man saw that he prevailed
not against Jacob, he touched the hollow of his thigh,
so that the hollow of Jacob’s thigh was out of joint
as he wrestled with him ; and he said: Let me go, for
the day breaketh ! And Jacob said : I will not let
thee go unless thou bless me. And the man said:
What is thy .name; and he said Jacob. And the
man said: Thy name shall be called no more Jacob,
but Israel (Prince of God), for as a prince hast
thou power with God and with men, and hast pre
vailed.”
Does not Jacob also question his opponent as to
who or what he is ?
Jacob says: “ Tell me, I pray thee, thy name,” and
his adversary answers: “Wherefore is it that thou
dost ask after my name ?” But Jacob’s question was
most pertinent; for in days when there were believed
to be many gods it was very necessary to know who
the One was with whom intercourse was had ; and
this could best be done through the name and title of
the individual.
Jacob’s opponent does not tell his name nor say
who he is ?
He does not; but owning himself in some sort
worsted in the encounter, only escaping from Jacob’s
�IOO
The Pentateuch.
grip indeed by touching a tender part of his body,
he blesses Jacob, who calls the place where the en
counter happened Peniel (the face of God) ; for says
he : “I have seen God face to face and my life is pre
served.” Jacob’s opponent would, therefore, seem to
have been no man, as said in the text, but El, Elohe,
or God himself in person.
. What interpretation can be put upon this strange
and obviously mythical tale ?
More than one has been attempted ; but its sense
has mostly remained to orthodox expositors as dark
as the darkest of the night in which the wrestling
match is said to have occurred. From the narrative,
Jacob evidently supposes that it was his God El with
whom he had been striving, though to our modern
notions the idea of man struggling with God in flesh
and blood seems even too extravagant to have been
possibly entertained. Jacob, however, does say that
he had seen God face to face ; so that on this point
there can be no question. It is then to be noted that
the opponent desires to be let go when “ the day
begins to break ; ” and that “ the sun rises ” on Jacob
as he passes over Peniel halting, yet with a blessing
from the encounter. These particulars, aided by a
small amount-of mythological knowledge, give a key
to the mystery involved in the tale : It is allegorical
of the struggle between Light and Darkness, i.e.,
between the beneficent and the adverse aspects of
Nature, combined in the Hebrew conception of the
Deity. The tale is probably a fragment of a larger
document, dissevered from the rest of the record which
told of the Light or Sun, Moon and Planet worship
followed by the far-off forefathers of the Hebrew race,
before they had swarmed away from the hills and
valleys of the high lands of Armenia and Mesopo
tamia. It has no connection, save by inference, with
anything that has gone before, nor with anything that
comes after in the Hebrew Scriptures—not even with
�Genesis: Jacob the Wrestler.
ioi
the change of Jacob’s name, for that had been men
tioned already.
The hollow of Jacob’s thigh is said to have been
put out of joint in one part of the narrative (xxxii.
25) ; in another (v. 32) it is a sinew which is said
to have shrunk—“the sinew which is upon the hollow
of the thigh ; therefore,” it is added, “ the children
of Israel eat not of the sinew which shrank unto this
day.”
The meaning of this, too, must be allegorical ?
No doubt of it. The part which the children of
Israel “ eat not unto this day” is neither the great
sciatic nerve, as is sometimes said, nor any tendon
connected with a muscle.
Have we not a story akin to this in what is called
the Pagan Mythology ?
We have—in the myth of the wrestling bout that
takes place between the Tyrian Heracles and Zeus, in
which Heracles, like Jacob, comes off halting with a
dislocation of the thigh. But why the story here
should be characterised as pagan and called mytho
logical and incredible, whilst the Hebrew tale is
looked on as sacred and held worthy of belief, is
not so obvious. The two myths have doubtless a
common origin. The Tyrian hero, the god in his
favourable aspect, contends with the Father of gods
and men in his adverse aspect, precisely as Jacob—
Israel the wrestler, assumed as symbolical of light,
contends with Elohe in his quality of darkness, or the
night. But Phoenicians, Tyrians, Canaanites, Israel
ites, &c., were all alike children of the same Semitic
stock, spoke closely allied dialects of the same lan
guage, and in their religious ideas, rites and ceremo
nies were at one.
There is another version of the wrestling match
between Hercules and an adversary, which throws
additional light on the Hebrew fragment ?
It is that in which Hercules contends with Antaeus.
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The Pentateuch.
The sun—Hercules, wrapt in the lion’s skin, had
his domicile in the zodiacal sign Leo; Anteus had
his in that of Aquarius. But Leo is the sign in which
the sun is supreme, and summer is in the ascendant;
Aquarius the sign in which the sun is at the lowest
point of his annual course, and winter rules the year.
Hercules’ adversary is aptly named Antaeus, Opponent,
-—his opposite or other self, in ceaseless contention
with whom he is alternately the victor and the van
quished, the light now getting the better of the dark,
the dark in turn becoming superior to the light, but
each destined ere long again and in endless succes
sion to yield to the other.
What happens after the brothers Jacob and Esau
have taken their several ways ?
Dinah, the daughter of Jacob by Leah, is violated
by Shechem, son of Hamor the Hivite, who, however,
inconsistently as it seems, then makes suit through
his father to Jacob to have the damsel to wife.
Does Jacob agree to the proposal ?
We have no account of his objecting, but his sons
are wroth with Shechem when they hear of the wrong
he has done to Dinah their sister. Nevertheless, to
the proposals made for reparation by marriage, they
answer deceitfully, and say they cannot give their
sister to one that is uncircumcised, but if every male
of the Hivites will consent to circumcision, then say
they we will give our daughters to you, and we will
take your daughters to us, and we will dwell with you
and become one people.
The Hivites agree to the terms; do Jacob and
his sons keep faith with them ?
Far from it; there is small account of good faith
between man and man in the legendary and mythical
accounts we have of these early times. On the third
day, when the circumcised Hivites are sore from the
operation, Simeon and Levi, two of Jacob’s sons,
“ take each man his sword and come upon the city
�Genesis : 'Jacob and the Hivites.
103
boldly and slay the males,” despoiling and carrying
off all it contained in the shape of cattle and other
wealth, and leading the women and their little ones
into captivity.
Deception and cruelty seem to have been very
much at home with Jacob and his family ?
So it plainly appears. Jacob, however, is not alto
gether satisfied with the daring act of his sons. But
it is not with their faithlessness and barbarity that he
quarrels; it is because by what they have done they
have made him “ to stink ” among the inhabitants of
the land, the Canaanites and Perizzites; and “ I,
being few in number (he says), they will gather
themselves together against me and slay me and my
house.”
* There is happily an air of improbability about this
story which seems to take it out of the sphere of his
tory, is there not ? .
There is, and not only of improbability, but of im
possibility. Two men, even with every advantage of
arms, could scarcely enter the smallest hamlet, slay
all the males, load themselves with the spoil, drive off
the flocks and herds, and carry away the women and
children with impunity. There are two accounts,
moreover, of this business in the same chapter of
Genesis, one of which may be read complete without
a word of the slaughter and spoil which figure in the
other; and, as that seems to be the older record, let
us also trust that it is the more truthful of the two.n
What incidents worth noting occur in Jacob’s on
ward journey ?
Ordered by his God to go up to Beth-el and there
to erect a pillar, he commands his household and all
who are with him to put away the strange gods that
are among them.
u See Bernstein’s Origin of the Legends of Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacob for a new and probably correct explanation of this
fable.
�104
'The Pentateuch.
This is an extraordinary order !
How should
Jacob, the familiar of his God and father of the
Israelites, have suffered strange gods in his family ?
But they obey ?
They give Jacob all the strange gods that were in
their hand, and their rings also, and he buries them
under the Oak that was by Shechem ?
Jacob and his family would seem from this to have
been, like Laban and his daughters, idolaters ?
That they were and did long continue to be so there
can be no doubt. The strange gods were, of course,
household images of small size, such as Rachel had.
stolen from her father Laban.
But the rings were not gods ?
No ; but rings of all kinds—ear-rings, nose-rings,
finger-rings, bracelets, anklets—were amulets dr
fetiches, emblematic of the Yoni or female element
in the reproductive power of nature—of which
the cosmical snake—the symbol of eternity—
with its tail in its mouth, was the prototype. The
Egyptian divinities are always represented with what
is called the Key of the Nile in one hand—a circle or
loop with a cross below—the circle, sign of eternity,
the cross significant of the four great epochs in the
flight of time, or of the moments when the sun, in
his annual round, crossed the equator at the vernal
and autumnal equinoxes, and attained his highest
summer and lowest winter meridian altitudes.
The place where the strange gods and the rings
are buried has also its significance, has it not ?
No doubt it has; they were buried under the Oak
as a propitiatory offering to the life-giving principle
in nature, universally typified among the earlier
races of mankind by trees.
Jacob comes to Padan Aram, and there God, as it
is said, appears to him again, informs him that he is
El-Scliaddai — God the mighty ; tells him that his
name shall not any more be Jacob, but Israel; bids
�Genesis: 'Jacob.
I05
him be fruitful and multiply • says that a nation and a
company of nations should be of him, and that kings
should come out of his loins, whilst the land that had
been promised to Abraham and Isaac should be con
firmed to him and to his progeny for ever. “ And
then,” continues the narrative, “ God went up from
him in the place where he talked with him.”
Have we not had much of this story already, with
certain strange accessories ?
Certainly; where we had the account of the
wrestling match that took place in the night season,
and only ended with the dawning of the day; when
Jacob’s name was changed to Israel, &c.
Can man,*reasonable and cultivated man, really
and truly accept such tales as inspired revelations
from God, or as guides to piety and purity of life ?
They are, undoubtedly, accepted as revelations, and
still believed in as actual occurrences, though the end
to be served by them in the direction indicated is not
so obvious. To the emancipated from superstitious
beliefs, however, it is inconceivable how they should
still pass current in the world, or be received as sup
plying examples that are not rather to be shunned
than followed. Had not men determined beforehand
that they had come from sacred and inspired sources,
their details and tendencies would assuredly never
have led to the conclusion that they had had any such
hallowed origin as that ascribed to them.
Reading the Hebrew Scriptures as thus, with
unsealed eyes, and by the light of collateral know
ledge, mythological and other, are we not forced on
conclusions as to the origin, worth, and real signifi
cance of these ancient writings, very different from
such as are generally entertained ?
So much follows of necessity; and we are then
left at liberty, from the book of nature and our own
minds, to form nobler and more worthy conceptions
of God and his Providential rule of the world than
�106
The Pentateuch.
any that are to be gathered from Hebrew sources;
and, further, to think that better books than the Bible
may be found to aid in the education of the young. ■
Journeying from Beth-el, what happens ?
Rachel is taken in labour, and dies in giving birth
to her son Benjamin; then there is a foul tale of
Reuben in connection with Bilhah, one of his father’s
wives or concubines; lastly, Jacob visits his father
Isaac in Hebron, where the old man dies at an in
credible age, and is buried by his sons Jacob and
Esau. Jacob then continues to dwell in the land of
Canaan, in which his father was a stranger, and
Joseph, his son by Rachel, now seventeen years old,
tends the flocks of his father along with his brothers,
the sons of Leah, Bilhah and Zilpah.
Joseph is not liked by his brothers ?
No,; Joseph as the elder-born of Rachel, Jacob’s
first love, and because he was the child of his old age,
“ was more loved by Israel than all his children.”
This naturally begat jealousy and dislike among the
others ; and then, as we are told that Joseph “ brought
to their father evil reports of his brothers,” this
assuredly would not make them love him any the
more.
Joseph has a dream besides that still further
inflames the dislike of his brothers ?
He dreams that as he and his brothers were binding
sheaves in the field, his sheaf stood upright, and all
his brothers’ sheaves stood round about and made
obeisance to his sheaf.
Has he not yet another dream P
He dreams further that the sun, moon, and eleven
stars made obeisance to him ; and when he tells this
dream to his father he is rebuked by his parent, who
says, identifying himself, Rebekah, and his eleven sons
with the sun, moon, and stars of the dream : “What
is this dream that thou hast dreamed ? Shall I and
thy mother and thy brethren indeed come to bow
�Genesis: yose'ph.
107
down ourselves to thee ?” Jacob, nevertheless,
“observes the saying,” and Joseph is naturally hated
more than ever by the other members of the family.
The Jews of old thought more of dreams than do
men of culture in the present day ?
Than men of culture, certainly, though dreams still
puzzle and terrify the ignorant and superstitious
vulgar. The Jews of old thought that “ dreams
were from God;” they generally interpreted them
literally, though sometimes also allegorically; and
the great bulk of their presumed communications
from God appear to have been receivedin dreams and
visions of the night, a mode of communication little
trusted at the present time, wherein men rely more
and more advantageously on knowledge and waking
thoughts than on sleeping fancies.
The further account, leading to the catastrophe
that is in preparation, informs us that Israel sends
Joseph to Shechem as a spy upon his other sons : “ Go,
I pray thee,” says Jacob, “ see whether it is well
with thy brothers, and well with the flocks, and
bring me word again.” A delegate of the kind
would not be apt to be over well received ?
Hardly; and the brothers, when they saw him afar
off, even before he came near them, conspired against
him to slay him. “ Here cometh this man of dreams,”
say they; “ and now let us slay him and cast him into
one of the pits, and we will say some evil beast hath
devoured him, and we shall see what will become of
his dreams.”
Reuben, however, interposes, and bids the rest
“ shed no blood, but cast him into a pit,” intending
thus, it would seem, to save his life and restore him
to his father ?
According to a second account it is Judah who
interferes : “ What profit,” says he, “ will it be if
we slay our brother and conceal his blood; come let
us sell him to the Ishmaelites (a troop of whom,
�io8
Phe Pentateuch.
going towards Egypt, have come in sight) ; let not
our hand be upon him, for he is our brother.”
There appear to be two accounts of this bad busi
ness, drawn.from different documents, and jumbled
together, as in so many other parts of the Jewish sacred
writings. In one it is Reuben who saves Joseph
alive ; in another it is Judah. Here it is Judah and
the brethren who sell Joseph to Ishmaelites, there
it is Midianitish merchants who draw him out of the
pit and sell him to Ishmaelites, who carry him to
Egypt; and again it is Midianites who sell him
in Egypt to Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh; and
yet again it is Ishmaelites who effect the sale.
What inference may be drawn from such diversity
of statement ?
That the idea of supernatural inspiration' in con
nection with the Jewish Scriptures ought to be aban
doned, and the matter seen as it must needs be in
fact—viz. : that the compiler or editor is here, as
elsewhere, drawing now from one document or tradi
tion, and then from another, and that with the super
stitious respect for the letter which characterised the
Jews of old, and without a show of critical discrimi
nation, he mixes up the several accounts into what he
intended should be a continuous and consistent nar
rative.
Reuben, who is not made a party to the sale of his
brother, returns to the pit, and “behold, Joseph was
not there ! and he rent his clothes and came to his
brethren and said : The child is not, and I, whither
shall I go I ” The brothers take little heed of his
wailing, but proceed as they had purposed ?
They take Joseph’s coat of many colours, and
having killed a kid, they dipped the coat in the blood,
and brought it to their father, who knows it, and in
his grief exclaims: “It is my son’s coat; an evil
beast hath devoured him I” So he rends his clothes,
puts sackcloth on his loins, mourns for his son many
�Genesis : Judah and Tamar.
109
days, and refusing to be comforted, says : “ I will go
down into the grave unto my son mourning.” A true
and beautiful picture of natural affection sorely tried,
and doubtless from the hand of one among the earliest
of the true poets whose writings have come down to
us 1
We have several particulars now related, not always
of the most delicate and moral kind when viewed in
the light of the more advanced ideas of delicacy and
morality of the present day ?
Particulars which, nevertheless, are interesting from
an antiquarian and ethnological point of view, and
important as marking intervals of time, and showing
how little faith is to be attached to many of the nar
ratives in the Hebrew Bible as embracing historical
truth's.
What are these ?
Joseph is seventeen years old when he is sold into
Egypt; and as Leah bears Issachar and Zebulon be
tween the birth of Judah and that of Joseph, Judah
must have been about twenty-four years of age at this
time. Judah now takes Shuah to himself as wife,
and she bears first one son, Er, then another, Onan,
and yet a third, Shelah. Er, Judah’s first-born, is
old enough to have a wife given him—Tamar; Er
dies (he is said to have been “ wicked in the
sight of the Lord, and so the Lord slew him”).
Judah desires his second son Onan to take his late
brother’s wife to himself, in conformity with the usage
of the country, and raise up seed to his brother. But
Onan does not like the match; and though he obeys
his father in so far as the union went, he resolves,
and so acts, as to raise no seed to his brother. This,
it is said, “ displeased the Lord, and he slew him also.”
Tamar, for the second time a widow, ought now to
have been given in marriage to Shelah, Judah’s third
son; but she had proved so disastrous a bargain to
Er and Onan, that Judah must have hesitated to ven-
�I IO
The Pentateuch.
ture on her with his sole remaining son. Tama? was
dissatisfied when she sees that Shelah, though grown
to man’s estate, is not given to her as her husband ;
and she, the widow of two of his sons, resolves to
seduce Judah himself. With this view she casts off
her widow’s weeds, veils herself, shows herself in an
open place as an harlot, and is addressed by Judah.
“ What wilt thou give me?” says Tamar to Judah
when solicited by him. “ I will give thee a kid from
the flock,” he replies. “ Give me a pledge till thou
send it.” “ What pledge shall I give thee ?” “ Thy
signet and thy bracelets, and the staff that is in thine
hand.” And he gave her all. Immediately after her
incestuous intercourse with Judah, Tamar resumes
her weeds, and when Judah sends the kid by his mes
senger desiring to have back the pledges he had left
with her, she is nowhere to be found.
What does Judah ?
He desires the kid to be disposed of, or given
away, nevertheless, “lest,” as he says, “he should be
shamed.”
What next in this edifying story ?
Judah is by and by informed that Tamar has
played the harlot, and is with child; and be says :
“ Bring her forth and let her be burnt.”
What does Tamar ?
When brought forth she shows the pledges she had
had, and says : “ By the man whose these are am I
with child; discern, I pray thee, whose are these—
the signet, the bracelets, the staff.”
And Judah ?
Acknowledging the pledge, he declares that she has
been “ more righteous than himself, because that he
had not given her to wife -to Shelah his son.”
Can we as moral beings conceive accounts of pro
ceedings such as these to have been written under
the inspiration of God for the instruction and im
provement of mankind ?
�Genesis: Joseph.
Ill
It is impossible.
Or that God has in especial favour the men who
are guilty of doings such as these, and the race who
think them not unworthy of a place among their
sacred annals as a people ?
This, too, even on the vulgar showing, is impos
sible.
Or that we do well in putting the book which con
tains such foul tales into the hands of our children as
a means of furthering them in a knowledge of that
wherein virtue and propriety of conduct consist r
It is only brutal ignorance, blind bigotry, and gross
superstition that can say it is well to do so. God
has no favourites among his creatures, or, if he has,
they are such alone as conform themselves to his laws
—physical and moral. Through the understanding
and higher moral nature wherewith man is endowed,
God proclaims his condemnation of acts that are only
worthy of the beasts of the field. But these tales are
from the traditions of ages barbarous and long gone
by, and only committed to writing in much more
modern times,—traditions descending, it may be, from
the Stone Age of the world, when men had no better
tools than such as were poorly supplied by chipped
flints, when they ate one another, and grilled and
split the long bones of their sires for the marrow they
contained. '
Joseph is brought to Egypt by the merchants or
slave dealers, and sold to an officer of the Pharaoh,
Potiphar by name, whose favourable opinion he forth
with secures. by his good conduct and intelligence.
Attempted to be seduced, and in her anger falsely
accused by Potiphar’s wife, however, he falls into
disgrace and is thrown into prison. Here, again, the
propriety of his demeanour wins him the notice and
confidence of the keeper of the prison; and having
successfully interpreted the dreams of two of Pharaoh’s
servants who had been put in ward for some offence,
�I 12
The Pentateuch.
he is brought under the notice of Pharaoh as a seer,
Pharaoh himself having dreamed a two-fold dream,
which none of the magicians or wise men of Egypt
could interpret. Summoned to the presence, the
Pharaoh tells his dream to Joseph, and he, from- its
tenor, interprets it as a notice from God of the coming
on of seven years of plenty, to be followed by seven
years of dearth. Joseph is careful to take no credit
to himself for his dream-interpreting powers ; in con
formity with Jewish ideas, he says he had but given
“ the answer of peace which he himself had received
from God.”
The Pharaoh accepts Joseph’s interpretation of his
dream ?
He does, and is so much pleased with the inter
preter, that he takes him into his counsels ; appoints
him as head over his house; takes the ring from his
own finger, and puts it upon Joseph’s ; arrays him
in fine linen; hangs a gold chain about his neck ;
gives him to wife Asenath, daughter of the Priest of*
On, and makes him ruler over all the land of Egypt.
“ Only in the throne will I be greater than thou,”
adds the confiding sovereign ruler of the land.
This is a great and sudden rise ?
A great and sudden rise, indeed; and all on the
faith of the still untested truth of the interpretation
of a dream ! Needful, however, as an introduction to
the narrative that follows, viz.: The arrival of Israel
and his family in Egypt, in consequence of the famine
that conveniently prevailed at this time in the land of
Canaan; the touching incidents of the meeting of
Joseph with his unnatural brethren, and the retri
butive justice which the writer would show to wait
on evil, and the reward that follows well-doing.
The years of plenty, succeeded by the years of
famine, as predicted by Joseph from the Pharoah’s
dream, follow, of course ?
Of course they do; and Joseph gathers store of
�113
Genesis: 'Joseph.
Corn, as the sand of the sea, into all the granaries of
Egypt'; so that, when the years of famine arrive,
though dearth prevails in all the neighbouring lands,
there is bread in Egypt. When the famine begins to
be felt, Joseph unlocks his stores, and is liberal enough
to sell, not only to the natives of the country, but, in
aid of the story, to strangers also. Hearing that
there is corn in Egypt, Jacob says to his sons, “Why
look ye one upon another ? Behold, I have heard
that there is corn in the land of Egypt; get ye down
thither, and buy for us from thence that we may live
and not die.”
The sons depart ?
Ten of them ; for Jacob will not part with Benja
min, his youngest son, “ lest, peradventure, mischief
befall him.” They arrive in Egypt; and Joseph
“knew his brethren, but they knew not him.” They
bow themselves with their faces to the earth before
the great Governor of Egypt; and Joseph, remember
ing his dreams, when he "sees them in this position,
and, doubtless, not entirely forgetting the cruel usage
he had had at their hands, then speaks roughly to
them, asks them whence they came, and says to them,
“ Ye are spies ; to see the nakedness of the land are
ye come.”
They excuse themselves ?
“ Thy servants are no spies,” say they, “ but twelve
brethren, the sons of one man in the land of Canaan;
and, behold, the youngest is this day with our father,
and one is not.”
“ By the life of Pharaoh,” answers Joseph, “ ye
shall not go hence, except your youngest brother come
hither. Send one of you,” according to one version
of the tale (for here we have two as usual—“ let one
of you be bound in prison,” says the other version),
“ whilst the rest carry corn for the famine of their
houses, but bring your youngest brother to me, so
shall your words be verified, and ye shall not die.”
I
�114
The Pentateuch.
Then come the compunctious visitings upon the
brethren for what they had done to Joseph ; and still,
in the presence of the Governor, and speaking in their
own tongue, they accuse one another of their hardbeartedness, notwitting that Joseph understood them,
“for he spake to them by an interpreter.”
Simeon is bound as hostage, and the rest depart
with provision for the way, their sacks full of corn,
and the money of each returned, tied up in the mouth
of his sack. They reach home, and narrate to their
father all that has befallen them ?
And communicate the conditions on which Simeon
is to be released ; but Jacob refuses absolutely to part
with Benjamin: “ My son shall not go down with
you; for his brother is dead, and he is left alone; if
mischief befal him by the way, then shall ye bring
down my grey hairs with sorrow to the grave.” But,
the famine continuing, when they had eaten up the
corn they had brought out of Egypt, Jacob bids them
go again and buy a little food.
The sons consent to go ?
Only on condition that Benjamin is suffered to go
with them : “ Slay my two sons,” says Reuben to his
father, “ if I bring him not to thee again.” “ Send
the lad with me,” says Judah, “ and we will arise and
go; that we may live and not die, both we and thou
and our little ones ; I will be surety for him ; of my
hand shalt thou require him.”
Jacob yields to their entreaties, and to sore
necessity ?
“ If it must be so now,” says the old man, “do this :
take of the best fruits in the land, and carry down
the man a present,—a little balm, and a little honey,
spices and myrrh, nuts and almonds; and take double
money in your hand; the money that was brought
again in the mouth of your sacks carry again in your
hand ; peradventure it was an oversight; take also
your brother, and arise, go again unto the man, and
�Genesis : Joseph.
115
God Almighty give you mercy before him, that he
may send away your other brother and Benjamin : if
I am bereaved of my children, I am bereaved ! ”
They depart, and stand a second time before
Joseph. When he sees Benjamin among them, he
orders the ruler of his house to bring his brethren
home, and to slay and make ready; for these men,
says he, shall dine with me at noon ?
Brought into Joseph’s house, they are much afraid,
because of the money they had found returned in
their sacks ; they excuse themselves to the steward;
inform him of the money they had found, and show
both this and that which they had now brought to
buy more corn.
The steward consoles them ?
Saying : “ Peace be to you ; fear not; your God
and the God of your father hath given you treasure
in your sacks. I had your money; and he brought
Simeon out unto them.”
They make ready the present they had provided
for Joseph, and bow themselves to the earth before
him, when he comes home. Joseph asks kindly alter
their welfare, and says: “ Is your father well, the old
man of whom ye spake, is he yet alive ?” “ Thy ser
vant our father is yet alive, he is in good health.”
And lifting up his eyes, and seeing Benjamin, his
mother’s son, he asks : “ Is this your younger brother
of whom ye spake ? And he said, God be gracious
unto thee, my son ! And he made haste, for his
bowels yearned upon his brother; and he sought
where to weep • and he entered into his chamber and
wept there. And he washed his face and went out
and refrained himself.”
Prosperity and his wonderful rise in the world had
not hardened Joseph’s heart, as so often happens ?
Joseph is an impersonation of goodness and for
giveness, drawn by a master’s hand in simple and
beautiful words. But it is a tale such as belongs not
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to the age of the world with which the name of
Joseph,. the son of Jacob, is connected. It is the
conception of an Isaiah or a Micah, or of a mind
more delicate and refined than either of these-—a
beautiful and touching story, unsurpassed in its
treatment and its pathos; a story over which our
eyes were wont to fill whiles we were children, as
they fill now, after seventy years and more, perhaps,
have passed over the heads of the men !
Joseph would seem to have taken some little plea
sure in frightening his naughty brothers ; for he bids
his steward put their money into the sacks of all as
before, and his own silver drinking-cup, beside the
money, into the sack of the youngest, so as to make
it appear that the cup had been stolen. Dismissed
on their way homewards, and outside the city gates,
Joseph says to his steward : Up, follow after the men ;
and when thou dost overtake them, say unto them :
Wherefore have ye rewarded evil for good ? Is not
this the cup in which my lord drinketh, and whereby
indeed he divineth ?
Joseph, it would therefore seem, was not only an
interpreter of dreams, but a diviner in other ways ?
Fortune-telling from the cup is still practised—
more, perhaps, in jest than in earnest—among our
selves. It is no golden jewelled goblet, however,
such as we must presume Joseph’s to have been, with
beads and rivulets of precious liquor stealing down
its sides, that is now in use by our gossips. It is the
homely tea-cup and the grounds adhering to the
bottom and sides which are the hieroglyphics that
prompt the Pythia in her responses.
Accused of having purloined the cup, the men, in
conscious innocence, rebut the charge; but are con
founded when, on the sacks being undone, the cup of
my lord the Governor of Egypt is found in the sack
of Benjamin. They rend their clothes, relade their
asses, and return into the city. Joseph would then
�Genesis : Joseph.
117
detain his brother Benjamin beside him, whilst the
rest returned to their home; but Judah pleads
■ touchingly against the Governor’s purpose : “ Oh,
my lord,” says he, “let thy servant, I pray thee,
speak a word in my lord’s ears. My lord asked his
servants, saying: ‘ Have ye a father or a brother ?’
and we said unto my lord, ‘We have a father, an old
man, and a brother, a child of his old age; and his
brother is dead, and he alone is left of his mother,
and his father loveth him. Now, therefore, when I
come to thy servant, my father, seeing that his life is
bound up in the lad’s life, it shall come to pass, when
he seeth that the lad is not with us, that he will
die, and thy servants shall bring down the grey hairs
of thy servant, our father, with sorrow to the grave ;
for thy servant became surety for the lad unto my
father, saying, ‘ If I bring him not unto thee, then
I shall bear the blame unto my father for ever.’ Now,
therefore, I pray thee, let thy servant abide instead of
the lad, a bondsman to my lord, and let the lad go up
with his brethren.”
Joseph can hold out no longer: “ Cause everyman
to go out from me,” he exclaims; and, turning to his
brethren, he says : “I am Joseph; come near me, I
pray you ; I am Joseph your brother whom ye sold into
Egypt. And doth my father yet live ? Now, therefore,
be not grieved nor be angry with yourselves that ye
sold me thither, for God did send me before you to
preserve life. Haste ye then and go to my father,
and say unto him : Thus sayeth thy son Joseph :
God hath made me Lord of all Egypt; come down
to me, tarry not. And ye shall tell my father of all
my g^ry in Egypt, and ye shall haste and bring
down my father hither. And he fell upon his brother
Benjamin’s neck and wept, and he kissed all his
brethren and wept upon them.” The good Joseph 1
and the sweet poetic mind that still makes our hearts
to throb in sympathy with its own as it wove the
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tale, though it has been stilled so many hundred
years !
The brothers return home and tell the wondrous
story to their father, whose heart faints within him
at first, for he scarce believes them. But seeing the
presents with which they are loaded his spirit revives,
and he says : “ It is enough ; Joseph my son is yet
alive ; I will go and see him before I die.” He takes
his journey accordingly with all belonging to him ?
With his sons and daughters and his son’s sons and
daughters, their cattle and all the gear they had gotten
in the land of Canaan, they move away, three score
and six in all, making up with Joseph, his wife
Asenath and the two sons she had borne him, the
three score and ten persons—the mystical number
seventy—connected with Jacob who come out of the
land of Canaan into Egypt.
The wealth, in cattle especially, said to have been
possessed by Jacob and his sons in the land of Canaan
might seem to make removal to Egypt on account of
famine unnecessary ?
So we might suppose ; with their flocks and herds
they could have been in no want of animal food; and
if the land was in a state to produce “ balm and
honey, nuts and almonds, spices and myrrh ” as pre
sents for the Governor of Egypt, it was also in a con
dition to yield corn for Jacob and his sons, and
herbage for their cattle ?
So we might fairly suppose. But continued peace
ful settlement in the land of Canaan would not have
enabled the Jewish scribes to exhibit their people in
any peculiar or very striking way as the special
favourites of their God Jehovah. Neither would he
have had the occasion required to show the many
strange signs and wonders they describe in proof of
his almighty power and his superiority over the gods
of Pharaoh and the Egyptians. Neither indeed would
such a course have left any excuse for the cruelties so
�Genesis : Jacob in Egypt.
119
wantonly committed against the Egyptians, or the
invasion of Palestine and the indiscriminate slaughter
of its inhabitants, accounts of which are laid up in
the Hebrew annals as acts approved—nay commanded
by God, meritorious in themselves and worthy of imi
tation by posterity.
But the famine, as foretold by Joseph to the Pha
raoh ; and, presumed to have extended to Palestine, is
the cause which led immediately to Jacob’s removal
with his family from the land of Canaan to Egypt?
The famine, too, must be a myth—part of the ma
chinery brought into play by the writer. Occasional
droughts with consequent dearths have, doubtless, at
all times prevailed in Palestine, as in other lands
within the variable latitudes, but the geographical
position of the country and all we know of its climate
forbid us to believe that drought and dearth for seven
successive years are within the sphere of possibility.
Egypt, again, not depending on its local rainfall for
the productiveness of its soil, but on the waters of the
Nile, whose source is more than a thousand miles away,
is as necessarily inundated once a year and fertilised,
as winter and summer come alternately over the
northern and southern halves of the globe. Total
failure of the crops in Egypt, even for one year, may be
said not to be possible. The rise of the river in one year
being more than in another, and the acreage effec
tually irrigated and cultivated being in consequence
less or more, there may in different years be relative
abundance or dearth, but never entire failure of the
land’s increase, never even scarcity for such a period
as seven years in succession.
Jacob and his son’s wealth consisting in cattle of
different kinds, the land of Egypt, so wholly agri
cultural, would not seem the most advantageous con
ceivable for the location of neat-herds and shep
herds ?
This difficulty is got over by Jacob and his family
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being settled by Joseph, with the Pharaoh’s approval,
in the land of Goshen, a district on the northern
borders of Egypt adapted to grazing, but which will
be looked for in vain upon the map of such extent as
might suffice to support the population that is said
finally to have possessed it.
There was a special objection, moreover, to the set
tlement of Jacob and his kindred in the land of Egypt
proper ?
Besides the first and most obvious objection that
presented itself to the writer’s mind—the impossi
bility of having herds and flocks among the polders
and canallated fields of the great valley of the Nile,
shepherds are said to have been an abomination to
the Egyptians.
What may be the meaning of this ?
An obscure epoch in the history of Egypt is pro
bably referred to, when the country was invaded and
for a time dominated by a barbarous people called
Hyksos or Shepherds, of whom little that is not con
jectural is known—a wild Arabian tribe in all pro
bability of the same Semitic stock as the Hebrews—
who broke in upon peaceful Egypt out of the neigh
bouring desert and made themselves masters of the
country for a season—how Ion git is impossible to say—
but who were finally either absorbed into the general
population, or, as the ruling class, were got the better
of and exterminated or expelled.
Jacob however takes his journey with all he has,
and as in his other significant moves does not fail to
have a fresh vision and communication from the God
of his father Isaac ?
God, says the text, speaks unto Israel (Jacob) in a
vision of the night, and announces himself as the God
of his father, bids him not fear to go down into Egypt;
for, adds his interlocutor : “ I will go down with thee,
and will bring thee up again and make of thee a great
nation.”
�Genesis: Jacob in Egypt.
121
A long time elapsed, however, as we learn from
another page of these scriptures, before God redeemed
the repeated pledges he is said to have made to the
Patriarchs ?
Four hundred and thirty years, according to one
of the accounts, between the promise now made to
Jacob and the Exodus from Egypt, when the first
steps may be said to have been taken which, after
forty years more of wandering in the desert, were to
lead to fulfilment of his engagements. But it is man
who makes promises and enters into covenants ; God
makes and enters into none, save in the eternal,
changeless laws which are his essence, and these are
not in time but from eternity.
And, then, were the Jews ever a great nation;
numerous as the stars of heaven or the sands of the
sea shore ?
Never. They did not even at any time obtain
entire possession of the land they believed had been
promised to them, and were alternately tributaries to
the Moabites, Philistines, Phoenicians, Egyptians,
Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans, by all
of whom they were at different times conquered,
amerced as tributaries, or led into captivity as slaves.
The promises made them, therefore, can only have
been in their own imaginations ?
They certainly cannot have been from God, for they
were never kept.
But to return—Jacob on his arrival in Egypt is
dutifully met by Joseph in his chariot, and by him is
presented to the Pharaoh. Inquired of by the sove
reign how old he is, what answer makes he ?
“ That he is an hundred and thirty years oldand
rather ungratefully and untruly, as it seems, from all
we know of his history, he adds : “ Few and evil have
been the days of the years of my life.”
Can we fancy the successful superseder of his elder
brother and filcher of his father’s blessing, the un-
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vanquished wrestler with Elohe himself, and the
prosperous possessor of herds and flocks, and a nume
rous progeny, to have given such an answer ?
Not if he were speaking in sober seriousness. His
own life had been prosperous; the evil in it had all
fallen upon others.
The famine continuing in the land of Egypt, how
does Joseph proceed ?
W arily and with a view to aggrandise the ruler,
harshly and so as to impoverish and break the
people ; for he first gathers into his own hand all the
money in the country by the sale of his hoarded corn ;
then he says, “ Give me of your cattle if money fail
and the year coming to an end with no abatement of
the scarcity, he finally buys up all the land, every
man selling his field for bread, and removes the
people into the cities from one end of Egypt to the
other.
Does he not make one exception in this getting
possession of the soil ?
He does : “ The land of the priests bought he not,”
a piece of information which enables us surely to
divine what he was who tells the story.
A priest ?
Undoubtedly. Nor was Joseph yet at an end with
his hard conditions to the people. In return for
the seed they received to sow their fields, he made
it a law over the land of Egypt unto this day that
Pharaoh should have the fifth part of the produce,
except of the land of the priests, which became not
Pharaoh’s.
Another exception in the same line, and with the
phrase “unto this day,” assuring us not only of the
probable calling of the narrator, but of the compara
tively late period when he lived and wrote ?
It does so assure us, very certainly. The children
of Israel, however, prosper in the land of Goshen,
having no hard conditions imposed on them by the
�Genesis : Jacob in Egypt.
123
Governor; and Jacob, we are told, lived for seventeen
years thereafter among his children.
The longest life, however, comes to an end at last,
and we have more than one account of the incidents
attending Jacob’s death ?
It appears so. In the first that meets us he calls
Joseph to his side and engages him by the oath held
most sacred among the Jews to dispose of his body in
the way he desires : “ Put, I pray thee, thy hand
under my thigh (admove manum tuum testibus meis)
and deal kindly and truly with me; bury me not in
Egypt, but I will lie with my fathers, and thou shalt
carry me out of Egypt and bury me in their buryingplace.” In the second account given of the patriarch’s
end Joseph is told of his father’s sickness, and taking
his two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, in his hand, he
visits his parent, who on his part is told of his son’s
arrival, when he “ strengthens himself and sits upon
the bed.” Seeing Joseph’s sons he asks who they are,
for his eyesight is dim. Being informed, he says,
“ Bring them, I pray thee, unto me, and I will bless
them.”
He blesses them ?
He does ; but imitates his own father Isaac in so far
that, though he blesses both of the lads, he gives for
no imaginable reason the preferential blessing with
the right hand to the younger son. In this second
account he says nothing about desiring to be buried
out of Eygpt, but having blessed Joseph he adds,
“ I die, but God will bring you again into the land of
your fathersy
Jacob, therefore, speaks of the land of Canaan as
his own country and the country of his fathers ?
He does so; and when we read of the ample pos
sessions of Abraham and of Jacob and of Esau, called
Duke of Seir, it is impossible not to see that the land
of Canaan had already been given by God to the Pa
triarchs and their seed; for they could not have be-
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The. Pentateuch.
come proprietors of hundreds of camels, of thousands
of oxen, and of hundreds of thousands of sheep and
goats, had they not also been lords of the soil.
Such considerations as these might lead us to infer
that the first coming of the Israelites into Egypt was
due to another cause than the famine at home, the
one assigned ?
It seems more likely, from the context and other
parts of the imperfect history we possess, to have
been owing to'the fortune of war,—the truth in al
likelihood being that a body of them was carried to
the land of the Pharaohs as captives at some period un
named in their history, they having been deported, in
conformity with ancient usage, from their own homes
to those of their conquerors, and by them treated as
slaves. The Hebrew Scriptures indeed are silent as
to any Egyptian captivity similar to the captivities of
Assyria and Babylon'; but when we discover the
Jewish physiognomy among the trains of captives de
picted in the temples, we are authorised to conclude
that the position of the children of Israel in Egypt
was never anything other than that of slavery. This
would better account for the hard usage they are said
to have suffered at the hands of their masters in after
times, which led to revolt and flight, than the reason
assigned in the record. The posterity of Jacob, after
a peaceful residence for centuries in Goshen, could
not have been looked on as intruders and to be feared,
nor treated with harshness, more than any of the other
inhabitants of the laud of Egypt.0
° Movers refers to a curious passage in ‘The Birds’ of Aris
tophanes, to show that the Israelites in early times must have
been slaves in Phoenicia as well as in Egypt. The Cucku
arrived in Phoenicia at the time of the wheat and barley har
vest, and his call interpreted by the Greek comic writer is to
this effect: Circumcised to the field! The Israelites must
therefore have been the bondmen, field labourers to their more
civilised and powerful neighbours.—Die Phoenizier,’ ii. 314.)
�Genesis : 'Jacob's Heath Song.
125
Jacob distinguishes Joseph from, his other sons ?
He does by the legacy he leaves him. After giving
him his blessing, he adds : “ Moreover I have given to
thee one portion above thy brethren which I took out
of the hand of the Amorite with my sword and with
my bow.” In no part of the Scriptures, however, is
there any mention made of early feuds between the
descendants of Abraham settled in Canaan and their
neighbours, nor of any feat of arms performed by
Jacob against the Amorites in particular. Jacob, on
the contrary, is characterised at the outset of his his
tory as a plain or peaceful man, so that the verse here
may be an after-thought of the writer for the greater
exaltation of Joseph, although Jacob’s boast may lead
us to suspect that we have by no means the history of
the Hebrew people complete.
Jacob blesses or addresses some words of farewell
to his other sons before he dies ?
He does; but what he says can be less interpreted
as blessing than as prophecy : “ Gather yourselves to
gether (he says) that I may tell you what will befal
you in times to come; gather yourselves together and
hearken, ye sons of Jacob, hearken to Israel your
father I”
He then addresses each in succession, saying first
to Reuben as his eldest—
“ Reuben, thou art my first-born, my might, the
beginning of my strength! * * * * Unstable as
water, thou shalt not excel; because thou wentest up
to thy father’s bed, then defiledst thou it.”
We have had the story of Reuben’s transgression
already, which seems so unnatural and abominable
that an allegorical interpretation has been sought not
only for it, but for the whole of the 49th chapter of
Genesis, to which our survey has now brought us.
What may be the nature of this interpretation ?
.We have already seen Jacob assuming that he, his
wife, and his other sons were the sun, moon, and
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The Pentateuch.
eleven stars of Joseph’s dream, and there can he littTe
doubt of the twelve tribes of Israel having been con
stituted as representatives of the twelve signs of the
zodiac through which the sun passes in his annual
circuit round the earth, as understood by all the
nations of antiquity. Antiquarian writers of the
highest authority are further agreed in concluding
that the several tribes (in much later times than the
age of Jacob, however) carried banners with devices
distinctive of each upon them, these being, in fact, no
other than the figures of animals, men or things to be
found, with little variety, on the planispheres or
zodiacs of the Indians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans,
and ourselves.
What is the interpretation given to the Patriarch’s
address to Reuben in conformity with this, which may
properly be spoken of as the enigmatical and astro
logical meaning that underlies the language of this
as of so many other parts of the Hebrew Scriptures ?
The tribe of Reuben is believed to have carried the
sign of Aquarius on its banner. Now the sign of
Aquarius is typified by a human figure with a pitcher
or urn out of which water is flowing : hence Reuben
is unstable as water; he defiles his father’s bed when
he cohabits with the Patriarch’s concubine Bilhah,
and so forfeits his birthright as eldest born, which is
given to Joseph. And oriental astronomers designate
one of the asterisms in the sign of Aquarius by the
name of Bulha, which rises when the sun is yet in
Capricornus,—the house of Saturn, the star of Israel,
—and sets at the precise time when Aquarius also
dips under the horizon head foremost, and by re
versing his urn was held by the ancients to cause the
overflow of the Nile.
This is certainly curious and is not usually adverted
to by commentators on the Hebrew Scriptures,
although it has great semblance of probability for
its truth. What says the Patriarch further ?
�Genesis: Jacob's Death Song,
127
“ Simeon and Levi are brethren ; instruments of
cruelty are in their habitations ; in their anger they
slew a man,” &c. Now the sign allotted to them was
Pisces, the fishes, a sign held of specially malignant
influence by the old astrologers ; for whilst the sun
is in Pisces all the constellations that were considered
adverse are seen above the horizon ; and with his
setting in this sign the disasters of the reign of
Typhon, i.e. of winter, begin ; for then it is that Orion
sets and is feigned to die from the sting of the veno
mous scorpion who rises, and that Osiris is entrapped
and slain by Typhon. In their self-will these brethren
are further said to dig down a wall—the Hebrew,
more correctly translated, meaning to maim, or it may
be to emasculate a bull; and in the Mithriac monu
ments in particular, when the sun in Pisces sets, the
scorpion is represented gnawing the genitals of the
vernal bull—i.e., the reproductive power of nature
falls into abeyance, and the destructive principle
asserts its power.
What is said to Judah ?
“ Judah is a lion’s whelp ; his hand is in the neck
of his enemies, and his father’s children bow down
before him.”
The interpretation of which is ?
That the sun having in the olden time attained his
highest northern meridian altitude in Leo, the cog
nisance of the tribe of Judah, all the other constella
tions are beneath or may be said to have become
subject to him; hence, the hand in the neck of ene
mies, and the father’s children bowing down before
him.
The sceptre it is said shall not depart from Judah
nor the ruler’s rod (not lawgiver as in the English
version) until he come to Shiloh and the people obey
him. How may this be interpreted ?
The constellation Cepheus, as King of Ethiopia, is
still seen on our celestial spheres with a crown on his
�1-18
The Pentateuch.
head and a sceptre in his hand. This constellation
rises towards the end of July under Leo, as it were,
and continues the paranatellon or concomitant aster
ism of Leo until the sun enters Scorpio. Cepheus,
the King, sets about the time Scorpio rises, and then
ceases as it seems to attend upon Leo; the brighter
of two of the most conspicuous stars in Scorpio, called
Shuleh by Arabian astronomers, then making its ap
pearance on the visible horizon.
What may be the meaning of the sentence where
Judah is said to bind his ass’s colt to the vine and to
wash his garments in wine ?
It probably alludes to the influence of the sun in
bringing to maturity the fruits of the earth, those of
the vine in especial, whose noble product, wine, glad
dens the heart of man.
Zebulon, says the Patriarch in continuation, shall
dwell at the haven of the sea, and shall be for a haven
for ships. How may this be interpreted ?
The standard of Zebulon was Capricornus ; and on
turning to a celestial globe we observe that the ship
Argo, with the most brilliant star in the southern
heavens—Canopus—visible in Egypt, by us unseen,
sets as Capricornus rises.
Issachar is the next in order ?
Issachar is a strong Ass couching between two
burthens ; and Issachar bore on his banner the sign
of Cancer, in which are the stars called the Asses.
Had the sun had the turning point in his course as
now in Cancer, instead of Leo as at the time the
zodiac was designed which the writer of Jacob’s
death-song must have had before him, we should find
no difficulty in interpreting the couching as between
the burthen of the past and the burthen of the future.
But the translation of the Hebrew by the English
word burthens, seems to be erroneous, the proper ren
dering being partitions (Drummond), Viehlvurden—
cattle hurdles (De Wette). Issachar saw that rest
�Genesis ; Jacob's Death Song.
x.
129
was good, yet bowed his shoulder to bear—he couched
at the turning point of the summer half of the year.
Dan it is said shall judge his people as one of the
tribes of Israel. Dan shall be a serpent by the way,
an adder in the path, that biteth the horse’s heels so
that his rider shall fall back ?
A sentence which finds its ready interpretation in'
the fact that the tribe of Dan bore the sign of Scorpio
on its banner. This was one of the accursed signs
according to the ancient astrologers; for with the
entrance of the sun into Scorpio commenced the reign
of Typhon, the death of Orion, and the emasculation
of the vernal bull. Close to Scorpio we see the
serpent Ophiucus,—the adder that bites the horse’s
heels,—the head of this serpent ascending along with
the feet of the Centaur, or Hippocentaur, to obtain
the element of the horse, the heels of which are said
to be bitten by the reptile. It is not without interest
to note that in the record of the doings of the tribe
of Dan elsewhere recorded (Joshua, ch. xix.), we
read of their taking the city of Leshem and giving it
the name of their chief or father, Dan. Now, the
bright star in Scorpio which we call Antares was
called Leshat by the Chaldeans and Lesos by the
Greeks, so that the astrological significance of what
is said of Dan is not doubtful.
Of Gad it is said a troop shall oveiyjome him, but
he shall overcome at the last ?
In Capricornus there is a cluster of stars called
variously Gadia and Gadi by the Chaldeans and
Syrians, Giedi by the Arabians. It might be pre
sumed at first sight, therefore, that Gad must have
had Capricornus for its cognisance. But the cogni
sance of Gad was Aries, the Ram, in which sign the
sun crossed the equator in the olden time, as in times
still older he made the passage in Taurus, and from
the inferior mounted triumphantly, victorious as it
were, over the inferior signs, in the lowest of which,
K
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Phe Pentateuch.
Capricornus, comprising the cluster or troop of stars
called Gadia, he was feigned to have been born at the
winter solstice: pressed on symbolically by a troop
at one time, the sun advancing in his course prevails
over it at last.
Out of Ashee the bread shall be fat, and he shall
give the dainties of the King (De Wette).
Libra was the sign carried on the banner of Asher,
and when the sun had reached this sign the happy sea
son of the year had come, with skies still mild and the
earth burthened with the load of ripened and ripening
fruits which under the fostering influence of the God
of Day it had produced. Hence the allusion to the
big loaf and the dainties for a King.
Naphthali is a hind let loose; he giveth goodly
words.
Tradition allots Virgo to Naphthali. The word
translated IxiniL had probably a different signification
in the original, and what is implied by the goodly
words he gave it is not easy to conjecture.
Joseph is a fruitful bough, even a fruitful bough
by a well, whose branches run over a wall.
The writer compares Ephraim, who assumed the
standard of his father Joseph, to a young bull, and
tradition assigns Taurus to the tribe of Ephraim—
Taurus, the sign in which the vernal equinox occurred
in very ancient times, and when the vegetable world
was starting into life. Hence the allusion to the
fruitful bough, spreading abroad in its luxuriant
growth. “ The archers have sorely grieved him, and
shot at him and hated him ; but his bow abode in
strength, pliant the power of his hands, made strong
by the hand of the mighty Jacob ” (De Wette), con
tinues the text. Now' it happens that immediately
after the sun has passed into Sagittarius, the head of
Taurus begins to set, whence we can easily conclude
as to the archer who shoots at him in hate. But the
whole of the matter here can only be satisfactorily
�Genesis ; 'Jacob''s Death Song,
iji
explained by referring to the Mithriac monuments,
delineations of several of which are given by Hyde in
his classical work, ‘Veterum Persarum et Medorum
Religionis Historia.” In these, Mithras the sun in
Taurus is represented on the back of a Bull, whose
side he pierces with a dagger, and its blood, the
symbol of life, flows down to vivify and fertilise the
earth, whilst a flying arrow is seen directed against
■ the breast of the animal, and the scorpion is observed
gnawing his genital organs.
“ Benjamin shall ravin as a wolf; in the morning
he shall devour the prey, and at night he shall divide
the spoil.”
This tribe bore the wolf on its banner, and one of
the ancient eastern symbols of the sign Gemini is the
wolf. Further, Gemini was the sign in which the
god with the dog or wolf’s head, Anubis, had his
station, who, besides announcing the rise of the Nile,
was also the planet Mercury, which changes alter
nately and so rapidly from an evening to a morning
and from a morning to an evening star, whence the
possible allusion to the prey and the spoil in connec
tion with the night and the morning P
In concluding his death song, Jacob commands his
sons assembled around him, precisely as he had com
manded Joseph individually in the first account we
had of the death-bed scene, not to bury him in Egypt,
but with his fathers in the cave that is in the field of
Machpelah, which Abraham bought with the field of
Ephron the Hittite for a burying-place. Having
made an end of commanding his sons, he brought his
feet together on the bed and departed, and was
gathered to his people.
p.The .writer mainly followed in the above astrological ex
position is Sir W. Drummond, in his ‘ CEdipus JudaicuS;’ with
some hints from Nork’s ‘ Biblische Mythologie.’ Where the
Scripture texts given differ from the accredited English ver
sion, De Wette’s unrivalled translation of the Bible has been
followed.
�132
The Pentateuch.
What is the conclusion now come to by the abler
and better informed of the critical exponents of the
Hebrew Scriptures in regard to the prophetical death
song of J acob ?
That it is a poetical prophecy after the event, largely
interlarded with allegorical and astrological matter,
and not composed, in all probability, until after the
epoch of the Kings of Judah. Dr Davidson agrees
with those critics who think it may have been written
by Nathan (vide ‘ Introduction to Old Testament,’ i., p.
198). “ The Deity,” says this ripe scholar, able critic,
and liberal theologian, “ did not see fit, so far as we
can judge, to impart to any man like Jacob the know
ledge of future and distant events. Had he done so,
he would not have left him to speak on his death-bed
like an Arab chief of no higher blessings to his sons
than rapine and plunder, and without the least refer
ence to another and better state of existence on which
he believed he should enter, and on which he might
counsel his sons to act continually.” That the death
song is allegorical is obvious enough to us, and
if it have the astrological meaning assigned to it by
such scholars and thinkers as Kircher, Jablonski,
Dupuis, Drummond, and Nork, it seems as if it could
only have been produced after the Babylonian cap
tivity, when the Jews had received a lesson in the
astrological lore of the Chaldeans ; they themselves
up to the time of the exile appearing to have been
profoundly ignorant of all beyond the fact that there
were lights in the sky—sun, moon, planets, and fixed
stars, which influenced them as they fancied in their
estates, and were set in heaven, moreover, for their
peculiar advantage.
Joseph and his brethren, now reconciled, like
dutiful sons, carry out their father’s injunctions in
regard to the burial ?
Joseph commands his servants the physicians to
embalm the body of his father Jacob, and having the
�Genesis:
Joseph.
ijj
Pharaoh’s leave of absence he sets out with all the
adult members of his father’s house for the land of
Canaan, where, after a grievous mourning, charac
terised in the text as “ the mourning of the Egyptians,”
he buries his father. He then returns to Egypt with
his brethren, who fearing that Joseph would now hate
them, their father being dead, and requite them for
the evil they had done him, send a messenger to him
and entreat forgiveness for their trespass and their
sin.
Joseph, as we know him, does not deny them ?
“ Fear not,” he says ; “for stand I not under God ?
Ye thought evil against me, but God turned it to
good, to bring it to pass as it is this day, to save
many people alive. Now therefore fear ye not; I will
care for you and for your children. And he com
forted them and spake kindly to them.” (Eng. vers,
and De Wette.)
Joseph lives long in Egypt, and sees the children
of the third generation of Ephraim his son; the chil
dren also of Machir, the son of Manasseh his own son,
were brought up on his knees—this implies a long
life ?
Joseph, according to the text, lives a hundred and
ten years and then dies. Before being gathered to
his fathers, however—and we might say as matter of
course and in emulation of his father Jacob—he says
to his brethren : “ God will surely visit you and bring
you out of this land unto the land which he swore to
Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.” He also takes an
oath of his kinsmen binding them to carry his bones
from Egypt to the ancestral burying-place in the land
of Canaan. His life at an end, his body is embalmed
and put into a coffin in Egypt.
�APPENDIX.
(a.) genesis of the earth.
The elements and their compounds probably ex
isted at first in states far different from those in
which they now present themselves : water as oxy
gen and hydrogen; the saline, earthy, and metallic
oxides, carbonates, chlorides, &c., in the form of their
constituent elements. A vast amount of heat must
also have been set free whilst the atmosphere and
crust of the earth were undergoing condensation and
consolidation from the gaseous and vaporous into the
liquid and solid states in which they now exist, which
could not all have been dissipated in space, and so
lost to the earth. Concentrated into mighty flashes of
lightning—electric sparks of portentous power,—it
was probably used in bringing into play the elective
affinities of the elements or simple substances, and so
producing the compounds in which we now meet with
them, the heat itself from sensible becoming latent in
these.
(b.) the confusion of languages.
Can any reasonable explanation be given of the
myth of the Tower of Babel ?
From its geographical position on the Euphrates—
now a sedge-grown stream creeping sluggishly along
among sand-banks and over shallows, but in former
ages rolling a much mightier tide to the sea—Babylon
�Appendix.
135
lay in the direct line of communication between the
East and the West. This naturally brought men of
different tongues together, and after the wars of
Nebuchadnezzar and his deportations from the con
quered countries it became a kind of centre in which
numerous different races of the human family were
made to congregate. Hence, such the diversity of lan
guage said to have prevailed that the inhabitants of
one quarter of the great city did not understand the
tongue of those of another. The inventor of the
mythical tale may have been one of the deported
Israelites, and well acquainted with the confusion of
tongues that prevailed in Babylon.
(C.) TEMPTATION OF ABRAHAM.
Have we not parallels in the old mythologies of
like intended but interrupted sacrifices of children by
their fathers ?
We have already referred to one at least where the
sacrifice is said to have been completed: Kronos,
arrayed in his royal robes, to stay a pestilence, offered
up his son Jehud to his father Uranos. But Athamas,
King of Iolchos, about to sacrifice his son to Jupiter
Laphystius, in fulfilment of the terms on which he
held his kingdom, like Abraham, wras prevented, the
god considerately substituting a golden-fleeced ram
for the son; Iphigenia, about to bleed on the altar of
Diana, was replaced by a hind, &c.
�
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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The Pentateuch in contrast with the science and moral sense of our age. Part III: [Thora - the Law]
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Willis, Robert
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Thomas Scott
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1873
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Bible
Judaism
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Bible. O.T. Pentateuch
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CT
m
THE PENTATEUCH
IN CONTRAST WITH
THE SCIENCE AND MORAL SENSE
OF OUR AGE.
By
A
PHYSICIAN.
“ Zufallige Geschichtswahrheiten konnen der Beweis von nothwendigen
Vernunftswahrheiten nie werden ”—Contingent historical truths can never be
demonstration of necessary rational truths.—Lessing.
'
PUBLISHED
BY THOMAS
SCOTT,
NO. II THE TERRACE, FARQUHAR ROAD, UPPER NORWOOD,
LONDON, S.E.
1873.
Price Sixpence.
�LONDON!
PRINTED BY C. W. RBYNELL, 16 LITTLE PULTENEY STREET,
HAYMARKET, W.
�Exodus: The Decalogue.
205
“Honour thy father and thy mother”:—a com
mandment natural, beautiful, good and proper in itself
assuredly, but unhappily immediately marred by the
context which adds : “ that thy days may be long in
the land, which the Lord thy God giveth thee;” as if
there were no finer sense of duty or moral obligation in
question, and the merely selfish or animal element in
the nature of man were the only ground of appeal
for its observance ! The commandment, as it stands,
is not unconditional, as it ought to be, but is weighted
with a motive, and so meets us in guise of a compact
or bargain, much of the same kind as that which
Jacob proffers for the acceptance of his God when
he sets up the stone Pillar at Beth-El, and vows
a vow, saying, “ If God will keep me in the way
that I go, and will give me bread to eat, &c., then
shall Jehovah be my God.” (Gen. xxviii. 20, 22).
“ Thou shalt not kill.”
“ Thou shalt not commit adultery.”
“ Thou shalt not steal.”
Respect for life, respect for that which is won by
industry and thrift—property in the proper sense of
the word ; and respect for the sanctity of the hearth
and all that pertains to it,—these the Hebrew writer
sees as the foundations on which human society rests.
Propounded in this place as coming immediately
from God, these laws, comprised as they are in the
primary nature of man, are in complete accordance
with the necessities and contingencies amid which he
lives. More than one of them, indeed, appears to
obtain even among certain of the sociable lower
animals. Unhappily they are not all, and at all
times, so carefully observed among ourselves as they
deserve to be. How little they were regarded
by the early Hebrews, is seen throughout the whole
course of their history,—from the murderous invasion
of Palestine and the rapine that accompanied it; the
treachery of Simeon and Levi when they slew the
Sechemites; the terrible order of Moses to the
Q
�206
The Pentateuch.
Levites to consecrate themselves to Jehovah and
earn a blessing by slaying their sons, their brothers,
and their neighbours ; the wholesale murders perpe
trated by such heroes as Samson, Gideon, Samgar,
and the rest; the individual homicides of Moses and
Phinehas, and Jael and Judith ; the incestuous acts of
Reuben and Amnon; the cruelty, vindictiveness,
unforgiveness, and adultery of David, &c., &c.
“ Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy
neighbour.”
Nothing, undoubtedly, can be imagined more im
moral and reprehensible in itself, or more adverse to
the security of settled life, than false witness-bearing.
Such a commandment, however imperative in a
policied state of society, could obviously have had
little application among nomads in the wilderness.
Its place in the Decalogue consequently gives us
another assurance of the late date at which this
summary was composed and promulgated.
“ Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou
shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his man
servant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass,
nor anything that is thy neighbour’s.”
The injunction against covetousness in general is a
decided advance, in a moral point of view, on all that
had gone before, and may be said to anticipate the
high tone of feeling presumed possible in humanity
by Jesus of Nazareth when he said that whosoever
lusted unlawfully had already committed the sin in
his heart. But it may not be impertinent to observe
that the commandments against false witness-bearing
and covetousness are not propounded as of universal
application. It is his neighbour alone that the Jew
is to have in respect. It was even held lawful to
spoil the Egyptians; was it not, perchance, lawful
also to swear falsely against them, and to covet their
men- and maid-servants, their asses and their oxen.
The Israelites are repeatedly enjoined to keep these
commandments ?
�Exodus: The Decalogue.
207
Repeatedly, but never on the ground of moral pro
priety or unconditional necessity. It is always in
prospect of some material advantage or return : that
they may have long lives, that they may have a
numerous progeny, that they may be victorious over
their enemies, that they may escape Jehovah’s anger,
and not become victims of pestilence, famine, or the
sword. The Decalogue, however, comprised but a
very small part of the Hebrew legislation. Almost
every particular in the life of the Jewish people, even
to its most private and intimate relationships, is
touched upon and regulated; practices being in
several places denounced that proclaim a state of
morals to have prevailed among the people which
shocks the higher and more delicate feelings happily
current in these our days.
Slavery is one of the subjects particularly referred
to ?
Slavery was an authorised institution among the
Jews, as it continues to be among so many other bar
barous and half-civilised peoples at the present time;
notable, however, in the case of the chosen seed, as
countenanced and regulated by their God. What is
remarkable, too, is this : That Jewish slaves were not
only obtained from abroad, but were purchased from
among themselves. Parents were even authorised to
sell their sons and daughters into slavery. The native
Hebrew slave, however, had privileges of his own,
for when he had served six years he recovered his
freedom. Had he fallen into slavery having neither
wife nor child, he then went out as he had come ; but
had he married and had had sons and daughters born
to him during the term of his servitude, the children
went not with him : they were the master’s property,
and—hard measure—the husband and father only ob
tained permission to remain with his wife and children
by vowing himself to slavery for the rest of his life!
Resolving to share their fate, a particular ceremony
was gone through ?
�20 8
The Pentateuch.
The man being brought before the judge, and, we
may presume, a declaration made and implemented,
his ear was then bored through with an awl against
the door-post, to signify his ascription to the house
for ever, and the ceremony was complete.
The Israelites were in the habit not only of selling
their daughters as slaves, but as concubines ?
“ If a man sell his daughter to be a maid-servant
[concubine, as appears by the context], she shall not
go out as the men-servants [slaves] do,”—to labour
in the fields, doubtless. She is to do the indoor-work
of the house and be her master’s bed-fellow. If she
pleased not her master, however, “who hath betrothed
her to himself,” or if she ceased to find favour in his
eyes, she might be redeemed [euphemism for bought]
by another ; or she might be handed over to the
owner’s son; but she was not to be sold to one of a
strange nation. Did her owner, notwithstanding his
disgust, continue to keep her, having taken to himself another wife, he was to provide her with food
and raiment, and still to comport himself towards her
in all things else as a husband. .Failing in any of
these particulars, the woman was free to go ; but it
was to be “ without money,” i.e., without a provision
from the man to whom she had been as a wife. An
easy way, therefore, lay open to the peculiar people of
ridding themselves of disagreeable wives or concu
bines : they had but to neglect to be quit of them.
Did a man smite another so that he died, the
offender was to be put to death ?
So it is said, but with important reservations; for
if the smiter had not lain in wait for his enemy, but
“ God had delivered him into his hands,” that is, had
he come upon him unawares and slain him, then was
he to have a place of refuge to flee to, Jehovah himself
being held in this case to have thrown the obnoxious
party in the slayer’s way, and given him the required
opportunity to wreak his vengeance on his enemy.
�Exodus: Domestic Legislation.
209
“ If, in striving together, one man smite another
with a stone or his fist, and he die not, but keep his
bed, if he rise again and walk abroad upon his staff,
then he that smote him shall be quit; only he shall
pay him for loss of time and his healing ”—surely an
equitable law, though something more might possibly
in many cases have been required.
Did a man smite his servant or his maid (his male
or female slave) with a rod, and he or she died
under his hand, then was the smiter to be surely
punished ; but, did the servant or the maid “ continue
fora day or two,” he was not to be punished, for the
servant or maid “ is his money.”
A notable distinction this between a cause im
mediate and a cause a little more remote, and made
on grounds that excite our wonder in the present day
when met with in a book still believed by so many to
be the word of God to man ; to have been composed
under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, whatever
meaning is attached to the phrase, and to be used as
among the prime and indispensable instruments in
the education of the young.
The slave, however, was not even thus indifferently
protected, save when his life was endangered ?
Did a man smite the eye of his servant, or the eye
of his maid, says the inspired text, so that it perish,
he shall let him go free for his eye’s sake ! Worse we
are to understand might have befallen the unhappy
slave, and he was, therefore, to be well content that
he had only lost an eye.
The same pleasant award is made in case the loss
were the minor one of a tooth ?
Did the owner smite out his man-servant’s tooth,
or his maid-servant’s tooth, he shall let him go free
for his tooth’s sake I
Did a man strive with and hurt a woman with
child, so that her fruit departed from her, and no far
ther mischief followed, he was to be surely punished
�210
'The Pentateuch.
as the woman’s husband should lay upon him, or, “ he
shall pay as the judge determines,” but if other mis
chief followed—if the woman died, then should life
be given for life.
This paying of like with like was a general prin
ciple in the ancient Israelitish legislation ?
Not carried out to the letter in every case, however,
as we have seen above, still it is said : Eye for eye,
tooth for tooth, burning for burning, wound for
wound, stripe for stripe,—the Zea? tdlionis, in a. word,
was the rule. But the savage nature of the precept,
though delivered as from God, and the evils to which
it necessarily led, were seen through by more than
one of the later Prophets, and the moral teacher of
Nazareth expunged it from the code of humanity for
ever when he said : “It was said of old, an eye for
an eye, a tooth for a tooth ; but I say unto you, do
good to them that hate you,” &c. (Matt, v.) If we
perchance see that this is carrying matters somewhat
far, we are still within the pale of our proper humanity
when we abstain from returning evil with the like.
Among these ancient ordinances or laws ascribed
to Moses, though a few of them only can be presumed
to date from of old, there is one that is completely
in harmony with what seems natural right, though
entirely ignored by modern legislation ?
That which says in these terms : “ If a man entice
a maid that is not betrothed and lie with her, he
shall surely endow her to be his wife” (Exod. xxii.
16.) Were such a law now on the statute book there
would certainly be less seduction practised, and fewer
bastard children brought into the world. If union of
bodies be the sole bond of marriage, as it is acknow
ledged to be by our laws—ceremonies and parchments
going for nothing, but being mere shams or makebelieves, would it not be logical were the fact of such
union having taken place to be constituted legal
marriage in every instance ?
�Exodus : General Legislation.
211
Such being God’s or Nature’s law, there can be but
one consistent answer to the question.
An ordinance follows those we have on matters
connubial which had long a most disastrous influence
on human society ?
That which says: “ Thou shalt not suffer a witch
to live.”
A witch ! what is a witch ?
An old woman presumed to be possessed of super
natural power of a wicked or maleficent kind.
We have no such personage among us now ?
The kind became extinct when physical science was
born. The last reputed English witch was judicially
murdered by a learned but credulous judge about
two centuries ago—'Warning for all time that pre
scriptive learning and legal eminence are no
safeguards against superstition and its offspring
inhumanity.
The learned judge in the instance referred to, as in
others—and they are legion—that had gone before,
only followed in all simplicity and blind sincerity the
injunction he found in his Bible, and administered
the law of the land, based, like his belief, on its text ?
No question of this. But the bad law has been
abrogated, and the judge is now pitied for his cre
dulity ; the belief in witches and witchcraft having
died out from among the cultivated, though it still
lingers among the imperfectly educated and the
vulgar, kept alive as it is by the authority of the book
which the clergy and ignorant laity alike continue to
force on the world as inspired by God, and as the
absolute guide in morals and religion, which the
open-eyed see that it most assuredly is not.
There is another ordinance among these reliques of
old and barbarous times that must have wrung the
hearts of parents, and brought mourning into the
homes of men through countless ages of the ancient
world ?
�212
The Pentateuch.
The one we have seen attempted to be particularly
connected with the escape from Egypt and the insti
tution of the Passover, which says : “ The first-born
of thy sons shalt thou give unto me, likewise of thine
oxen and thy sheep; seven days it shall be with his
dam, on the eighth thou shatt give it unto me.” Of
the terrible meaning hidden in these words we have
already had occasion to speak, and found it not
doubtful that “ giving to the God ” in ancient times
meant sacrifice upon his altar. And it is to be noted
that the ordinance as it stands in this—one of the
least manipulated parts of the Hebrew Scriptures,—
makes no provision for redemption by substitution or
by money : the first-born of man and beast, by the
oldest Hebrew statute we possess, was Glierem to
the God ; and that which was cherem could not be
redeemed, but must surely be put to death. The
word in the original which is softened down in the
English version into “ set apart,” means burned :—
the blood as the life was poured out about the altar,
and the body burned upon its fire as an offering of
a sweet savour to the El God,—Baal (Saturn), or
Molech. So late as the days of the prophet Ezekiel,
the redemption clause made no part of the text; it
was interpolated after his day.
*
Sacrifice we know, by the universal practice of
ancient peoples, to have been among the oldest, as it
was also believed to be the most potent of all the
means possessed by man of propitiating the God he
feared as having power to do him good or ill ?
It was so unquestionably, especially among the
Semitic tribes that peopled Western Asia, and the
more precious the offering, whether in itself or to
the giver, the higher rose the claim upon the God for
favour through its means. But the life of a human
being was obviously of far more’ worth than that of a
�Exodus: Human Sacrifices.
213
beast, and the life of a man’s own child priceless to
him in comparison with any other human life.
Hence the value attached to human sacrifice in
general, but, above and beyond all other, to the
sacrifice of a son by his father.
Ideas of the same nature appear to have continued
to influence men’s minds and their acts up to
relatively recent epochs in religious history ?
That they have done so is as unquestionable as that
they continue to do so at the present hour. Ecclesi
astical Christianity has no other foundation. The
“ crowning sacrifice,” as the death of their Christ is
characterised by the churches, has been well said by
an able and learned writer to perpetuate an ancient
rite in its most appalling form, making of a merciful
God a ruthless demon, and giving to the purely moral
doctrine of Jesus of Nazareth the character of a
religion of Molech.
*
In the later periods of the Jewish History, however,
as we have it, the first-born of men were ordered to
be redeemed ?
They were so, and Jehovah is even made by one of the
later prophets to repudiate the claim to all that opened
the matrix which is put into his mouth by the earlier
writer: “ They caused their sons and daughters to
pass through the fire to Molech, which I commanded
them not.” (Jerem. xxxii. 35). Such a rite as the
ever-recurring sacrifice of a new-born babe, the first
of its parents, wore too terrible an aspect to continue
as an institution after some little progress had been
made from utterly barbarous to more civilised life.
Substitution was, doubtless, the first step taken in
favour of the human victim, and among the Hebrews
may even be supposed to have preceded the circum
cision, or partial sacrifice, and the money price that
were finally paid to the priest in its stead. But it
Mackay, 1 Progress of the Intellect,’ ii., 460.
�214
The Pentateuch.
was not among the Israelites alone that redemption
of the human subject from immolation to the God by
means of a substitute or a payment in money came
at length to be effected. We have evidence of a like
advance in ideas leading to like results in practice
among other ancient peoples. If in the Hebrew
legends we have the ram caught in the thicket as a
substitute for Isaac on the point of being sacrificed
by his father Abraham—a tale of very modern inven
tion, as has been hinted, the name of Abraham not
*
having been known to the Jews before the days of
David—in those of Greece we find Athamas spared
the trial of sacrificing his son Phrixos, the divinity
in his now more placable aspect consenting, like
Jehovah, to receive a ram instead of the youth.
Iphigenia, too, in some of the myths, escapes her
impending doom by the goddess at whose shrine she
was to have bled, accepting a hind in her place.
Belonging to still earlier periods, perhaps, there is,
further, the myth of Jupiter Laphisteus, to whom
Rhea presents a stone in swaddling bands instead of
the customary new-born child,—Jupiter Laphisteus, in
whom we not only recognise the Chronos and Saturnus of the Aryan race, but the El-Elijon, the Chijun,
Chamos, Baal, and Molech of the Semites under
another name. In the Egyptian records, still farther,
we have the story of the Three Candles burnt to the
Sun God in his temple at On, in lieu of the Three
Men who, from immemorial times, had been the daily
sacrifice at his shrine.
These legendary and mythical tales all proclaim
the advance that may have been made somewhat
simultaneously among the better policied and more
civilised peoples of the ancient world in their ideas of
what might be truly acceptable to their gods ?
Very possibly : Substitution—an animal for a human
* Vide Our Genesis, page 70-71.
�Exodus : Human Sacrifices.
215
being; Circumcision—Sacrifice of a small but signifi
cant part for the whole ; Presentation at the shrine
with an Initiatory rite of no more moment than the
sprinkling with a little water—still practised in these
days, and a Money payment to the priest—still also
part of the ceremony.—Such, in all likelihood, were
successive steps, proclaiming advances in the Religious
Idea, due, undoubtedly, to progress in the knowledge
of Nature, as well as in civilisation and general refine
ment among mankind.
Human victims, however, long continued in ancient
times to be offered to the Gods on extraordinary
occasions ?
No longer presented as the rule, they nevertheless
continued to be offered occasionally and exceptionally.
In entering on their wars, some of the ancient peoples
seem to have thought that an oblation of the kind to
the God of Slaughter was a due and necessary pre
liminary. Achilles, as we read in the Iliad, offered
up a number of his Trojan captives to Ares ; and
Themistocles, in less mythical times, sacrificed three
distinguished Persian prisoners to Dionysus on the
eve of the battle of Salamis. After his victory over
Antony, Augustus, to propitiate the manes of the
deified Caesar, sacrificed three hundred victims of
senatorial and equestrian rank upon his altar. Commodus offered up a human victim with his own hand
in the Mithriac mysteries to which he was attached ;
and Heliogabalus, two centuries after the Christian
era, had the sons of some of the most distinguished
families of Italy brought to Rome and sacrificed in
the Syriac mysteries which supplied the fashion of his
religious clothing. In the Hebrew history we have
the story of Mesha, King of Moab, besieged in his
capital and sorely pressed by the Israelites, sacrificing
his son and heir, dressed in the royal robes, upon the
wall in sight of the besiegers, and with such effect
that they, indignant, alarmed, and satisfied that no
�2l6
The Pentateuch.
further effort on their part would now avail them—
the God being necessarily propitiated by so distin
guished a victim—raised the siege and departed
home. Is it needful, in fine, to allude to the great
sacrifice which the successors of the Jewish sect
having Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph, for
their teacher, believe to have been offered to Jehovah
as a propitiation for the sins of mankind; or to
speak of the fiery deaths of heretics and so-called
blasphemers in modern times, as other than offerings
to appease the offended majesty of God ?—Ordinary
criminals were beheaded or hanged; they to whom
heresy or blasphemy was imputed were done to death
by fire.
What may be said to be the general character of
the many commandments or ordinances that now
follow in the book of Exodus ?
That many of them are good and humane, some of
them childish, and a few positively wicked. But all
obviously are not by the same hand ; numerous inter
polations in favour of the Levitical caste and the
priesthood being especially conspicuous. There is
further such incongruity between so many of the
commandments and the circumstances of the times
in which they are generally presumed to have been
promulgated, that it is easy to see they cannot all
date from the days of Moses. They are, indeed,
mostly and very distinctly adapted to a people
policied in a certain sense, settled in fixed homes,
and having the culture of the soil for their principal
occupation, not to a multitude wandering in the
wilderness, destitute of everything, and only kept
from perishing of hunger and thirst by reiterated
miraculous interpositions—a multitude who could not
possibly have brought ripe fruits and fermented
liquors, the produce of carefully tended vineyards
and fields, nor consumed in smoke upon the altars of
their God holocausts of the bullocks, sheep, and
�Exodus : Sources of the Legislation. 217
goats which, had they had them, were so much
wanted for their own subsistence. What lands,
among other items spoken of in the legislation, could
they have had at this time either to till or to leave
untilled ; with what were they to hold high festival
three times in the year, when they had neither
leavened nor unleavened bread to eat; what could
they have sown, what reaped in the waterless wilder
ness ; and how could they have appeared otherwise
than empty-handed at all times before Jehovah ? Let
us cease to think of these ancient writings as con
temporaneous with the still more ancient times and
circumstances they pretend to portray !
All, indeed, seems plainly enough to imply that the
legislation ascribed to Moses or referred to his age
must have been the product of much more modern
times ?
Such a cenclusion is inevitable. There is, never
theless, so much that is old in the 21st, 22nd, and
23rd Chapters of the Book of Exodus that they have
together been referred in the main to ancient docu
ments, believed to have been extant in the time of
the authors of the text in its present form.
*
Moses is now called up into the mountain along
with Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the
Elders of Israel; but Moses alone is admitted to the
presence of Jehovah, the rest being ordered to worshp
afar off. In spite of this, however, and very incon
sistently as it seems, we are by and by informed that
the Elders of Israel saw God and he laid not his
* Compare particularly Dr Davidson’s Introduction to the
Old Testament: ‘Authorship and Composition of the Penta
teuch,’ Vol. I., p. 1—134; Knobel’s ‘ Kurzgefasstes Exegetisches Handbuch zum alten Testament—Die Bucher Exodus
and Leviticus,’ 8vo, Leipz. 1857; Kuehnen, ‘Hist, critique
des Livres de l’Ancien Testament,’ Trad, de l’Hollandais par
M. A. Pierson, .Torn. I.; the Bishop of Natal’s exhaustive
work, ‘The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua,’ and the learned
Dr Kalisch’s ‘ Commentaries on Exodus and Leviticus.’
�218
The Pentateuch.
hand on them; they saw God and yet did eat and
drink!
Saw God ! What man has ever seen God, save in
the manifestations made of his Being and Agency in
the things of heaven and earth, and in their various
properties or aptitudes ? If we are not informed in
so many words that it was an Image of their God
that was seen by the Elders, the context seems to
show that it could have been nothing else; for,
under his feet, it is said, “they saw as it were a
paved work of sapphire stone, and as it were the
body of heaven in his clearness ”—the similitude of
the God, in a word, relieved by the clear blue sky.
Or, did the Elders of Israel perchance see more of
the Infinite body of God than appears in the expanse
of heaven—called Dyaus by our far off Aryan
Ancestors, Zeus and Deus by their descendants, the
Greeks and Romans ? If it was not an Image on
which they looked they certainly saw no more of God
—the Infinite, the Eternal—than meets man’s eye
when he gazes on the depths of endless space. But
this is not what is meant in the text. The ancient
Hebrews, like modern Christians, thought of God as
a Person, and so, perforce, possessed of parts and
proportions, as well as of the intellectual and moral
endowments they owned themselves.
The Elders see Jehovah, however, as said, and sur
vive the sight; but Moses alone is allowed to come
into his immediate presence. And there upon the
mountain, shrouded by a cloud, he remains according
to the record for forty days and forty nights, without
meat or drink—a long time if we measure it by what
we knpw of aught that passed between his God and
him.
Jehovah, it is said, bids Moses speak to the chil
dren of Israel and order them to bring offerings of
gold, silver and brass, of blue, purple and scarlet fine
linen, of goats’ hair, rams’ skins dyed red and badgers’
�Exodus : The Ark of the Testimony. 219
skins, of shittim wood, oil for the lights, spices for
the anointing oil, ingredients for sweet incense, onyx
stones for the Ephod, and precious stones for the
breastplate of the priest. “ And that I may dwell
among ye,” proceeds the narrative, making Jehovah
the speaker, “ let them make me a Sanctuary after
the pattern of the Tabernacle, two cubits and a half
long, a cubit and a half broad, and a cubit and a half
high, to be overlaid with gold within and without;
and a Mercy Seat of pure gold two cubits and a half
high, a cubit and a half broad; and two Cherubims
of beaten gold, one at either end with wings covering
the Mercy Seat, their faces looking towards one
another,” &c.
This Ark or Sanctuary was a highly-important
piece of furniture with the ancient Hebrews ?
As with several others among the peoples of the
old world—Egyptians, Phoenicians, Assyrians, &c.
Upon the proper ark or coffer, the seat or throne, de
signated Mercy Seat in the Old Testament, is ordered
to be placed, where the God was to be found for con
sultation by the priest; and within it the object
entitled Eduth was commanded to be kept. The ark
itself, in some sort the symbol as containing the
symbols of Deity, was believed to be possessed of
supernatural powers ; for it was death to touch or
attempt to look into it, and the power and counte
nance of the tutelary God was supposed to accompany
it wherever it went.
We have already had the Eduth mentioned inci
dentally in connection with the miraculous manna of
the wilderness, when we found the word translated
Testimony, and used now as if it were Jehovah that
was meant, and again, as if the Law or Tables of the
Law were the thing signified; the word Eduth, in
deed, is always translated Testimony in this sense in
the English version of the Bible. But when the con
text is taken into account, it seems as if it cannot
�210
The Pentateuch.
always have such a meaning. It constantly meets us
as if it could only apply to an image or symbolical
figure of some sort.
The Israelites, however, were emphatically for
bidden to make molten or graven images, or the like
ness of anything in heaven or earth ?
At an advanced period of their history as a people;
certainly not before the age of Solomon. But neither
in the days of this Sybarite king, nor even in much
later times, do the Jews appear to have known, or, if
they knew, to have given any heed to the prohibition.
We have but just seen figures of Cherubim ordered
by Jehovah himself for the covering of the Ark; and
an empty seat would have been an indifferent object
for consultation by the priest when he entered the
holy of holies to ask advice. The seat must have been
occupied, therefore, and doubtless by the Image or
Symbol of the God. If neighbouring tribes and
peoples had images and emblems of their Gods, we
may be very certain that the early Hebrews also had
theirs :—They had borne for forty years in the wilder
ness the “ Tabernacle of their Chiun, their idol, the
Star of their God which they had made,” says one
of the earlier prophets whose writings have escaped
mutilation by modern editors (Amos v. 26). The
golden calf set up by Aaron in the Wilderness and the
golden calves erected by Jeroboam at a subsequent
period, as the God and the Gods who had brought
them out of Egypt, could have been no novelties to
the Israelites. On the contrary, they were the old
familiar forms under which Deity was conceived and
approached with offerings by their fathers as by them
selves. The interdict against molten and graven
images came from the advanced Jehovistic party of
the kingdom of Judah, about the time of Hezekiah
probably, if it were not even so late as that of Josiah,
when the leading minds among the Jews had attained,
to the conception of the all-pervading, or so-styled,
�Exodus: The Ark of the Testimony. 221
spiritual nature of the Godhead, which as Infinite and
Ubiquitous can be fitly represented by no “similitude.”
The Eduth may, therefore, have been an image,
if not of any such specific Divinity as was conceived of
under the names of El, Eloha, Chiun, Chemosh,
Baal, Melkart, Molech, or Jahveh, yet of the emblem
that was once universally held typical of the repro
ductive power inherent in Nature or the Nature God ?
There are hints in various places of the Hebrew
sacred writings that have escaped the expurgating
hands of their latest editors which necessarily lead to
the conclusion that the seat in the sanctuary was
not unoccupied, but was verily filled by an image of
the God himself, carefully secluded, however, in later
times at least, from the prying eyes of vulgar curiosity.
Aaron, on entering the inner veiled compartment of
the shrine, was to take a censer full of live coals from
the altar of burnt offerings, to sprinkle incense there
on, and “ raise a cloud before Jehovah.” The prophet
Isaiah must have seen something more than an empty
stool when he exclaimed that he was undone, for that
he “ a man of unclean lips had seen the king (Melek,
Molech), the Lord of Hosts (Jahveh-Tzabaoth)
vi. 5. Ezekiel, indeed, does not hesitate to fill the
throne which he saw with the “likeness of the
appearance of a man ” (i. 26), a roundabout way of
saying an image of Jehovah; and then we have
Jehovah’s own orders for the construction of the
sanctuary in which he promises to dwell among his
people. But God the Infinite and Eternal can have
his dwelling-place in no sanctuary made by the hands
of man. It was his similitude, therefore, or his
symbolical representation that was to be seen on the
lid of the Sacred Coffer between the Cherubim ; and,
when not there displayed, that was laid up with other
sacred apparatus in its interior, the coffer being of the
precise dimensions calculated to receive the life-size
seated figure of a man.
R
�222
The Pentateuch.
The ancient Hebrews were not, as already hinted,
the only people who had a sacred ark or coffer, in
which articles held holy, or apparatus employed in
their religious rites were stored ?
By no means. The ark of the ancient Egyptians,
as we see it in their paintings and sculptures, bears
the most exact resemblance to that of the Hebrews as
described in their records. It has the mysterious
figures of the cherubim with wings on its cover, and
between them the Truncated Cone, symbol of the
generative or reproductive principle immanent in
nature. Among the peoples of the ancient world the
Ark or Sacred Coffer appears to have been more
especially connected with the worship of Dionysus—
the Sun, in his character of regenerator. In the one
said to have been found in the citadel of Troy, when
taken by the Greeks, the image or emblem of
Dionysus—AyaXpa Azorovaov (ayaX/za simulacrum,
res auro ornata, an Image, a gilded Something), is
the article that is particularly mentioned as having
been found within it; and from an old writer, Cle
ment of Alexandria, we learn that in the heathen
arks or sacred coffers, generally, the article laid up
was tov Atovovoov Aibotov (atboia pudenda ab aibws').
These references may help us to a conclusion as to
what the Eduth really was which was stowed away in
the Hebrew Ark of the Covenant, and so carefully
concealed from all eyes save those of the priest. Is
not the Greek word AzJws, in fact, the Hebrew word
Eduth ? *
* On the Hebrew Ark of the Testimony see Spencer, De
Legibus Hsebrseor. Ritualibus, Lib. iii. Diss. v. Singularly
enough the word Eduth is not mentioned in that mine of
learning and interesting information, Winer’s Biblisches
Realworterbuch (3tte. Aufl., 2 vols., 8vo, Leipz., 1847). To
suppose that Winer was ignorant of what is said above were
absurd. He knew it all; but the theologian could not face the
conclusion to which the scholar and critic must necessarily
have come. See also Movers, Die Phoenizier i., chaps. 2 and 3.
�Exodus : The Seven-light Candlestick. 223
There are several other articles connected with the
Hebrew ritualistic worship which require more than
a passing notice ?
The Seven-light Candlestick in particular, with its
arms—three on either side, to hold as many lamps ;
its shaft, branches, bowls, knobs, flowers, and even
the accessory tongs and snuff dishes being all alike
ordered to be “ one beaten work of pure gold, after
the pattern that was shown thee in the mount.”
The lavish expenditure of gold and precious stones,
and of such costly stuffs as purple, blue and scarlet
linen, &c., might lead to the conclusion that the
fugitives had spoiled the Egyptians more effectually
than it is easy to imagine them willing to lend. But
the whole tale is a fiction, involving as it does childish
or worse conceptions of the Deity, and containing
injunctions so utterly impossible of execution under
the circumstances, that there needs no more than a
hint to satisfy every reasonable person not blinded by
a foregone conclusion, that it must date from days
when Jerusalem was the capital of the kingdom of
Judah, with the first or even the second Temple
already in existence, and serving as a model from
which the writer drew.
The gold candlestick with its seven lights, so par
ticularly described in the text, must be presumed to
have had a special significance, symbolical or other
wise ?
That it was symbolical, may be safely assumed, of
the Sun, Moon, and five known Planets—Mercury,
Venus, Mars, Jupiter and, high and far removed over
all, Saturn, the peculiar star of the ancient Hebrew
race—the star of their God by whatever name known
to them at different epochs of their history—Chiun,
Chamos, El, Israel, Baal, Molech, or Jahveh.
This costly piece of furniture it has been surmised
Was not for ornament only or even for giving
light ?
�224
The Pentateuch.
Besides its symbolical significance and every-day
uses, it appears to have been in constant requisition,
in conformity with the astrological notions of anti
quity, for purposes of divination, and especially in
casting nativities. The arms of the candlestick being
in sockets and moveable, the lamps they carried,
severally representing a planet, were probably
arranged by the priest in fanciful accordance with
the relative positions in the heavens of the sun, moon,
and wandering stars at the moment of a birth, and
a forecast thus obtained of the fate that was to befal
the future man or woman.
*
Such forecasts or predictions, however, must have
been constantly falsified by events ?
No doubt; but in spite of this the belief in Judicial
Astrology has either had such tenacity of life in itself,
or continues to possess such attractions for the super
stitious and uninformed, that it cannot be said even
now to have wholly died out from among us. Though
no use is ever made, in so far as we know, of the
information obtained, and the end for which it was
once so eagerly sought after is not even surmised, the
precise moment at which every child born among us
comes into the world is still regularly noted by the
gossips who hold high festival in the Lying-in room.
There are other remnants of the old sun, moon,
and star worship, and of the beliefs once universal in
planetary influences that still linger in the world ?
The general and genial merry-making at the winter
solstice—Dies nctlalis Solis, of the ancient world
the brief period of mourning followed, by rejoicings
at the vernal equinox—Easter (A® Orienie Lux)- of
which we have already had occasion to speak ; the
Beal-fires (El, Bel, Baal), still danced about and
leaped through with shouts and exclamations by the
Breton and Irish peasantry at the summer solstice ;
See Landseer, ‘ Sabsean Researches,’ 4to, Lond., 1823.
�Exodus: The Altar; the Priest's Robes. 225
the sacrifice of the goats, one to Jehovah, another to
Asazel, by the Israelites on Soul-Affliction Day, and
the weeping of the women of Northern Palestine for
Tammuz, in the olden time, at the autumnal equinox,
are all alike reminders or relics of the Sun, Moon,
Star, and Time or Season worship that once prevailed
so extensively over the ancient world; a form of
worship, however, implying a considerably advanced
epoch in the history of human society ; for Astrologism proper could have formed no element in the reli
gious system of the primitive races of mankind. Among
these the mere sense of A Something beyond them
selves, accredited with power to do them good or ill,
would seem to have constituted, as it still continues
with the Savage to constitute, the ground and the
substance of all religious belief and observance.
Particular instructions are given for the fashion
and quality of the altar, or altars,—for there were
two, one for burnt offerings, another for incense ?
The sacrificial altar in earlier times was of the
simplest possible construction, consisting of nothing
more than a heap of earth or a circle of twelve unhewn
stones—one for each month of the year—set up on
level ground. At a later period it seems to have con
sisted of a grating of brass, resting at the sides on
supports, and approached by a number of steps.
The Priest’s robes are also objects of most minute
instructions to Moses ?
They are so indeed; he was to speak to such as
were “ wise-hearted and filled by the Lord with the
spirit of wisdom; ” and they, with the directions he
should give them, were to make a robe and broidered
coat, an ephod and girdle, all of gold, and of blue
and purple and scarlet fine twined linen, with cunning
work; a cap or mitre for the head ; two chains of
pure gold of wreathen work for the neck, hung from
two onyx stones on the shoulders, set in gold and
engraven with the names of the twelve tribes of
�226
The Pentateuch.
Israel. Besides which, there was to be a “ Breast
plate of Judgment,”—Choschen,—four-square, with
four rows of precious stones, three in each row,
engraven with the names of the twelve tribes, and
attached to the Ephod by means of gold chains ; and
another article that has been the subject of much
discussion with Bible expositors and commentators,—
the “ Urim and Thummim.”
What was the Urim and the Thummim ?
The text says no more than this :—“ Thou shalt
put in the breast-plate of Judgment the Urim and
the Thummim; and they shall be upon Aaron’s heart
when he goeth in before Jehovah.”
This would make the Urim and Thummim distinct
from the breast-plate of Judgment:—something to
be put into or contained within it ?
It would so according to the rendering of the
original usually followed. But the Hebrew may as
well be translated put upon as put into. The Urim
and Thummim has consequently been thought by
competent critics to be nothing more than the com
plete breast-plate under another name—a conclusion
which has much to recommend it. By one distin
guished scholar and historical writer, however
(Michaelis, Mosaisches Recht), it is believed to have
consisted of two or more precious stones, cut as dice,
which were used in “ asking Jehovah by Lot ”—a
mode of essaying to look into futurity of which we
find such frequent mention in the Hebrew Scriptures,
although the lots or means used are nowhere named.
The learned Spencer (De Legibus Hsebrzeorum
Ritualibus, Lib. iii. Diss, vii.), following the LXX.,
and assuming the words to signify Manifestation and
Truth, after a disquisition extending over one hun
dred and ninety-three quarto pages ! opines that the
Urim and Thummim were Teraphim or sacred
domestic images of the God or Gods! Great
obscurity, therefore, manifestly hangs over the sub-.
�Exodus : The Urim and Thummim. 227
ject of the Urim and Thummim. But when we
think of the many hands through which the Hebrew
Scriptures have passed, the numberless manipulations
they have undergone, and the interest later editors
had in keeping everything like Idolatry and Sabeeism
out of sight, we shall not wonder that so little is left
us by which we may positively know what the Urim
and Thummim signified in itself, or how it was
used for purposes of divination, in which, as its
designation, Breast-plate of Judgment, implies, it
was undoubtedly an important instrument.
The thing called Urim and Thummim is ordered
to be composed of twelve precious stones, which are
said to have been—
A Ruby, a Topaz, a Carbuncle,
an Emerald, a Sapphire, and a Diamond;
a Ligure or Cornelian, an Agate, an Amethyst,
a Beryl, an Onyx, and a Jasper ?
Assuming the stones to be rightly named, the first
series of six is seen to consist of such as are of a
lustrous or brilliant character ; the second series, like
in number, of others that are generally opaque or
lustreless. To the first series it must have been that
the epithet Urim (Ur, Or, Light) was applied ; as to
the lustreless set of six, it was that the title Thummim
was given (Tumas, Sanskrit, Darkness). Ordered to
*
be engraved with the names of the Twelve Tribes of
Israel, the twelve stones upon the High Priest’s Choschen certainly also typified the twelve signs of the
zodiac, which, besides symbolizing the months of the
year, were likewise held to be the houses of the planets
and of several of the more remarkable among the
fixed stars, whose rising and setting marked the
seasons. The brilliant stones were doubtless repre
sentatives of the signs when the sun, in the ascendant
in the northern hemisphere, was pouring light and
* Nork, Biblische Mythologie, i. 175, note.
�228
The Pentateuch.
life upon the world ; the dark or lustreless stones,
again, stood for the inferior signs, when the power of
the sun is in abeyance, and darkness, symbolical of
night and death, dominates the hour.
The composition of the Urim and Thummim seems,
therefore, to proclaim the astrological or divining
nature of the instrument ?
That it was consulted through the priest as an
oracle, and referred to at times in learning the will
of Jehovah, is certain. It is to be presumed that
the aspect of the heavens and the places therein of
the planets and principal fixed stars having been
noted at the time action in any contingency was
proposed to be taken, the Urim and Thummim was
then consulted by the priest in conformity with the
rules of the diviner’s art, and an answer in affirmation
or negation of the purpose in question obtained.
We have instances in the Hebrew Scriptures in
which the Urim and Thummim was used in this
way ?
When Joshua, the son of Nun, was chosen by
Moses as his successor, he was set before Eleazar the
priest, and the congregation of Israel, and the priest
is ordered at all times to “ ask counsel for him after
the judgment of the Urim before Jehovah” (Numb,
xxvii. 21). Saul enquiring of Jehovah on a certain
occasion after he had fallen out of favour with
Samuel the priest, through non-compliance with his
behests, “ received no answer, neither by dreams,
nor by Urim, nor by the prophets,” i.e., the sooth
sayers (1 Sam. xxviii. 6). The Teraphim, or house
hold gods, of which the Ephod was one of the forms
most familiar to the chosen people of Jehovah in
historical times, appears to have been frequently sub
stituted for the Urim and Thummin : “Bring hither
the Ephod,” says King David, the man according to
God’s own heart—by credit and report, to Abiathai’
the priest, upon a certain occasion; and addressing
�Exodus: The E'phod an Idol.
229
the Idol he says : “ 0 Jehovah God, will the men
of Keilah deliver me up into his (Saul’s) hand ? ”
And Jehovah said: “They will deliver thee up”
(1 Sam. xxiii; 9). Another time the same pious and
exemplary monarch—according to the Bible and the
clergy—says : “ Bring me hither the Ephod,” and he
“ enquires of Jehovah, saying, shall I pursue after
this troop P ” and is answered : “pursue” (lb. xxx.
7). The Urim and the Ephod, or Gilded Image of
Jehovah, were therefore used indifferently as means of
ascertaining the will and pleasure of their God by
the Hebrew people.
But the children of Israel are always credited with
having been worshippers of the one only God, and to
have known nothing of idolatry ?
Let the reader conclude for himself on the above
showing what they were in fact, and begin, if by
possibility he may, to read the Bible with his eyes
unsealed and his reason as his guide.
Returning to the prescriptions for the priest’s
robes, a certain part called Ephod, is particularly
described ?
It was to be made in fashion of a habergeon, or
cape, having a hole in the upper part for the head to
pass through. Its hem, however, was elaborately
ornamented with figures of pomegranates of blue, and
purple, and scarlet, having gold bells interposed.
. The pomegranate had a particular symbolical sig
nificance in the religious mysteries of the ancient
world ?
It was a special emblem of fertility, and an element
in the cult of the Reproductive Principle inherent in
Nature, with which, as with Sabmism, the Hebrew
system, when seen with the eyes of the understanding,
is found to assimilate in so many particulars.
The word Ephod has, therefore, two different
meanings in the Hebrew scriptures ?
In one we have seen it applied to the Image of
�230
The Pentateuch.
Jehovah, used by King David as an oracle ; here we
find it applied to a part of the priest’s robes.
The High Priest was further to have his special
title or designation engraved on a plate of gold
fastened to the front of his mitre or cap ?
A title expressed in these solemn and significant
words: Holy to Jehovah (Holiness to the Lord
*
Eng. vers.).
What might this imply ?
More than appears at first sight. The High Priest
—Aaron—was “ to bear the iniquity of the offerings
hallowed by the children of Israel in their giftsi. e.
Aaron, as High Priest and consecrated to Jehovah, in
receiving the offerings of the people at the door of the
Sanctuary was presumed to concentrate on himself
the essence of their expiatory powers, and in virtue
of his office was liable to be called on at any moment
to enact the part of substitute and make atonement
in his individual person for the sins of the people at
large. And we shall find sufficient reason by and by
for concluding that Aaron was actually required, at a
critical moment in the progress of the Israelites to
wards the Promised Land, to make good the terms of
the contract or understanding on which he held his
office.
Aaron’s sons, solemnly consecrated as his assistants
in the priestly office, and so devoted to Jehovah, are
also furnished with clothing according to special
patterns ordered by their God ?
They are to have coats, breeches to cover their
nakedness, caps of a certain fashion, &c.
Can we, living in this 19th century of the Christian
aara, believe that any orders for the clothing of Aaron
and his sons ever came from God ?
The Infinite all-pervading Essence or Spirit con
ceived by us as Cause, and called God, sends man
into the world naked enough, but furnished with the
senses which induce, and the ingenuity which enables
�Exodus : Consecration of Aaron & his Sons. 231
him to clothe himself for decency, for comfort, and
even for what he intends as ornament—whence not
only the loin-band, and the blanket and skewer, but
the embroidered coat, the chignon, and the bustle—
all according to patterns he devises for himself; cer
tainly after none devised for him by God.
The ceremonies by which Aaron and his sons are
consecrated to their office are also matters of particular
instruction to Moses from Jehovah ?
Besides anointing with consecrated oil, a bullock
and two rams are to be sacrificed before the taberna
cle of the congregation. The fat, kidneys, and caul
of the bullock are to be burned on the altar of sacri
fice, but the rest of the carcase is to be consumed with
fire outside the camp. The blood, as Jehovah’s most
peculiar portion, was to be streaked upon the horns
of the altar, and poured out about its base.
And the rams—how were they to be disposed of ?
One of them was to be sacrificed, like the bullock,
but the whole carcase was to be burned upon the altar
as an offering to Jehovah ; the bullock, doubtless, was
seen as too bulky to be conveniently dealt with in
this way. The other ram, having been slaughtered,
its blood was to be put on the tip of the right ear of
Aaron and his sons, on the thumbs of their right
hands and the great toes of their right feet severally,
their robes being at the same time sprinkled with
anointing oil and blood ; and whilst the fat and kid
neys, the rump and right shoulder were burnt on the
altar as Jehovah’s portion, the rest of the carcase was
to be seethed in the holy place, and there eaten by
Aaron and his sons.
This eating of the victims sacrificed in view of the
expiation of sin was held to be an indispensable part
of the religious rite ?
Without it the act of atonement was not believed
to be complete. As the Life had gone to Jehovah in
the blood, and certain parts, sublimated by fire, been
�232
The Pentateuch.
presented to him for a sweet savour and for food, so
was it by the flesh of the victim, hallowed through
Jehovah’s acceptance of his share, entering the bodies
of the priest and the assembly, that they were pre
sumed to be sanctified and their sins forgiven them.
Like other old observances grounded on speculative
notions, the custom of offering an imaginary sacrifice,
eating the imaginary flesh, drinking the imaginary
blood of an imaginary victim, and so obtaining for
giveness of their sins—oftener real than imaginary—•
is still kept up by communities boasting of the ad
vances they have made in reason and refinement.
Can we in the present age of the world, and with
the lights we have through our cultivated under
standing and accumulated knowledge, believe that
God ever gave such instructions as we have but just
perused—ever ordered the fashion of the priest’s
garments—ever, as a means of consecration to his
service, commanded his ministers to be anointed with
spiced oil; to be touched on the tips of their ears,
their thumbs, their great toes, and to have their
clothes sprinkled with the blood of a sheep ?
It is impossible to do so any longer.
Or that forgiveness for his sins and shortcomings
can be had by man through eating and drinking,
were it even the body and blood of the God he
worshipped ?
Let every man answer this query for himself. If
he have not been crippled in his capacity to judge
aright by a vicious education, or have not naturally
a soft part in his head, he will only be able to answer
it in one way. The more advanced among the Jews
themselves indeed must, in later times, have come to
the conclusion at which all reasonable men, whether
Jew or Gentile, have now arrived, when we find one
of their more advanced writers addressing them in
such words as these :—“ For what, 0 man, does
Jehovah require of thee but to do justly and to love
�Exodus: The Sacrifices.
233
mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God ” (Micah
vi. 8).
Can we, however, suppose that God gives command
ments at one time which he abrogates at another ?
God is the changeless and eternal: the same yester
day, to-day, and for ever. It is man who changes,
makes and unmakes, orders and annuls, not knowing
his mind from one hour to another.
What, then, conclude as to these minute command
ments about slaying and burning, anointing with oil
and sprinkling with blood, roasting, seething, and
eating in the holy place, &c., &c. ?
That very certainly they never came from God;
and that the men who maintain that they do are either
possessed of the moral and intellectual obliquity of
vision that leads astray, or are chargeable with the
blindness that comes of wilfulness.
Certain ordinances follow concerning the various
kinds of sacrifice that were to be offered, and the
times and seasons at which particular rites were to be
observed ?
A bullock is ordered to be offered daily for a sin
offering and for an atonement; two lambs also, day
by day throughout the year, one in the morning, the
other in the evening; these last being presented ap
parently as a kind of daily ration to Jehovah : Anthropomorphosing God, man imagined that God must be
fed like himself.
In this case flesh meat required the addition of
bread ?
Which is not forgotten any more than a measure
of wine to flavour the repast. Twelve cakes of un
leavened bread baked of wheaten flour, with olive oil
seasoned with salt and spice, were to be duly laid with
each recurring Sabbath morn upon the table which
stood beside the altar of sacrifice, the stale cakes
being then removed for the use of the priests, whose
perquisite they were.
�234
The Pentateuch.
There is also a special altar of Incense, the Jewish
Jehovah being held to delight in other and to human
nostrils sweeter scents than the smell of burning fat,
flesh, and blood ?
This altar, ordered to be overlaid with pure gold,
was to stand by the Ark of the Testimony, before the
Mercy Seat. On it Aaron was to burn sweet incense
every morning when he dressed the lamps, and at even
also, when he lighted them; for there it was that
Jehovah was to be met with and “ give the children
of Israel to know that he was Jehovah their God, and
that he dwelt among them.”
Are we not to think that God is the God of All the
inhabitants of the earth, and that he dwells not here
or there, in a tent or tabernacle, seated on the lid of
a coffer, but has his habitation in the universe ?
Our reason and philosophy assure us of so much ;
but the children of Israel and their teachers did not
think so ; and they who accept their annals as from
God are bound in consistency to agree with them ; an
obligation, however, with which we see the world
feeling it every day more and more difficult to comply.
“ When thou takest the sum of the children of Israel,
says the text, then shall every man give a ransom for
his soul (life) unto Jehovah, that there be no plague
among them.” The price to be paid as insurance of
their lives against pestilence being ?
Half a shekel of the sanctuary, the rich giving no
more, the poor no less.
Such an ordinance must surely point to a time when
the Israelites were a settled community, not to one
when they were wanderers in the wilderness, and at
starvation point ?
No doubt of it; and the order, now seen in this
light by every competent and candid critic, proclaims
the relatively modern date not only of the writing,
but of the institution of the festival itself; for neither
in Exodus (xxiii. 14), nor in Deuteronomy (xvi.),
�Exodus: Temple Furniture.
235
where the festivals of the year are particularly
commanded, do we find any mention made of
an atonement festival. It cannot even have been
known to Ezekiel (xlv. 18), the festivals of the
Seventh month of which he speaks being mere
repetitions of those of the First month, and the
word Atonement does not occur in his text. The great
day of the year to the Jews of Post-Exilic times, con
sequently, was unknown to the Israelites who lived
before the Babylonian Captivity.
Is it reasonable, however, to suppose that man can
ransom his life-, atone for his sins, or make an offer
ing to God by means of a piece of money ?
It is most unreasonable to think that he can. Man
can approach God in no way save by studying to
know and religiously obeying his laws. The money
price was a recent tax for the support of the religious
establishment of the country : “ thou shalt take the
atonement money of the children of Israel, and shalt
appoint it for the service of the tabernacle of the
congregation.” There could obviously be neither
numbering nor taxing of a horde wandering in the
wilderness, and having no tabernacle of the congrega
tion with numerous attached officials to maintain.
There were to be lavers of brass for the ministering
priests to wash in—furniture most essential, con
sidering the bloody work in which they were habitu
ally engaged. The oil used in anointing or conse
crating was also to be prepared in a particular
manner with oil olive, myrrh, and cassia; it was a
holy anointing oil, not to be imitated nor put upon
a stranger under penalty of death. The confection
for burning on the altar of incense also, composed of
sweet spices and frankincense, was to be prepared
after the art of the apothecary, and was to be ac
counted holy to Jehovah; whosoever should make
any like it, or who should even “ smell thereto,” was
to be cut off from his people.
�236
The Pentateuch.
Can we, we ask yet again, as reasonable beings,
believe that instructions for such trifles as these
were ever given by the great God of Nature to
mankind ?
No, no, no!
Or that he should threaten death to the man who
smelled at a compound of spice and frankincense ?
Never!
And can the book in which such commandments
are propounded as coming from God either be, or by
possibility be conceived to contain, the word of his
will to man ?
It is impossible to think that it can, when viewed
in connection with the Idea we are now privileged to
form of God. All that is said in the book before us
on the topics in question is, however, in perfect con
formity with the Idea which the legendary Moses,
and generations long after Moses and his age, may
be presumed to have entertained of their God, who
was in no wise the impartial parent of the universe,
but the partial God of the children of Israel; not the
God who makes the sun to shine and the rain to fall
on the just and the unjust alike, but a capricious
despot who guided the sunbeam and the shower at
his arbitrary will and pleasure on those he favoured
or had in despite.
How could the Israelites, so lately slaves to the
Egyptians, be supposed to have had among them
workmen possessed of skill to prepare the materials
and execute the details of the apparatus ordered for
use in the worship of their God ?
We can only conceive them short-handed in this
respect; still Jehovah, according to the text, informs
Moses that he had called Bezaleel, the son of Uri, and
filled him with the wisdom to contrive cunning works
in silver, and gold, and brass, in cutting and setting
precious stones, and in carving timber, and had given
him Aholiab, of the tribe of Dan, to help him, beside
�Exodus: Moses in the Mount.
237
others, wise-hearted, though unnamed,, and filled with
the wisdom necessary to make all as commanded.
It is somewhat difficult, nevertheless, to imagine
gold- and silver-smiths, lapidaries and engravers in
jasper and calcedony, carvers, gilders, weavers, up
holsterers, and the like, at work in the midst of a
starving multitude of fugitives from slavery, locked
in by a howling wilderness, and in want of the merest
necessaries of life ?
It is certainly difficult to think of arts that only
belong to settled and peaceful communities being
carried on under such circumstances.
Whence we conclude ?
That all these instructions are the work of rela
tively modern times, and that so much of the Penta
teuch as embodies them, as it cannot be from Moses,
so neither can it be from any document derived from
his age. The writer lived after the age of Solomon
and had the temple as a model from which he drew,
and the skilled Phoenician artizans who built and
ornamented it—Hirom of Tyre and his assistants, as
types of Bezaleel, the son of Uri, and Aholiab of the
tribe of Dan. Even in times when the Chaldmans
and Assyrians were policied peoples—astronomers,
artizans, &c., and using engraved cylinders as seals
in their dealings with one another, the intaglio of the
cylinder is not cut by the lapidary’s wheel of later
days, but by scratching with some point harder than
jasper or cornelian.
*
Moses must have been some considerable time
away whilst receiving all the minute instructions
said to have been given him by Jehovah on the
mountain ?
He was absent, according to the record, for forty
days and forty nights, and is said neither to have
eaten bread nor drunk water during all that time—
* See Landseer, ‘ Sabasan Researches.’
S
�238
The Pentateuch.
a statement sufficient of itself to stamp the entire
narrative as mythical; for as by God’s eternal fiat
man must eat and drink that he may live, so fasting
from solid and liquid food cannot be continued for
more than a very few days without serious derange
ment to the health, and, if persisted in for any much
longer term, without death ensuing as the penalty.
A very notable incident occurs during the absence
of Moses in the Mount ?
The people come to Aaron and say : Up ! make us
Gods to go before us ; for as for this Moses who brought
us out of the land of Egypt we wot not what has
become of him.
Is this a style of address likely to have been made
to Aaron the Priest, the brother of Moses, the leader
of the people ?
A late writer might be supposed to speak in such
terms—more respectfully couched, however,—for the
information of his public ; but the people about Aaron
could scarcely have thought it necessary to remind
him that it was Moses who had brought them out of
Egypt; and they could not but have known that
their leader was up in the mountain, in conference
with Jehovah.
Aaron, however, remonstrates with the foolish
people, and bids them think of all the wonders done
for them by Jehovah, who still dwelt amid the cloud
which only hid Moses from their sight upon the
mountain ?
He does nothing of the sort; assenting at once to
the reasonableness of their clamour apparently, and
familiar, as it might seem, with the worship of God
under the figure of a Bull, he bids them bring him
the rings of their wives and of their sons and
daughters; and having made a molten calf of the
gold, and fashioned it with a graving tool, he presents
it to the people as the God who had brought them
out of their Egyptian bondage 1 He does even more
�Exodus : The Golden Calf.
239
than this; he builds an altar before the Image of
the Bull-calf he has fashioned, and makes procla
mation for the morrow of a feast “ to the Lord! ”
This is most extraordinary—altogether incom
prehensible and incredible ! Would the man who
had witnessed and even taken an active part in the
performance of the extraordinary wonders said to have
been wrought in Egypt, and who could not but have
felt assured of the continuing countenance of Jehovah,
have acted as Aaron is now reported to have done ?
It is impossible to believe that he would.
Would a brave man, a truly pious man, who put
his trust in God through simple natural instinct, have
done anything of the kind ?
He would have suffered himself to be torn in pieces
by the rabid multitude first. '
What then conclude concerning the tale of the
golden calf?
Either that it is a fabrication, contrived for a
purpose which the writer has in view, or that Aaron
is inadvertently allowed to appear as he probably was
in fact—no priest of Jehovah, the spiritual conception
of the late writer of the Pentateuch, but the minister
of the God—El, Baal, Chiun, or Chamos, the true
deity of the ancient Hebrew and other cognate Semitic
tribes—the God of Times and Seasons and Repro
duction ; the God who ceaselessly begetting ceaselessly
devours his offspring, and whose visible image in
the early ages of the world struggling from darkness
into light was the Stone, the Tree, the Serpent, the
Bull, and the universally recognised symbol of the
reproductive power inherent in nature—the Phallus.
The mythical Aaron, we must conclude, either pre
sented the people with the image of the God with
whose worship they were already familiar ; or the
late writer whose work we have before us—one of
the Jehovistic Reformers, a priest of Judah, and
living in or after the reign of Hezekiah—may have
�240
The Pentateuch.
invented the tale of the Golden Calf of the Wilder
ness for the purpose of proclaiming how abhorrent to
Jehovah, the God of the Jews, was the Calf worship
established by Jeroboam as the religion of his realm
of Israel, which he had rent from the kingdom of
Judah.
The people are well content with the Idol which
Aaron has provided, and the feast he has promised ?
They rise up early in the morning, and having
made burnt and peace offerings to their Calf-God,
they sit down to eat and to drink, give themselves
up to merriment and the rites hallowed in the
worship of the Nature-God, upon the particular
character of which it is not necessary to speak
more at large in this place.
What, according to the text, says Jehovah to
Moses on the Mount, whilst all this is going on
below ?
“Get thee down,” says he, “for the people have
corrupted themselves ; they have turned aside quickly
out of the way I commanded them; they have made
them a golden calf, and have worshipped it, and made
offerings to it, and said: This is thy God, 0 Israel,
which has brought thee out of the land of Egypt! ”
It is Aaron the priest, however, who has just said
so ; but what more ?
“ Behold, this is a stiff-necked people; now, there
fore, let me alone that my wrath may wax hot against
them and that I may consume them.”
Jehovah would, apparently, have Moses restrain
him from breaking out upon the people and con
suming them. What answer does Moses make ?
He beseeches Jehovah, and asks him why he should
be wroth with the people and give the Egyptians
occasion to say :—He brought them out for mischief,
to slay them in the mountain and consume them from
the face of the earth. “ Turn from thy fierce wrath,”
he continues, “ and repent of this evil against thy
�Exodus : Moses and the Golden Calf. 241
people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, to
whom thou swearedst by thine own self and saidst, I
will multiply thy seed as the stars of heaven, and this
land I have spoken of I will give to your seed to
inherit it for ever.”
What reply is the Jewish writer’s Jehovah—gene
rally accepted by Christians as the Omnipotent
Creator of the Universe—made to give to this friendly
remonstrance and reminder of the man Moses ?
It certainly is not the God of Philosophy and
Enlightened Piety who replies; it is the redactor of
this Hebrew legend who speaks when he makes his
God say that he “repents of the evil he thought to
do to his people;” for God is not a man that he
should repent, as a later and more advanced writer in
the same heterogeneous collection of books and frag
ments of books has said of the Deity whom he, in
better days, conceived.
Moses comes down from the mountain with the two
tables of the law in his hand, the writing, we are in
formed, being on both sides, and the handy work of
God himself. Coming near he hears shouting and
uproar in the camp, which Joshua, who seems now to
have joined him—although we have heard nothing of
this before—mistakes for sounds of discord or war,
but which Moses, with a truer ear and the intelligence
he had from Jehovah, interprets as no sounds of strife
but of mirth and rejoicing. Reaching the camp, he
sees the Calf and the dancing; his anger is roused,
and in his passion he casts the tables out of his hand
and breaks them in pieces beneath the mount.
This last act was surely unbecoming in a great leader,
as showing a lack of self-control, although his anger
was natural enough. What does he with the Calf ?
That, it is said, he burns in the fire, grinds to
powder, strews it on water which he makes the
people drink, and so compels them to swallow the
God that Aaron had made for them.
�242
The Pentateuch.
Can Gold be burned into ashes in the fire, and
strewed on water so that it may be drunk ?
Gold is unchangeable in any heat short of that
which is centred in the electric spark, by which, if in
leaf, it is dissipated in vapour. Gold, however, may
be beaten out into leaves and then broken up into
particles so fine as to be diffusible through liquids;
but it cannot be reduced to powder by burning in a
furnace; neither, indeed, can it be melted and cast
into an image of any description save wTith means and
appliances such as Aaron could not have commanded
in the wilderness.
So much at least of the story must, therefore, be a
product of the writer’s imagination; even as must
the information he gives, whereby we learn that the
tables which Moses brake in his vexation were written
on this side and on that by the finger of God himself,
a fact—if by possibility it could have been a fact, and
as involving an absurdity we unhesitatingly declare
it could be none, the Supreme Cause not having
fingers like a man—which the narrator could by no
possibility have known ?
So much presents itself as certain to the unpreju
diced mind.
Moses will, of course, be wroth with Aaron his
brother for what he has done ?
So we should have expected; but there is little
show of anger in the remonstrance he makes.
“What,” says he, in the mildest terms imaginable,
where the most severe would have been so much in
place, “ did this people unto thee that thou hast
brought this great sin upon them ? ” A question to
which Aaron can find no better reply than by begging
my Lord, his brother, not to be angry with him, repeat
ing the particulars of his reprehensible act, and declar
ing that, having cast the gold given him by the people
into the fire “ there came out this calf;” a miracu
lous image, therefore, that fell out of the fire, like
�Exodus : Slaughter of the People.
243
those we read of in Greek and Roman legends which
fell from heaven ! After this the subject is dropped
in so far as Aaron, the chief offender, is concerned.
But not as regards the ignorant people who, by
their doings, have roused the anger of Jehovah, and
the still more significant wrath of their leader ?
No, truly ! For Moses seeing that the people were
naked—“ Aaron having,” as it is said, “ made them
naked to their shame ”—scant clothing or nothing on
being the proper costume in the religious orgies of
the earlier ages of the world—he takes his stand in
the gate of the camp and says : “ Who is on Jehovah’s
side, let him come unto me; when all the sons of Levi
gathered themselves to him.”
What order is given-them in the name of Jehovah,
the God of Israel ?
A very terrible order indeed ! “ Put every man
his sword by his side,” says he, “ and go in and out
from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay
every man his brother, and every man his companion,
and every man his neighbour.”
What! in spite of his having persuaded Jehovah
to repent of the evil he had intended against his
people ?
So it appears by the report, which, though we may
cling to the hope that it never had any foundation in
fact, is nevertheless not entirely out of keeping with
Other horrible practices of barbarous man—the custom
of the West Coast of Africa at the present time for
example. “ On that day it is said there fell of the
people three thousand men ! for Moses had said :
‘ Consecrate yourselves to-day to Jehovah, even
every man upon his son and upon his brother, that
he may bestow a blessing upon you this day !!! ”’
And there are men with open eyes and accessible
understandings among us who still maintain that
human sacrifices were not only never offered to their
God by the early Hebrews, but that they were even
�244
The Pentateuch.
abhorrent to the old Jewish mind ; that the firstborn
of the sons and daughters of Israel were at all times
redeemable by presentation at the Tabernacle to the
priest and payment of the petty sum of five silver
shekels of the sanctuary ?
Many men whose soundness of understanding,
scholarly acquirements, critical acumen and candour
can be implicitly relied on in all other directions,
halt in this one, and become false to themselves and
the great task they undertake of bringing light and
proclaiming the truth. And how shall we, living
near the end of this nineteenth century since Jesus
of Nazareth, our brother, and Epictetus, and Anto
ninus, and Seneca, and Marcus Tullius, and so many
others spoke their words of reason and of love and
mercy to the world, imagine that God could ever
have ordered the men who lived in any age to conse
crate themselves and earn his blessing by the wholesale
murder of naked, defenceless men, their sons, their
brothers, their neighbours, and their friends ; or how
continue to receive the record of such atrocities as
the revealed word of God ?
How, indeed I But such stories begin at length
to be questioned even by the many; the few—the
really educated, the well informed, the rational, the
merciful—have long rejected them as blasphemies, if
there be any such 1 against every conception which
reasonable man can form of the Supreme Not our
selves of a pious writer of the present day, by us
called shortly God.
What have we in the way of assurance that the
tale of this massacre cannot be founded on fact—
cannot be true ?
The certainty that the Levites did not exist as a
priestly caste—and the priestly character is implied
in the sacrificial part they are here made to enact—
in the age of Moses. Though pains are taken by
the late writers and editors of the Pentateuch to refer
�Exodus : Moses remonstrates with Jehovah. 245
the connection of the Levites with sacred matters to
the age of Moses, the Levitical Priesthood is satis
factorily ascertained to have been a relatively modern
institution—certainly not to have existed until after
the age of Solomon.
God, therefore, we must believe, never gave orders
to Moses of the kind detailed ?
God speaks not and never spoke in human speech
to man. We know not what amount of barbarity
had place in the mind of the mythical Moses, but an
order to slay ignorant men for yielding to the blind
instincts of their nature and conforming to the usages
of their forefathers very certainly never came from
God.
What does Moses now ?
He tells the people that they had sinned a great
sin, and full sorely have they been made to know and
to pay for it; but he adds that he will now go up to
Jehovah and peradventure make atonement for their
sin-—-speaking as if none had already been made
through the three thousand lives sacrificed by his
own orders !
What says Moses to Jehovah ?
Oh ! this people have sinned a great sin and made
them gods of gold ; yet now, if thou wilt forgive
their sin [and here there seems to be a gap in the
narrative, the terms Moses would make for the sin
ners being wanting], and if not, blot me, I pray thee,
out of thy book which thou hast written.
What answer does he receive ?
“ Whosoever hath sinned against me, him will I
blot out of my book,” is the curt reply.
This surely cannot be the God whom men in the
present day conceive and speak of as the loving father
of all, ready to forgive the sin of whosoever repents
and amends his ways ?
Certainly not; he is the God of a still earlier age
'of the world even than that of the Jehovistic writer
�246
The Pentateuch.
whose work we have before us,—a God delighting in
blood-stained altars, best pleased of all with human
sacrifices, requiring the first-born of man and beast
as burnt-offerings to himself, having his preferences
and partialities, commanding the extermination of
the peaceful and less powerful inhabitants of lands
no longer in his gift, and making lavish promises of
dominion, never attained, to a horde of barbarians
arrogating to themselves the title of his peculiar
people.
Jehovah, too, is represented as keeping a sort of
debtor and creditor account against mankind, after
the manner of things on earth ; but we find no notice
of the unwarranted use that had just been made of
his name, and of the slaughter of the three thousand
defenceless men in defiance of his own resolution, on
remonstrance made to him, to abstain from the evil
he had purposed against his people. Moses’ order to
the murderous Levites, however, was surely a crime
of a far deeper dye than the people’s sin—admitting
for a moment that the worship of their God under
the form of the Bull was a sin rather than an act of
ignorance, harmless in itself, sanctioned by the high
priest, and in conformity with immemorial usage
among themselves ?
There is no mention of anything of the kind;
neither is Moses taken to task for having himself
presumed to order the act of vengeance from which
he had diverted his God. He is merely commanded
to lead on towards the promised land. Jehovah,
however, still angry! with his people, will not accom
pany them in person as usual; he will not trust him
self among them, “ lest he break forth on them and
consume them by the wayhe will only send his
angel with the host in his stead.
This cannot surely be any likeness of the one God,
ruler of heaven and earth, with the conception of
whom the Jews are generally credited ?
�Exodus: Jehovah plagues the People. 247
It is much rather the portrait of an irascible mortal
not over-much possessed of self-control. It certainly
has nothing in common with the Idea of the Infinite,
Ubiquitous Cause, which men of culture now appre
hend under the name of God.
Though represented as not breaking out on the
people at once, and consuming them on the spot, the
Jehovah of the writer, we soon find, does not really
forego his purpose of revenge; he does not truly
keep his word to Moses, and “ repent of the evil he
had purposed against his peoplehe rather, as it
appears, abides by his resolution to blot them out of
his book; for in striking contrast with his merciful
purpose as previously announced, he now assures
Moses that “ the sins of the people shall be visited
upon them.” And the threat is not idle; for even as
if nothing had already been done in the way of expia
tion or amends by the slaughter of the three thousand,
Jehovah, we now learn, visits the people with a
plague “ because of the Calf which Aaron made.”
Do not the poor people appear to us in these
days rather to have needed instruction than merited
plaguing for yielding to the error of their age and
worshipping, under the form of a Calf or Bull, the
unknown Something beyond themselves which their
intuitive nature led them to divine, but which the
knowledge of their age did not permit them to con
ceive aright ?
As simply compassionate and considerate men we
should assuredly say so. And there is indeed excuse
as ample for the efforts of early man by personification
to obtain something like a definite conception of his
Deity as there is now nothing to be said for those
who still insist on speaking of God as a Person.
Modern theologians do, in fact, fall into the same
error as the ancient Hebrews when they speak of a
personal God; for a Person is an Entity among other
entities, limited in space, having length, breadth,
�248
The Pentateuch.
and thickness,—in other words, having a Form
of some sort. But figure God as he may, and in
the noblest fashion he can imagine, man’s Image of
God must still be as far from having any similitude to
the Supreme as was the golden Calf of the idolatrous
Israelites.
Referring to the later history of the Jewish people
—the split that took place between the kingdoms of
Judah and Israel, their mutual jealousies, animosities,
disastrous wars, and the coarsely expressed hostility
of the Jehovistic religious party of Jerusalem to the
worship of any other than the conception of Deity
under the name of Jehovah, to which the leading
minds among them had attained,—may we not infer
a motive for the invention of such a story as that of
the Golden Calf and the slaughter that followed its
worship ?
The tale may almost certainly be said to have been
composed after the reign of Solomon, its purpose
being as certainly to show the terrible consequences
that followed the desertion of Jehovah, the God of
Judah, for such Gods as Jeroboam, King of Israel, set
up for his subjects in Sechem and Dan.
*
Jehovah, then, all in renewing his promises of
giving the people possession of the land flowing with
milk and honey, having driven out its present occu
pants the Amorites, Hivites, Hittites, and others
from before them, will not trust himself to go in their
midst as heretofore, lest enraged by their perversity
and stiff-neckedness he break out and consume them
by the way—how does Moses proceed ?
He pitches the Tabernacle without the camp, and
whilst all the people stand at their tent doors, he him
self enters the structure, and it comes to pass, says
the text, that the cloudy pillar descends and stands
* See Bernstein : ‘ On the Origin of the Legends of Abra
ham, Isaac, and Jacob,’ one of Mr Scott’s series of papers, of
great interest.
�Exodus : Moses and Jehovah.
249
at the Tabernacle door. “And Jehovah talked with
Moses,” speaking to him “face to face as a man
speaketh unto his friend.”
How could so vast a multitude as the Israelites are
said to have been, have stood at their tent doors
within sight of the Tabernacle, and seen Moses enter
it to have a colloquy with Jehovah ?
How, indeed, seeing that they were millions in
number. But have we the matter of the conversation ?
We have—from the writer, understood. Moses
entreats Jehovah not to desert them, and reminds
him (!) that the people are his people. “ Is it not in
that thou goest with us that it shall be known that
I and thy people have found grace in thy sight, and
so are separated from all the people that are on the
face of the earth ? ”
Does Jehovah yield to the remonstrance of the
man ?
He does. The foolish mortal whose words we have
here, presuming to speak in the name of his God, pro
ceeds : “I will do this thing also that thou hast spoken;
for thou hast found grace in my sight, and I know thee
byname.”
Moses, presuming apparently on this compliant
mood of his God, makes another request as a kind
of personal favour : “ I beseech thee,” he says, “ show
me thy glory.” To which Jehovah, according to the
text, replies : “ I will make all my goodness pass before
thee; I will proclaim the name of Jehovah before
thee, and will be gracious to whom I will be gracious,
and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy
but “ thou canst not see my face; for there shall no
man see me and live. Behold there is a place by
me; thou shalt stand upon a rock; and it shall come
to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put
thee in a cleft of the rock, and will cover thee with
. my hand while I pass by; and I will take away my
hand, and thou shalt see my back parts.”
�2^0
The Pentateuch.
All this is worse than childish—it is absurd—alto
gether unworthy even to have been imagined, much
more to have been reduced to terms by man gifted
with reason. How shall the Omnipresent God, im
manent in the yet farther than the farthest of the fixed
stars plunged in the depths of endless space as in
the point therein that is filled by the mote on which
we dwell, be conceived of as shrunk to the limits of
a person, communing in human speech with an in
quisitive man as with his fellow, and showing him his
back parts ? God, let us be well assured, hides not
his face, though it have no feature in common with
the face of man, from him who reverently seeks to
know and to hold communion with him. In the uni
verse of things is God ever to be clearly seen, and in
the changeless laws by which the wondrous fabric is
upheld are his power and his providence ceaselessly
made known. Perusing these man dies not, but rises
ever into newness of life.
Have we not something analogous to this tale of
Moses’ curiosity in wishing to see the face of Jehovah
in what is called the heathen to distinguish it from the
Hebrew mythology ?
We have. Hercules, urgent with Jupiter to be
allowed to see his face, is long denied by the Father
of Gods and men. But, yielding at length, Jove slays
a Ram, wraps himself in the fleece, puts the head of
the animal over his own as a mask, and so meets the
Hero. Whilst it is extremely difficult to connect a
meaning with the Hebrew myth, it is not difficult to
read the mystery involved in the one we have from
the Greeks. Herakles, the Sun, in his annual course
through the Zodiac, is eager to arrive at the vernal
equinox, whose sign in the olden days was the Ram,
when, emerging from the inferior to the superior
signs, he escapes from his wintery impotence to his
summer power—from seeming death to renovated
life. This old astrological myth, the later Jewish
�Exodus: Jehovah and Moses.
251
writer, without understanding its meaning, has in all
probability transferred to his pages, but so travestied
as to leave it without the symbolical and poetical
significance it had in its original shape.
After his interview with Jehovah in the Tabernacle
and the vision he has whilst ensconced in the cleft of
the rock, Moses receives fresh instructions ?
He is commanded to hew two tables of stone like
the first, on which, says Jehovah, “ I will write
the words that were in the first tables which thou
breakedst; and be ready in the morning and come up
unto Mount Sinai ? ”
Moses does as he is commanded ?
With the two tables of stone in his hand he ascends
the mountain, and Jehovah, on his part, descends in a
cloud and proclaims himself as “ Jahveh-Elohim, mer
ciful and gracious, long-suffering and abundant in
goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands,
forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin, and that
will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity
of the fathers upon the children and upon the chil
dren’s children unto the third and fourth genera
tion.”
The former and the latter clauses of this communi
cation do not very well agree ?
Certainly they do not, and herein we have fresh
assurance of the composite character of the text—
evidence of the manipulation it has undergone and
of the additions that have been made to it at different
times. The merciful idea of one, and he, we may
presume, the later writer, is utterly opposed to the
revengeful and merciless conception of the other and,
let us believe, the older hand. God the absolute, had
he ever spoken—and we venture to say again that
God never did speak in articulate sounds to man—•
could not in one breath have so mixed up mercy with
far-reaching vengeance. We know the world is so
'constituted that all things with their being have in-
�2^2
The Pentateuch.
herent aptitudes which fit them for their states; and
it is in the exercise of these that sentient beings enjoy
their lives, and that what is called the goodness of
God finds its expression ; as, on the other hand, it is
in contravention of the laws of Nature, which are the
laws of God, that they bring down pains and penalties
on themselves, and that that which must be held to
be the righteous justice—never to be spoken of as the
vengeance—of God is displayed.
God does not surely visit the sins of the fathers on
their children ?
Never, in the sense in which the statement in the
text is made and is meant to be understood. In con
formity with the laws of hereditary descent, however,
the children of vicious and immoral parents, as well
as of those who have injured their health by indul
gence and excess of any kind, are apt to be vicious
and immoral, sickly and short-lived.
Jehovah renews the covenant he has already made
at several times with Moses and the patriarchs, and
declares his purpose of doing marvels such as have
not been done in the earth before. He will drive out
the inhabitants of the land to which he is leading his
people, and they, on their part, are to destroy the
altars of the natives, to break in pieces their images,
and cut down their groves [Aschera—wooden pillars,
typical of Astarte]. They are to worship no God
other than Jehovah, “for Jehovah, whose name is
Jealous, is a jealous Godto make no covenant with
the inhabitants of the land; to make no sacrifices to
their gods ; not to take of their daughters as wives or
concubines for their sons; to make no molten gods ;
to keep the feast of unleavened bread; and much
besides, though it is mostly repetition of what has
gone before, even to the seething of the kid in its
mother’s milk; the injunction as regards the first
born of man and beast being here accompanied by
the interpolated clause authorising its redemption, in
�Exodus: Moses and Dionysos.
253
contravention of the positive order elsewhere imple
mented, that it was Jehovah’s unconditionally, and
that whatsoever was ch&rem or devoted to Jehovah
“was' surely to be put to death.” How long does Moses
remain in the mountain on this second visit ?
Forty days and forty nights, of course, forty being
the sacred number; and under the same impossible
conditions as before, without meat or drink during
all that time.
There is something remarkable about Moses when
he comes down from the mountain ?
“ The skin of his face shone,” it is said, “ though
he wist it not.” The people being afraid to come
near him, he puts on a veil whilst speaking with
them, which he only removes when he goes in to
commune with Jehovah.
What may be the meaning of this ?
It were hard to say, unless it be that Moses is
occasionally made to take the place of his God, as he
certainly at times shows himself the more placable
and considerate of the two,-—-than which nothing can
be conceived more absurd; or it may be that, coming
from the great presence in which he is said to have
stood, he is represented as shedding physical as well
as metaphysical light; whence the shining of his face
and the need of the veil; hence, too, the horns, typical
of rays of light, with which the sculptor and painter
have felt themselves authorised to ornament his brow.
These extraordinary particulars appear to turn
Moses into a wholly mythical personage ?
Assimilating him as they do in so remarkable a
manner with the Dionysos, or Bacchus, of the Pagan
Mythology. He, as well as Moses, is born in Egypt,
and the birth of each is concealed for a time, to
escape the hostility of a royal personage. Both are
exposed in an ark or cradle on the Nile, and are alike
rescued by a king’s daughter. Both lead a host to
victory—Dionysos in India, Moses in Palestine—
T
�254
The Pentateuch,
with a rout of women and children among them.
Both walk dryshod through seas and rivers, which
part at the word of command; and both draw water
from the rock by striking it with a magic rod. Both
have one of their names, at least, from Water—Mow,
in Egyptian, signifying water,—the Hebrew leader
being called Mouses, and the heathen god Myses.
Dionysos, moreover, like Moses, has the predicate
Legislator, Thesmophoros ; and both are represented
as horned,—Dionysos being characterised as Taurokeros, Bull-horned, and Moses, as just said, being
familiarly represented with horns upon his forehead.
As the heathen god, to conclude, was styled Luaios
and Liber, the Free, the Freer, so is Moses the De
liverer ■ and if Dionysos have several proper names,
so has Moses,-—Manetho informing us that he was
known as Osarsiph and Tisithes ; Osarsiph being no
other than Osiris, and Tisithes, i.e. Seth, the sacred
name of Sirius, the star whose heliacal rising regu
lated the Egyptian year and symbolised its God.
Is there not something like inconsistency in the
circumstances amid which the Tables of the Law are
at length delivered to Moses, and the fact that the
Law itself—in so far, at least, as the decalogue is
concerned—has been already imparted, with every
possible impressive adjunct,—Mount Sinai quaking
and being all of a smoke, thunder bellowing, lightning
flashing about its crown, and loud and long-breathed
trumpet-blasts coming out of the cloud that hung
about it ?
It might be said, with great show of truth, that the
account we have of the delivery of these Tables is but
another version, and by another hand, of the delivery
of The Law at large—many of the heads of the Deca
logue following in the part of the text that is now
before us, such as the commandment to have no God
but Jehovah, to make no molten images, and to rest
on the seventh day. To these, however, are appended
�Exodus: Legislation.
255
many other injunctions, some momentous, many in
different, but all alike left out of the Eclectic Sum
mary under the Ten heads which we presume we
owe to the more practised and much later writer of
the Twentieth Chapter. Among the number of these
additional commandments is the order to keep the
feasts of unleavened bread and of weeks, of firstfruits and the in-gathering of the year’s increase
at the year’s end; to appear thrice in the year before
Jahveh-Elohim, the Elohim (God) of Israel; not to
offer the blood of his sacrifices with leaven ; to leave
nothing of the feast of the passover until the morn
ing; and not to seethe a kid in its mother’s milk—a
procedure that must have had a significance to the
Israelites which we fail to discover.
Besides these, there is the important reminder that
all that opens the womb, whether of man or beast, ox
or sheep, that is a male, is Jehovah’s ; the firstling of
an ass, however, being ordered exceptionally either to
be redeemed 'with a lamb or to be put to death by
having his neck broken. What Jehovah’s objection
to receive the firstling of the ass may have been we
do not learn from the Hebrew scriptures. Erom
other sources of information, however, we know that
the ass was one of the animals sacred to the Egyptian
Typhon, the God in his adverse aspect; and that the
mode of sacrifice of the animal to him was that pre
cisely which is commanded in the Hebrew text,—it
was thrown down from a height, and so killed or had
its neck broken. The first-born son of the human
kind, is now ordered to be redeemed, and none are
to appear before Jehovah empty.
The redemption clauses, where they occur, we have
already seen reason to conclude, must have been
added subsequently to the original requisition for the
first-born ?
When we observe that the text in several other
places has nothing about redemption, that this is in
�256
The Pentateuch.
direct contradiction to antecedent positive require
ments, and that denunciations against the practice of
child-sacrifice are of frequent occurrence in the writings
of the later prophets, we shall find no reason to doubt
*
that inasmuch as the first-born of man, being males,
are now ordered to be redeemed, so were they in
former times, and as the rule, sacrificed on the altar
of El, Bel or Baal-Molech, the proper God of the
early Hebrew people and no other than Saturn, the
chief God of the Semitic race.
So much for the Book of the Exodus; all that fol
lows after the thirty-fifth chapter, to which we have
now arrived, containing little or nothing but repe
titions of what has been already minutely set forth in
the chapters from the twenty-first to the thirty-fourth
inclusive.
The whole of this concluding part of the Book has
been held by two esteemed Jewish critics and scholars
to be the composition of a writer who lived not earlier
than from the 270th to the 260th year before the
Christian sera.f The text of these chapters, how
ever, being referred by Kuehnen to the Book of the
Origins, and given by Dr Davidson to the Elohist,
may, possibly, be as old as the earlier portions
of the Book which treat of the same matters.
But questions of age and authorship do not greatly,
and at every turn, interest us here, engaged as we
chiefly are with the moral aspects of the subject, and
* To quote a single instance from the Prophets: “ They
built the high places in Tophet, in the valley of the sons of
Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire.”
(Jerem. vii. 31.) The restriction of the sacrifice to males
appears even to have been a late addition. All that opened
the matrix, whether male or female, was doubtless the original
form.
+ See Kalisch, ‘ Hist, and Crit. Comment, on the Old Testa
ment : Exodus and Leviticus; ’ and Popper, ‘ Die biblische
Bericht fiber die Stiftshiitte.’ 8vo. Leipz. 1862.
�Exodus: Composition of the Book.
257
the possibility of receiving it as the veritable word of
God to man. That Exodus comprises some of the most
ancient records of the Hebrew myths and legislative
enactments that have reached us, is unquestionable.
Down to the thirty-fifth chapter it is, in the main, very
certainly older than every part of the Book of Genesis,
and has been presumed to have been compiled and put
together about the beginning of the seventh century
before Christ—a thousand years after the age of Moses,
but both added to and altered in still more recent
times. How can we, in truth, as reasonable men,
imagine Moses surrounded by the Israelites in the
desert calling to him Bezaleel and Aholiab, and others,
cunning workers in gold and silver and precious
stones, weavers, dyers, embroiderers, tanners, with
a host of artificers besides, and setting them to
carry out the minute instructions he is said to
have received from Jehovah for making the Tent
or Tabernacle, the Ark of the Testimony, the Altars
of burnt offering and Incense, the Table of the Show
bread, &c., &c.,—the surfaces of these last being
ordered to be overlaid with pure gold (when they are
not to be wholly composed of this precious metal),
the cherubim all of beaten gold, the seven-light lamp
stand with its knobs, branches, lamps, snuffers and
snuffer dishes, all also of pure gold; the hangings of
fine twined linen—scarlet, purple, and blue—inter
laced with gold, fastened to pillars having chapiters
overlaid with silver by means of hooks of the same
precious and, in the olden time, little known metal,
&c., &c.,—as we find matters set forth with wearisome
prolixity and iteration in this concluding part of the
book of Exodus ?
It is not possible to do so. The people, according
to the record, were only kept from starving by mira
culous showers of manna (which we feel certain never
fell from heaven, though it may then have been, as it
still is, scantily produced at a particular season by
�• 258
The Pentateuch.
the thorny mimosa that lives a dwarfed existence in
many parts of the desert), and flights of quails, which
still arrive in Egypt, Palestine, and other lands at
certain times of the year. How could a community
so circumstanced have had the apparatus-furnaces,
crucibles, moulds, lathes, looms, saws, planes, dye
stuffs, tan-pits, and the hundred other implements
and appliances indispensable to workers in wood,
metal, and precious stones, in wool, flax, and leather ?
The Israelites were never mechanics or mechanicians.
So late as the age of Saul they had not a blacksmith
among them, but sent their ploughshares and coulters
to their neighbours, the Philistines, to be sharpened.
If this be true their early battles could have been
fought with no better arms than clubs ; in the days
of the Judges, Samgar is said to have used an ox
goad, and Samson so primitive a weapon as the jaw
bone of an ass, in the mythical combats in which so
many hundreds or thousands of the enemy compla
cently suffered themselves to be slaughtered by these
heroes of the imagination—even so late as the age of
Solomon artificers had to be brought from Tyre to
plan and build the Temple ! The whole of the tales
about Moses’ laws and constructions are beyond all
question the creation of writers who lived long, very
long, after the age of the great leader—men who had
seen settled life, and must be presumed to have had
not only the First but the Sqcond Temple as the
model from which they drew.
It was not very long, according to the record, after
the Exodus, before the Tent or Tabernacle, the Ark
and Altars, with their furniture complete, were set up
and ready for inauguration ?
No more than a year : “ On the First day of the
First month of the Second year after quitting Egypt,”
all being in order, the ceremony of Inauguration was
performed. The lamps having been lighted, incense
sublimated, and burnt offerings presented, “a cloud,”
�Exodus : Composition of the Book.
259
it is said, descended and covered the Tent, and the
Glory of Jehovah filled the Tabernacle.
This is but a short time, all things else considered ?
Were so much accomplished by the end of the first
year or beginning of the second, it becomes by so
much the more difficult to imagine what the Israelites
could have been about during the remaining thirty
eight or rather thirty-nine years said to have been
spent by them as wanderers in the wilderness. From
the inauguration of the Tabernacle the history of
the people is a blank until we meet with them making
an attempt, in which they were foiled, to penetrate
Palestine proper on the side of Moab. Forty years,
however,—forty being the sacred number and indis
pensable in the narrative—had to be got over, and
the historian—or shall we say the poet—uses them in
a series of marchings and counter-marchings, to and
fro, from one imaginary station or camping-place to
another, with ever-recurring miraculous interpositions
of Jehovah to keep the people from dying of hunger
and thirst, and repeated murmurings and rebellions
on their part, not without good reason as it seems ;—•
eight or nine-and-thirty years are consumed in
getting over ground that, with every allowance for
contingencies in the shape of delays, difficulties,
necessary halts, &c., could easily have been left
behind in something less than eighteen months after
quitting Sinai, by a horde numerically great as it
is possible to imagine the Israelites to have been, if
they managed to live even for a year in the wilder
*
ness.
The Book of the Exodus ended, and the apparatus
for the ceremonial worship of the sons of Israel com
plete, we now come to the minute instructions for
* Goethe—Nihil quod non tetegit, &c.—has discussed this
subject in a very complete manner in his notes to the better
understanding of his West-East Divan: Zum bessern Verstandniss des West-Ostlichen Divan : Israel in der Wuste.
�26o
The Pentateuch.
carrying it into practice, these being especially com
prised in the next Book of the Series—Leviticus—
although many points have already fallen under our
notice in the book that engages us. The ceremonial
worship of the Jews, however, interests us little in
the present age ; it had even in most particulars ceased
to interest the better minds among themselves some
considerable time before their disruption and disper
sion as a people. Its practice has long since and
necessarily been abandoned in many of its most im
posing elements by the modern Jew, the dweller in
every inhabited land beneath the sun where there is a
living to be made by petty or more liberal traffic,
money-dealing, and the like. The record of such a
system of religious observance, the outcome of the
blind religious sense, indeed, could have no real
interest apart from the tale it unfolds of the childish
beliefs and barbarous acts mistakenly held good and
acceptable to God in an early age of the world’s
history, were it not for the influence it has had on
the religious ideas and religious practices of the most
civilised among the peoples of the earth. There is now
no longer any slaughter of bullocks and rams, goats
and turtle-doves, before the Image of Jehovah at the
door of the Tabernacle or Temple, no burning of fat
and flesh to make what was regarded as a sweet
savour to Jehovah, no longer the lamb at morning and
at evening as his daily ration, nor the show-bread as
its complement and the measure of wine as the
indispensable drink offering ! The terms of the later
Jewish legislation may even be said to have made the
continuance of the sacrificial and ceremonial system
of earlier days, entitled Mosaic or Levitical, impos
sible. By the modern reformed code sacrifice could
only be performed in one, place, and that Jerusalem,
and at one altar—that of the Temple—an ordinance
which may have been devised in view of the Jewish
people scattered over the face of the globe, and
�Exodus : Conclusion.
261
announced as a means of getting rid of the blood
stained rites of the earlier system.
The worship of God by the descendants of the
ancient Hebrews has indeed been long purified from
almost everything that can offend the reasonable reli
gious views of the cultivated in the present age; and
it might even seem that there was a possible future
for the Jehovism professed by the most advanced and
enlightened of their later writers. Could the Jews
but abandon the insolent and indefensible idea of their
being, or ever having been, in any sense, the peculiar
people of God; discard the barbarous rite of circum
cision as a necessity of their initiation ; cease to think
of any kind of wholesome aliment as otherwise than
clean, and of bullocks and sheep as food unfit for them
unless slaughtered in a certain way by one of them
selves, they would have done away with almost all
that keeps them Parias in the midst of the enlightened
among European communities. The last named silly
prejudice in particular given up, one great bar to a
good social understanding between Jew and Gentile
would be removed ; and until it is removed no per
fectly good understanding can be come to between
them, for must not my brother eat of the same
mess and drink of the same cup as myself I
If so much be ever accomplished, the descendants
of the ancient Hebrew stock will have made a
greater stride in the Religious Idea than did their
fathers when they forsook the worship of BaalPeor, Moloch, and Astarte, gave up eating with
the blood (eating raw flesh) on High-places, and
ceased to celebrate the orgies of the Phoenician Venus
in booths and under the shade of green trees. Com
porting themselves in all respects as reasonable
beings, they would possibly find that, instead of
being looked on as subjects for the proselytising zeal
of ignorant, bigoted, and presumptuous men and
women to wreak itself hopelessly upon, they might,
�262
The Pentateuch.
without themselves coming under the influence of
any such bad passion, discover that adherents to the
simple theism they professed were to be won from
among their uncircumcised neighbours, more piously
minded than the mass, but lacking the capacity to
believe that God had ever cursed the world, or con
trived matters so indifferently as to make its redemp
tion necessary by appearing in human shape to be a
propitiatory sacrifice to himself. The people of Eng
land spend a million a-year in missions and futile
efforts to convert the Jew and the heathen to Christi
anity,-—-whence may the mission come that shall con
vert them from the unworthy ideas of the Supreme
they entertain, and teach them the eternal laws he has
ordained for the rule of their lives, of the earth they
inhabit, and of the infinite Universe of which they
and it are so small and insignificant a part!
�
Dublin Core
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Title
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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The Pentateuch in contrast with the science and moral sense of our age.
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 205-262 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: "By a Physician". Author believed to be Robert Willis. From the library of Dr Moncure Conway.
Creator
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Willis, Robert
Date
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1873
Publisher
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Thomas Scott
Subject
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Bible
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The Pentateuch in contrast with the science and moral sense of our age.), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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CT123
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Bible
Conway Tracts