But how huge does the difficulty become if we take the more reasonable dimensions of twelve miles square for this camp; that is, about the size of London! Imagine at least half a million of men having to go out daily a distance of six miles and back to the suburbs for the common necessities of nature, as the law directed.

The Israelites undoubtedly had flocks and herds of cattle (Ex. 34: 3).

They sojourned nearly a year before Sinai, where there was no food for cattle; and the wilderness in which they sojourned nearly forty years is now and was then a desert (Deut. 32: 10; 8: 15). The cattle surely did not subsist on manna!

Among other prodigies of valor, 12,000 Israelites are recorded in Num.

31 as slaying all the male Midianites, taking captive all the females and children, siezing all their cattle and flocks, numbering 808,000 head, taking all their goods and burning all their cities, without the loss of a single man. Then they killed all the women and children except 32,000 virgins, whom they kept for themselves. There would seem to have been at least 80,000 females in the aggregate, of whom 48,000 were killed, besides (say) 20,000 boys. The number of men slaughtered must have been about 48,000. Each Israelite therefore must have killed 4 men in battle, carried off 8 captive women and children, and driven home 67 head of cattle. And then after reaching home, as a pastime, by command of Moses, he had to murder 6 of his captive women and children in cold blood.

Now, I respectfully submit that, judging from the account of the Exodus of the Jews, which they have written themselves, we cannot credit it.

The narrative is full of contradictions, and is so absurd and incredible, and even impossible, that we must regard it as a _huge myth_. There may have been an Exodus from Egypt, of which this account is an exaggeration, but it bears so many evidences of the _fabulous_ that we cast it aside and are led to doubt whether the Jews were ever in Egypt except as tramps and vagabonds, and to suspect that the whole story is an _adapted_ history of some great exodus of some ancient tribes written for a _purpose._

I think it has been shown that the Jews were not the people that they have been supposed to be. They are a modern people in the world's history, antedated by many highly-civilized and powerful nations. They are not descendants of Abram, as will be shown more fully hereafter, and their population never reached the fabulous numbers that are given in what is called their sacred history. Indeed, there is so much of the _fabulous_ about them, so much of _false pretence_ that upon the very face is impossible and incredible, that the wonder is that Christians should ever have seriously thought of regarding them and their inst.i.tutions as the source and substance of what Christianity is. We have no prejudice against the Jews. We cast no reflection upon the so-called Hebrews of the present day. They are not responsible for their ancestors, any more than Gladstone, Huxley, Tyndall, Spencer, and other brainy Englishmen are responsible for the savagery and barbarism of _their_ forefathers.

It has been our object in this chapter to show the _Munchausenish_ character of Jewish history, upon which the whole superstructure of modern theology rests. If anybody is proud of his descent from such a people, he is welcome to the glory.

CHAPTER IV. MOSES AND THE PENTATEUCH

_"But even unto this day, when Moses is read, the veil is upon their heart."-2 Cor. 3:15._

THE first five books of the Old Testament, supposed by many to have been written by Moses, are called the Pentateuch. In the early chapters of Genesis, in the "Authorized Version," there is placed at the head of the page in the margin, "a. m. 1," which mean Anno Mundi-the year of the world-one, and immediately below it are the letters "b. c."-which mean Before Christ-"4004." This is the system of chronology established by Archbishop Ussher, and means that 4004 years before Christ the world was _one_ year old. It is claimed that Moses promulgated the law about 1451 b. c., and this must have been about two thousand five hundred and fifty-three years after the Creation, which added to 1890, the present date, would make the world just five thousand eight hundred and ninety-four years old. Lyell, a most judicious geologist estimated the delta of the Mississippi at one hundred thousand years, and some persons think these figures should have been doubled. Professor John Fiske thinks the glacial period began two hundred and forty thousand years ago, and that human beings inhabited Europe at least one hundred and sixty thousand years earlier, thus giving an antiquity to our race of not less than four hundred thousand years. Other scientists talk of hundreds of thousands, and even _millions_, of years, but we attach no importance to specific figures. We simply insist upon an antiquity which very far exceeds six thousand years.

Learned Egyptologists place Rameses II., the Pharaoh of the Jewish captivity, whose mummy is now to be seen in the museum at Cairo, at 1390 years b. c. It seems strange that his mummy should be on exhibition in a museum when "he and all his hosts were swallowed up in the Red Sea." If we are told that Rameses II. was succeeded by Sethi II., we find from Egyptian records that both of these kings lived to a good old age, and the mummy of each has been preserved, and not even a hint is given that either of them was drowned. But we have, according to the tables of Abydos and Bunsen, which are generally accepted, three thousand six hundred and twenty years before Christ as the time in which Menes, the first monarch of Egypt, reigned, making two thousand two hundred and thirty years as the period of the Egyptian monarchy before the reign of Rameses II.

But I contend that Egyptian civilization extends back at least seven thousand years, and Miss Amelia

B. Edwards, the Egyptologist, who has recently lectured in our Pennsylvania University course, thinks ten thousand years not too high an estimate. In support of ibis hypothesis, the great antiquity of man, which no scholar now disputes, carries us back many thousands of years beyond Menes, and there are many facts which favor the a.s.sumption that the valley of the Nile was one of the places inhabited for an indefinite period. The works of art-monuments, architecture, paintings, etc.-show an antiquity that cannot be estimated. Manetho, an Egyptian priest, who wrote a history of Egypt, by request of Ptolemy II., two hundred and eighty-six years before Christ, carries us back more than seven thousand years.

The Pentateuch is a compilation by several authors, and hence its patchwork character. Professors Ewald and Kuenen and others have proved this, and Dean Stanley, of the English Establishment, has admitted it.

Some portions may have been compiled eight hundred or nine hundred years before Christ, but not the two contradictory accounts of the creation and fall of man. The a.s.syrian cuneiform tablets, which were discovered in 1873 and 1874 a. d., and which are now in the British Museum, show that this ancient people had this story about two thousand years before the time of Moses. The Jews learned it in Babylon, and none of the other Old-Testament writings contain any notice of it, because it was not known until after the return of the Jews from their captivity in Babylon, five hundred and eighteen years before Christ. Is it not reasonable to suppose that the various Old-Testament writers would have made some reference to the Pentateuch had they known of its existence?

Professor Francois Lenormant of the National Library of France, a most learned archaeologist and palaeontologist, and a most devout Christian, in his _Beginnings of History_ admits that the Jews borrowed substantially the story of the creation and the fall from more ancient nations, and furnishes the original copies. The legends recorded in Genesis are found among many ancient peoples who lived many centuries before Moses; and Berosus, a priest of the temple of Belus, who wrote two hundred and seventy-six years before Christ, affirms that fragments of Chaldean history can be traced back 15 Sadi or 150,000 years. I have mentioned these things because they are germane to what is to follow.

There is good reason for thinking that the book of Deuteronomy was written about six hundred and twenty-one years before Christ, and the remaining books of the Pentateuch were of later date, coming down to four hundred and fifty years before Christ. This Professor Kuenen has demonstrated beyond controversy in his _Religion of Israel_, to which I must refer for his arguments in detail. The best scholarship of the world does not believe that what is called the Law of Moses was written prior to the fifth or sixth century before Christ, and learned men in Holland, Germany, and England, as well as the most advanced thinkers in America, now accept this opinion. Professor Robertson Smith, in the _Encyclopdia Britannica_, adopts this view, and Dean Stanley, in his _Jewish Church_, does not leave us in doubt as to his opinion.

Take the following as an example of what I mean (Gen. 12:6): "And the Canaanite was then in the land;" whereas the expulsion of the Canaanites did not occur until several centuries after the death of Moses, when this must have been written. In Gen. (36: 31) we read, "Before there reigned any king over Israel." This must have been two hundred years after the death of Moses. "The nations that were before you" (Lev. 13: 8) of course presupposes that the Canaanites had already been subdued.

"Now the man Moses was very meek, above all the men that were upon the face of the earth" (Num. 12:13), could hardly have been written by Moses himself. The expression "unto this day" frequently occurs, and shows that the time was long after the events took place. It is also implied in various places that the writer resided in Palestine, and so it could not have been Moses. In Deuteronomy (19: 14) we read, "Thou shalt not remove thy neighbor's landmark which they of old time have set in thine inheritance." They had no landmark to remove, unless this was written concerning the land of Canaan long after the death of Moses. They are reproached for not keeping the Sabbath in the past for a long time, and this is given as a reason for the Captivity; and hence Leviticus 26:34, 35, 43 was written after the Captivity, which began in 597 b. c. In Gen.

14:14, Lot is taken prisoner and rescued from his captors, whom they "pursued unto Dan." Now, there was no such place as Dan until after the entrance into Canaan. We read in Judg. 18:27, 29 that this city was called Laish, which was burned by the Israelites, and then they built a city, and they called it "Dan, after the name of their father: howbeit the name of the city was Laish at first." This "trout in the milk" is as striking as if some one should write of Chicago when the Declaration of Independence was signed. In Gen. 36:31 we read, "And these are the kings that reigned in the land of Edom before there reigned any king over the children of Israel." This pa.s.sage shows that it was written after there had been kings in Israel, and could not have been written by Moses. I could show similar incongruities concerning the manna in Gen. 16: 35, compared with Josh. 5: 12. So Deut. 24: 14 must have been written after the entrance into Canaan, as until then they had no _lands_, and there were no gates and no "strangers within their gates." The same might be said of the fourth commandment of the Decalogue: the Israelites had no _gates_ until after they entered Canaan. It could not have been written by Moses in the wilderness of Arabia.

These ill.u.s.trations might be produced indefinitely, but enough have been given to show that the Pentateuch was written several hundred years after the death of Moses, and that we are justifiable in fixing the date for most of it in the fourth, fifth, or sixth century before the Christian era. The Pentateuch abounds in duplicate traditions of the same transactions, and also in diversity and contradictions. These numerous repet.i.tions are fatal to the supposition that it was written by Moses. If Moses was the author of the Pentateuch, we should expect to find a good many hints of this in other parts of the Bible; whereas we have no reference to Sinai and its awful thunders, and, although Moses is mentioned in the New Testament, it only shows the existence of traditions to that effect at that time. Not until the time that Christianity arose, about thirteen hundred years after the death of Moses, did the tradition obtain currency that he was the author of the Pentateuch.

The fact is, the Jews are a comparatively modern people, and were not known as a nation until the time of Alexander the Great (356-325 b. c.), and Herodotus, by never mentioning them, so indicates. While the Hindoos, Egyptians, Grecians, Romans, Chaldeans, and Babylonians had their men of science, literature, and law, whose fame only brightens with the flight of time, the Jews have no _history_ except what was written by themselves, and that is so absurd, impossible, and contradictory that n.o.body can believe it.

Everybody knows that the ancient Jews were the const.i.tutional imitators of other peoples. They have always been the second-hand clothes-dealers of the world. As a race they never have been noted for originality, but have always been ready to borrow what belonged to other people, and then, with characteristic self-complacency, have claimed to be the "original Jacobs" of everything good and great. We intend this as no reflection upon the Jews of the present day.

C. Staniland Wake, an English writer, in his great work on the _Evolution of Morality_, vol. ii., page 59, thus expresses his views: "Judging from this fact, many persons imagine-or at least, from the superst.i.tious reverence that they have for the Decalogue, appear to do so-that until the time of the Hebrew lawgiver the most ordinary rules of morality were unknown. The mere fact of Egypt being the starting-point of the Exodus ought to be sufficient to disabuse the mind of this idea, without reference to the contents of the code itself. But the moral laws given in the Decalogue are of so primitive a character that it is absurd to suppose, except on the a.s.sumption that the Hebrews were at that period in a condition of pure savagery, that G.o.d would personally appear to give his immediate sanction to them. The commands, Honor thy father and thy mother, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor, Thou shalt not covet, were simply _reiterations_ of laws to which the Hebrews had been subject during their whole sojourn in Egypt, and which must, in fact, have been familiar to them before their ancestors left their traditional Chaldean home."

Then we must bear in mind that Moses himself was an Egyptian by birth, and that he was brought up at the court of Pharaoh until he was forty years of age, and in Acts 7: 22 we are told that "Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and in deeds."

The whole matter relating to the Pentateuch is thus summed up by the late Prof. John Wm. Draper, M. D., LL.D., late of the University of New York, in his _Conflict between Religion and Science_: "No man may dare to impute them (the books of the Pentateuch) to the inspiration of Almighty G.o.d, their inconsistencies, incongruities, and impossibilities, as exposed by many learned and pious modern scholars, both German and English, are so great. It is the decision of these critics that Genesis is a narrative based upon legends; that Exodus is not historically true; that the whole Pentateuch is _unhistoric_ and _un-Mosaic_: it contains the most extraordinary contradictions and impossibilities, sufficient to involve the credibility of the whole-imperfections so conspicuous that they would destroy the authenticity of any modern historical work."...

"To the critical eye they all present peculiarities which demonstrate that they were written on the banks of the Euphrates, and not in the desert of Arabia. They contain many Chaldaisms."... "From such a.s.syrian sources the legends of the creation of the earth and heavens, the Garden of Eden, the making of man from clay and the woman from one of his ribs, the temptation of the serpent, etc.,... were obtained by Ezra." "I agree in the opinion of Hupfeld, that the discovery that the Pentateuch is put together out of the various sources of original doc.u.ments is beyond all doubt, is not only one of the most important and most pregnant with consequences for the interpretation of the historical books of the Old Testament-or rather for the whole of theology and history-but it is also one of the most certain discoveries which have been made in the domain of criticism and the history of literature."

But not only do the laws of Egypt antedate the laws accredited to Moses, but the Hindoos had laws which were yet more ancient. The writings of Buddha, who died in 477 b. c., refer to older books and quote from them, and these again refer to still older books, until we reach laws which existed many thousands of years before the Law of Moses, as the laws of Manu were drawn from the "immemorial customs" of the nation and const.i.tute a kind of _common law_. "The most accurate scholars point to India as the origin of Egyptian civilization," says Le Renouf, the learned Egyptologist.

If Egyptian literature was derived in a remote period from India, what must be the date of old India's laws as compared with the laws of the Hebrews? It is no wonder that Max Muller, professor in the orthodox University of Oxford, says (in Chips, vol. i., p. 11): "After carefully examining every possible objection that can be made against the date of the Vedic hymns, their claim to that high antiquity which is ascribed to them has not, as far as I can judge, been shaken." The same learned Sanskrit scholar says, "The opinion that the pagan religions were mere corruptions of the religion of the Old Testament, once supported by men of high authority and great learning, is now as completely surrendered as the attempt at explaining Greek and Latin as corruptions of Hebrew"

(_Science of Religion_, p. 24). This great Sanskrit scholar admits in many places in his voluminous writings the greater antiquity of the pagan scriptures, and gives many weighty reasons to show how impossible and absurd it is to suppose that they have been changed and interpolated to adapt them to more modern times.

The Vedas, the sacred writings of the Hindoos, according to Sir William Jones the Orientalist, "cannot be denied to have an antiquity the most distant." According to the Brahmans, they are coeval with the creation, and the Sama-Veda says, "They were formed of the soul of Him who exists by, or of, himself." The Hindoo laws were codified by Manu and copied by all antiquity, notably by Rome in the compilation or digest of the laws of all nations called the Code of _Justinian_, which has been adopted as the foundation of all modern legislation. I could, did time permit, furnish the laws of Manu, the Justinian Code, and the Civil Code of Napoleon in parallel columns, in a way to show their common origin beyond a doubt. Laws of betrothal and marriage, paternal authority, tutelage, and adoption; property, contract, deposit, loan, sale, partnership, donation, and testamentary bequest,-all were elaborately promulgated by the Code of Manu in 2680 _slocas_.

Laws were arranged under eighteen princ.i.p.al heads, concerning as many different causes for which laws are enacted: Debts, deposits and loans for use, sale without ownership, gifts, non-payment of wages, agreements, sale and purchase, disputes, boundaries, a.s.saults, slander, robbery and violence, adultery, altercation between man and wife, inheritance, and gaming. "The court of Brahma with four faces" is where four learned Brahmans sat in judgment, one of whom was the king's chief counsellor.

One of their trite sayings was, "When justice, having been wounded by iniquity, approaches the court, and the judges extract not the arrow or dart, they also shall be wounded by it."

The mode of conducting lawsuits was, in a great degree, similar to that used in all civilized countries of the present day. The oath taken by witnesses was as follows: "What ye know to have been transacted in the matter before us, between the parties reciprocally, declare at large and with truth, for your evidence in the cause is required."

"The witness who speaks falsely shall be fast bound under water in the snaky cords of Varuna, and be wholly deprived of power to escape torment during a hundred transmigrations."

Brahmans were banished for giving false evidence, but all others were punished by blows on the abdomen, the tongue, feet, eyes, nose, and ears, and in capital cases blows were inflicted upon the whole body.

Some of the moral sayings of the Hindoos run thus: "He who bestows gifts for worldly fame, while he suffers his family to live in distress, touches his lips with honey, but swallows poison. Such virtue is counterfeit. Even what he does for his spiritual body, to the injury of those he is bound to maintain, shall bring him ultimate misery, both in this world and the next.

"Content, returning good for evil, resistance to sensual appet.i.te, abstinence from illicit gains, knowledge of tbe Vedas, knowledge of the Supreme Spirit, veracity, and freedom from wrath, form the tenfold system of duties.

"Honor thy father and thy mother. Forget not the favors thou hast received. Learn whilst thou art young. Seek the society of the good.

Live in harmony with others. Remain in thine own place.

"Speak ill of none. Ridicule not bodily infirmities. Pursue not a vanquished foe. Deceive even not thy enemies. Forgiveness is sweeter than revenge. The sweetest bread is that earned by labor. Knowledge is riches.

"What one learns in his youth is as lasting as graven on stone. The wise is he who knows himself. Speak kindly to the poor. Discord and gaming lead to misery. He misconceives his interest who violates his promise.

"There is no tranquil sleep without a good conscience, nor any virtue without religion. To honor thy mother is the most acceptable worship. Of women the fairest ornament is modesty."

The following, from the laws of Manu (lib. iii. Sloca 55), will contrast strangely with the law of Moses regarding the treatment of women and the esteem in which they should be held:

"Women should be nurtured with every tenderness and attention by their fathers, their brothers, their husbands, and their brothers-in-law, if they desire great prosperity."

"Where women live in affliction the family soon becomes extinct; but when they are loved and respected, and cherished with tenderness, the family grows and prospers in all circ.u.mstances."

"When women are honored the divinities are content; but when we honor them not all acts of piety are sterile."

"The households cursed by the women to whom they have not rendered due homage find ruin weigh them down and destroy them as if smitten by some secret power."

"In the family where the husband is content with his wife, and the wife with her husband, happiness is a.s.sured for ever."

That there were many trivial things in the ancient pagan laws, and many practices prevailed among a portion of the people which seem idolatrous, we freely admit; but the same is true of many of the Hebrew laws, which are too obscene for quotation here. We also find among the Hebrews all forms of _nature-worship_, such as sun-worship, tree-worship, fire-worship, ser-pent-worship, and phallic-worship. Of this more later on.

Besides the Hindoos and the Egyptians, there were many nations more ancient than the Hebrews. The Grecian Argos was founded 1807 b. c.