"I will smite them with the pestilence, and disinherit them, and will make of thee a greater nation and mightier than they."

But when Moses had cooled a little and came to reflect upon what he had made the "Lord" say, he fell into his ordinary condition of hesitancy.

Supposing some great disaster should happen to the Jews at Kadesh, which lay not so very far from the Egyptian border, the Egyptians would certainly hear of it, and in that case the Egyptian army might pursue and capture Moses. Such a contingency was not to be contemplated, and accordingly Moses began to make reservations. It must be remembered that all these ostensible conversations with the "Lord" went on in public; that is to say, Moses proffered his advice to the Lord aloud, and then retailed his version of the answer he received.

"Now if thou shalt kill all this people as one man, then the nations which have heard the fame of thee will speak, saying,

"Because the Lord was not able to bring this people into the land which he sware unto them, therefore he hath slain them in the wilderness....

"Pardon, I beseech thee, the iniquity of this people according unto the greatness of thy mercy, and as thou hast forgiven this people from Egypt even until now.

"And the Lord said, I have pardoned according to thy word."

Had Moses left the matter there it would not have been so bad, but he could not contain his vexation, because his staff had not divined his wishes. Those men, though they had done their strict duty only, must be punished, so he thought, to maintain his ascendancy.

Of the twelve "spies" whom Moses had sent into Canaan to report to him, ten had incurred his bitter animosity because they failed to render him such a report as would sustain him before the people in making the campaign of invasion to which he felt himself pledged, and on the success of which his reputation depended. Of these ten men, Moses, to judge by the character of his demands upon the Lord, thought it inc.u.mbent on him to make an example, in order to sustain his own credit.

To simply exclude these ten spies from Palestine, as he proposed to do with the rest of the congregation, would hardly be enough, for the rest of the Hebrews were, at most, pa.s.sive, but these ten had wilfully ignored the will of Moses, or, as he expressed it, of the Lord.

Therefore it was the Lord's duty, as Moses saw it, to punish them.

And this Moses proposed that the Lord should do in a prompt and awful manner: the lesson being pointed by the immunity of Joshua and Caleb, the two spies who had had the wit to divine the will of Moses. Therefore, all ten of these men died of the plague while the congregation lay encamped at Kadesh, though Joshua and Caleb remained immune.

Moses, as the commanding general of an attacking army, took a course diametrically opposed to that of Joshua, and calculated to be fatal to victory. He vented his irritation in a series of diatribes which he attributed to the "Lord," and which discouraged and confused his men at the moment when their morale was essential to success.

Therefore, the Lord, according to Moses, went on:

"But as truly as I live, all the earth shall be filled with the glory of the Lord.

"Because all those men which have seen my glory, and my miracles, which I did in Egypt and in the wilderness, have tempted me now these ten times, and have not hearkened to my voice;

"Surely they shall not see the land which I swear unto their fathers, neither shall any of them that provoked me see it:

"But my servant Caleb, because he had another spirit with him, and hath followed me fully, him will I bring into the land whereinto he went;..."

Having said all this, and, as far as might be, disorganized the army, Moses surrendered suddenly his point. He made the "Lord" go on to command: "Tomorrow turn you, and get you into the wilderness by the way of the Red Sea." But, not even yet content, Moses a.s.sured them that this retreat should profit them nothing.

"And the Lord spake unto Moses and unto Aaron, saying, How long shall I bear with this evil congregation, which murmur against me? I have heard the murmurings of the children of Israel, which they murmur against me."

And the Lord continued:

"Say unto them, As truly as I live, ... as ye have spoken in mine ears, so will I do to you.

"Your carcases shall fall in this wilderness; and all that were numbered of you, ... from twenty years old and upward, which have murmured against me.

"Doubtless ye shall not come into the land....

"But as for you, your carcases, they shall fall in this wilderness....

"And the men which Moses sent to search the land, who returned, and made all the congregation to murmur against him, by bringing up a slander upon the land,--

"Even those men that did bring up the evil report upon the land, died by the plague before the Lord.

"But Joshua ... and Caleb, ... which were of the men that went to search the land, lived still.

"And Moses told these sayings unto all the children of Israel and the people mourned greatly."

The congregation were now completely out of hand. They knew not what Moses wanted to do, nor did they comprehend what Moses was attempting to make the Lord threaten: except that he had in mind some dire mischief.

Accordingly, the people decided that the best thing for them was to go forward as Joshua and Caleb proposed. So, early in the morning, they went up into the top of the mountain, saying, "We be here, and will go up unto the place which the Lord hath promised: for we have sinned."

But Moses was more dissatisfied than ever. "Wherefore now do you transgress the commandment of the Lord? But it shall not prosper."

Notwithstanding, "they presumed to go up unto the hilltop: nevertheless the ark of the covenant of the Lord, and Moses, departed not out of the camp.

"Then the Amalekites came down, and the Canaanites, which dwelt in that hill, and smote them, and discomfited them, even unto Hormah"; which was at a very considerable distance,--perhaps not less than thirty miles, though the positions are not very well established.

This is the story as told by the priestly chronicler, who, of course, said the best that could be said for Moses. But he makes a sorry tale of it. According to him, Moses, having been disappointed with the report made by his officers on the advisability of an immediate offensive, committed the blunder of summoning the whole a.s.sembly of the people to listen to it, and then, in the midst of the panic he had created, he lost his self-possession and finally his temper. Whereupon his soldiers, not knowing what to do or what he wanted, resolved to follow the advice of Joshua and advance.

But this angered Moses more than ever, who committed the unpardonable crime in the eyes of the soldier; he abandoned his men in the presence of the enemy and by this desertion so weakened them that they sustained the worst defeat the Israelites suffered during the whole of their wanderings in the wilderness. Such a disaster brought on a crisis. The only wonder is that it had been so long delayed. Moses had had since the exodus a wonderful opportunity to test the truth of his theories. He had a.s.serted that the universe was the expression of a single and supreme mind, which operated according to a fixed moral law. That he alone, of all men, understood this mind, and could explain and administer its law, and that this he could and would do were he to obtain absolute obedience to the commands which he uttered. Were he only obeyed, he would win for his followers victory in battle, and a wonderful land to which they should march under his guidance, which was the Promised Land, and thereafter all was to be well with them.

The disaster at Hormah had demonstrated that he was no general, and even on that very day the people had proof before their eyes that he knew nothing of the desert, and that the Lord knew no more than he, since there was no water at Kadesh, and to ask the congregation to encamp in such a spot was preposterous. Meanwhile Moses absorbed all the offices of honor and profit for his family. Aaron and his descendants monopolized the priesthood, and this was a bitter grievance to other equally ambitious Levites. In short, the Mosaic leadership was vulnerable on every hand. Attack on Moses was, therefore, inevitable, and it came from Korah, who was leader of the opposition.

Korah was a cousin of Moses, and one of the ablest and most influential men in the camp, to whom Dathan and Abiram and "two hundred and fifty"

princes of the a.s.sembly, famous in the congregation, men of renown, joined themselves. "And they gathered themselves together against Moses and against Aaron, and said unto them, Ye take too much upon you, seeing all the congregation are holy, every one of them, and the Lord is among them: wherefore then lift you up yourselves above the congregation of the Lord?"

Koran's grievance was that he had been, although a Levite, excluded from the priesthood in favor of the demands of Aaron and his sons.

"And when Moses heard it, he fell upon his face."

And yet something had to be done. Moses faced an extreme danger. His life hung upon the issue. As between him and Korah he had to demonstrate which was the better sorcerer or magician, and he could only do this by challenging Korah to the test of the ordeal: the familiar test of the second clause of the code of Hammurabi; "If the holy river makes that man to be innocent, and has saved him, he who laid the spell upon him shall be put to death. He who plunged into the holy river shall take to himself the house of him who wove the spell upon him." [Footnote: Code of Laws promulgated by Hammurabi, King of Babylon. Translated by C. H.

W. Johns, M.A., Section 2.] And so with Elijah, to whom Ahaziah sent a captain of fifty to arrest him. And Elijah said to the captain of fifty, "If I be a man of G.o.d, then let fire come down from heaven, and consume thee and thy fifty. And there came down fire from heaven, and consumed him and his fifty." [Footnote: 2 Kings I, 10.]

In a word, the ordeal was the common form of test by which the enchanter, the sorcerer, or the magician always was expected to prove himself. Moses already had tried the test by fire at least once, and probably oftener. So now Moses reproached Korah because he was jealous of Aaron; "and what is Aaron, that ye murmur against him?... This do; Take you censers, Korah, and all his company; and put fire therein, and put incense in them before the Lord to-morrow; and ... whom the Lord doth choose, he shall be holy: ye take too much upon you, ye sons of Levi."

But it was not only about the priesthood that Moses had trouble on his hands. He had undertaken, with the help of the Lord, to lead the Israelites through the wilderness. But at every step of the way his incompetence became more manifest. Even there, at that very camp of Kadesh, there was no water, and all the people clamored. And, therefore, Dathan and Abiram taunted him with failure, and with his injustice to those who served him. And Moses had no reply, except that he denied having abused his power.

"And Moses sent to call Dathan and Abiram, the sons of Eliab: which said, We will not come up:

"Is it a small thing that thou hast brought us up out of a land that floweth with milk and honey, to kill us in the wilderness, except thou make thyself altogether a prince over us?

"Moreover, thou hast not brought us into a land that floweth with milk and honey, or given us inheritance of fields and vineyards: wilt thou put out the eyes of these men [probably alluding to the "spies"]? We will not come up."

This was evidently an exceedingly sore spot. Moses had boasted that, because the "spies" had rendered to the congregation what they believed to be a true report instead of such a report as he had expected, the "Lord" had destroyed them by the plague. And it is pretty evident that the congregation believed him. It could hardly have been by pure accident that out of twelve men, the ten who had offended Moses should have died by the plague, and the other two alone should have escaped.

Moses a.s.sumed to have the power of destroying whom he pleased by the pestilence through prayer to the "Lord," and he, indeed, probably had the power, in such a spot as an ancient Jewish Nomad camp, not indeed by prayer, but by the very human means of communicating so virulent a poison as the plague: means which he very well understood.

Therefore it is not astonishing that this insinuation should have stung Moses to the quick.

"And Moses was very wroth, and said unto the Lord, Respect not thou their offering: I have not taken one a.s.s from them, neither have I hurt one of them."

Then Moses turned to Korah, "Be thou and all thy company before the Lord, thou, and they, and Aaron, to-morrow:

"And take every man his censer, and put incense in them, and bring ye before the Lord every man his censer, two hundred and fifty censers."