* Genesis xv, 6.** Ezekiel xx, 25.
It no more troubles the conscience of Jehovah to play a trick upon his people than it did that of Abraham when he trafficked in his wife's honor. Nor did it in the least surprise the prophets when they caught their god lying to them. "Wilt thou be altogether unto me as a liar?" asks Jeremiah; and again he says, "Ah, Lord God! surely thou hast greatly deceived this people." * But is he then going to look for another and a more honest god? Not at all. He does not regard lying as an insurmountable defect in the character of his god. And this because there is no ethical code in the bible; the bible is jealous of one thing—the right belief.
Jeremiah is not the only prophet who is willing to overlook in his deity so slight a defect as immorality: "Shall there be evil in a city and the Lord hath not done it?" is the exulting cry of Amos. **
Isaiah makes the God of Israel say: "I make peace and create evil.... I, the Lord, do all these things." *** Nor did it in the least disconcert another prophet to admit that "the Lord hath put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these thy prophets." **** Like people, like God. It is not religion that shapes and molds a people, but the people who make their religion. This explains such passages as the following, which the Jews attributed to their God:
And if the prophet be deceived when he hath spoken a thing, I the Lord have deceived the prophet. (v)
Thus saith the Lord, Behold, I frame evil against you, and devise a device against you. (vi)
* Jeremiah xv, 18; iv, 10.** Amos iii, 6.*** Isaiah xlv, 7.**** I Kings xxii, 23.v. Ezekiel xiv, 9vi. Jeremiah xviii, 11.
In one of his letters, St. Paul does not hesitate to write that God purposely causes people to believe in a lie that he may have an excuse to damn them for not believing the truth. That people could read such a passage without protest and abhorrence, shows how effective has been the blight of this Asiatic cult upon the mind and heart of the western world. "And for this cause," writes the Apostle Paul, "God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: that they all might be damned." *
The God who in the Old Testament hardened the heart of Pharaoh that he might ruin him and his people, leads people, in the New Testament, to hug a delusion to their souls that he might damn them. And this is the being who is not only to be our pattern for morality, but it shall also be considered impossible for any one to be better than he is. To try to improve on this "divine" pattern is blasphemy, both to the Jew and the Christian.
To teach that no one can be better than Jehovah, as he is depicted in the bible, is the most hopeless pessimism. Morality is born of hope and courage. It is the idea of human perfectibility and the idea of progress which give wings to human effort. The bible denies to man the privilege to transcend the ideals of the past, or to be better than his Asiatic gods.
* II Thessalonians ii, 11, 12.
What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God. *
* Micah vi, 8.
THIS, and similar passages, are often quoted to give the bible a reputation. Many commentators, Mathew Arnold among them, contend that righteousness is the major key-note of the Old Testament. To prove this, the above passage from the prophet Micah is often quoted. Another text which these commentators are fond of quoting reads as follows:
And to him that ordereth his conversation aright will I show the salvation of God.*
* Psalms 1, 23.
To deserve this salvation by a life of righteousness, it is claimed, was the one all-permeating thought of the "people of the bible." But this last passage from the Psalms occurs only once in the Old Testament, and it is a little strange that there should be just one reference to the thought which is said to permeate the whole bible. However, that is not the real answer to the conclusions drawn from this passage. By consulting the margin of the Revised Version of the bible, which, too, is the work of Christian scholars and has this advantage over the Authorized Version, that it is more accurate—by consulting, then, the latest and more accurate translation of the bible, we find that the text reads:
Whosoever offereth the sacrifice of thanksgiving glorifieth me, and prepareth a way that I may show him the salvation of God.
There is nothing here about "righteousness," or ethical conduct, or conversation. It was the English translators who gave the text its moral tone.
Let us now examine the text which opens this chapter. It declares that God requires of his people justice, mercy and humility. The word which has been translated into English as "mercy" ishesed. It is difficult to believe that this word meant in Hebrew what we understand by "mercy." In the one hundredth and thirty-sixth Psalm, David, whose character we explain in this book, thus praises thehesed, or "mercy" of God:
To him that smote Egypt in their first-born; for his mercy (hesed) endureth forever.*
Surely no modern moralist would think of attributing the wholesale murder of all the first-born in a land to the "mercy" of God! In the same vein, David, while praising Jehovah's "mercy" for "overthrowing Pharaoh and his host, in the Red sea," for "slaying great kings," and "famous kings," whom God killed in battle and whose lands he gave to the Jews, he exclaims, "For his hesed (mercy) endureth forever." We associate with the idea of "mercy," tenderness, compassion and charity. What makes "mercy" or charity a great quality is that it is, as a rule, bestowed upon the unfortunate, and even the undeserving. But to describe killing people in their sleep, or throwing down stones from heaven to destroy soldiers defending their homes, ** or to drown a nation trying to recover their property from the Jews who had "spoiled the Egyptians," before fleeing the land, as acts of "mercy," is to make of morality a mockery. What is the difference between the red Indian extolling Manitou for the scalps he has given him, and David singing:
* Psalms cxxxvi, 10.** Joshua x, ii.
To him that smote Egypt in their first-born:
For his mercy endureth forever. *
* Consult Chilperic's article in The Reformer, Vol. VI, page664.
Who would for a moment hesitate between these lines of David and
The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth, as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath:
of Shakespeare?
It is not our purpose to show that the Old Testament knows nothing of "mercy" in the modern sense of the word, but that the wordhesedin the bible text, which figures in the English translation of this text as "mercy," means something quite different. Following the lead of the great Hebrew scholar, Gesenius, Chilperic makes the wordhesedin this text from Micah, synonymous with our word "piety." What Jehovah desires of his people, then, is not clemency, but piety; not the love of man, but the love of God. It is the duty of man to God, not the duty of man to his fellows, the world over, that the Jewish prophet has in mind. The first-born of Egypt and all the other foes of Israel were destroyed as a reward for the piety of the chosen people. It is for this David praises the hesed of the Lord. In the same way, the "do justly" in the text has also a purely ceremonial meaning. The word "justly" in the translation is not the English of the Hebrew word in the text, which ismishpat. The Jews used the word in the sense of the law, or the judgments and ordinances, of Jehovah. What the Lord requires, then, in this text from Micah, which the commentators make so much of, is "to perform the law, to love piety, and to submit to Jehovah." And when the prophet quotes the Semitic God as saying: "I desired hesed (mercy), and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings," * he means just what the modern revivalist means when he says: "All your morality can not save you. What God insists upon ispiety." If further evidence be required to know that what we understand by justice, love, charity, had no place in the vocabulary of the bible writers, there is the story narrated in I Samuel, xv. This "moral" teacher, Samuel, orders King Saul, in the name of Jehovah, to slaughter the Amalekites, "both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass." The king, in carrying out this program, manages to spare the lives of the best of the cattle; he also allows the Amalekite king to escape alive. Whereupon, Jehovah is so provoked that, "it repenteth me that I have set up Saul to be king," he says. Then Samuel goes to see the king, who relates to him how he had consumed the Amalekites by putting everything to the sword. "And Samuel said, What meaneth then this bleating of the sheep in mine ears and the lowing of the oxen which I hear?" The king replied that the best of the sheep and of the oxen were reserved "to sacrifice unto the Lord." Observe now the answer which the prophet of God gave to the king:
* Hosea vi, 6.
Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.
Now we understand what it is that the Lord demands; so did Saul, after Samuel had explained it to him, for "Samuel hewed Agag (the king whose life had been spared) in pieces before the Lord in Gilgal." From a human point of view, it would have been more moral to sacrifice to God the cattle Saul had saved than to "hew in pieces" a human being, but that is the morality of man; to be moral in the bible sense is to do as God commands, whether what he commands you to kill be a sheep or a human being. Morality, according to the bible, means unquestioning obedience. Addressing a monster revival meeting, the Christian preacher declared that: "Violation of the sixth commandment, cursing, theft, drunkenness, and even murder, are pardonable sins, but refusal to accept the Son of God is an eternal barrier to the heavenly kingdom." *
* The Toledo News-Bee, May 17, 1911.
That is our definition of immorality.
IT is the claim of both Jews and Christians that the Ten Commandments form the foundation, not only for the moral and civil laws of our country, but of the civilized world as well. Some bibliolaters, in their zeal, go so far as to say that there was no morality in the world before the Ten Commandments were announced. That is to say, in their opinion, morality is but a few thousand years old. Why, the world itself, according to the bible chronology, is nearly six thousand years old. Are we to understand, then, that until the time of Moses the world managed to get along without any morality at all?
But we know that the world is very much older than six thousand years, and that there were great empires and a civilization which was already old, long long before the Jews arrived. Egypt was at the zenith of her culture when the sons of Jacob appeared within her gates to beg for bread, and Babylonia and Persia were world-empires when the Jews were still slaves. But to admit that there was any morality before Moses, is to give up the bible. What need could there be of a moral law coming down from heaven, if there were one already growing out of the earth? No deity is needed to find for us what was never lost, or to give us what we already possessed. To admit, therefore, that there were ancient nations who flourished and waxed strong in art and commerce, in culture and character, long before the Ten Commandments descended from the clouds, would be fatal to the claim that there can be no morality without the bible.
The defenders of the bible find themselves in a very embarrassing position. They can not deny Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome; but if they admit the greatness and glory of these empires, what becomes of their claim that morality was first given to the world by Moses in the wilderness? There is only one way out of the dilemma: Refuse to discuss the question. And that is practically the tactics of the bible champions at present. It is absolutely impossible to find any more an educated and respectable churchman who is willing to debate the question before an audience of inquirers. Silence is their one remaining asset.
It is related in the bible that the Ten Commandments were written on two tables of stone by the deity himself. But in a fit of anger, Moses, in whose custody the documents in stone were placed, "cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount." * This was a device to account for the nonexistence of the tables. If ever there were a time when a miracle would have been in order, it was when Moses dropped the commandments. After forty days of labor, Jehovah delivers the moral law, and not wishing to entrust the work of taking down his dictation to Moses, he inscribes them on imperishable stone, with his own hand. And then they fall and break, like any schoolboy's slate. The slates should not have broken—and they would not have broken—if all the other miracles told in the bible are true. To have miracles without number when we do not need them, and then to refuse the one miracle that could have saved the handwriting of God, is a fatal argument against the miraculous.
* Exodus xxxii, 19.
It is true that Moses was summoned to the mountain for a new set of tables and commandments, but as I shall proceed to explain, the second Ten Commandments were not written by the deity. His handwriting was irretrievably lost by the breaking of the first tables. We have miracles to preserve shoes and garments, and dead men's bones, but none to save the writing of God. Thus it is that all the "original" documents of the prophets and the apostles have perished, while the real wood of the cross and the coat of Jesus have been miraculously preserved.
In Exodus, thirty-second chapter, verse sixteen, we read:
And the tables were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, graven upon the tables.
But what was the use? The tables broke, and the writing is lost. Why go to all that trouble to produce original documents, only to lose them so shortly after they are finished? The thirty-fourth chapter and the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth verses of the book of Exodus inform us that the second collection of Commandments which were given to replace the broken tables of stone, were not written by Jehovah, but by Moses:
And the Lord said unto Moses, write thou these words... And he (Moses) was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights... And he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten commandments.*
* Exodus xxxiv, 27, 28.
But not only were the new commandments not in God's handwriting, but they were also totally different from the first Ten Commandments. Thus it was not only the divine writing that perished, but also the moral law as first given. It is true that Moses reports what the lost commandments were, but if he could remember them, why was it necessary for him to go up the Mount for a transcript of them? The unpleasant conclusion is forced upon our minds that not only had Moses forgotten what the broken tables of stone contained, but Jehovah, himself, could not remember them. Where, then, did Moses get the Ten Commandments which he says were on the broken slates? I do not know. If he reported them from memory, and his memory were reliable, why was a second set of slates ordered, that the Lord might write on them "the words that were in the first tables, which thou breakest"? * If a second series of commandments were given, as the text plainly states, because the first series was lost, how did Moses reproduce the lost commandments? Could he have put the fragments of the broken tables together, restoring thereby the handwriting of God? Really, it is not history that the bible gives us, but gossip.
It has already been shown that the deity did not write the second version of the moral law with his own hand, although he promised he would. Let me now present the second version of the Ten Commandments, to show that Jehovah had forgotten just as completely as had Moses, the first Ten Commandments which he himself had inscribed on the slates.
* Exodus xxxiv, 1, abbreviated.
Exodus XXXIV.
1. Thou shalt worship no other god: for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a Jealous God.
2. Thou shalt make thee no molten gods.
3. The feast of unleavened bread shalt thou keep.
4. Every firstling that is male is mine. And the first fruits of the land thou shalt bring unto the Lord.
5. Six days thou shalt work, but on the seventh day thou shalt rest.
6. Thou shalt observe the feast of weeks.
7. Thrice in the year shall all your men children (women not wanted) appear before the Lord God.
8. Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leaven.
9. The sacrifice of the passover shall not be left over till the morning.
10. Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother's milk.
That these were the commandments given to take the place of those unfortunately lost appears by the text that follows, and which we ask permission to quote again:
And the Lord said unto Moses, Write thou these words:
... And he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten commandments. *
* Exodus xxxiv, 27.
By comparing these two pronouncements, only a very slight resemblance can be discovered between them. In both documents, God is jealous, and the feast of Sabbaths and weeks is ordered to be scrupulously observed. There is not a single commandment in the second deliverance which can be described as ethical in its import. It is a "moral law" without the remotest suggestion of morality in it. Nothing is said about the duty of man to himself, his neighbor, or his posterity. The Ten Commandments which were broken and lost contained, at least, prohibitory clauses against murder, theft, adultery, and the bearing of false witness against one's neighbor. Even though these interdictions had in view the protection of the Jew only, as the conduct of Israel toward other peoples plainly shows; and even though only a portion of the lost decalogue concerned itself with morality at all, the others being of a theological and ceremonial character, still they, at least, have theappearanceof being a moral law, while the second decalogue is not even that.
And why are there ten commandments? The Protestants split the first commandment which forbids the worship of other gods and the making of graven images into two separate commandments; the Catholics, on the other hand, divide the last commandment, which says, "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house," or wife, or ox, or ass, into two, by separating the wife from the ass and the ox. "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife," is a commandment by itself in the Catholic bible, while, as explained, the Protestant bible makes no distinction between a man's ox, ass and wife. Of course, we prefer the Catholic manipulation of the bible, in this respect, to that of the Protestants, who are more jealous of the favor of Jehovah than of that of woman. But by what authority do these sects go about splitting the divine commandments? Only recently Cardinal Gibbons expressed great horror at the suggestion of certain Protestants that the Ten Commandments should be abbreviated and modernized. "What blasphemy," exclaimed the cardinal. Yet, his church was guilty of that very kind of "blasphemy" when it separated what God had joined together—the ass, the ox and the wife.
THE most telling criticism against the bible as an ethical work is that, while every one of its moral commandments are deliberately countermanded and cancelled and allowed to be, yes, ordered to be, broken, not one of the ceremonial or theological commandments was for a single time even suspended, or its neglect winked at, by the all-seeing Jehovah. The man who gathered kindling wood on the seventh day, or called on other gods, or ate his totem, or forgot his taboo, or omitted the Abrahamic rite, or ate fat, or forgot his blood offerings, or married a Gentile, or ate leavened bread on certain days, or approached too near to a priest or the candlesticks, was never allowed to escape punishment; while the thief, the murderer, the debauchee, the falsifier, the traitor, the assassin, was again and again applauded and rewarded with special favors. The commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," was barely spelled out in full when the Lord orders a saturnalia of murder.
Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Put every man his sword by his side, 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 neighbor... even every man upon his son.*
Who can have patience with such a book? What has become of the intellect of Europe that it can go to such a book for its morality? In one of Napoleon's unpublished letters, addressed to Junot, after giving secret instructions about the movement against Lisbon, he adds, "Shoot, say, sixty persons." ** If that makes him a monster, what shall we say of a being who asks fathers to murder their sons, and sons their fathers, in cold blood, and that, too, immediately after he had said, "Thou shalt not kill." But why was this bacchanalia of bloodshed ordered? The answer will cause a shudder: "That he (Jehovah) may bestow upon you a blessing this day." *** To kill was an act of worship. To please God was better than to spare one's children from the edge of the sword. God demanded murder, and not until he was obeyed would he "bless" them! Do we need any further proof that there is only one commandment in the bible: "Thou shalt obey the Lord thy God," that is to say, the priest. If he forbids murder, obey him; if he commands murder, obey him. But the most important point about all this is that both the giving and the breaking of a "moral" commandment is for the purpose of furthering the theological and ritualistic interests. "And the Lord plagued the people," that is to say, he ordered this internecine murder—why? Not because they had violated any of the "moral" commandments, but, mark the excuse given, "because they made the calf." **** The most abominable thing in the sight of this priest-made God, is not immorality, but infidelity.
* Exodus xxxii, 27-29.** Lettres Médités de Napoleon. Le cestre.*** Exodus xxxii, 29.**** Exodus xxxii, 35.
It would be easy to enumerate the so-called "moral" commandments, one after the other, and show how every one of them was ordered broken when the interests of the creed required it. "Thou shalt not steal" was revoked again and again, and a thousand encouragements offered to seize the land and goods of others. The commandment "Thou shalt not commit adultery" was made a mockery of by the express instruction to make a raid on neighboring countries and carry off the young girls by force. * We have reason to be ashamed of Europe, of the Aryan races, for wanting to place such a book into the hands of young and old as the Word of God.
* Numbers xxxi, 18.
Indeed, without any violence, either to the letter or to the spirit of the bible, we may offer the following as the real Ten Commandments given by God to Moses:
1. Thou shalt steal everything thou canst—thou shalt plunder, and practice usury.
2. Thou shalt murder the alien and the heathen as well as thy own brother.
3. Thou shalt bear false witness.
4. Thou shalt commit adultery.
5. Thou shalt covet.
6. Thou shalt hate thy neighbor of another faith.
7. Thou shalt persecute.
8. Thou shalt be cruel, and buy and sell human beings.
9. Thou shalt be superstitious.
10. Thou shalt despise woman, but permit a man to marry as many wives, and keep as many concubines as his fancy dictates. And let a man divorce his wife whenever it shall please him to do so.
Space fails us to quote all the texts in the bible which support the above commandments. It would be like reproducing the greater portions of the bible to offer even a partial list of the direct and indirect ways in which the bible lends its authority, as well as encouragement, to the commission of what we would consider criminal acts. Moreover, it would be a very unpleasant task to repeat, or to call attention to, those parts of the bible which this phase of my subject leads me into. And yet I do not see how I can altogether shirk the disagreeable task. The reader has no idea how big a part of the bible is unreadable. If anybody undertook to bring out a cleanly version of the bible for family use, he would soon find that the Old Testament, at least, would have to be left out, almost completely. Dr. Thomas Inman says: "A long experience in life and a retentive memory would lead me to say that the bible, as we have it, is the first book which leads many youths astray." *
That Jehovah ordered his people tosteal, is clearly indicated by the following text:
When ye go, ye shall not go empty: But every woman shall borrow of her neighbour, and of her that sojourneth in her house, jewels of silver and jewels of gold, and raiment: and ye shall put them upon your sons and upon your daughters; and ye shall spoil the Egyptians!
What they were ordered to do to the Egyptians, they were ordered to do to all the nations they could lay their hands upon. The lands and goods of others were to be seized by force. Stealing was forbidden if the property belonged to a Jew; it was sanctioned if the property belonged to the "heathen."
Murderis plainly commanded in the following text:
Slay every man his brother, and every man his companion and every man his neighbour.**
* Ancient Faiths, etc., Vol. II, page 77.** Exodus iii, 21, 22.
There is hardly a page in the Old Testament which is not red with bloodshed.
Lyingwas approved by the deity. Moses was commanded to tell a falsehood to Pharaoh, as were many of the other prophets advised to practice deception. Despite all the plagues which God is said to have sent upon the Egyptians to prove his might and power to deliver his people out of bondage, it was found necessary, as a last resort, to tell a lie to the king of Egypt to induce him to permit their departure. Upon being asked by Pharaoh why and where they wanted to go, Moses answered:
The God of the Hebrews hath met with us: let us go, we pray thee, three days' journey into the desert, and sacrifice unto the Lord our God; lest he fall upon us with pestilence, or with the sword.*
While planning to go on an expedition to seize the lands which their God had promised them, they tell Pharaoh that they only desire to hold some kind of a prayer-meeting in the desert, after which they would come back, supposedly to return the jewels of gold and silver they had borrowed from the neighbors. The falsehood was effective when all the miracles had failed. The Egyptians actually, if the story is true, allowed the Jews to rob them before they left.
God also commanded Samuel to lie:
And the Lord said unto Samuel... I will send thee to Jesse the Bethlemite: for I have provided me a king among his sons. And Samuel said, How can I go? if Saul hear it, he will kill me. And the Lord said, Take a heifer with thee, and say, I am come to sacrifice to the Lord.**
In the same way, the bible, it is to be regretted, sanctions sexual immorality.
And the Lord said to Hosea, Go take unto thee a wife of whoredom.***
Again, the Lord commands:
When thou goest forth to war against thine enemies, and the Lord thy God hath delivered them into thine hands, and thou hast taken them captive, and seest among the captives a beautiful woman, and hast a desire unto her... thou shalt go in unto her, and be her husband, and she shall be thy wife. And it shall be, if thou have no delight in her, then thou shalt let her go whither she will.****
Not a word is said about obtaining the woman's consent. And the following:
But all the women children that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.(v)
* Exodus v, 3.** Samuel xvi, 1, 2.*** Hosea i, 2.**** Deuteronomy xxi, 10-14.v. Numbers xxxi, 18.
Such texts show how indifferent the bible is to what we understand by morality.
As tocoveting: The whole of the biblical instructions was nothing more than a continuous encouragement to the Jews to covet everything that was their neighbors, from the jewelry of the Egyptian, to the lands, the cattle, the homes and daughters of the nations of the earth:
And Abram fell on his face: and God talked with him, saying... I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession. *
For all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever. **
But it will be impossible to command people to rob and slay their neighbors, and to covet their homes and women, without at the same time, commanding them tohatethem.
Ye shall not eat of anything that dieth of itself; thou shalt give it unto the stranger... that he may eat it; or thou mayest sell it unto an alien. ***
Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother.... unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury. ****
Jesus improved upon the Old Testament by calling upon his followers to include in their hatred the members of their own family:
If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.(v)
* Genesis xvii, 3, 8.** Genesis xiii, 15.*** Deuteronomy xiv, 21.**** Deuteronomy xxiii, 19, 20.v. Luke xiv, 26.
Religiouspersecutionis openly sanctioned both in the Old and the New Testaments. Every expression of independence, or disagreement with the priesthood, was blasphemy, and punishable by death.
And he that blasphemeth the name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him: as well the stranger, as he that is born in the land, when he blasphemeth the name of the Lord, shall be put to death.*
The Bible gives a very long list of "blasphemies" for which the death penalty is ordered—from failing to circumcise one's children, to gathering sticks on the Sabbath. And as to those professing a different faith, the commandment was as follows:
These are the statutes and judgments, which ye shall observe to do in the land, which the Lord God of thy fathers giveth thee to possess it, all the days that ye live upon the earth.
Ye shall utterly destroy all the places, wherein the nations which ye shall possess served their gods, upon the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree:
And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place. **
* Leviticus xxiv, 16.** Deuteronomy xii, 1-4.
Could intolerance go further than that! Other peoples are not to have any gods at all. Even as their lands will be taken away from them, so shall their gods. And since their Jehovah never intended to be the god of anybody else but a Hebrew, it followed that the Jews were the only people privileged to own a god.
Why should "all the high places," where the other nations served their gods, be destroyed? Did not Moses go to Mount Sinai, a high place, to worship Jehovah? Why may not a Gentile have his own high place, as well as a Jew? Surely, the heathen gods on their mountains could not possibly have given a more unmerciful set of commandments than those which Jehovah dictated to Moses. There was no breadth in the God of the Jews.Live and let live, or Think and let think, is the conquest of modern thought for which we are indebted to Rationalism. We say it, reluctantly, but say it we must, Jehovah was a bigot. How long will the Jews continue to profess a religion which requires of them to live in Europe and America, and in the twentieth century, according to the ways of the desert? If Gentiles, in every country, are in great numbers forsaking Christianity, let the exodus of the Jews from the synagogue be equally earnest and pronounced.
Crueltywas to be the accompaniment of religious persecution.
The descriptions of acts of cruelty against the stranger seem to have given positive pleasure to the writers of the bible, for they enter into the most repulsive details in narrating them:
For the Lord shall sell Sisera into the hand of a woman.... Howbeit Sisera fled away on his feet to the tent of Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite: for there was peace between Jabin the king of Hazor and the house of Heber the Kenite.
And Tael went out to meet Sisera, and said unto him, Turn in, my lord, turn in to me; fear not. And when he had turned in unto her into the tent, she covered him with a mantle... Then Jael Heber's wife took a nail of the tent, and took an hammer in her hand, and went softly unto him, and smote the nail into his temples, and fastened it into the ground: for he was fast asleep and weary. So he died.... Behold, Sisera lay dead, and the nail was in his temples. *
* Judges iv, 9, 17-23.
For this act of treacherous cruelty Jael was sainted:
Blessed above women shall Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite be, blessed shall she be above women in the tent.... She put her hand to the nail, and her right hand to the workmen's hammer; and with the hammer she smote Sisera, she smote off his head, when she had pierced and stricken through his temples.... So let all thine enemies perish, O Lord.*
Superstitionsof the most degrading type are recommended and their daily practice sanctioned. Though they claimed to be on talking terms with the deity, they had, nevertheless, to cast lots, and resort to sorcery and divination, to find out the mind of the Lord.
Take me an heifer of three years old, and a she goat of three years old, and a ram of three years old, and a turtledove, and a young pigeon.
And he took unto him all these, and divided them in the midst, and laid each piece one against another: but the birds divided he not.... And it came to pass, that, when the sun went down, and it was dark, behold a smoking furnace, and a burning lamp that passed between those pieces.
In the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abram. **
Could anything be more meaningless?
...And it came to pass, when Moses held up his hand, that Israel prevailed: and when he let down his hand, 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 up his hands, the one on the one side, and the other on the other side; and his hands were steady until the going down of the sun.
And Joshua discomfited Amalek and his people with the edge of the sword. **
* Judges v, 24-31.** Exodus xvii, 11-13.
Only the most hopeless ignorance could credit such a performance.
And Jesus thought that by self-mutilation one could become a candidate for heaven:
For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother's womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.
And the four beasts said, Amen.
THE most unfortunate person in the whole bible is a woman. How is it then that the bible has come to be regarded as really the emancipator of woman? Well, that is only one of many fictions about the "Holy" book. Not only is the responsibility for the fall of man, and the existence of such a place as hell, thrown upon woman, because she ate of the forbidden tree; but she is also introduced as a mere fragment of man, made out of one of his ribs. As soon as born she was sold into perpetual slavery.
Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.*
* Genesis iii, 16.
Never once did God promise a daughter to any of his favorites. And girls are completely left out from the family chronicle. In biblical genealogies there are no women. "The Hebrew word used in the bible for 'female,'" says Joseph McCabe, "can not with decency be translated literally into English." Women were strictly excluded from the service of Jehovah. Nor were they privileged to repair to Jerusalem on the stated occasions required, by the national worship to appear before Jehovah. It is no wonder that under these conditions the women of the bible, as Lecky says, were "of a low order, and certainly far inferior to those of Roman history, or Greek poetry." Paul was inspired to command: "Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection.... I suffer not a woman to teach (Paul never could have dreamed of our public schools), nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence." *
In the Old Testament motherhood is an act deserving atonement, and rules are given how a woman shall apply for absolution, as it were, after childbirth. If her offspring were a boy, the punishment was lighter than when she gave birth to a girl. **
* I Timothy ii, 11, 12.** Leviticus xii, 2-5.
The commandment for a man to sell his daughter into slavery, as also the institution of polygamy, and concubinage and divorce, extensively practiced by the leaders in the Holy Bible, show what precious little interest Jehovah took in the welfare of woman. The bible continued for centuries—down to the time of the Renaissance—to keep woman in subjection. Even to-day, one of the greatest obstacles in the path of woman is the bible. In a sermon at Saint Crantock's, preached only six years ago, the vicar offered the following reasons for opposing the granting to women the rights and opportunities enjoyed by man:
(1) Man's priority of creation. Adam was first formed, then Eve.
(2) The manner of creation. The man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man.
(3) The purport of creation. The man was not created for the woman, but the woman for the man.
(4) Results in creation. The man is the image of the glory of God, but woman is the glory of man.
(5) Woman's priority in the fall. Adam was not deceived; but the woman, being deceived, was in the transgression.
(6) The marriage relation. As the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be to their husbands.
(7) The headship of man and woman. The head of every man is Christ, but the head of the woman is man.
For this one sin alone—its insult and injustice to woman—we should never make our peace with the bible. Worse than all its miracles, fables, absurdities, immoralities, contradictions, indecencies, is its tyranny over woman because she isweak. This is unpardonable.
It is no defense to say that allowance must be made for the remote times in which these barbarities were committed. It is not the morality of the "times" but the morality of an infallible book that is under discussion. Moreover, why could not the people who daily saw God and heard from him, be at least as decent as their "heathen" neighbors? The Midianites, whose virgin daughters Moses ordered his followers to abduct, after all the rest of the inhabitants had been put to death, had sheltered Moses for forty years when he fled for his life from Egypt. * Their hospitality is repaid by Moses in this unspeakable fashion. Why could not Moses be as honorable and humane as the Midianites? Even by the admissions of the bible itself, the nations whom Jehovah ordered to be exterminated were very much more hospitable than the Jews. Had Assyria, Egypt, Babylonia or Persia followed the example of the Jews, there would not have been any Jews left in the world to-day. And the fact that, after long years of captivity in heathen countries, when permission was given the Jews to return to Jerusalem, many of them refused to do so, preferring a foreign country to their own, is decisive proof that the "heathen" did not treat the Jews so unmercifully as Jehovah wanted the Jews to treat the heathen. I can protest against the massacre of the Christians by the Turks, or of the Jews by the Christians, because I do not believe the bible is binding upon my conscience. But how can a Christian or a Jew plead for liberty of conscience? How can a Jew or a Christian protest against being massacred while hugging to his bosom a book which commands and approves of the most inhuman treatment of one people by another?