XL
OF MOSES, CONSIDERED ONLY AS THE CHIEF OF A NATION
THE MASTER of nature only gives strength to the arm which he deigns to choose. Moses is supernatural in every thing. More than one learned man has looked upon him as a very able politician. Others have considered him only as a weak reed, which the divine hand deigned to use, to frame the destiny of empires. What can we think of an old man of eighty years of age, who by himself alone undertakes to conduct a whole people over whom he had no authority? His arm cannot fight, nor his tongue articulate. He is described a cripple and a stammerer. He conducts his followers for forty years successively into horrid deserts. He wants to give them a settlement; but he gives them none. If we were to pursue his steps, in the desert of Sur, Sin, Oreb, Sinai, Phara, Cadesh Barnea, and observe his retrograde motions towards the very spot he set out from, we could not easily conceive that he was a great captain. He is at the head of six hundred thousand warriors, and he could neither provide clothing nor subsistence for his troops. God does all things, God remedies all things, he nourishes, he clothes the people by miracles. Moses, then, is nothing of himself, and his impotence shows, that he can be guided by nothing but the hand of the Almighty; we therefore consider him only as a man, and not the minister of God. His person, in this capacity, is an object of more sublime inquiry.
He wants to go into the country of the Canaanites, on the west of Jordan, in the country of Jericho, which is in fact the only fruitful spot of the whole province; and instead of taking this road, he turns towards the east, between Esiongaber, and the Black Sea, a savage barren country, thick strewed with mountains that do not produce a single shrub, without a rivulet, without a fountain, save a few little wells of salt water. When the news of this eruption of a foreign people reached the Canaanites or Phenicians, they came and gave them battle in these deserts, near Cadesh Barnea. How can he let himself be beat at the head of six hundred thousand soldiers, in a country which does not now contain three thousand inhabitants? At the end of thirty-nine years, he gains two victories, but he does not compass any one object of his legislation: he and his people die before he sets foot in the country which he wanted to conquer.
A legislator, according to our common notions, should make himself beloved and feared; but he should not push severity to barbarity: he should not, instead of inflicting by the ministers of the law some punishments upon the criminal, make a foreign nation murder the greatest part of his own people.
Could Moses at near the age of an hundred and twenty years, being conducted only by himself, have been so inhuman, so hardened in bloodshed, as to command the Levites to massacre indiscriminately their brothers to the number of twenty-three thousand, and, to screen his own brother, who ought rather to have died, than made a golden calf to be adored? And, strange to relate, his brother is after this shameful action created high pontiff, and thirty-three thousand men are massacred.
Moses had wedded a Midianite, daughter to Jethro, high-priest of Midian, in Arabia Petraea: Jethro had heaped kindness upon him: he had bestowed his son upon him, to serve him as a guide in the deserts; what cruelty, contrary to all policy (to judge according to our feeble notions) must Moses have been guilty of, to sacrifice twenty-four thousand men of his own nation, under pretense that a Jew had been found lying with a Midianite? And how can it be said, after such astonishing butchery, “that Moses was the most gentle of all men?” We must acknowledge, humanly speaking, that these horrid deeds revolt against reason and nature. But, if we consider Moses as the minister of God’s designs and vengeance, the aspect is entirely changed: he is not a man that acts as a man; he is the instrument of the divinity, whom we should not call to account. We should offer up silent adoration.
If Moses had of himself instituted his religion, like Zoroaster, Thaut, the first Bramins, Numa, Mahomet, and many others, we might ask him, why he did not avail himself of the most useful and efficacious means of restraining lust and sin? why he did not expressly preach the immortality of the soul, rewards and punishments after death; dogmas long before received in Egypt, in Phoenicia, in Mesopotamia, in Persia, and in India? “You have been instructed, we should tell him, in the wisdom of the Egyptians, you are a legislator, and you absolutely neglect the principal dogma of the Egyptians, the most necessary dogma to man, a belief so salutary and holy, that your own Jews, barbarous as they were, embraced it a long time after you; it was, at least, partly adopted by the Esssenes, and the Pharisees, at the end of a thousand years.”
This perplexing objection against a common legislator falls to the ground, and loses, as we find, all its force, when a law given by God himself, who condescended being the king of the Jewish people, temporally rewarded and punished them, and who would not reveal the knowledge of the immortality of the soul, and hell’s eternal torments, but at the time appointed by his decrees. Almost every event merely human among the Jews is the summit of horror. Everything divine is above our feeble comprehensions. We are constantly silenced by them both.
There have been men of extensive knowledge, who have carried their scepticism so far, as to doubt there having ever existed such a one as Moses; his life, which is a series of prodigies from his cradle to his grave, appeared to them an imitation of the ancient Arabian fables, and particularly that of the ancient Bacchus. They do not know at what period to fix Moses; even the name of Pharaoh, King of Egypt, is unknown. No monument, no vestige, remains of the country in which he is said to travel. It seems impossible to them, that Moses should have governed two or three millions of men for forty years in uninhabitable deserts, where we can scarce meet at present with two or three gangs of vagabonds, who do not altogether make more than between three and four thousand men. We are far from adopting this bold opinion, which would sap the very foundation of the ancient history of the Jewish people.
Neither shall we adhere to the opinion of Aben Esra, of Maimonides, Nugens, or the author of the Jewish Ceremonies, though the learned Le Clerc, Middleton, the learned men known by the title of theologians of Holland, and even the great Newton, have added weight to the doctrine. These illustrious scholars imagine that neither Moses nor Joshua could write those books that are attributed to them: they say that their histories and laws would have been engraven upon wood, if in fact they had existed; that this art requires prodigious assiduity; and that it was not possible to cultivate this art in deserts. They found their opinion, as may be seen in other places, upon anticipation and apparent contradictions. In opposition to these great men, we embrace the common opinion, which is that of the synagogue and the church, whose infallibility we acknowledge.
Not that we dare accuse the Le Clercs, the Middletons, or the Newtons of impiety; God forbid! we are convinced that if the books of Moses and Joshua, and the rest of the Pentateuch, do not appear to them to come from the hands of those heroes of Israel, they were not less of opinion that these books were inspired. They acknowledge the finger of God in every line of Genesis, in Joshua, Sampson, and Ruth. The Jewish writer was, as we may say, nothing more than the secretary of God; that God who has dictated all things. Newton, doubtless could not think otherwise; this we sufficiently know. God keep us from resembling those perverse hypocrites, who avail themselves of every pretense to accuse all great men of irreligion, just as they were formerly accused of magic! We should think that we did not only act dishonestly, but cruelly insult the Christian religion, if we were so abandoned as to want to persuade the public, that the most learned men and the greatest geniuses upon earth are not true Christians. The more we respect that church which we submit to, the more we are of opinion that this church tolerates the opinions of these virtuous scholars, with that charity that forms its character.