And as though to show that this book is of purely human origin, with the mingled good and evil inseparable from all early efforts at legislation, we read, after the foregoing horrors the following noble and generous teaching:
“Thou shalt not raise a false report: put not thine hand with the wicked to be an unrighteous witness. Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil; neither shalt thou speak in a cause to decline after many to wrest judgment. Neither shalt thou countenance a poor man in his cause.
If thou meet thine enemy’s ox or his ass going astray, thou shalt surely bring it back to him again. If thou see the ass of him that hateth thee lying under his burden, and wouldest forbear to help him, thou shalt surely help with him. Thou shalt not wrest the judgment of thy poor in in his cause. Keep thee far from a false matter; and the innocent and righteous slay thou not: for I will not justify the wicked. And thou shalt take no gift: for the gift blindeth the wise, and perverteth the words of the righteous. Also thou shalt not oppress a stranger: for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (xxiii., 1—9.)
Here we see the pen of some lofty and tender lawgiver, who has nothing in common with the savage chief who “breathed out threatenings and slaughter.”
It is blasphemy to deny that the Lord on Mount Sinai gave a number of frivolous commands, about a candlestick (Ex. xxv., 31—39) with its snuff-dishes, and curtains, and hangings, and dresses, with their trimmings of “a golden bell and a pomegranate, a golden bell and a pomegranate, upon the hem,” and “holy ointment,” and “perfume,” etc., etc. (Ex. xxv.—xxx.). After the making of stars and suns it seems but poor work to give directions about “loops,” and “taches,” and a “curious girdle,” fitter employment for a cabinet maker and a tailor than for a god with “thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the voice of the trumpet exceeding loud.” While Moses and the Lord were discoursing on upholstery the people were getting into trouble down below, and god, who is “without passions,” (Art. 1) felt his wrath “wax hot against them” (Ex. xxxii., 10). Moses did not ask for forgiveness on the ground of god’s goodness, but he appealed to his vanity, and reminded him that the Egyptians would crow over him if he destroyed his own people (xxxii., 12.) Thereupon god, who is not a man “that he should repent” (Numb, xxiii., 19), “repented of the evil which he thought to do” (Ex. xxxii., 14). God who is “without body” (Art 1) had written two tables with his “finger” (Ex. xxxi., 18), and these tables “were the work of god, and the writing was the writing of god” (xxxii, 16). So careless was Moses of this unique specimen that he lost his temper and broke it in pieces, and then, arriving at the camp, he sent the sons of Levi through the camp, bidding them “slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor,” and when 3,000 men had fallen he bade the murderers: “Consecrate yourselves to-day to the Lord, even every man upon his son and upon his brother, that he may bestow a blessing upon you” (w., 27—29). Yet it is blasphemy to deny that this great wickedness was god-inspired.