It is blasphemy to deny that the foul stories of Tamar and Onan, of Tamar and Judah, and of the births of Pharez and Zarah—the children of Judah and his daughter-in-law —with all the details of the several events (Gen. xxxviii.), are of divine authority. If any one but god had told the stories they would be indecent, and the teller would be liable to prosecution under Lord Campbell’s act. Out of the filthiest literature the story told in verses 27—30 could not be paralleled, and I doubt if Holywell Street has anything fouler on its book-shelves. Yet little innocent girls are given the book containing these perfectly useless and indescribable nastinesses; and if decent people venture to criticise the book, avoiding the parts of it only fit for pious hands, they are liable to be sent to gaol, and the judge accuses them of undermining morality! The sooner the morality built on Judah, Tamar, and the stories of Onan and Pharez, is undermined the better for decent society.
The story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife is told in the next chapter (Gen. xxxix), and I have heard a clergyman read this story out in church without the smallest hesitation to listening men, women, and children. Christianity blunts the very commonest feelings of human decency in the minds of its followers; and the clergy, who deprave the minds of the young by circulating the Holy Book, have the insolence to accuse unbelievers in its divinity of undermining morality!
It is blasphemy to deny that god blessed the Egyptian midwives for telling a deliberate lie (Ex. i., 19, 20). It is also blasphemy to deny that “Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord” (Prov. xii., 22). The only deduction we can draw from these two facts, both given on divine authority, is that god blesses that which is an abomination to him. Once again we must say piously: “His ways are not as our ways.”
With the second chapter of Exodus begins the story of Moses, “the man of god.” Like most of the Bible saints, Moses was a great sinner from the point of view of ordinary morality. He began his public career with a murder. “And it came to pass in those days, when Moses was grown, that he went out unto his brethren and looked on their burdens; and he spied an Egyptian smiting an Hebrew, one of his brethren. And he looked this way and that way, and when he saw that there was no man, he slew the Egyptian and hid him in the sand” (Ex. ii., 11, 12). The careful looking “this way and that way” before he interferes shows the care for his own person that characterises Moses. A man might have been moved by honest indignation to smite an oppressor. The careful looking round and the hiding of the body do not impress us with a sense of the heroic.