After what I have observed above, it will be useless to say much as to your third letter, in which you examine minutely the passages Thomas Paine has pointed out to prove the Pentateuch not genuine. First, As to the objection taken from the name of Dan, I never thought it specious. This is not the case with the very next one, which is of very great weight. The writer, after enumerating a number of Arabian names, concludes in these words, "These are the kings that reigned in Edom, before there reigned any king over the children of Israel." Contrary to my expectations, you acknowledge this to have been written after the Jews had kings. Many of your brethren have attempted to deny it by quibbles! but you say that this does not invalidate the authority of the book: wonderful! if your _alma-mater_ taught you, that an evident lie or contradiction in any book, particularly of remote antiquity, and relating histories unsupported by impartial authors, does not create a suspicion, which approaches to certainty, that the book is not authentic; if you think so, I must give up arguing with you. It may be an interpolation, you observe. How did you learn this? You will at least leave, me the right to suppose, and you cannot deny that the presumption is against you, an absurdity in a book is a reason for distrusting the rest. I have probability on my side; for the Jew who forged this passage, either from piety or ignorance, might have forged the whole book, or so interpolated it, as to destroy its credibility. At any rate, the detection of falsehood in a history, is not a motive to suppose it true. It requires an excess of piety to break through all the rules of logic and common sense. How does it happen, that the Lord Jahovah does not provide better against such mistakes creeping into the book of the law of his favourite people? It could seem as if he had done it on purpose to create incredulity, and enjoy the pleasure of punishing unbelievers, as of old, he hardened Pharaoh's heart, that he might have a pretext to inflict calamities on him and his people.
My Lord, what credit would we give to a history of William the Conqueror that had the following sentence, after naming different persons, _And these were the names of the Kings of England before George the Third came to the throne_; for what purpose could any person insert such a passage? He must have been absolutely mad. It could only get into the work from its being compiled during the reign of George the Third, and arising from a forgetfulness of the writer, or ignorance of the transcriber: in no case could it be inserted in a book, which you say was kept in the public records, and over whose purity the whole Jewish learned men would watch; you must either give up your argument from the public records of this people, and no longer deem them great authority; or, if you persist in it, I leave you to reconcile the most palpable interpolations and forgeries with the scrupulous attention with which you suppose the Jews preserved the word of God. But what is most curious in this passage is, that we find it verbatim in 2 Chronicles, chap. i. ver. 43, and you seem to glory in discovering this similarity of the passages. "Why might not," you say at the end of your fourth letter, "the author of the book of Chronicles have taken them, (meaning the names of the kings of Edom, &c.), as he has taken many other genealogies, supposing them to have been written in the book of Genesis by Samuel?" Another acknowledgment of more interpolations in Genesis.