The Emancipation of Massachusetts

by Brooks Adams

Dr. Budde, who is a good example of the modern hypercritical school, takes very nearly the opposite ground. His theory is that Moses was in search of a war god, and that he discovered such a god, in the god of the Bedouin tribe of the Kenites whose acquaintance he first made when dwelling with his father-in-law Jethro at Sinai. The morality of such a god he insists coincided with the morality which Moses may have at times countenanced, but which was quite foreign to the spirit of the decalogue.

Doubtless this is, in a degree, true. The religion of the pure Bedouin was very often crude and shocking, not to say disgusting. But to argue thus is to ignore the fact that all Bedouins did not, in the age of Moses, stand on the same intellectual or moral level, and it is also to ignore the gap that separated Moses and his congregation intellectually and morally from such Bedouins as the Amalekites.

Dr. Budde, in his Religion of Israel to the Exile, insists that the Kenite god, Jehovah, demanded “The sacred ban by which conquered cities with all their living beings were devoted to destruction, the slaughter of human beings at sacred spots, animal sacrifices at which the entire animal, wholly or half raw, was devoured, without leaving a remnant, between sunset and sunrise,—these phenomena and many others of the same kind harmonise but ill with an aspiring ethical religion.”

He also goes on to say: “We are further referred to the legislation of Moses, ... comprising civil and criminal, ceremonial and ecclesiastical, moral and social law in varying compass. This legislation, however, cannot have come from Moses.... Such legislation can only have arisen after Israel had lived a long time in the new home.”

To take these arguments in order,—for they must be so dealt with to develop any reasonable theory of the Mosaic philosophy,—Moses, doubtless, was a ruthless conqueror, as his dealings with Sihon and Og sufficiently prove. “So the Lord our God delivered into our hands Og also, the king of Bashan, and all his people: and we smote him until none was left to him remaining....

“And we utterly destroyed them, as we did unto Sihon, king of Heshbon, utterly destroying the men, women, and children of every city.” [Footnote: Deut. III, 3-6.]

There is nothing extraordinary, or essentially barbarous, in this attitude of Moses. The same theory of duty or convenience has been held in every age and in every land, by men of the ecclesiastical temperament, at the very moment at which the extremest doctrines of charity, mercy, and love were practised by their contemporaries, or even preached by themselves. For example:

At the beginning of the thirteenth century the two great convents of Cluny and Citeau, together, formed the heart of monasticism, and Cluny and Citeau were two of the richest and most powerful corporations in the world, while the south of France had become, by reason of the eastern trade, the wealthiest and most intelligent district in Europe. It suffices to say here that, just about this time, the people of Languedoc had made up their minds, because of the failure of the Crusades, the cost of such magnificent establishments was not justified by their results, and accordingly Count Raymond of Toulouse, in sympathy with his subjects, did seriously contemplate secularization. To the abbots of these great convents, it was clear that if this movement spread across the Rhone into Burgundy, the Church would face losses which they could not contemplate with equanimity. At this period one Arnold was Abbot of Citeau, universally recognized as perhaps the ablest and certainly one of the most unscrupulous men in Europe. Hence the crusade against the Albigenses which Simon de Montfort commanded and Arnold conducted. Arnold’s first exploit was the sack of the undefended town of Béziers, where he slaughtered twenty thousand men, women, and children, without distinction of religious belief. When asked whether the orthodox might not at least be spared, he replied, “Kill them all; God knows his own.”

This sack of Béziers occurred in 1209. Exactly contemporaneously Saint Francis of Assisi was organizing his order whose purpose was to realize Christ’s kingdom upon earth, by the renunciation of worldly wealth and by the practice of poverty, humility, and obedience. Soon after, Arnold was created Archbishop of Narbonne and became probably the greatest and richest prelate in France, or in the world. This was in 1225. In 1226 the first friars settled in England. They multiplied rapidly because of their rigorous discipline. Soon there were to be found among them some of the most eminent men in England. Their chief house stood in London in a spot called Stinking Lane, near the Shambles in Newgate, and there, amidst poverty, hunger, cold, and filth, these men passed their lives in nursing horrible lepers, so loathsome that they were rejected by all but themselves, while Arnold lived in magnificence in his palace, upon the spoil of those whom he had immolated to his greed.

In the case of Moses the contrast between precept and practice in the race for wealth and fortune was not nearly so violent. Moses, it is true, according to Leviticus, declared it to be the will of the Lord that the Israelites should love their neighbors as themselves, [Footnote: Lev. XIX, 18.] while on the other hand in Deuteronomy he insisted that obedience was the chief end of life, and that if the Israelites were to thoroughly obey the Lord’s behests, they were to “consume all the people which the Lord thy God shall deliver thee; thine eye shall have no pity upon them: neither” should thou serve their gods, “for the Lord thy God is a jealous God.” [Footnote: Deut. VII, 16.] And the penalty for slackness was “lest the anger of the Lord thy God be kindled against thee, and destroy thee from off the face of the earth.” [Footnote: Deut. VI, 15.] There is, nevertheless, this much to be said in favor of the morality of Moses as contrasted with that of thirteenth-century orthodox Christians like Arnold; Moses led a crusade against a foreign and hostile people, while Arnold slaughtered the Albigenses, who were his own flock, sheep to whom he was the shepherd, communicants in his own church, and worshippers of the God whom he served. What concerns us, however, is that the same stimulant animated Moses and Arnold alike. The stimulant, pure and simple, of greed. On these points Moses was as outspokenly, one may say as brutally, frank as was Arnold. In the desert Moses commanded his followers to exterminate the inhabitants of the kingdom of Bashan in order that they might appropriate their possessions, which he enumerated, and Moses had no other argument to urge but the profitableness of it by which to secure obedience to his moral law.