* St. Augustine, in his "City of God," allows that in his
time, the whole story about Adam, Eve, the serpent, and the
garden of Eden, with its forbidden fruit, was considered as
allegorical. There was not one, but there were two prohibited trees!
The Emperor Julian, with that wisdom which characterised
him, observed that, "If there ever had been, or could be a
tree of knowledge, instead of God forbidding man to eat
thereof, it would be that of which he would order him to eat
the most." Reason is the real forbidden tree of priestcraft.
From a mass of ill-strung fables, derived from such a variety of sources—a chaos of revolting prodigies, mixed up with a few probable facts, such as the expulsion or flight from Egyptian slavery, the murders and devastations in Southern Syria, etc., we cannot, in the bounds of a lecture, notice more than a few of the most prominent miracles, all of which had Pagan prototypes.
As every oriental country had its cosmogony, accounting very clearly, though contrarily to each other, for the origin of things, so all had traditionary floods, which each nation quoted as proof of its antiquity.* Why should not the Jews have one also? The Chaldeans said that theirs happened 25,000 years before the war of Troy, when the immense surface now occupied by the Mediterranean Sea was inundated.. The Egyptians had their inundations; and hence their ark of Osiris (the archetype of the Noah's ark) the same as the constellation Argo. The Greeks had their floods of Ogyges and Deucalion; the latter of which, was fully treated of by Berosus, and after him by Lucian, in his Syrian goddess; but the Jews, who took everything from their masters, borrowed the Chaldean pilot Noe, made him skipper of their ark, slightly changing his name to Noah, and appropriated to themselves the flood of Deucalion,** with all its details, almost word for word as fabled by Berosus and Lucian.. That this tradition was not adopted by the Jews until long after the alleged time of Jehovah's flood, is proved by the orders which he gave Noah respecting clean and unclean beasts, the distinction whereof not being made until several hundred years after the assumed time of Noah. Nothing can be more probable than that, amongst the initiated few, all these floods had secret reference to the supposed influence of the winter or watery constellations.
* Even the long lives of the antediluvians, according to the
Jews, are the exact copy of the Iogues of the Hindu
Indians.
** The flood of Xisuthrus was almost the same as that of
Deucalion.
The Pentateuch, or first five books of the old Jewish "will of God" have been attributed to Moses; though, from their internal evidence, it is altogether impossible that he could be the author, even if we allow him to have been a real personage. These books were most likely compiled and got up in imitation of the five books of the Egyptian Hermes, who was at one time the personified genius of the constellation Sirius; at another, of the planet Mercury. That the god Bacchus was the archetype of Moses, seems to have been the opinion of many learned men, particularly the celebrated Bishop Huet, and I. Vossius, who agree that the Arabian name of Bacchus is Meses; and the identity is further proved, inasmuch as the etymon of the two words is the same, signifying saved from the waters. Justin, in his "Historium Judærum," seems also to favor the fact that Moses was a fabulous person, where he says that it was not he, but Abraham, who led the Jews out of Egypt; that their number was 6,000, not 600,000;* and that they were turned out of the land for uncleanness, being all lepers.
* On almost all occasions, the Jewish tales, in relation to
numbers, whether of men or other animals, are so
ridiculously exaggerated, that if we adopt the scale of
allowing them one for every hundred enumerated in their
books, we shall do them ample justice. This gives Solomon
ten in place of his thousand ladies: a harem still
abundantly numerous to produce "vexation of spirit."
A vast and sublime idea was attached to the attributes of Jahouh, whilst he was at home in Egyptian Thebes; but, in accompanying Moses and his barbarians into the Arabian desert, we find him completely shorn of all grandeur and dignity of character. He was there drilled and moulded into a god, whose will and commands were precisely those of the robber-in-chief and his priests, jointly and severally; by whom he was converted into the Jewish Juggernaut, delighting in blood; and on all occasions standing forward to prompt and justify their villainous schemes of devastation and murder.* At a very early stage of his connexion with Moses, he is degraded by being brought into contact with the dramatic jugglers of lower Egypt; of whose legerdemain tricks we have a sample in the stage representation of what are called the plague miracles. As a priest, Moses was no doubt initiated into all the arts of these sleight-of-hand impostors. In the trial of skill exhibited by the contending operators in these conjurations, we have a tissue of the most absurd and ridiculous fooleries imaginable,—the writer having taken leave of his senses, we have the hyperbole run mad. Much of this jugglery was done by means of real or counterfeit serpents! After all the water in Egypt, even the great river Nile itself, had been turned into blood, the magicians do the same miracle, though Aaron had not left them a drop of water in all Egypt! Then follow other romances, wherein the "God" appears far more blameable than Pharaoh, whose sin of obstinacy is visited upon the innocent cattle; and in succeeding plagues, all the horses, asses, camels, oxen and sheep, having many lives, are killed over and over again. The story of the locusts is not miraculous; but we have an outrageous prodigy in a darkness for three days; to say nothing of its substantial property of being felt or handled. Why did not the Goshenites (who had their usual light) avail themselves of so good an opportunity to run away? They were waiting until "the Lord" should issue his general order to commit the robbery on the Egyptians. Though all Pharaoh's horses had been twice or thrice killed during these plagues, he finds no difficulty in mustering a numerous cavalry to pursue the fugitives. Moses being a mere copy of Bacchus, all the above stage trickery—the dividing of the Red Sea and the Jordan, are rude imitations of the exploits of the latter, who performed marvellous feats and gambols, turning water into blood, drying up rivers, converting water into wine, etc., etc.
* Oh! what a mountain of faith and prejudice is required to
hide this glaring, this palpable truth!
** See Lucian's "Alexander."
It appears an awkward business that the omniscient Jehovah could not safely undertake the midnight massacre of Egypt's firstborn, without some sign to prevent the possibility of his committing a blunder, by falling foul of his chosen Goshenites; and, therefore, another general order is issued, to smear their doorposts with blood as a mark of security, while the butchery was going on. This shocking tale might have arisen out of the historical fact, that the seventh Ptolemy caused all the young men of Alexandria to be murdered. This inference may be objected to on account of the supposed anachronism, respecting which we shall make a short digression. Precise historical dates have been carefully avoided or obscured by the Bible-makers; and there is scarcely any allusion to time, that is supported by concurrent testimony; and, therefore, it is only by a cross-examination of its internal evidence, that we can judge of the various periods when the Old Testament was compiled.*
* All the narrative writings of the Jews, which betrayed too
openly a recent composition, such as the Maccabees (which in
a historical point of view, are the most valuable parts of
the Bible), and many others were excluded, and declared
apocryphal by the Old Testament composers; yet numerous
tell-tale proofs escaped them; for instance, Nehemiah speaks
of "Darius the Persian." Now, between Cyrus and that prince,
there reigned fourteen kings of Persia, during a period of
280 years. Therefore, not only were the Jew books written
after their Babylonian slavery, but many centuries
afterwards.