“Women should be nurtured with every tenderness and attention by their fathers, their brothers, their husbands, and their brothers-in-law, if they desire great prosperity.”
“Where women live in affliction the family soon becomes extinct; but when they are loved and respected, and cherished with tenderness, the family grows and prospers in all circumstances.”
“When women are honored the divinities are content; but when we honor them not all acts of piety are sterile.”
“The households cursed by the women to whom they have not rendered due homage find ruin weigh them down and destroy them as if smitten by some secret power.”
“In the family where the husband is content with his wife, and the wife with her husband, happiness is assured for ever.”
That there were many trivial things in the ancient pagan laws, and many practices prevailed among a portion of the people which seem idolatrous, we freely admit; but the same is true of many of the Hebrew laws, which are too obscene for quotation here. We also find among the Hebrews all forms of nature-worship, such as sun-worship, tree-worship, fire-worship, ser-pent-worship, and phallic-worship. Of this more later on.
Besides the Hindoos and the Egyptians, there were many nations more ancient than the Hebrews. The Grecian Argos was founded 1807 b. c. Athens and Sparta existed 1550 b. c. Then there were the Phœnicians, a maritime people who flourished more than five thousand years ago, whose monuments and inscriptions are found in Palestine to-day, while the Hebrews have left us neither monument nor inscription. The Chaldeans established a monarchy four thousand or five thousand years ago, and three thousand five hundred or four thousand years back the Assyrians became masters of the valley of the Euphrates and the Tigris, and from these people the Jews got all they ever knew about things subsequently recorded in the Pentateuch.
The Jewish and Christian religions (for they are claimed to be one) are next to being the youngest, or most modern, of any of the great religions of the world, the Mohammedan being the last. Each claimed divine authority; all had their lawgivers, priests, and prophets, who wrote, as they claimed, their bibles by divine inspiration. The error of Judaism is in claiming the greatest antiquity, as well as claiming to be the only religion having the divine sanction.
I cannot refrain from mentioning some things which cannot be regarded as wholly irrelevant. Moses had a very remarkable experience in his infancy. At his birth he was placed in an ark and set afloat on the Nile, and was rescued by Pharaoh’s daughter, who called a nurse for him who proved to be his mother. We have many counterparts of this in Grecian and Egyptian mythology. Perseus was shut up in a chest and cast into the sea by the king of Argos, and was found by Dictys, who educated him. Bacchus was confined in a chest by order of the king of Thebes, and was cast upon the Nile. He had two mothers—natural and adopted. Osiris, the Egyptian divinity, was confined in a coffer and thrown into the river. He floated to Phœnicia. His mother wandered in silence and grief to Byblos, and was selected by the king’s servants and taken to the palace, and was made the nurse of the young prince. We could give several other parallel cases, but we pause and wonder whether the reported experience of Moses was not another version of the same myth.
We next find this “greatest of statesmen and lawgivers” a fugitive from justice (Ex. 2: 11-15). He had killed a man and buried him in the sand, and when he learned that the murder was known by the Hebrews, and Pharaoh sought to slay him, he fled to the land of Midian and tended the flocks of Jethro, a priest, until he was eighty years old. He knew then that it was wrong to kill just as well as he did after receiving the Ten Commandments; for he “looked this way and that” to find out whether any one saw him, and “he feared, and said, Surely this is known.” He showed a sense of guilt. He always seemed afraid of Pharaoh on account of this murder.