He was next commissioned to deliver his brethren from their bondage in Egypt, and was instructed to say that “I Am that I Am” had sent him (Ex. 3: 14). Now, it seems to me very strange that Nuk-Pa-Nuk was the Egyptian name for God, and means, “I Am that I Am!” (Bonwick, Egyptian Belief, p. 395). This name was found upon an Egyptian temple, according to Higgins (Anacalypsis, vol. ii. p. 17), who says, “I Am was a divine name understood by all the initiated among the Egyptians;” and Bunsen affirms, in his Keys of St. Peter, that the “I Am of the Hebrews was the same as the I Am of the Egyptians.”
There is another peculiarity about Moses that seems strange to me. In his statue in Fairmount Park he is represented as having horns, and he is so portrayed in the statue by Michael Angelo. Now the sun-god Bacchus had horns, and so had Zeus, the Grecian supreme deity. Bacchus was called “the Lawgiver,” and it is said that his laws were written upon two tables of stone. It is also said that he and his army enjoyed the light of the sun (pillar of fire) during the night-time, and he, like Moses, had a rod with which divers miracles were wrought. The Persian legend relates that Zoroaster received from Ormuzd the Book of the Law upon a high mountain. Minos received on Mount Dicta, from Zeus, the supreme god, the law. There are many such cases. Even Mohammed, it is said, so received the Koran.
Then the crossing of the Red Sea by Moses and his three millions of absconding slaves “dry-shod,” and the “rock in the wilderness giving forth water when struck by the rod of Moses,” both have several parallels. Orpheus, the earliest poet of Greece, relates how Bacchus had crossed the Red Sea dry-shod at the head of his army, and how he “divided the waters” of the rivers Orontes and Hydaspis and passed through them “dry-shod,” and how he drew water from the rock with his wonderful rod. Professor Steinthal notes the fact “that almost all the acts of Moses correspond to those of the sun-gods.” It may seem strange that the Hebrews were acquainted with Grecian mythology, yet we know this was the fact. Rev. Dr. Isaac M. Wise says, “The Hebrews adopted forms, terms, ideas, and myths of all nations with whom they came in contact, and, like the Greeks, in their way cast them all in a peculiar Jewish religious mould.”
Moreover, there are strange inconsistencies and contradictions connected with the alleged giving of the Law to Moses. In both Exodus and Deuteronomy God is represented as speaking the words, and in Deut. 5:22 it is said God “wrote them on two tables of stone” after speaking them, and in Ex. 24: 28 Moses is represented as doing the writing: “And he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten commandments.” We here find a hundred commandments, more or less, of a ceremonial character, and only one of the original ten, the one relating to the Sabbath, and we here find “earing-time and harvest” made a season of rest just as much as the Sabbath. Then there are different reasons given for the observance of the Sabbath in Ex. 20 and Deut. 5—the one that God “rested on the seventh day” after creating all things in six days (of course this was in six days of twenty-four hours each, else there was no pertinency in the reason); and the other, that it was in commemoration of the deliverance of the Hebrews from the bondage in Egypt.
It has been claimed that at least the Sabbath is an institution first established in the Decalogue of Exodus, and yet even this must be denied. Evidences of the observance of the seventh day as sacred are found in the calendars of the ancient Egyptians and Assyrians, and the Records of the Past assert that Sabbath observance was in existence at least eleven hundred years before Moses or Exodus among the Accadians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians.
There are also great variances in the language of the two accounts in Exodus and Deuteronomy, which could not have existed if copied from what God had written in stone. The second table of stone was an exact copy of the first (Deut. 10:2). When Moses got excited at Aaron’s golden calf and broke the two tables of stone containing the Law, and God was going to destroy the people, Moses dissuaded him from doing so by telling him what the Egyptians would then say about him! (Num. 14; 13-16.)
It is worthy of note that the first commandment is of doubtful monotheism: Thou shalt have no “other gods before me,” implying that there were other gods. Then there is something not pleasant in the idea of a “jealous God,” as used in this commandment and frequently in other places. Contrast this with the Hindoo Geeta, where God is represented as saying, “They who serve even other gods, with a firm belief in doing so, involuntarily worship Me. I am He who partaketh of all worship, and I am their reward.” God is defined in the Hindoo Vedas as, “He who exists by himself, and who is in all because all is in him; whom the spirit can alone perceive; who is imperceptible to the organs of sense; who is without visible parts, Eternal, the Soul of all being, and whom none can comprehend.” “God is one, immutable, without form or parts, infinite, omnipresent, and omnipotent.” No need to prohibit the making of a “graven image” to represent such a god.
Now take Moses’ description of God. He only saw his “back parts” (Ex. 33: 22, 23), and God held his hand over him when in the cleft of the rocks while he passed by, that he might not see his glory. And, while it is said, “Thou canst not see my face; for there shall no man see me and live” (Ex. 33: 20), yet “the Lord spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend” (Ex. 33:11). He was with him in the mountain forty days and nights, and saw him and talked to him, and so did at least seventy-three other persons (Ex. 24: 9). Yet we are told in John 1:18, “No man hath seen God at any time.”
Then there are many other “commandments” in the Bible which cannot be reconciled with the “Ten Commandments,” and very many acts regarded as criminal in this nineteenth century which are not forbidden, but indirectly or tacitly sanctioned. One of the “Ten Commandments” is, “Thou shalt not kill,” but husbands are directed to kill their wives if they propose to them a change of religion, and killing is commanded in numerous instances and for trivial offences, such as picking up sticks to make a fire on the Sabbath.
Take the following as specimens of the cruelty of Moses: