Apart from statistics, however, the Books of the Pentateuch ascribed to Moses are full of the most flagrant contradictions and absurdities. It is evident that, instead of being the production of some one contemporary writer, they have been compiled and edited, probably many times over, by what I have called the "scissors and paste method," of clipping out extracts from old documents and traditions, and piecing them together in juxtaposition or succession, without regard to their being contradictory or repetitions.
Thus in Exodus xxxiii. 20, God says to Moses: "Thou canst not see my face and live; for there shall no man see me and live"; and accordingly he shows Moses only his "back parts"; while in ver. 11 in the very same chapter we read, "And the Lord spoke unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto a friend." Again in Exodus xxiv. the Lord says to Moses, "that he alone shall come near the Lord" (ver. 2), while in vers. 9—11 of the same chapter, we are told that "Moses, Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel went up; and they saw the God of Israel, and there was under his feet as it were a paved work of a sapphire stone," and although they saw God, were none the worse for it, but survived and "did eat and drink." Is it possible to believe that these excessively crude representations of the Deity, and these flagrant inconsistencies, were all written at the same time, by the same hand, and that the hand of a man who, if not a holy inspired prophet, was at any rate an educated and learned ex-priest of Hieropolis, skilled in all the knowledge of the Egyptians?
The contradictions in the ideas and precepts of morality and religion are even more startling. These oscillate between the two extremes of the conception of the later prophets of a one Supreme God, who loves justice and mercy better than sacrifice, and that of a ferocious and vindictive tribal god, whose appetite for human blood is as insatiable as that of the war-god of the Mexicans. Thus we have, on the one hand, the commandment, "Thou shalt do no murder," and on the other, the injunction to commit indiscriminate massacres. A single instance may suffice. The "Book of the Law of Moses" is quoted in 2 Kings xiv. as saying, "The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, nor the children for the fathers; but every man shall be put to death for his own sin." In Numbers xxxi., Moses, the "meekest of mankind," is represented as extremely wroth with the captains who, having warred against Midian at the Lord's command, had only slaughtered the males, and taken the women of Midian and their little ones captives; and he commands them to "kill every male among the little ones, and every woman that hath known man by lying with him; but all the women children that have not known man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves."
These Midianites, be it remembered, being the people whose high priest Jethro had hospitably received Moses when he fled for his life from Egypt, and gave him his daughter as a wife, by whom he had children who were half Midianites, so that if the zealous Phinehas was right in slaying the Hebrew who had married a Midianite woman, Moses himself deserved the same fate.
The same injunction of indiscriminate massacre in order to escape the jealous wrath of an offended Jehovah is repeated, over and over again, in Joshua and Judges, and even as late as after the foundation of the Monarchy, we find Samuel telling Saul in the name of the Lord of Hosts, to "go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy them, slaying both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass," and denouncing Saul, and hewing Agag in pieces before the Lord, because this savage injunction had not been literally obeyed. Even under David, the man after the Lord's own heart, we find him torturing to death the prisoners taken at the fall of Rabbah, and giving up seven of the sons of Saul to the Gibeonites to be sacrificed before the Lord as human victims. It is one of the strangest contradictions of human nature that such atrocious violations of the moral sense should have been received for so many centuries as a divine revelation, rather than as instances of what may be more appropriately called "devil worship."
Nor is it a less singular proof of the power of cherished prepossessions that such a medley of the sublime religious ideas and lofty poetry of the prophetic ages, with such a mass of puerile and absurd legends, such obvious contradictions, and such a number of passages obviously dating from a later period, should be received by many men of intelligence, even to the present day, as the work of a single contemporary writer, the inspired prophet Moses.
When we pass from the Pentateuch to the succeeding Books of Joshua and of Judges the same remarks apply. The falling of the walls of Jericho at the sound of the trumpet, and the defeat of an army of 135,000 men of Midian and Amalek with a slaughter of 120,000, by 300 men under Gideon, armed with pitchers and trumpets, are on a par with the wandering of 2,500,000 Israelites in the desert for forty years, fed with manna of the size of hoar-frost. The moral atmosphere also continues to be that of Red Indians down to the time of David, for we read of nothing but murders and massacres, sometimes of other races, sometimes of one tribe by another; while the actions selected for special commendation are like those of Jael, who drove a nail into the head of the sleeping fugitive whom she had invited into her tent; or of Jephthah, who sacrificed his daughter as an offering to the Lord in obedience to a vow. This barbarous state of manners is confirmed by Flinders Petrie's discoveries at the supposed site of Lachish, which show the ruins of a walled city of the Amorites, built upon by the mud hovels of a race as rude as the rudest Bedouins who now wander on the edge of the Arabian desert.
The only safe conclusion seems to be that authentic annals of Jewish history only begin with the Monarchy, and that everything prior to David and Solomon, or possibly Saul and Samuel, consists of myth, legend, and oral tradition, so inextricably blended, and so mixed up with successive later additions, as to give no certain information as to events or dates.
All that it is safe to assume is, that in a general way the Hebrews were originally a Semitic tribe who migrated from Chaldæa into Palestine and thence into Egypt, where they remained for an uncertain time and were oppressed by the national dynasty which expelled the Hyksos; that they left Egypt probably in the reign of Menepthah, and as a consequence of the rebellion recorded by Manetho; that they then lived for an unknown time as wandering Bedouins on the frontier of Palestine in a state of very rude barbarism; and finally burst in like a horde of Aztecs on the older and more civilized Toltecs of Mexico. For a long period after this, perhaps for 200 or 300 years, they lived in a state of chronic warfare with one another, and with their neighbours, massacring and being massacred with the alternate vicissitudes of war, but with the same rudeness and ferocity of superstitions and manners. Gradually, however, they advanced in civilization, and something of a national feeling arose, which led to a partial consolidation under priests, and a more complete one under kings.
The first king, Saul, was opposed by priestly influence and defeated and slain in battle, but a captain of condottieri, David, arose, a man of great energy and military genius, who gradually formed a standing army and conquered province after province, until at his death he left to his successor, Solomon, an empire extending from the frontier of Egypt to Damascus, and from the Red Sea almost to the Mediterranean.