A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 06

by Voltaire

Your books indeed say, that you were reduced to slavery under Chushan-Rashataim, king of Mesopotamia, for eight years; under Eglon, king of Moab, for eighteen years; then under Jabin, king of Canaan, for twenty years; then in the little canton of Midian, from which you had issued, and where you dwelt in caverns, for seven years; then in Gilead, for eighteen years—notwithstanding that Jair, your prince, had thirty sons, each mounted on a fine ass—then under the Phœnicians (called by you Philistines), for forty years—until at last the Lord Adonai sent Samson, who tied three hundred foxes, one to another by the tails, and slew a thousand Philistines with the jaw-bone of an ass, from which issued a fountain of clear water; which has been very well represented at the Comédie Italienne.

Here are, by your own confession, ninety-six years of captivity in the land of promise. Now it is very probable that the Syrians, who were the factors for all nations, and navigated as far as the great ocean, bought some Jewish slaves, and took them to Cadiz, which they founded. You see that you are much more ancient than you think. It is indeed very likely that you inhabited Spain several centuries before the Romans, the Goths, the Vandals, and the Moors.

I am not only your friend, your brother, but moreover your genealogist. I beg, gentlemen, that you will have the goodness to believe, that I never have believed, I do not believe, and I never will believe, that you are descended from those highway robbers whose ears and noses were cut off by order of King Actisanes, and whom, according to Diodorus of Sicily, he sent into the desert between Lake Sirbo and Mount Sinai—a frightful desert where water and every other necessary of life are wanting. They made nets to catch quails, which fed them for a few weeks, during the passage of the birds.

Some of the learned have pretended that this origin perfectly agrees with your history. You yourselves say, that you inhabited this desert, that there you wanted water, and lived on quails, which in reality abound there. Your accounts appear in the main to confirm that of Diodorus; but I believe only the Pentateuch. The author does not say that you had your ears and noses cut off. As far as I remember, (for I have not Diodorus at hand), you lost only your noses. I do not now recollect where I read that your ears were of the party; it might be in some fragments of Manetho, cited by St. Ephraem.

In vain does the secretary, who has done me the honor of writing to me in your name, assure me that you stole to the amount of upwards of nine millions in gold, coined or carved, to go and set up your tabernacle in the desert. I maintain, that you carried off nothing but what lawfully belonged to you, reckoning interest at forty per cent., which was the lawful rate.

Be this as it may, I certify that you are of very good nobility, and that you were lords of Hershalaïm long before the houses of Suabia, Anhalt, Saxony, and Bavaria were heard of.

It may be that the negroes of Angola, and those of Guinea, are much more ancient than you, and that they adored a beautiful serpent before the Egyptians knew their Isis, and you dwelt near Lake Sirbo; but the negroes have not yet communicated their books to us.

THIRD LETTER.

On a few Crosses which befell God's People.

Far from accusing you, gentlemen, I have always regarded you with compassion. Permit me here to remind you of what I have read in the preliminary discourse to the "Essay on the Spirit and Manners of Nations," and on general history. Here we find, that two hundred and thirty-nine thousand and twenty Jews were slaughtered by one another, from the worshipping of the golden calf to the taking of the ark by the Philistines—which cost fifty thousand and seventy Jews their lives, for having dared to look upon the ark, while those who had so insolently taken it in war, were acquitted with only the piles, and a fine of five golden mice, and five golden anuses. You will not deny that the slaughter of two hundred and thirty-nine thousand and twenty men, by your fellow-countrymen, without reckoning those whom you lost in alternate war and slavery, must have been very detrimental to a rising colony.