Secular view of the Bible. From studies of the Hebrew; with the evidences as to Jesus

Part I

["According to the number of thy cities are thy gods ^ OJehudahT* —Jeremiah, ii ; 13.]

[" Thus saith the Lord God unto Jerusalem, thy birth and thy nativity is of the land of the Canaanite ; thy father was an Amorite and thy mother a cHittith^ — Ezekiel, 16 ; 3, 45].

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TO THE READER.

O statement made in this book, save this sentence, is meant to be positive ; all is tentative, suggestive.

It is due to God and to mankind, it is due to that universal and spontaneous aspiration of all men which we call religion, and it is due to literary art that the Bible should be rescued from its isolation, and made a common heritage. The currents of modern thought and taste, supported by human experiences, are leaving this most valuable and charming book in an eddy. We no longer read it as our fathers and mothers did.

Our present translations of these writings render them hostile to social science. Intelligent people refuse to believe that God was for many centuries only beneficent to a little tribe or nation, who were no better, no wiser, nor more fortunate than others. The story of the Jews must be regarded as we would that of any other people ; hence their writings are not more sacred than those of others.

The Church has seen fit to declare these writings sacred, but it does not require us to consider the Jews themselves a sanctified caste. But surely the mere annals of a people, the secular narratives of the Bible, were never designed by any one to be considered as the word of God, whatever may be claimed for the prophecies and visions. As in case of all other reports of events, these narrations are subject to the doctrine of probabilities.

Science, which is the kinship of facts, is forced to deny

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IV TO THE READER.

that to be the word of God which solemnlj^ states that, in order to complete the slaughter of a fleeing foe, Joshua made the Sun stand still for a whole day. The Church itself can not wisely insist that this miracle was wrought ; and yet if it concedes aught on the subject, even that it is figurative, the whole fabric of miracle falls, since anyone would then have a right to construe as figurative or untrue the reanimation of Lazarus after his body had putrefied, or any other miracle or prodigy ; so that if the Church holds us to a belief in the miracle of Lazarus or the immaculate conception, we must hold it to its endorsement of the statement that Joshua stopped the Sun, for by its adoption of the Bible as a whole the Church has declared one assertion in this word of God as sacred as another.

The Jews had a right to fancy that they were under the special care of God. They had a right to suppose their law-givers or prophets had interviews with God. Others besides the Jews have believed the like. Thousands of devotees of every land who pass a night in prayer and ecstacy console themselves in much the same way.

But the mere annals of the Jews or Israelites do not show these annals were messages of God. Indeed, parts of the Jewish writings, such as the Ruth, the Esther, the Canticles, have not the least hint of religion, or the providential care of Jehoah or other name of God ; and the Church, for devout purposes, may as well have incorporated into the canon the " Cupid and Psyche" of Apuleius as these. And so the Har Epheraim stories of the Judges and other parts of the Jewish writings have almost as little reference to religion as those we have mentioned. The same may be said of the story of Joseph, who succeeds by his wits and not by any help of Jehoah.

Hence, even if we should consider many parts of the Bible to be sacred, or the word of God, there are other parts of it which have nought to say of God or his help, and

TO THE READER. V

therefore cannot be by any one deemed religious, or thus sacred from criticism and comment.

The purpose of all our translations, however, is to make of these writings a sacred book. The translations thus show the effect of this deliberate design. No accurate result can be attained when such is the method. We only get a religious meaning when very often there is a duplicate and opposite meaning in the same story ; a practice which is the wit of Oriental story -telling.

The prime fault, however, of our translations is that they are so rendered that, with the assistance of the Church authority, they cut off these writings from their natural and inalienable connection with contemporary cults and literature. The religious bias isolates them. And this when many of the incidents are in touch with the Egyptian and Greek and Chaldaic literature which has survived to us. One may be shocked at our suggestion that Israel in the Ma-Debar or " wilderness " has for its basis the popular myth of the hero's descent into Hades, but there is certainly nought in the story of Shimshon or David which should exempt them from explanations we apply to the story of Heracles or Bellerophon, or the Egyptian tale of "The Two Brothers." It is not easy to see how anyone's salvation can depend on his acceptance of the statement that Joshua stopped the Sun or that Mosheh turned the Nile to blood or that Jesus cast out devils who went into the bodies of a drove of hogs. Is it not more sensible to rest our hopes of bliss hereafter on an honorable life than on our credulity as to these superhuman narratives ?

Certainly, we have left to us, after so treating these narratives, the whole of the Law and the Prophets. Adhering to this Law, we may continue to kill men who gather sticks to cook their dinner on Sunday (Num. 15: 32-36; Ex. 35 : 2), and we may continue to kill our wives and children if they ask us to serve other gods than Jehoah ( Deut. 13 : 6-10), &c. Still confiding in the " Prophets," we may con-

VI TO THE READER.

tinue to believe that Ezekiel saw men with 'our faces and four wings, and that Daniel saw lions with feathers like an eagle and leopards with wings like a fowl, and that Joel's day of Jehoah will be preceded by the darkening of the Sun and the Moon turned to blood. But by all means let us absorb into our literature, with reasonable explanations, the gems of antique fancy which have come to us in the stories from the Hebrew, so that we may leave them no longer stained with the soil, but cut into glittering facets, and sparkling in the crown of intellectual manhood, as dear to the Buddhist as to the Jew, to the Brahman as to the Christian.

In Part II of this book will be found the sequence of a dissection of Hebrew story. That Jesus lived, and won some little following, uttered some mysterious discourses, created some commotion, and was put to death, seem to be facts which the most skeptical must admit. Whatever else is said of him will be found discussed or referred to herein. It will be seen that he is the product of the Jewish Scriptures ; that most of the incidents of his life are depicted in them. That he did not perform as wondrous miracles as Joshua or Mosheh is because he was on a real stage and was an actual personage.

The ideal of Jesus is as ancient as suffering yet hopeful humanity. Whether applied to Jesus or to some other this ideal will never die. The intelligent understand that it has numerous names and phases. There is no mj^stery about it. This ideal is that of the Deliverer. It is Hope personified.

We shall continue to have theophanies. Has not the divine Mother appeared to us at Lourdes within half a century? There must be others as they are needed. Those who prepare them for our poor distraught humanity are their benefactors. Suppose it be true that the augurs wink at one another when the)^ meet ; are their beautiful devices

TO THE READER. Vll

the less solacing for that ? Think of the miserable myriads who are consoled ! It would be better, perhaps, if they would give us, in place of the old giant-killers, the gentle souls who bathe the tired feet with their tears and wipe them with soft hair. But this is not to say that those of us who pretend to possess intelligence should refuse to understand these social phenomena, these devices, these writings ; and surely the writings should be made intelligible, and only accepted when fairly and impartially translated.

Note. — In our rendering of the Hebrew words and names we have invariably used the Heth as ** Ch," and left the He to do the office of our " H ; " and this seems conformable to the Egyptian rendering of Hebrew words, as well as the Greek usage of them. The Bible translators have no rule on the subject, and use the Heth either way. But the Caph we have also used as " Ch " when perhaps it should have the hard sound of the Koph, which is that of *' K " or " Q " ; but thb latter is less important than the rule we adopt as to the Heth.

Chapter I. Purpose Of Hebrew Narratives

THE solemn endorsement of the Jewish Scriptures, now embodied as the " Old Testament," by the Christian Church must stand out forever as one of the most remarkable facts in the history of religions. By this act Christianity made itself liable for and guarantor of a series of writings not a line of which has a known author, and but few incidents of which are corroborated by other testimony ; writings which record prodigies and miracles more daring and more frequent than are asserted in the literature of any serious sort promulgated by any other people. The first known promulgation of this series of writings was that in the Greek language, called the Septuagint, which began with the translation of the " Law " into that tongue, perhaps as early as 200 B. C, but the history of which translation is not known. The Masoretic text of the Hebrew, in which rules for spelling, punctuation, and vowelling the consonants are laid down, is that from which English editions are rendered, but which Masoretic text was so much later than our era that Jerome at Bethlehem, who translated from Hebrew into Latin, about B. C. 400, did not use it ; so that no one can say what alterations were made in the original writings or when they took the precise text from which our translations are made, though all the books are understood to be enumerated by Josephus, writing at the close of the first century. That we possess the Hebrew Scriptures substantially as written seems, however, quite probable, qualified as this must be by any translation from an obsolete language used in a distant age, and from the standpoint of favor which requires that a sacred book must be had.

Whether or not Christianity acted wisely in incorporating the Hebrew Scriptures into its creed or system, and thus standing sponsor for numerous positions which science must perpetually combat, and which must ever conflict at many points with ethical development, can be perhaps answered in the affirmative while we have an unscientific and uncritical age, but must put the Church on the defensive should the opposite epoch arrive. Judaism can of course reply that Christianity has its own cross to bear in its repeated assertions of the violation of natural laws, but at least it can be answered that these were for the advantage of mankind, and not alone for the behoof of a wretched handful of obscure people upon whom the most stupendous miracles had no contemporary effect. In the long run, however, it seems very probable that Christianity will suffer as much as it has gained or will gain by thus chaining itself to a corpse.

But it must be said that the Jewish Scriptures often supply correctives to their narratives of the marvelous which suffice to disprove them. When we hear that Mosheh led six hundred thousand fighting men out of Egypt (Ex. 12:37; Num. i: 45-46); that at Zemaraim ("fleeces" or "leaves") the Judeans arrayed 400,000 "valiant men of war" against 800,000 "chosen men" of Israel, of which latter a half million were killed in that battle (2 Chr. 13:); that Asea's 580,000 Judeans defeated one million Ethiopes (2 Chr. 14: 8-15); that Shelomeh had one thousand wives and concubines (i K. 11: 3) and forty thousand stalls for his chariot horses (i K. 4: 26), and built a temple which he overlaid with gold (2 Chr. 3: 4-5), &c., we have other statements which almost directly deny such as these ; for two generations before the twelve hundred thousand

Hebrews are said to have met in battle at Zemaraim, David, sovereign of both monarchies, mustered " all the chosen men," and these numbered only 30,000 (2 Sam. 6:2); and a century after Zemaraim the king of the northern monarch}'-, Achab, numbered " all the people, even all the children of Israel, being 7,000" (i K. 20: 15), while his contemporary king of Judea is credited with 1,160,000 "men of war," besides the garrisons (2 Chron. 17: 13-19). And Asea's host and victory over the million Ethiopes does not prevent his call on Damascus for protection against the petty sovereignty of Samaria (2 Chr. 16:1-10). In the case of the host of fighting men who left Egypt, under the special protection of Jehoah, it must seem that 600,000 valiant men had no manly motive for flight or migration, and that their wanderings for forty years in a corner of that continent which Alexander of Macedon set out to conquer with 35,000 men, requires the ecclesiastical explanation given it (Num. 14: 26-45) of Jehoah's displeasure. So, it must seem that the riches and power of the famous Shelomeh were not historic in great degree when we find he did not sufficiently pay cHiram of Tyre for the money and timber had of him even by ceding a district which lay within about sixty miles of Jerusalem (i K. 9: 11- 14); and when his father David fled on foot (2 Sam. 15: 30) before Abshalom, news of whose death came by men running afoot (18: 24). To these of many instances may be added the manifest feebleness of the Judeans when Nebuchadrezzar in three raids sent there only found 4600 persons he saw fit to carry away, which 4600 constituted the famous ''Captivity" (Jere. 52: 27-30).

The custom of every person and of every people is to glorify and magnify the exploits of their ancestors. The humblest as well as the most cynical are openly or secretly proud of a genealogy which gives consideration in the eyes of others. This trait is a valuable one, since it leads to pride, a virtue which often saves from meanness. Ancient writers, such as Homer, Livy, Virgil, were addicted to this, and Josephus is a conspicuous example. If the Jewish anthors of the annals of that people were innocent of this tendency the fact would be out of the usual order. Indeed, it must seem that there were especial circumstances at the date of the composition of the body of their writings which influenced this natural or social disposition.

The special circumstances to which we refer are coupled with and involve the date of these writings. In a subsequent chapter we shall take up the several books in detail, and briefly point out the internal evidences of their date ; but there are external evidences which are also largely conclusive, and which will be mentioned as we proceed. It is, indeed, difficult to see how, if Jerusalem was so utterly burned and destroyed by the Chaldeans, B. C. 586, any writings then extant could have escaped destruction. Among the country people, and in other towns, there were no doubt many songs and stories of heroes and saints; many shrines whose devotees told of exploits and miracles ; for every town had its own god down to co-exile times (Jere. 11 : 13), as the names of the towns also attest. The songs of Lamech and of Deborah, that of the Bow, and the stories of Jakob, Gidaon, Shimshon, David, &c., were at best local survivals of a nebulous and incipient literature. If, on the other hand, the Old Testament books were written after the arrival of Ezra at Jerusalem, B. C. 456, save that portion which he brought with him as laws, it may be that some of it was composed in foreign lands ; in Chaldea, Egypt, Syria, Phoenicia, Arabia, or wherever else the misfortunes of their country had dispersed the Canaanites. "When Zion travailed," says the Isaiah (66: 8) "she brought forth her children " ; her literary children, we delight to understand. Adversity brings into play the intellectual faculties as well as the imaginative capacity. Rendered thus active, yet retaining certain local peculiarities, it would be natural that those who arose to opulence or royal favor should father a literature, or claim it, which would explain their absenteeism, and even avouch their respectability. We shall, however, probably be able to see that the main body of the Jewish writings as we have them in the canon were composed for domestic purposes.

It is curious, if this latter postulate be accepted, that Greek literary activity began about the same time, B. C. 450, though its volume was far greater, vastly more varied, and almost equally durable, yet confined mainly to two or three centuries, as was that of the Jews or Canaanites; Herodotus, ^schylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Thucydides, Aristophanes, Xenophon, &c., being actually or practically contemporaries within that fifth century before Christ when it appears the main portion of our Old Testament canon was written.

It must seem that the Jewish annals detail atrocities which in this ethical day serve to condemn rather than to glorify them as a people. Thus, the destruction of the Midianites, told in the 31st chapter of the Numbers, where the Hebrews claim "they slew every male" (v. 7), even "every male among the little ones, and every female that hath known man by lying with him " (v. 17), reserving only virgins, of whom thirty-two were awarded to Jehoah (vv. 40-41); this, we say, could not have been told to honor their ancestors. The like must be said of the loth and nth chapters of the Joshua, in which "all that breathed" were destroyed, and the 15th of i Samuel; as, also, the horrors committed by David on the captive Ammonites of Rabbah (2 Sam. 12: 31). We prefer to believe, and think it demonstrable, that such stories as these were written by the Ezraites or Jehovist sect in pursuance and illustrative of that policy of exclusiveness inaugurated after the arrival from Babylon in order to prevent adulteration with surrounding peoples (Ezra 9: 1-2; Nehe. 9: 1-2). The correction of the Midianite story is readily found in the Elohist statement of the Judges (6: 1-6), where, a few generations after Mosheh is thus said to have destroyed the people who cared for him when he was a fugitive, and one of whom he married, it is found that the Israelites were subjugated by the Midianites, who were " as locusts for multitude; they and their camels were without number " (v. 5 ) ; and hence the utter destruction of them recorded in the Numbers (31 :) could scarcely have been told save for the purpose of making them abhorrent to the returned Jews at a time after the '' Captivity " when ** multitudes of camels" still bore gold and spices, and perhaps bevies of Midianite damsels, from Sheba to Tyre and Damascus (Isaiah 60: 6).

The alleged destruction of Hazor (Josh. 11 : 10-15) is of like sort, only more glaring in its contradiction, as, soon after the Israelites are said to have destroyed that town, they were subjugated by Jabin, king of Hazor (Judges 4: 2-3). It will be found that this polity of exclusiveness is responsible for most of the dreadful atrocities alleged to have been done upon the surrounding peoples; responsible also for such charges as that the Ammonites and Moabites were descended from the incest of Lot with his daughters; for the story that Esav (Edom) sought to kill Jakob (Gen. 27: 41); that the Canaanites (Amorites, Jebusites, Sidonians, &c.) were under a special curse to be "servant of servants" (Gen. 9: 25); that Keturah, ancestress of the Midianites, like Hagar, ancestress of the Edomites, was not "another wife " (Gen. 25: i) but the "concubine" (i Chron. i: 32) of Abraham. These and other similar atrocities and calumnies, we say, were not so much boasts of their own ancestry by the Jews, as they were the arguments of the Jehovists for home use at Jerusalem under the Ezraic polity of ethnic and sequent religious isolation; fostered as was this polity by such contact with the civilization on the Euphrates as made the neighboring Bedouins appear uncouth. It will be observed that the main Elohistic accounts are more fraternal and amicable as to other peoples; since we have in these the prayer of

Abraham for and the promise of El to Ishmael (Gen. i8: 18-26) ; the friendship of Esav and Jakob (Gen. 33:); the intermarriage of Israelites with Canaanites (Judges 3: 5-6) ; the marriage of Ruth of Moab with Boaz, of Esther with a Persian, and other evidences of more liberal opinions or of absentee authorship.

The Jehovists or Ezraites insist that theirs was a nation of great antiquity, which had formerly dwelt in Egypt, and whose ancestors had made a contract with Jehoah (Gen. 28: 20-22) to be his particular people; hence they were not to adulterate with other people. The Elohist school or sect, which might be called that of Jeremiah, seem to know little about these claims. Thus, this latter sect say the Israelites dwelt in Gilead three hundred years before they crossed the Jordan into Palestine (Judges 1 1 : 26) ; while it is the Ezraites or Jehovists who relate the horrible history of the conquest and extermination of the Canaanites. It is easy to suppose there were tribal movements and growth among the tribes or peoples about the Jordan, and that some family of fugitives came there from Egypt ; but that there was a Joshua and a wholesale conquest, attended by the frightful massacres recorded in the loth and nth chapters of the Joshua, seems to be a mere literary effort to illustrate the doctrine of exclusiveness which Ezra had promulgated. The Joshua itself, as well as the Elohist book, the Judges, contradicts these merciless and unequalled atrocities ; showing as it does that the Canaanites were not destroyed or removed (Joshua 9: 17-18; 13: 13; 15: 63; i6: 10; 17: 12), while the author of the Judges (i: 21, 27- 36; 3: 5-6; &c.) denies the story of conquest and wholesale murder. Even Rachab, the traitor-harlot of Jericho, seems to have been absorbed into Ezra's nation (Josh. 6 : 25) ; but it is proper to note that moral obliquity reaches its ultimate when the author of the Matthew (1:5) asserts that this infamous woman was an ancestress of Jesus of Nazareth, and when the authors of the Hebrews (11 : 31)

and the James (2: 25) seek to honor her. It also seems that a certain Kenite tribe of Midian became a part of the Israelite nation (Judges i : 16). In its arraignment of Jerusalem the Ezekiel (16: 3, 45) twice charges that "the Amorite was thy father and thy mother a cHittith," two peoples who are said to have formerly occupied the country, but who were not descended from Abram or Jakob, and the charge is preferred some nine centuries after the supposed extirpation of the Canaanites by the famous Jehoshua. But the Ezra (9:1) itself, a thousand years after Jehoshua, shows that the Canaanites, cHittith, Perizzites, and Jebusites were occupying Palestine at the time Ezra himself was at Jerusalem, and still later the heathen were round about Nechemiah (Nehe. 5: 17) ; texts which are fatal to the alleged conquest and extermination by Jehoshua, if not to the whole preceding history, at least so far as this asserts the supremacy there of the Hebrews, or the existence there of the Jews. Indeed, the Ezekiel, which professes to have been written during the " Captivity" by one who calls himself Ben-Adam or '' son of man," possibly gave, in its closing chapters, the hint upon which the story of the occupation and division of Canaan by the Hebrews was founded.

It is a bold yet possible conjecture that Ezra, in writing the Exodus and some other parts of the Pentateuch, used the legend of Osiris, familiar to all the ancients as that of a ''Deluge" (Arabic Tuphon; Heb. Shet-Aph or Ma-Bol), and that Isar-El in Ma-Debar or Ma-Deb-ar (trans, "wilderness") is the Egyptian Asar overcome by Seth (Gr. Typhon), as the "Mediteranean" (Heb. Acheron) annually drains the "cup-bearer" (Heb. Ma-Skek-ah) Nile, or symbolically puts it into its Aar-On or " ark," where he becomes the Kann-aa (trans, "jealous"), perhaps " embalmed" {Ia-cHan-at)y or Cana-An god; for Ma-Deb-ar, literally " from-speaking " (Ex. 34 : 33), would be the land of " silence," though Debar is rendered " speech," " oracle,"

" thing," " plague," while Deb-ah is " evil-report," like the Greek Diab-AUo or ** slanderer," whence " diabolic," and Debel-ah is a " cake," such perhaps as Egyptians put in the tomb with the dead and the Greeks into the mouth of the deceased for an offering to Kerberus, as in the ^neid (6: 419,), and so the Dub or "she-bear" which tore the wicked children (2 K. 2 : 24). The " Pass-over " or Pa- Sach, which is alleged to have commemorated the departure of Israel into Ma-Debar, cannot be positively identified with Egyptian rites unless we knew better what these were, and because their sacred year changed entirely around the calendar in the course of 1460 years in consequence of the omission of the surplus six hours above the 365 days, but Pa-Usek ('' the Usek") was both a transport "boat " (Egyp. Oud), whence perhaps Je-hoah, and the necklace or collar of Osir-is; the observance of carrying the sacred boat toward the sea and the finding of his body beginning about the 9th and not the 13th of Nisan of a fixed year ; while, on the other hand, it has been suspected the Hebrews or Jews worshipped at one time the foe of Osiris, Seth or Set, which is possibly supported by the name of their priestly dynasty of Zad-ok, the Egyptian form of which would be Sat-uk ; but it is possible also, as the name Ezra is apparently the same as Osir-is, that Ezra changed the older cult of Set or Melachzadek (" Melchizedek ") to that of Osir-is, as the name Aberah-Am also means " passover " {Aber), and Abera-im is our word " Hebrews."

Howbeit, the Israelites start into the Ma-Debar, first stopping at Succ-oth, and they cross the Jam Suph (trans. " Red Sea "). They carry the bones of Jo-Seph, otherwise " Baal cHelom-oth the Liz-ah " (trans, "dreamer ") as his brothers call him, perhaps "the god who speaks in dreams," or interprets them, though Saph or Saph-ti was a name of the Egyptian deity worshipped on the Red Sea, as well as a name of Osir-is. They were led by Mosheh the Nebie, who seems under this " prophet " title to be A-Nub (Gr.

lO SECULAR VIEW OF THE BIBLE.

A-Nubis ; feminine Niobe ; Chal. Nebo). the conductor of souls in Egyptian theology, and represented usually with the head of the ''jackal" (Jl^h. Shual -, Egyp. Sabu). The other parts are elaborations. This allegory, applied to the Hebrews, had a practical purpose, perhaps, as many Canaanites migrated to Egypt after Nebu-Chadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem, and the purpose may have been to fetch them back, for it seems to have been written after the Jeremiah (41: 17, etc.), in whose remonstrances against that sojourn one finds no mention of it, and certainly the citation of a former cruel bondage there would have been his most potent argument. No doubt there were other fugitives to Egypt, and the stories of deluges, descents into Hades or Sheol, voyages to the land of ogres and giants, etc., were common to the ancients; and "brought you up out of Mi-Zera-im " is good Hebrew for " from-Zera-im " or " enemies," or " from-seeds " or *' from-rocks "; the latter definition reminding one of the escape of Odysseus from Scylla (Sach-El) and Char-yb (cHoreb)-Dis, from Cycelops and Sir-ens, for he, like Joshua or Caleb, was the only one that survived. In the story of Osir it is only his body that is recovered, and this is found and cut in pieces, so that his soul passes into Amenti or Kar-Neter to *' judge" (Heb. Sheph-af; Daian) other souls, whom A-Nub brings to him ; and some are changed into pigs or given to Am (Egyp. "devourer"), the original Kerberus, while the good or "justified" {Cher-71 or Turn) become Osir-ei (Isira-Aelites ?) and dwell in Aal-u or Aar-u, which latter perhaps gave name to J-Eru-Salem. In the Greek Osiri seems Heraor Era-Cles, and, after all his good works for men, he suffers while in love with lol-e, but in El-ysium he is wedded to Hebe, as the outlawed or aged David is to Abi-Gail or Abi-Shag, or Hebe-Gail and Hebe-Shag ; perhaps the Rach- Ab who welcomed Israel's spies whom Joshua sent out from Shittim or the " acacias " of which the Aar-on was built (Josh. 2 : i), for Hebe is the Hapi or " Nile," the