Chapter XII

Was intolerance a matter of divine law in Judaism, and was it always practiced?

By divine law, I believe, we mean the precepts God himself has given. He required the Jews to eat a lamb cooked with lettuce, and the guests to eat it standing, staff in hand, in commemoration of the Passover. He ordained that the high priest should be consecrated by placing blood on his right ear, his right hand, and his right foot—customs extraordinary to us, but not to antiquity. He required that the goat Hazazel be laden with the people's iniquities; he forbade them to eat fish without scales, pigs, hares, hedgehogs, owls, griffons, ixions, and so on. Deutér. Chap. 14.

He instituted festivals and ceremonies. All these things, which seemed arbitrary to other nations, subject to enacted law and custom, became divine law for the Jews because God himself commanded them, just as everything Jesus Christ, son of Mary, son of God, has commanded us is divine law for us.

Let us not inquire here why God replaced the law he had given Moses with a new one, or why he commanded more things of Moses than of the patriarch Abraham, and more of Abraham than of Noah.²³ He seems to condescend to adapt himself to the times and to the size of the human population: a father's gradual instruction. But these abysses lie too deep for our feeble sight. Let us keep within the bounds of our subject, and first examine what intolerance was among the Jews.

It is true that in Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy—Amos, Chap. 5, v. 26.

Jérém. Chap. 7, v. 22.

Actes des Ap. Ch. 7, v. 42.—there are very severe laws governing worship, and still more severe punishments. Several commentators struggle to reconcile the accounts of Moses with passages in Jeremiah and Amos, and with St. Stephen's celebrated speech, reported in the Acts of the Apostles. Amos says that throughout their time in the wilderness the Jews worshiped Moloch, Remphan, and Kium. Jeremiah expressly says that God asked no sacrifice of their fathers when they came out of Egypt. St. Stephen, addressing the Jews, puts it this way: “They worshiped the host of heaven; for forty years in the wilderness they offered neither sacrifices nor sacrificial victims; they carried the tabernacle of the god Moloch and the star of their god Rempham.”

Other critics infer from the worship of so many foreign gods that Moses tolerated those gods, and offer these words of Deuteronomy as proof: Deutér. Chap. 12, v. 8. “When you are in the land of Canaan, you shall not do as we do today, when everyone does whatever seems good to him.”²⁴

They support their view by observing that no religious observance by the people in the wilderness is mentioned: no Passover celebrated, no Pentecost; no mention of a Feast of Tabernacles, no established public prayer. Even circumcision, the seal of God's covenant with Abraham, was not practiced.

They also appeal to the history of Joshua. Josué, Ch. 14. v. 15 & suiv. This conqueror says to the Jews: “The choice is yours: choose whichever course you please, whether to worship the gods you served in the land of the Amorites, or those you acknowledged in Mesopotamia.” The people answer: “That shall not be; we will serve Adonai.” Joshua replies: “You have chosen for yourselves; then remove the foreign gods from among you.” It is therefore beyond dispute that under Moses they had gods other than Adonai.

There is no point here in refuting the critics who think the Pentateuch was not written by Moses. Everything on this subject was said long ago; and even if some small part of the books of Moses had been written in the time of the judges, kings, or high priests, those books would be no less inspired and no less divine.

It is enough, I think, that Holy Scripture proves that despite the extraordinary punishment the Jews brought upon themselves by worshiping Apis, they long retained complete freedom. Perhaps even the slaughter of twenty-three thousand men, which Moses ordered because of the calf erected by his brother, taught him that severity gained nothing, and obliged him to close his eyes to the people's passion for foreign gods.

He himself soon seems to transgress the law he has given. Nomb. Chap. 21, v. 9. He has forbidden every graven image, yet he erects a bronze serpent. The same exception to the law appears later in Solomon's Temple. That prince has twelve oxen carved to support the Temple's great basin; cherubim are placed in the Ark, with an eagle's head and a calf's head. Apparently it was this crudely fashioned calf's head, found in the Temple by Roman soldiers, that long gave rise to the belief that the Jews worshiped a donkey.

The ban on worshiping foreign gods is in vain: Solomon is an idolater undisturbed. Jeroboam, to whom God gave ten shares of the kingdom, erects two golden calves and reigns for twenty-two years, uniting in his own person the offices of monarch and high priest. Under Rehoboam, the little kingdom of Judah sets up foreign altars and statues. The holy king Asa does not destroy the high places. The high priest Uriah erects an altar belonging to the king of Syria in the Temple, in place of the altar of burnt offerings. Liv. IV. des Rois, Chap. 16. In short, we see no religious coercion. I know that most Jewish kings destroyed and murdered one another; but it was always for their own interests, not for their beliefs.

It is true that among the prophets—Liv. III. des Rois, Chap. 18, v. 38 & 40.

Liv. IV. des Rois, Chap. 2, v. 24.—there were some who enlisted heaven in their vengeance. Elijah called down heavenly fire to consume the priest of Baal; Elisha summoned bears to devour forty-two little children who had called him baldhead. But these are rare miracles, and deeds it would be rather harsh to wish to imitate.

It is further objected that the Jewish people were very ignorant and very barbarous. Nomb. Chap. 31. We are told that in their war against the Midianites,²⁵ Moses ordered them to kill all the male children and all the mothers, and to divide the spoils. The victors found 675,000 sheep, 72,000 oxen, 61,000 donkeys, and 32,000 girls in the camp; they divided these among themselves and killed all the rest. Several commentators even maintain that thirty-two girls were sacrificed to the Lord: thirty-two souls fell to the Lord's share.

Indeed, the Jews sacrificed human beings to the Divinity: witness the sacrifice of Jephthah,²⁶ witness King Agag,²⁷ hacked to pieces by the priest Samuel. Ezekiel himself promises them human flesh to eat as an encouragement. Ezéch. Chap. 39, v. 18. “You shall eat,” he says, “the horse and the rider; you shall drink the blood of princes.” In the entire history of this people we find no act of generosity, greatness of soul, or beneficence; yet through the cloud of this barbarism, so long and so dreadful, rays of universal tolerance are always breaking.

Jephthah, inspired by God, to whom he sacrificed his daughter, says to the Ammonites: Juges, Chap. 11, v. 24. “Does not what your god Chemosh has given you belong to you by right? Allow us, then, to take the land our God has promised us.” This declaration is explicit; it can lead a very long way. At the very least, it plainly proves that God tolerated Chemosh. For Holy Scripture does not say: “You think you have a right to the lands you say the god Chemosh has given you.” It says positively: “You have a right”; they belong to you by right—which is the true meaning of the Hebrew words Otho thirasch.

The story of Micah and the Levite, told in chapters 17 and 18 of the Book of Judges, is another indisputable proof of the tolerance and the very great freedom allowed among the Jews. Micah's mother, a very wealthy woman of Ephraim, had lost eleven hundred pieces of silver. Her son returned them to her; she dedicated this money to the Lord and had idols made from it. She built a little chapel; a Levite served the chapel for ten pieces of silver, a tunic, a cloak each year, and his board; and Micah exclaimed: Chap. 17 v. dernier. “Now God will do me good, for I have a priest of the line of Levi in my house.”

Meanwhile, six hundred men of the tribe of Dan were looking for some village in the country to seize and settle in. They had no Levite priest with them, and needed one so that God would favor their venture. They went to Micah's house and took his ephod, his idols, and his Levite, despite the priest's protests and the cries of Micah and his mother. Then they confidently attacked the village called Laish, putting everything to fire and sword, as was their custom. They renamed Laish Dan in memory of their victory, and placed Micah's idol on an altar. Still more remarkable, Jonathan, the grandson of Moses, became high priest of this temple, where both the God of Israel and Micah's idol were worshiped.

After Gideon's death, the Hebrews worshiped Baal-berith for nearly twenty years and abandoned the worship of Adonai, without any leader, judge, or priest calling for vengeance. Their crime was great, I admit; but if even this idolatry was tolerated, how much more must differences within the true worship have been tolerated?

Some offer the following as proof of intolerance. The Lord himself allowed his Ark to be captured by the Philistines in battle. He punished the Philistines only by afflicting them with a disease of the private parts resembling hemorrhoids, toppling the statue of Dagon, and sending a multitude of rats into their fields. But when the Philistines, to appease his wrath, sent the Ark back, drawn by two cows still nursing their calves, and offered God five golden rats and five golden anuses, the Lord killed seventy elders of Israel and fifty thousand of the people for having looked at the Ark. The answer is that the Lord's punishment did not fall upon a belief, a difference in worship, or any idolatry.

Had the Lord wished to punish idolatry, he would have destroyed all the Philistines who dared to capture his Ark and who worshiped Dagon. Instead, he destroyed fifty thousand and seventy of his own people solely because they had looked at his Ark, which they were not permitted to look at. So greatly do the laws, the customs of that age, and the Jewish dispensation differ from everything we know; so far above our ways are the inscrutable ways of God. “The severity shown,” says the judicious Dom Calmet, “toward this great number of men will seem excessive only to those who have failed to understand how much God wished to be feared and revered among his people, and who judge God's purposes and designs only by the feeble light of their own reason.”

God therefore punishes not a foreign worship, but a profanation of his own: an indiscreet curiosity, a disobedience, perhaps even a spirit of rebellion. Plainly, such punishments belong to God alone within the Jewish theocracy. We cannot repeat too often that those times and customs bear no relation to our own.

Finally, when in later centuries Naaman the idolater asked Elisha whether he was permitted to follow his king into the temple of Remnon and worship there with him, did not this same Elisha, who had had the children devoured by bears, answer: “Go in peace”? Liv. IV. des Rois, Chap. 20, v. 25.

There is much more. The Lord commands Jeremiah to put ropes around his neck, with collars²⁸ and yokes, and to send them to the petty kings, or Melchim, of Moab, Ammon, Edom, Tyre, and Sidon. Through Jeremiah, the Lord tells them: Jérém. Chap. 27, v. 6. “I have given all your lands to Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, my servant.” Here is an idolatrous king declared God's servant and favorite.

The same Jeremiah, whom the Jewish Melk, or petty king, Zedekiah, had thrown into a dungeon, obtained his pardon from Zedekiah and advised him in God's name to surrender to the king of Babylon: Jérém. Chap. 18, v. 19. “If you go and surrender to his officers,” he says, “your soul shall live.” God therefore finally takes the side of an idolatrous king. He delivers to him the Ark, the mere sight of which had cost fifty thousand and seventy Jews their lives. He delivers to him the Holy of Holies and the rest of the Temple, whose construction had cost a hundred and eight thousand talents of gold, a million and seventeen thousand talents of silver, and ten thousand gold drachmas, left by David and his officers for building the House of the Lord. Without counting the money spent by Solomon, this amounts to some nineteen billion sixty-two million at today's rates. Never was idolatry better rewarded. I know this calculation is exaggerated, and that there is probably a copyist's error; but reduce the sum by half, to a quarter, even to an eighth, and it will still astonish you. We are scarcely less surprised by the riches Herodotus says he saw in the temple at Ephesus. In the end, treasures are nothing in God's eyes; the title of his servant, given to Nebuchadnezzar, is the true and priceless treasure.

God favors no less the Kir, or Koresh, or Kosroes, whom we call Cyrus. Isaïe, Chap. 44 & 45. He calls him his Christ, his Anointed, although he was not anointed in the ordinary sense of the word, and followed the religion of Zoroaster. He calls him his Shepherd, although in men's eyes he was a usurper. In all Holy Scripture there is no greater sign of special favor.

You see in Malachi that from east to west the name of God is great among the nations, and pure offerings are made to him everywhere. God cares for the idolatrous Ninevites as he does for the Jews; he threatens them and forgives them. Melchizedek, who was not a Jew, was a priest of God. Balaam, an idolater, was a prophet. Scripture thus teaches us that God not only tolerated all other peoples, but watched over them with a father's care—and we dare to be intolerant!

23 Since we intend to add a few useful notes to this work, we will observe here that God is said to have made a covenant with Noah and with all the animals. Yet he allows Noah to eat everything that lives and moves, excepting only blood, which he does not permit him to consume. God adds that he will exact vengeance from every animal that has shed human blood.

From these passages and many others we may infer what all antiquity has always believed down to our own day, and what all sensible people believe: that animals possess some understanding. God makes no covenant with trees and stones, which have no feeling; he makes one with animals, whom he has deigned to endow with feeling often more acute than ours, and with certain ideas necessarily bound to that feeling. That is why he forbids the barbarity of feeding on their blood: blood is indeed the source of life, and therefore of feeling. Drain an animal of all its blood, and every organ falls still. Scripture is thus entirely right to say in a hundred places that the soul—that is, what was called the sensitive soul—is in the blood; and this very natural idea has been shared by every people.

On this idea rests the compassion we owe to animals. Of the seven precepts of the Noahides accepted among the Jews, one forbids eating a limb taken from a living animal. This precept proves that men had been cruel enough to mutilate animals in order to eat their severed limbs, leaving them alive so that they could feed in turn on the different parts of their bodies. This custom did in fact survive among certain barbarous peoples, as we see in the sacrifices on the island of Chios to Bacchus Omadios, the eater of raw flesh. In allowing animals to serve as our food, God therefore urges some humanity toward them. We must admit that making them suffer is barbarous, and certainly only habit can diminish our natural horror at slaughtering an animal we have fed with our own hands. There have always been peoples who felt grave scruples about it. These scruples persist on the Indian peninsula; the entire school of Pythagoras, in Italy and Greece, consistently abstained from meat. In his book on abstinence, Porphyry reproaches his disciple for leaving his school merely to indulge a barbarous appetite.

It seems to me that anyone who dares to maintain that beasts are nothing but machines must have renounced the light of natural reason. There is a manifest contradiction in admitting that God has given beasts all the organs of feeling, yet maintaining that he has given them no feeling.

It also seems to me that anyone who fails to distinguish in animals the different voices of need, suffering, joy, fear, love, anger, and all their affections can never have observed them. It would be very strange if they expressed so well what they did not feel.

This observation may give practiced minds much to reflect on concerning the power and goodness of the Creator, who deigns to grant life, feeling, ideas, and memory to the beings he himself has fashioned with his almighty hand. We know neither how these organs were formed, nor how they develop, nor how life is received, nor by what laws feelings, ideas, memory, and will are bound to that life. And in this profound, eternal ignorance inherent in our nature, we argue without end and persecute one another, like bulls fighting with their horns without knowing why or how they have horns.

24 Several writers rashly conclude from this passage that the chapter concerning the golden calf—which is nothing other than the god Apis—was added to the books of Moses, along with several other chapters.

Ibn Ezra was the first who believed he could prove that the Pentateuch had been compiled in the time of the kings. Wollaston, Collins, Tindal, Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke, and many others have argued that engraving one's thoughts on polished stone, brick, lead, or wood was the only way of writing. They say that in Moses' day the Chaldeans and Egyptians wrote in no other way; that only the essence of what one wished to transmit to posterity could then be engraved, very briefly and in hieroglyphics, not detailed histories; that it was impossible to engrave great books in a wilderness where one moved so often, where there was no one to supply clothing, cut it out, or even mend sandals, and where God was obliged to work a forty-year miracle to preserve his people's clothes and shoes. They say it is unlikely that there were so many engravers of characters when the most necessary crafts were lacking, and even bread could not be made. If told that the pillars of the Tabernacle were bronze and their capitals solid silver, they answer that the order may have been given in the wilderness, but was carried out only in happier times.

They cannot conceive how this poor people could have demanded a solid-gold calf to worship at the very foot of the mountain where God was speaking to Moses, amid thunderbolts and lightning that the people could see, and to the sound of the heavenly trumpet they could hear. They are astonished that on the very day before Moses came down from the mountain, the entire people appealed to Moses' brother for a solid-gold calf. How did Aaron cast it in a single day? How did Moses then reduce it to powder? They say that no craftsman can make a gold statue in less than three months, and that even the most advanced chemistry is insufficient to reduce it to a powder that can be swallowed. Thus Aaron's transgression and Moses' operation would have been two miracles.

Their humanity, the goodness of heart that misleads them, prevents them from believing that Moses had twenty-three thousand people slaughtered to atone for this sin. They cannot imagine twenty-three thousand men allowing themselves to be massacred by Levites in this way without a third miracle. Finally, they find it strange that Aaron, the guiltiest of all, should have been rewarded for the crime for which the others were so horribly punished, and made high priest while the bloodied corpses of twenty-three thousand of his brothers lay heaped at the foot of the altar where he was about to sacrifice.

They raise the same difficulties about the twenty-four thousand Israelites massacred by order of Moses to expiate the offense of a single man discovered with a Moabite girl. So many Jewish kings, and Solomon above all, married foreign women with impunity that these critics cannot accept that union with a Moabite was so great a crime. Ruth was a Moabite, although her family originally came from Bethlehem; Holy Scripture always calls her Ruth the Moabite. Yet on her mother's advice she went and lay in Boaz's bed, received six bushels of barley from him, afterward married him, and became David's forebear. Rahab was not only a foreigner but a prostitute; the Vulgate gives her no other title than prostitute. She married Solomon, prince of Judah, and it is also from this Solomon that David descends. Rahab is even regarded as a figure of the Christian Church; this is the view of several Fathers, and especially of Origen in his 7th homily on Joshua.

Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, by whom David fathered Solomon, was a Hittite. Go further back, and the patriarch Judah married a Canaanite woman; his sons married Tamar, of the line of Aram. This woman, with whom Judah unwittingly committed incest, was not of the line of Israel.

Thus our Lord Jesus Christ deigned to take flesh among the Jews in a family whose ancestry included five foreigners, to show that foreign nations would share in his inheritance.

Rabbi Ibn Ezra was, as we have said, the first who dared to maintain that the Pentateuch had been compiled long after Moses. He bases his view on several passages: “The Canaanites were then in this country. Mount Moriah, called the mountain of God. The bed of Og, king of Bashan, may still be seen in Rabbah, and he called all this land of Bashan the villages of Jair, to this day. There has never been a prophet in Israel like Moses. These are the kings who reigned in Edom before any king reigned over Israel.” He maintains that these passages, speaking of things that happened after Moses, cannot be by Moses. The answer to these objections is that these passages are notes added long afterward by copyists.

Newton, whose name should otherwise be spoken only with respect, but who could err since he was human, attributes the books of Moses, Joshua, and Judges to much later sacred authors in the introduction to his commentaries on Daniel and St. John. He bases this on chapter 36 of Genesis; on four chapters of Judges, 17, 18, 19, and 21; on Samuel, chapter 8; on Chronicles, chapter 2; and on the Book of Ruth, chapter 4. Indeed, if chapter 36 of Genesis speaks of kings, if they are mentioned in the books of Judges, if the Book of Ruth speaks of David, it seems that all these books were compiled in the time of the kings. This is also the view of some theologians, headed by the famous Le Clerc. But this opinion has only a few followers whose curiosity plumbs these abysses. Such curiosity is surely not among our human duties. When the learned and the ignorant, princes and shepherds, appear after this brief life before the Master of eternity, each of us will then wish to have been just, humane, compassionate, and generous. No one will boast of having known precisely in what year the Pentateuch was written, or of having disentangled the text from the notes customary among the scribes. God will not ask whether we sided with the Masoretes against the Talmud, whether we never mistook a kaph for a beth, a yod for a vau, a daleth for a resh. Surely he will judge us by our actions, not by our understanding of Hebrew. We hold firmly to the Church's decision, as is the reasonable duty of a believer.

Let us end this note with an important passage from Leviticus, a book composed after the worship of the golden calf. Levit. Chap. 17. It commands the Jews to stop worshiping the hairy ones, the goats with which they have even committed infamous abominations. We do not know whether this strange worship came from Egypt, the homeland of superstition and sorcery. But it is believed that the custom of our supposed sorcerers—going to the Sabbath, worshiping a goat there, and abandoning themselves with it to inconceivable obscenities whose very idea inspires horror—came from the ancient Jews. Indeed, it was they who taught sorcery in part of Europe. What a people! So strange an infamy seemed to deserve a punishment like the one brought upon them by the golden calf; yet the lawgiver is content simply to prohibit it. This fact is reported here only to make the Jewish nation known. Bestiality must have been common among them, since theirs is the only known nation whose laws were obliged to prohibit a crime no other lawgiver elsewhere had even suspected. Lévit. Chap. 18 v. 23.

We may suppose that amid the hardships and privations the Jews endured in the deserts of Paran, Horeb, and Kadesh-barnea, the female sex, weaker than the other, had succumbed. The Jews must indeed have lacked girls, since they are always ordered, whenever they seize a town or village, whether to the left or right of the Asphaltic Lake, to kill everyone except girls of marriageable age.

The Arabs who still inhabit part of these deserts always stipulate in their treaties with caravans that they be given girls of marriageable age. It is likely that the young men in these dreadful lands carried the depravity of human nature so far as to couple with goats, as is said of certain shepherds in Calabria.

It remains to be determined whether these couplings produced monsters, and whether there is any foundation to the ancient tales of satyrs, fauns, centaurs, and minotaurs. History says so; natural science has not yet enlightened us on this monstrous question.

25 Midian was not included in the Promised Land. It is a small district of Idumea, in Arabia Petraea, beginning to the north at the torrent of Arnon and ending at the torrent of Zared, amid rocks and on the eastern shore of the Asphaltic Lake. This country is now inhabited by a small band of Arabs; it may be about eight leagues long, and a little less wide.

26 The text leaves no doubt that Jephthah sacrificed his daughter. “God did not approve these consecrations,” says Dom Calmet in his dissertation on Jephthah's vow; “but once they have been made, he requires their fulfillment, if only to punish those who made them, or to restrain the heedlessness with which they would have been made had their fulfillment not been feared.” St. Augustine and almost all the Fathers condemn Jephthah's act. It is true that Scripture says he was filled with the spirit of God; and St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Hebrews, chapter 11, praises Jephthah, placing him alongside Samuel and David.

St. Jerome, in his epistle to Julian, says: “Jephthah sacrificed his daughter to the Lord, and for that reason the Apostle numbers him among the saints.” Here are judgments on either side upon which we are not permitted to pass our own; we must fear even to hold an opinion.

27 The death of King Agag may be regarded as a true sacrifice. Saul had taken this king of the Amalekites prisoner in war and accepted his surrender on terms. But the priest Samuel had ordered him to spare nothing, saying in these very words: Liv. I. des Rois, Chapitre 15. “Kill everyone, from men to women, down to little children and those still at the breast.”

Samuel hacked King Agag to pieces before the Lord at Gilgal.

“The zeal that animated this prophet,” says Dom Calmet, “put the sword in his hand on this occasion, to avenge the glory of the Lord and confound Saul.”

In this fatal affair we see a consecration, a priest, a victim: it was therefore a sacrifice.

Every people whose history we possess has sacrificed human beings to the Divinity, except the Chinese. Plutarch reports that even the Romans did so in the days of the Republic.

We see in Caesar's Commentaries that the Germans were about to sacrifice the hostages he had given them when he freed those hostages by his victory.

I have observed elsewhere that this violation of the law of nations against Caesar's hostages, and these human victims sacrificed—to crown the horror—by women's hands, somewhat belie Tacitus' panegyric of the Germans in his treatise De moribus Germanorum. In that treatise, Tacitus seems more intent on satirizing the Romans than on praising the Germans, whom he did not know.

Let us say here in passing that Tacitus loved satire even more than truth. He wants to make everything hateful, even actions indifferent in themselves; and his malice pleases us almost as much as his style, because we love malicious gossip and wit.

Let us return to human victims. Our ancestors sacrificed them just as the Germans did. This is the lowest depth of stupidity to which our nature, left to itself, can sink, and one of the fruits of our feeble judgment. We said: “We must offer God what is most precious and most beautiful to us; nothing is more precious to us than our children; we must therefore choose the most beautiful and the youngest to sacrifice to the Divinity.”

Philo says that in the land of Canaan people sometimes sacrificed their children before God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac to test his faith.

Sanchuniathon, quoted by Eusebius, reports that in great dangers the Phoenicians sacrificed their dearest child, and that Ilus sacrificed his son Jehud at about the time God put Abraham's faith to the test. It is difficult to penetrate the darkness of that antiquity; but it is all too true that these horrible sacrifices were practiced almost everywhere. Peoples abandoned them only as they grew more civilized. Cultivation brings humanity.

28 Those unfamiliar with ancient customs, who judge only by what they see around them, may be astonished by these peculiarities. But we must remember that in Egypt and much of Asia at that time, most things were expressed through figures, hieroglyphics, signs, and symbols.

The prophets, called seers among the Egyptians and the Jews, not only expressed themselves in allegories but represented the events they foretold through signs. Thus Isaiah, the first of the four great Jewish prophets, takes a scroll and writes on it: “Shas bas, plunder quickly.” Isaïe, Chapitre 8. Then he approaches the prophetess; she conceives and bears a son, whom he calls Maher-shalal-hash-baz. This figures the evils the peoples of Egypt and Assyria will inflict upon the Jews.

This prophet says: “Before the child is old enough to eat butter and honey, and knows how to reject evil and choose good, the land you hate will be delivered from the two kings. The Lord will whistle for the flies of Egypt and the bees of Assyria. The Lord will take a hired razor and shave off all the beard and the hair of the feet of the king of Assyria.”

This prophecy of bees, beard, and shorn hair of the feet can be understood only by those who know that it was customary to summon swarms with the sound of a flageolet or some other rustic instrument; that the greatest insult one could offer a man was to cut off his beard; that “the hair of the feet” meant pubic hair; and that this hair was shaved only in filthy diseases such as leprosy. All these figures, so alien to our style, mean nothing more than that in a few years the Lord will free his people from oppression.

The same Isaiah walks completely naked to signify that the king of Assyria will lead away from Egypt and Ethiopia a multitude of captives with nothing to cover their nakedness. Isaïe, Chapitre 20

Ezekiel eats the parchment scroll presented to him. Ezéch. Chap. 4 & suiv. Then he covers his bread with excrement and lies on his left side for three hundred and ninety days, and on his right for forty days, to convey that the Jews will lack bread and to signify the years their captivity is to last. He puts on chains, representing those of the people; he cuts off his hair and beard and divides them into three parts. The first third represents those who are to perish in the city; the second, those who will be put to death around the walls; the third, those who are to be carried away to Babylon.

The prophet Hosea joins himself to an adulterous woman, whom he buys for fifteen pieces of silver and a homer and a half of barley. Ozée, Chap. 3. “You shall wait for me,” he tells her, “many days, and during that time no man shall approach you. Such is the state in which the children of Israel will long remain, without kings, without princes, without sacrifices, without an altar, and without an ephod.” In short, the Nabi, the seers, the prophets, almost never predict anything without representing the thing predicted by a sign.

Jeremiah therefore merely follows custom when he binds himself with ropes and puts collars and yokes on his back, to signify the enslavement of those to whom he sends these symbols. Look closely, and those times are like those of an ancient world that differs in every way from the new one: civil life, laws, the manner of waging war, religious ceremonies—everything is utterly different. We need only open Homer and the first book of Herodotus to be convinced that we bear no resemblance to the peoples of remote antiquity, and that we must distrust our judgment when we try to compare their customs with our own.

Nature itself was not what it is today. Magicians had a power over it they no longer possess: they charmed serpents, called up the dead, and so on. God sent dreams, and men interpreted them. The gift of prophecy was common. There were transformations such as Nebuchadnezzar's into an ox, Lot's wife into a pillar of salt, and five cities into a lake of bitumen.

There were kinds of human beings that no longer exist. The race of giants—Rephaim, Emim, Nephilim, Anakim—has disappeared. St. Augustine, in la Cité de Dieu, Livre V, says he saw the tooth of an ancient giant as large as a hundred of our molars. Ezekiel speaks of the Gammadim pygmies, a cubit tall, who fought at the siege of Tyre; and in almost all this the sacred authors agree with the secular ones. Diseases and remedies were not the same as in our day: the possessed were cured with the root called Barad, set in a ring that was held beneath their noses.

In the end, that entire ancient world was so different from ours that we can draw no rule of conduct from it today. And if, in that distant antiquity, people persecuted and oppressed one another in turn over their worship, we should not imitate such cruelty under the law of grace.

Was intolerance a matter of divine law in Judaism, and was it always put into practice?

I believe we call the commands God himself has given divine law. He wanted the Jews to eat a cooked lamb with lettuce, standing with a staff in their hands to commemorate the Passover. He ordered that the high priest be consecrated by putting blood on his right ear, right hand, and right foot. These customs seem strange to us, but they did not to the ancient world. He wanted the goat Hazazel to carry the people's sins. Deutér. Chap. 14. He forbade them to eat fish without scales, pigs, hares, hedgehogs, owls, griffons, ixions, and so on.

He established the festivals and ceremonies. To other nations, all these things seemed arbitrary, a matter of human law and custom. But because God himself commanded them, they became divine law for the Jews, just as everything Jesus Christ, son of Mary and son of God, commanded us is divine law for us.

Let us not ask here why God replaced the law he had given Moses with a new one, or why he required more of Moses than of the patriarch Abraham, and more of Abraham than of Noah.²³ He seems willing to adapt his demands to the times and to the size of the human population. These are the gradual steps of a father. But these depths are too great for our weak sight. Let us stay within our subject and first see what intolerance was like among the Jews.

It is true that in Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy, Amos, Chap. 5, v. 26.

Jérém. Chap. 7, v. 22.

Actes des Ap. Ch. 7, v. 42. there are very harsh laws about worship, and still harsher punishments. Many commentators find it hard to reconcile Moses' accounts with passages in Jeremiah and Amos, and with the famous speech of St. Stephen recorded in Acts of the Apostles. Amos says the Jews always worshiped Moloch, Remphan, and Kium in the wilderness. Jeremiah expressly says that God asked their fathers for no sacrifices when they left Egypt. In his speech to the Jews, St. Stephen puts it this way: "They worshiped the army of heaven. They offered neither sacrifices nor sacrificial victims in the wilderness for forty years. They carried the tabernacle of the god Moloch and the star of their god Rempham."

Other critics infer from the worship of so many foreign gods that Moses tolerated these gods. As proof they quote these words from Deuteronomy: Deutér. Chap. 12, v. 8. When you are in the land of Canaan, you will not do as we do today, when everyone does what seems right to him.²⁴

They support their view by pointing out that no religious act by the people in the wilderness is mentioned. No Passover was celebrated, no Pentecost. There is no mention of a celebration of the Feast of Tabernacles, and no public prayer was established. Finally, circumcision, the seal of God's covenant with Abraham, was not practiced.

They also rely on the story of Joshua. Josué, Ch. 14. v. 15 & suiv. This conqueror tells the Jews: "You have a choice. Choose whichever course you please: to worship the gods you served in the land of the Amorites, or those you acknowledged in Mesopotamia." The people answer: "That will not be our course. We will serve Adonai." Joshua replied: "You have made your own choice. Now remove the foreign gods from among you." So under Moses they had unquestionably had other gods besides Adonai.

There is no point here in refuting the critics who think Moses did not write the Pentateuch. Everything on that subject was said long ago. Even if some small part of the books of Moses had been written in the time of the judges, kings, or high priests, those books would be no less inspired and no less divine.

It seems enough to me that Holy Scripture proves that, despite the extraordinary punishment the Jews brought on themselves by worshiping Apis, they retained complete freedom for a long time. Perhaps even the slaughter of twenty-three thousand men that Moses carried out over the calf his brother had set up taught him that severity achieved nothing, and forced him to overlook the people's passion for foreign gods.

He himself, Nomb. Chap. 21, v. 9. seems soon to break the law he has given. He has forbidden every image, yet he sets up a bronze serpent. The same exception to the law appears later in Solomon's temple. This prince has twelve oxen carved to support the temple's great basin. Cherubim are placed in the Ark; they have an eagle's head and a calf's head. Apparently it was this badly made calf's head, found in the temple by Roman soldiers, that led people to believe for so long that the Jews worshiped a donkey.

The ban on worshiping foreign gods achieves nothing: Solomon practices idolatry undisturbed. Jeroboam, to whom God gave ten shares of the kingdom, has two golden calves set up and reigns for twenty-two years, combining the offices of monarch and high priest. Under Rehoboam, the little kingdom of Judah sets up foreign altars and statues. The holy king Asa does not destroy the high places. The high priest Uriah, Liv. IV. des Rois, Chap. 16. sets up an altar belonging to the king of Syria in the temple, replacing the altar of burnt offerings. In short, there is no sign of religious coercion. I know that most of the Jewish kings destroyed and murdered one another. But they always did so for their own interests, not for their beliefs.

It is true that among the prophets, Liv. III. des Rois, Chap. 18, v. 38 & 40.

Liv. IV. des Rois, Chap. 2, v. 24. some brought heaven into their acts of revenge. Elijah brought fire down from heaven to consume the priest of Baal. Elisha brought bears to eat forty-two small children who had called him baldhead. But these are rare miracles, and acts it would be rather cruel to try to imitate.

Another objection is raised, Nomb. Chap. 31. that the Jewish people were very ignorant and very barbarous. We are told that in their war against the Midianites,²⁵ Moses ordered them to kill all the male children and all the mothers, and divide the spoils. In the camp the victors found 675,000 sheep, 72,000 oxen, 61,000 donkeys, and 32,000 girls. They divided these up and killed all the rest. Several commentators even maintain that thirty-two girls were sacrificed to the Lord: thirty-two souls fell to the Lord's share.

In fact, the Jews sacrificed human beings to God. The sacrifice of Jephthah²⁶ is evidence of this, as is King Agag,²⁷ cut to pieces by the priest Samuel. To encourage them, even Ezekiel, Ezéch. Chap. 39, v. 18. promises that they will eat human flesh. "You will eat," he says, "the horse and the rider; you will drink the blood of princes." In this people's whole history there is not one act of generosity, greatness of spirit, or kindness. Yet rays of universal tolerance keep breaking through the cloud of this long and dreadful barbarism.

Jephthah, Juges, Chap. 11, v. 24. who was inspired by God and sacrificed his daughter to him, says to the Ammonites: "Does what your god Chemosh has given you not belong to you by right? Then let us take the land our God has promised us." This declaration is explicit. It can have far-reaching implications. At the very least, it is clear proof that God tolerated Chemosh. For Holy Scripture does not say: "You think you have a right to the lands you say the god Chemosh gave you." It says outright: "You have a right to them"—They are owed to you by right. This is the true meaning of the Hebrew words Otho thirasch.

The story of Micah and the Levite, told in chapters 17 and 18 of the Book of Judges, is another undeniable proof that the Jews allowed tolerance and the greatest freedom. Micah's mother, a very rich woman from Ephraim, had lost eleven hundred pieces of silver. Her son returned them. She dedicated this money to the Lord and had idols made from it. She built a small chapel. A Levite served it for ten pieces of silver, a tunic, and a cloak a year, together with his food. Micah exclaimed: Chap. 17 v. dernier. "Now God will do me good, since I have a priest of the line of Levi in my house."

Meanwhile, six hundred men of the tribe of Dan were looking to take some village in the country and settle there. They had no Levite priest with them, but needed one to secure God's favor for their undertaking. So they went to Micah's house and took his ephod, idols, and Levite, despite the priest's objections and the cries of Micah and his mother. Then they confidently attacked the village called Laish, putting everything to fire and sword, as was their custom. They renamed Laish Dan to commemorate their victory, and placed Micah's idol on an altar. More remarkably still, Jonathan, the grandson of Moses, was the high priest of this temple, where they worshiped both the God of Israel and Micah's idol.

After Gideon's death, the Hebrews worshiped Baal-berith for nearly twenty years and gave up worshiping Adonai. No leader, judge, or priest called for vengeance. Their crime was great, I admit. But if even this idolatry was tolerated, how much more must differences within true worship have been tolerated?

Some offer the following as proof of intolerance. The Lord himself allowed the Philistines to capture his Ark in battle. He punished them only by striking them with a disease of the private parts resembling hemorrhoids, knocking down the statue of Dagon, and sending a mass of rats into their fields. But to calm his anger, the Philistines sent the Ark back, drawn by two cows nursing their calves, and offered God five golden rats and five golden anuses. The Lord then killed seventy elders of Israel and fifty thousand of the people for looking at the Ark. The answer is that the Lord's punishment did not fall on a belief, a difference in worship, or any form of idolatry.

If the Lord had wanted to punish idolatry, he would have killed all the Philistines who dared to capture his Ark and who worshiped Dagon. Instead, he killed fifty thousand and seventy of his own people simply because they had looked at his Ark when they were not supposed to. So different are the laws and customs of that time, and the whole Jewish order, from everything we know. So far above our ways are God's unfathomable ways. "The severity shown," says the sensible Dom Calmet, "toward this great number of men will seem excessive only to those who have not understood how much God wanted his people to fear and respect him, and who judge God's intentions and plans only by the weak light of their own reason."

God therefore does not punish a foreign form of worship, but the desecration of his own: improper curiosity, disobedience, perhaps even a rebellious spirit. It is clear that in the Jewish theocracy, such punishments belong to God alone. We cannot repeat too often that those times and customs have nothing in common with ours.

Finally, in later centuries, when Naaman the idolater asked Elisha, Liv. IV. des Rois, Chap. 20, v. 25. whether he was allowed to accompany his king into the temple of Remnon and worship there with him, did not this same Elisha, who had had children eaten by bears, answer him: "Go in peace"?

There is much more. The Lord orders Jeremiah to put ropes, collars,²⁸ and yokes around his neck and to send them to the petty kings, or Melchim, of Moab, Ammon, Edom, Tyre, and Sidon. Jeremiah gives them this message from the Lord: Jérém. Chap. 27, v. 6. "I have given all your lands to Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, my servant." Here is an idolatrous king declared God's servant and favorite.

The same Jeremiah, whom Zedekiah, the Jewish Melk, or petty king, had thrown into a dungeon, obtained Zedekiah's pardon and advised him on God's behalf, Jérém. Chap. 18, v. 19. to surrender to the king of Babylon. "If you go and surrender to his officers," he says, "your soul will live." So God finally takes the side of an idolatrous king. He hands over to him the Ark, the mere sight of which had cost fifty thousand and seventy Jews their lives. He hands over the Holy of Holies and the rest of the temple, whose construction had cost one hundred eight thousand talents of gold, one million seventeen thousand talents of silver, and ten thousand gold drachmas, left by David and his officers to build the house of the Lord. Without counting the money Solomon spent, this comes to about nineteen billion sixty-two million at today's rate. Never was idolatry better rewarded. I know this account is exaggerated and that there is probably a copying error. But reduce the sum by half, to a quarter, even to an eighth, and it will still astonish you. We are scarcely less surprised by the riches Herodotus says he saw in the temple at Ephesus. In the end, treasures are nothing in God's eyes. The name of his servant, given to Nebuchadnezzar, is the true priceless treasure.

God, Isaïe, Chap. 44 & 45. shows no less favor to Kir, or Koresh, or Kosroes, whom we call Cyrus. He calls him his Christ, his Anointed, although he was not anointed in the usual sense of that word and followed the religion of Zoroaster. He calls him his Shepherd, although in human eyes he was a usurper. There is no greater sign of special favor anywhere in Holy Scripture.

You read in Malachi that from east to west God's name is great among the nations, and pure offerings are made to him everywhere. God takes care of the idolatrous Ninevites as he does of the Jews. He threatens them and forgives them. Melchizedek, who was not Jewish, was a priest of God. Balaam, an idolater, was a prophet. Scripture therefore teaches us that God not only tolerated all other peoples but cared for them as a father. And we dare to be intolerant!

23 Since we intend to add a few useful notes to this work, we will point out here that God is said to have made a covenant with Noah and with all the animals. Yet he allows Noah to eat everything that lives and moves. He excludes only blood, which he does not allow people to consume. God adds that he will take vengeance on every animal that has shed human blood.

From these passages and several others we can infer what the whole ancient world believed, what has been believed down to our own day, and what all sensible people think: animals have some understanding. God does not make a covenant with trees and stones, which have no feeling. He makes one with animals, to which he has chosen to give feeling often more keen than ours, and some ideas necessarily linked to that feeling. That is why he does not want us to be so barbarous as to feed on their blood. Blood really is the source of life, and therefore of feeling. Drain an animal of all its blood, and every organ stops working. Scripture is therefore quite right to say in a hundred places that the soul—that is, what was called the sensitive soul—is in the blood. This very natural idea has been shared by all peoples.

This idea is the basis of the compassion we owe animals. Of the seven precepts of the Noahides accepted among the Jews, one forbids eating a limb from a living animal. This precept proves that people had been cruel enough to mutilate animals to eat their severed limbs, leaving the animals alive so they could feed on their bodies piece by piece. This custom did in fact survive among some barbarous peoples, as we see from the sacrifices on the island of Chios to Bacchus Omadios, the eater of raw flesh. So, while allowing us to use animals for food, God recommends that we treat them with some humanity. We must admit that it is barbarous to make them suffer. Certainly only habit can lessen our natural horror at cutting the throat of an animal we have fed with our own hands. There have always been peoples who felt very strong objections to this. Those objections still endure on the Indian peninsula. The whole school of Pythagoras, in Italy and Greece, consistently abstained from eating flesh. In his book on abstinence, Porphyry reproaches his disciple for leaving his school only to indulge his barbarous appetite.

It seems to me that anyone who dares to claim that animals are only machines must have abandoned the natural light of reason. It is an obvious contradiction to admit that God has given animals all the organs of feeling and then maintain that he has given them no feeling.

It also seems to me that anyone who cannot distinguish their different cries of need, pain, joy, fear, love, anger, and all their emotions can never have observed animals. It would be very strange if they expressed so well things they did not feel.

This observation can give thoughtful minds much to consider about the power and goodness of the Creator. He chooses to grant life, feeling, ideas, and memory to the beings his own almighty hand has made. We do not know how these organs were formed, how they develop, how life is received, or by what laws feelings, ideas, memory, and will are linked to that life. In this deep and permanent ignorance, which is part of our nature, we argue endlessly and persecute one another like bulls fighting with their horns, without knowing why or how they have horns.

24 Several writers rashly conclude from this passage that the chapter about the golden calf—which is simply the god Apis—was added to the books of Moses, along with several other chapters.

Ibn Ezra was the first to believe he could prove that the Pentateuch was compiled in the time of the kings. Wollaston, Collins, Tindal, Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke, and many others have argued that carving thoughts into polished stone, brick, lead, or wood was the only way of writing. They say that in Moses' time the Chaldeans and Egyptians wrote in no other way. At that time, they say, people could carve only a very abbreviated account, in hieroglyphs, of the main facts they wanted to pass on to later generations, not detailed histories. It would have been impossible to carve large books in a wilderness where people moved so often, where no one could supply or cut clothing, or even mend sandals, and where God had to perform a forty-year miracle to preserve his people's clothes and shoes. They say it is unlikely that there were so many engravers of written characters when the most necessary crafts were lacking and people could not even make bread. If they are told that the tabernacle's pillars were bronze and their capitals solid silver, they reply that the order may have been given in the wilderness, but it was only carried out in happier times.

They cannot understand how this poor people could have asked for a solid gold calf to worship at the very foot of the mountain where God was speaking to Moses, amid the thunder and lightning they could see, and with the sound of the heavenly trumpet they could hear. They are astonished that on the very day before Moses came down the mountain, this whole people turned to Moses' brother to ask for a solid gold calf. How did Aaron cast it in a single day? How did Moses then reduce it to powder? They say that no craftsman could make a gold statue in less than three months, and that even the most advanced chemistry could not reduce it to a powder people could swallow. So Aaron's wrongdoing and Moses' operation would both have been miracles.

Their humanity and kindness of heart mislead them and keep them from believing that Moses had twenty-three thousand people slaughtered to atone for this sin. They cannot imagine twenty-three thousand men letting Levites massacre them in this way without a third miracle. Finally, they find it strange that Aaron, the guiltiest of all, should have been rewarded for the crime for which the others were so horribly punished. He was made high priest while the bloody corpses of twenty-three thousand of his brothers lay piled at the foot of the altar where he was about to sacrifice.

They raise the same objections about the twenty-four thousand Israelites massacred on Moses' orders to atone for the offense of a single man caught with a Moabite girl. So many Jewish kings, especially Solomon, married foreign women without punishment that these critics cannot accept that a union with a Moabite woman was such a great crime. Ruth was a Moabite, although her family originally came from Bethlehem. Holy Scripture always calls her Ruth the Moabite. Yet on her mother's advice she went and lay down in Boaz's bed, received six bushels of barley from him, later married him, and became an ancestor of David. Rahab was not only a foreigner but a prostitute. The Vulgate gives her no other title than prostitute. She married Solomon, prince of Judah, and David was also descended from this Solomon. Rahab is even regarded as a prefiguration of the Christian Church. Several Fathers take this view, especially Origen in his seventh homily on Joshua.

Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, by whom David had Solomon, was a Hittite. Going further back, the patriarch Judah married a Canaanite woman. His children married Tamar, of the line of Aram. This woman, with whom Judah unknowingly committed incest, was not of the line of Israel.

Thus our Lord Jesus Christ chose to become flesh among the Jews in a family descended from five foreigners, to show that foreign nations would share in his inheritance.

As already stated, Rabbi Ibn Ezra was the first who dared to claim that the Pentateuch was compiled long after Moses. He bases his claim on several passages: "The Canaanites were then in this country. Mount Moriah, called the mountain of God. The bed of Og, king of Bashan, can still be seen in Rabbah. And he called all this land of Bashan the villages of Jair, to this day. There has never been a prophet in Israel like Moses. These are the kings who reigned in Edom before any king reigned over Israel." He maintains that these passages, which discuss things that happened after Moses, cannot be by Moses. The reply to these objections is that these passages are notes added much later by copyists.

Newton, whose name should otherwise only be spoken with respect, but who could make mistakes because he was human, attributes the books of Moses, Joshua, and Judges to much later sacred authors in the introduction to his commentaries on Daniel and St. John. He bases his argument on chapter 36 of Genesis; four chapters of Judges, 17, 18, 19, and 21; Samuel, chapter 8; Chronicles, chapter 2; and the Book of Ruth, chapter 4. Indeed, if chapter 36 of Genesis speaks of kings, if they are mentioned in the books of Judges, and if the Book of Ruth speaks of David, all these books seem to have been compiled in the time of the kings. Some theologians, led by the famous Le Clerc, also take this view. But this opinion has only a few followers whose curiosity probes these depths. Such curiosity is certainly not among human duties. When the learned and the ignorant, princes and shepherds, appear after this short life before the Master of eternity, each of us will then wish to have been just, humane, compassionate, and generous. No one will boast of knowing exactly what year the Pentateuch was written or of having separated the text from the notes used by the scribes. God will not ask whether we sided with the Masoretes against the Talmud, or whether we ever mistook a kaph for a beth, a yod for a vau, or a daleth for a resh. He will certainly judge us by our actions, not by our understanding of Hebrew. We firmly accept the Church's decision, as a believer reasonably should.

Let us end this note with an important passage from Leviticus, Levit. Chap. 17. a book composed after the worship of the golden calf. It orders the Jews to stop worshiping the hairy ones, the goats with which they have even committed infamous abominations. We do not know whether this strange worship came from Egypt, the home of superstition and sorcery. But it is believed that the custom of our supposed witches of going to the Sabbath, worshiping a goat there, and giving themselves over with it to unimaginable obscenities, horrible even to think of, came from the ancient Jews. Indeed, it was they who taught witchcraft in part of Europe. What a people! Such strange infamy seemed to deserve a punishment like the one the golden calf brought on them. Yet the lawgiver is content simply to forbid it. This fact is reported here only to make the Jewish nation known. Bestiality must have been common among them, Lévit. Chap. 18 v. 23. since theirs is the only known nation whose laws had to forbid a crime that no lawgiver elsewhere had even suspected.

We may suppose that, during the hardships and shortages the Jews endured in the wildernesses of Paran, Horeb, and Kadesh-barnea, the female sex, weaker than the other, had died off. The Jews must indeed have lacked girls, since whenever they take a town or village, whether to the left or right of the Asphaltic Lake, they are always ordered to kill everyone except girls of marriageable age.

The Arabs who still inhabit part of these wildernesses always stipulate in their agreements with caravans that they be given girls of marriageable age. It is likely that in these dreadful lands young men carried the corruption of human nature so far as to mate with goats, as some shepherds in Calabria are said to do.

It remains to be seen whether these matings produced monsters, and whether there is any basis for the old stories of satyrs, fauns, centaurs, and minotaurs. History says there is. Natural science has not yet enlightened us on this monstrous question.

25 Midian was not included in the Promised Land. It is a small district of Idumea in Arabia Petraea. It begins toward the north at the stream of Arnon and ends at the stream of Zared, among the rocks on the eastern shore of the Asphaltic Lake. A small band of Arabs inhabits this country today. It may be about eight leagues long and a little less wide.

26 The text makes it certain that Jephthah sacrificed his daughter. "God did not approve these vows," says Dom Calmet in his dissertation on the vow of Jephthah: "but once they have been made, he wants them carried out, if only to punish those who made them, or to curb the carelessness with which people would make them if they did not fear having to fulfill them." St. Augustine and almost all the Fathers condemn Jephthah's action. It is true that Scripture says he was filled with the spirit of God, and that St. Paul, in chapter 11 of his Epistle to the Hebrews, praises Jephthah, placing him with Samuel and David.

In his letter to Julian, St. Jerome says: "Jephthah sacrificed his daughter to the Lord, and that is why the Apostle counts him among the saints." Here are judgments on both sides on which we are not allowed to pass our own judgment. We should be afraid even to have an opinion.

27 The death of King Agag can be regarded as a true sacrifice. Saul had taken this king of the Amalekites prisoner in war and accepted his surrender on terms. But the priest Samuel had ordered him to spare nothing. His exact words were: Liv. I. des Rois, Chapitre 15. "Kill everyone, from men to women, down to small children and those still nursing."

Samuel cut King Agag to pieces before the Lord at Gilgal.

"The zeal that inspired this prophet," says Dom Calmet, "put the sword in his hand on this occasion to avenge the Lord's glory and to humble Saul."

In this fatal episode we see a dedication to God, a priest, and a victim. It was therefore a sacrifice.

Every people whose history we have has sacrificed human beings to God, except the Chinese. Plutarch reports that even the Romans sacrificed them during the Republic.

We see in Caesar's Commentaries that the Germans were about to sacrifice the hostages he had given them when his victory freed those hostages.

I have pointed out elsewhere that this violation of the law of nations against Caesar's hostages, and these human victims sacrificed, to complete the horror, by women's hands, rather contradict Tacitus' praise of the Germans in his treatise De moribus Germanorum. In that work, Tacitus seems more concerned with satirizing the Romans than praising the Germans, whom he did not know.

Let us mention in passing that Tacitus preferred satire even to truth. He wants to make everything hateful, even actions that are neither good nor bad. His malice pleases us almost as much as his style, because we like slander and wit.

Let us return to human victims. Our ancestors sacrificed them just as the Germans did. This is the lowest point of stupidity our nature reaches when left to itself, and one result of our weak judgment. We said: "We must offer God what we have that is most precious and most beautiful. Nothing is more precious to us than our children. So we must choose the most beautiful and youngest to sacrifice to God."

Philo says that people sometimes sacrificed their children in the land of Canaan before God ordered Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac to test his faith.

Sanchuniathon, quoted by Eusebius, reports that in times of great danger the Phoenicians sacrificed their dearest child, and that Ilus sacrificed his son Jehud at about the time God tested Abraham's faith. It is difficult to penetrate the darkness of this ancient past. But it is all too true that these horrible sacrifices were practiced almost everywhere. Peoples abandoned them only as they became more civilized. Civilized manners bring humanity.

28 People who know little about ancient customs and judge only by what they see around them may be surprised by these odd practices. But we must remember that in those days, in Egypt and much of Asia, most things were expressed through images, hieroglyphs, signs, and symbols.

The prophets, called seers among the Egyptians and Jews, not only spoke in allegories but acted out the events they foretold through signs. Thus Isaiah, Isaïe, Chapitre 8. the first of the four great Jewish prophets, takes a scroll and writes on it: Shas bas, plunder, quickly. Then he approaches the prophetess. She conceives and gives birth to a son, whom he calls Maher-shalal-hash-baz. This symbolizes the harm the peoples of Egypt and Assyria will do to the Jews.

This prophet says: "Before the child is old enough to eat butter and honey, and knows how to reject evil and choose good, the land you hate will be freed from the two kings. The Lord will whistle for the flies of Egypt and the bees of Assyria. The Lord will take a hired razor and shave off the whole beard and the hair of the feet of the king of Assyria."

This prophecy about bees, a beard, and shaved hair of the feet can only be understood by people who know certain customs. People called swarms together with the sound of a small flute or another rustic instrument. Cutting off a man's beard was the greatest insult one could offer him. Pubic hair was called the hair of the feet, and it was only shaved in cases of foul diseases such as leprosy. All these images, so foreign to our way of writing, mean only that in a few years the Lord will free his people from oppression.

The same Isaiah, Isaïe, Chapitre 20 walks completely naked to show that the king of Assyria will take a crowd of captives from Egypt and Ethiopia who will have nothing to cover their nakedness.

Ezekiel eats the parchment scroll, Ezéch. Chap. 4 & suiv. presented to him. Then he covers his bread with excrement and lies on his left side for three hundred ninety days, and on his right side for forty days. This shows that the Jews will lack bread and represents the years their captivity is to last. He puts on chains, representing those of the people. He cuts off his hair and beard and divides them into three parts. The first third stands for those who are to die in the city; the second, those who will be killed around its walls; the third, those who are to be taken to Babylon.

The prophet Hosea, Ozée, Chap. 3. unites with an adulterous woman, whom he buys for fifteen pieces of silver and a homer and a half of barley. "You will wait for me," he tells her, "for many days, and during that time no man will approach you. This represents the state in which the children of Israel will remain for a long time, without kings, princes, sacrifices, an altar, or an ephod." In short, the Nabi, the seers, the prophets, almost never make a prediction without representing what they predict by a sign.

So Jeremiah is only following custom when he binds himself with ropes and puts collars and yokes on his back to signify the slavery of the people to whom he sends these symbols. If we pay attention, those times are like an old world that differs in every way from the new one. Civil life, laws, ways of making war, religious ceremonies: everything is completely different. We need only open Homer and the first book of Herodotus to be convinced that we have no resemblance to the peoples of remote antiquity, and that we should distrust our judgment when we try to compare their customs with ours.

Nature itself was not what it is today. Magicians had a power over it that they no longer have. They charmed snakes, called up the dead, and so on. God sent dreams, and people interpreted them. The gift of prophecy was common. There were transformations such as Nebuchadnezzar's into an ox, Lot's wife's into a pillar of salt, and five cities into a lake of bitumen.

There were kinds of human beings that no longer exist. The races of giants, the Rephaim, Emim, Nephilim, and Anakim, have disappeared. In la Cité de Dieu, Livre V, St. Augustine says he saw an ancient giant's tooth as large as a hundred of our molars. Ezekiel speaks of the Gammadim pygmies, a cubit tall, who fought at the siege of Tyre. On almost all these points, sacred authors agree with secular ones. Diseases and remedies were not the same as they are today. The possessed were cured with a root called Barad, set in a ring that was held under their noses.

In the end, that entire ancient world was so different from ours that we cannot draw any rule of conduct from it today. And if, in that remote past, people persecuted and oppressed one another in turn over their worship, we should not imitate that cruelty under the law of grace.