The Eliminator; or, Skeleton Keys to Sacerdotal Secrets

The Vedas, the sacred writings of the Hindoos, according to Sir William Jones the Orientalist, “cannot be denied to have an antiquity the most distant.” According to the Brahmans, they are coeval with the creation, and the Sama-Veda says, “They were formed of the soul of Him who exists by, or of, himself.” The Hindoo laws were codified by Manu and copied by all antiquity, notably by Rome in the compilation or digest of the laws of all nations called the Code of Justinian, which has been adopted as the foundation of all modern legislation. I could, did time permit, furnish the laws of Manu, the Justinian Code, and the Civil Code of Napoleon in parallel columns, in a way to show their common origin beyond a doubt. Laws of betrothal and marriage, paternal authority, tutelage, and adoption; property, contract, deposit, loan, sale, partnership, donation, and testamentary bequest,—all were elaborately promulgated by the Code of Manu in 2680 slocas.

Laws were arranged under eighteen principal heads, concerning as many different causes for which laws are enacted: Debts, deposits and loans for use, sale without ownership, gifts, non-payment of wages, agreements, sale and purchase, disputes, boundaries, assaults, slander, robbery and violence, adultery, altercation between man and wife, inheritance, and gaming. “The court of Brahma with four faces” is where four learned Brahmans sat in judgment, one of whom was the king’s chief counsellor.

One of their trite sayings was, “When justice, having been wounded by iniquity, approaches the court, and the judges extract not the arrow or dart, they also shall be wounded by it.”

The mode of conducting lawsuits was, in a great degree, similar to that used in all civilized countries of the present day. The oath taken by witnesses was as follows: “What ye know to have been transacted in the matter before us, between the parties reciprocally, declare at large and with truth, for your evidence in the cause is required.”

“The witness who speaks falsely shall be fast bound under water in the snaky cords of Varuna, and be wholly deprived of power to escape torment during a hundred transmigrations.”

Brahmans were banished for giving false evidence, but all others were punished by blows on the abdomen, the tongue, feet, eyes, nose, and ears, and in capital cases blows were inflicted upon the whole body.

Some of the moral sayings of the Hindoos run thus: “He who bestows gifts for worldly fame, while he suffers his family to live in distress, touches his lips with honey, but swallows poison. Such virtue is counterfeit. Even what he does for his spiritual body, to the injury of those he is bound to maintain, shall bring him ultimate misery, both in this world and the next.

“Content, returning good for evil, resistance to sensual appetite, abstinence from illicit gains, knowledge of tbe Vedas, knowledge of the Supreme Spirit, veracity, and freedom from wrath, form the tenfold system of duties.

“Honor thy father and thy mother. Forget not the favors thou hast received. Learn whilst thou art young. Seek the society of the good. Live in harmony with others. Remain in thine own place.

“Speak ill of none. Ridicule not bodily infirmities. Pursue not a vanquished foe. Deceive even not thy enemies. Forgiveness is sweeter than revenge. The sweetest bread is that earned by labor. Knowledge is riches.

“What one learns in his youth is as lasting as graven on stone. The wise is he who knows himself. Speak kindly to the poor. Discord and gaming lead to misery. He misconceives his interest who violates his promise.

“There is no tranquil sleep without a good conscience, nor any virtue without religion. To honor thy mother is the most acceptable worship. Of women the fairest ornament is modesty.”

The following, from the laws of Manu (lib. iii. Sloca 55), will contrast strangely with the law of Moses regarding the treatment of women and the esteem in which they should be held:

“Women should be nurtured with every tenderness and attention by their fathers, their brothers, their husbands, and their brothers-in-law, if they desire great prosperity.”

“Where women live in affliction the family soon becomes extinct; but when they are loved and respected, and cherished with tenderness, the family grows and prospers in all circumstances.”

“When women are honored the divinities are content; but when we honor them not all acts of piety are sterile.”

“The households cursed by the women to whom they have not rendered due homage find ruin weigh them down and destroy them as if smitten by some secret power.”

“In the family where the husband is content with his wife, and the wife with her husband, happiness is assured for ever.”

That there were many trivial things in the ancient pagan laws, and many practices prevailed among a portion of the people which seem idolatrous, we freely admit; but the same is true of many of the Hebrew laws, which are too obscene for quotation here. We also find among the Hebrews all forms of nature-worship, such as sun-worship, tree-worship, fire-worship, ser-pent-worship, and phallic-worship. Of this more later on.

Besides the Hindoos and the Egyptians, there were many nations more ancient than the Hebrews. The Grecian Argos was founded 1807 b. c. Athens and Sparta existed 1550 b. c. Then there were the Phœnicians, a maritime people who flourished more than five thousand years ago, whose monuments and inscriptions are found in Palestine to-day, while the Hebrews have left us neither monument nor inscription. The Chaldeans established a monarchy four thousand or five thousand years ago, and three thousand five hundred or four thousand years back the Assyrians became masters of the valley of the Euphrates and the Tigris, and from these people the Jews got all they ever knew about things subsequently recorded in the Pentateuch.

The Jewish and Christian religions (for they are claimed to be one) are next to being the youngest, or most modern, of any of the great religions of the world, the Mohammedan being the last. Each claimed divine authority; all had their lawgivers, priests, and prophets, who wrote, as they claimed, their bibles by divine inspiration. The error of Judaism is in claiming the greatest antiquity, as well as claiming to be the only religion having the divine sanction.

I cannot refrain from mentioning some things which cannot be regarded as wholly irrelevant. Moses had a very remarkable experience in his infancy. At his birth he was placed in an ark and set afloat on the Nile, and was rescued by Pharaoh’s daughter, who called a nurse for him who proved to be his mother. We have many counterparts of this in Grecian and Egyptian mythology. Perseus was shut up in a chest and cast into the sea by the king of Argos, and was found by Dictys, who educated him. Bacchus was confined in a chest by order of the king of Thebes, and was cast upon the Nile. He had two mothers—natural and adopted. Osiris, the Egyptian divinity, was confined in a coffer and thrown into the river. He floated to Phœnicia. His mother wandered in silence and grief to Byblos, and was selected by the king’s servants and taken to the palace, and was made the nurse of the young prince. We could give several other parallel cases, but we pause and wonder whether the reported experience of Moses was not another version of the same myth.

We next find this “greatest of statesmen and lawgivers” a fugitive from justice (Ex. 2: 11-15). He had killed a man and buried him in the sand, and when he learned that the murder was known by the Hebrews, and Pharaoh sought to slay him, he fled to the land of Midian and tended the flocks of Jethro, a priest, until he was eighty years old. He knew then that it was wrong to kill just as well as he did after receiving the Ten Commandments; for he “looked this way and that” to find out whether any one saw him, and “he feared, and said, Surely this is known.” He showed a sense of guilt. He always seemed afraid of Pharaoh on account of this murder.

He was next commissioned to deliver his brethren from their bondage in Egypt, and was instructed to say that “I Am that I Am” had sent him (Ex. 3: 14). Now, it seems to me very strange that Nuk-Pa-Nuk was the Egyptian name for God, and means, “I Am that I Am!” (Bonwick, Egyptian Belief *, p. 395). This name was found upon an Egyptian temple, according to Higgins (*Anacalypsis, vol. ii. p. 17), who says, “I Am was a divine name understood by all the initiated among the Egyptians;” and Bunsen affirms, in his Keys of St. Peter, that the “I Am of the Hebrews was the same as the I Am of the Egyptians.”

There is another peculiarity about Moses that seems strange to me. In his statue in Fairmount Park he is represented as having horns, and he is so portrayed in the statue by Michael Angelo. Now the sun-god Bacchus had horns, and so had Zeus, the Grecian supreme deity. Bacchus was called “the Lawgiver,” and it is said that his laws were written upon two tables of stone. It is also said that he and his army enjoyed the light of the sun (pillar of fire) during the night-time, and he, like Moses, had a rod with which divers miracles were wrought. The Persian legend relates that Zoroaster received from Ormuzd the Book of the Law upon a high mountain. Minos received on Mount Dicta, from Zeus, the supreme god, the law. There are many such cases. Even Mohammed, it is said, so received the Koran.

Then the crossing of the Red Sea by Moses and his three millions of absconding slaves “dry-shod,” and the “rock in the wilderness giving forth water when struck by the rod of Moses,” both have several parallels. Orpheus, the earliest poet of Greece, relates how Bacchus had crossed the Red Sea dry-shod at the head of his army, and how he “divided the waters” of the rivers Orontes and Hydaspis and passed through them “dry-shod,” and how he drew water from the rock with his wonderful rod. Professor Steinthal notes the fact “that almost all the acts of Moses correspond to those of the sun-gods.” It may seem strange that the Hebrews were acquainted with Grecian mythology, yet we know this was the fact. Rev. Dr. Isaac M. Wise says, “The Hebrews adopted forms, terms, ideas, and myths of all nations with whom they came in contact, and, like the Greeks, in their way cast them all in a peculiar Jewish religious mould.”

Moreover, there are strange inconsistencies and contradictions connected with the alleged giving of the Law to Moses. In both Exodus and Deuteronomy God is represented as speaking the words, and in Deut. 5:22 it is said God “wrote them on two tables of stone” after speaking them, and in Ex. 24: 28 Moses is represented as doing the writing: “And he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten commandments.” We here find a hundred commandments, more or less, of a ceremonial character, and only one of the original ten, the one relating to the Sabbath, and we here find “earing-time and harvest” made a season of rest just as much as the Sabbath. Then there are different reasons given for the observance of the Sabbath in Ex. 20 and Deut. 5—the one that God “rested on the seventh day” after creating all things in six days (of course this was in six days of twenty-four hours each, else there was no pertinency in the reason); and the other, that it was in commemoration of the deliverance of the Hebrews from the bondage in Egypt.

It has been claimed that at least the Sabbath is an institution first established in the Decalogue of Exodus, and yet even this must be denied. Evidences of the observance of the seventh day as sacred are found in the calendars of the ancient Egyptians and Assyrians, and the Records of the Past assert that Sabbath observance was in existence at least eleven hundred years before Moses or Exodus among the Accadians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians.

There are also great variances in the language of the two accounts in Exodus and Deuteronomy, which could not have existed if copied from what God had written in stone. The second table of stone was an exact copy of the first (Deut. 10:2). When Moses got excited at Aaron’s golden calf and broke the two tables of stone containing the Law, and God was going to destroy the people, Moses dissuaded him from doing so by telling him what the Egyptians would then say about him! (Num. 14; 13-16.)

It is worthy of note that the first commandment is of doubtful monotheism: Thou shalt have no “other gods before me,” implying that there were other gods. Then there is something not pleasant in the idea of a “jealous God,” as used in this commandment and frequently in other places. Contrast this with the Hindoo Geeta, where God is represented as saying, “They who serve even other gods, with a firm belief in doing so, involuntarily worship Me. I am He who partaketh of all worship, and I am their reward.” God is defined in the Hindoo Vedas as, “He who exists by himself, and who is in all because all is in him; whom the spirit can alone perceive; who is imperceptible to the organs of sense; who is without visible parts, Eternal, the Soul of all being, and whom none can comprehend.” “God is one, immutable, without form or parts, infinite, omnipresent, and omnipotent.” No need to prohibit the making of a “graven image” to represent such a god.

Now take Moses’ description of God. He only saw his “back parts” (Ex. 33: 22, 23), and God held his hand over him when in the cleft of the rocks while he passed by, that he might not see his glory. And, while it is said, “Thou canst not see my face; for there shall no man see me and live” (Ex. 33: 20), yet “the Lord spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend” (Ex. 33:11). He was with him in the mountain forty days and nights, and saw him and talked to him, and so did at least seventy-three other persons (Ex. 24: 9). Yet we are told in John 1:18, “No man hath seen God at any time.”

Then there are many other “commandments” in the Bible which cannot be reconciled with the “Ten Commandments,” and very many acts regarded as criminal in this nineteenth century which are not forbidden, but indirectly or tacitly sanctioned. One of the “Ten Commandments” is, “Thou shalt not kill,” but husbands are directed to kill their wives if they propose to them a change of religion, and killing is commanded in numerous instances and for trivial offences, such as picking up sticks to make a fire on the Sabbath.

Take the following as specimens of the cruelty of Moses:

“But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save nothing alive that breatheth” (Deut. 20:16).

Here is another of his injunctions: “Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor” (Ex. 32:27).

Here is another: “Thus saith the Lord of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel [some four hundred years before], how he laid wait for him,” etc. “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass” (1 Sam. 15: 2, 3). This was sweeping, merciless revenge on the innocent.

He commands the Jews to swindle the Egyptians by false pretence, “spoiling” them of their jewelry (Ex. 3:19-22). He authorized them to take usury of strangers, but not of one another; and to sell the “flesh of animals that had died of themselves” to strangers and aliens, but not to run the risk of poisoning themselves (Deut. 14:21).

In the affair with the Midianites Moses was more cruel than the officers and common soldiery. He was “wroth with them” because they had saved all the women alive, and required that they should go back and finish the brutal butchery. I cannot do this subject justice without transcribing a large portion of Num. 31:

“And they warred against the Midianites, as the Lord commanded Moses; and they slew all the males.

“And they slew the kings of Midian, beside the rest of them that were slain; namely, Evi, and Rekem, and Zur, and Hur, and Reba, five kings of Midian; Balaam also the son of Beor they slew with the sword.

“And the children of Israel took all the women of Midian captives, and their little ones, and took the spoil of all their cattle, and all their flocks, and all their goods.

“And they burnt all their cities wherein they dwelt, and all their goodly castles, with fire.

“And they took all the spoil, and all the prey, both of men and of beasts.

“And they brought the captives, and the prey, and the spoil, unto Moses and Eleazar the priest, and unto the congregation of the children of Israel, unto the camp at the plains of Moab, which are by Jordan near Jericho.

“And Moses, and Eleazar the priest, and all the princes of the congregation, went forth to meet them without the camp.

“And Moses was wroth with the officers of the host, with the captains over thousands, and captains over hundreds, which came from the battle.

“And Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all the women alive?

“Behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the Lord in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the Lord.

“Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.

“But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.”

What shall we say when we remember that Moses found a refuge with the Midianites for forty years when he was a fugitive from justice for the murder of the Egyptian, and the Midianites were the first to show the Jews hospitality when they escaped from the bondage of Egypt? Moreover, Moses had married a woman of Midian, and might have been supposed to have some regard for her kinswomen. It cannot be claimed that Moses was compelled by the low condition of the people to treat the Midianites thus, for he was the sole author of this extreme butchery of women and children, and was “wroth” with his officers for not committing the atrocity in the first place. True, he charges the women with having “caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the Lord in the matter of Peor but this could not justify the butchery of some forty-eight thousand women and twenty thousand boys, besides the old men. And then the thirty-two thousand virgins had a fate worse than death, though called the 'Lord’s tribute',” and the priests got their full share of the spoil. For those who would justify such cruelty and wholesale butchery, as they would justify famine and pestilence the effect of natural laws, I can have no very great respect.

It has been said, “Cruel as many of the Mosaic punishments undoubtedly were, it is well to remember that two hundred years ago the criminal code of England was almost, if not equally, bloody. If Moses stoned adulteresses to death, it is not very long since we put witches and Quakers to death, while in many other countries the stake and the fagot were the chief arguments in aid of orthodoxy. It would not be just to judge of the punishments inflicted over three thousand years ago from the standpoint of the present century, when the Mosaic dispensation has passed away and that of the law of love substituted. There was no mercy in the smoking rocks of Sinai. There was nothing but the law in all its sternness.”

This is all very well, but we should remember that the cruel criminal codes of modern times got their cruelty from the Mosaic code. “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Ex. 22: 18) was one of the laws of Moses, and from first to last thirty thousand witches were' executed in Great Britain and two hundred thousand in Germany. Sir Matthew Hale pronounced the death-sentence on a “witch,” and Blackstone, the great commentator, thought that witchcraft must be real because the Bible said there were witches! Scotland continued to burn witches until 1722, and Germany until 1780, while in 1515 there were five thousand witches burned at Geneva. I am ashamed to speak of our own hanging of witches in Massachusetts, but it is very well known that it was done by authority of the law of Moses: “A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them” (Lev. 20: 27).(1)

Rev. Rabbi Hirsch sums up his conclusions as the result of his study of the Pentateuch:

“The non-authenticity of the Pentateuch is shown by the work itself. It is indicated by—(1) The impossible occurrences in the desert; (2) The various contradictions and repetitions, as in the descriptions of the festivals; the provision of the officiators for the sacrifices; the appropriations of the tithes; the rules for sacrificing the first-born children to Deity—the law regulating these matters varying in Deuteronomy and Numbers; (3) Certain phrases used, as “up to the present day,” which lose all significance if applied to Moses. Thus the book itself shows not one author, but many.

“The non-authenticity of the Pentateuch is shown also by lack of reference to it in the prophetical and historical books. Jeremiah, when denouncing in unmeasured terms the very sins prohibited by the Decalogue, never uses the language of those cardinal rules of morality; the prophecies show no trace of the priestly ordinances; and, though most of the laws refer to Sinai, the name occurs in none of the prophetical books.

In 1865 the witch-laws were yet in force in South Carolina!

“It contains old songs; embodies the written law or judicial decisions of the Israelites in the Book of the Covenant; springs from two currents of history, the Elohist and Jehovist, the former composed of the younger Elohist of the South and the older Elohist of the North; shows Deuteronomy very much altered from its original form by emendations and additions, being formerly without the first four and the closing chapters, and the Levitical Law or Priestly Codex having been later incorporated with Joshua and the books of Moses; and lastly it is marred by changes made in accordance with the new religious spirit.”

We know very little about Moses. If there ever was such a man—which is very doubtful, taking the writings accredited to him for authority—he is not shown to have been “the greatest statesman and lawgiver the world has ever produced.” Neither have the Jews ever developed, in ancient or modern times, such a moral character as a people as to justify the supposition that they had a great and inspired leader among them, and that he taught them anything not well known for many centuries before to more ancient and more intelligent nations.

The assumption that Moses was the author, under divine guidance, of what is commonly called the Ten Commandments, about one thousand four hundred and fifty-one years before the Christian era, is assumption only, without a particle of proof to sustain it. What are commonly called the laws of Moses were written by some person or persons unknown in the fifth or sixth centuries before the beginning of Christianity. Most of the matter of what is called the Pentateuch was borrowed from older and wiser nations—the Egyptians, the Hindoos, the Greeks, etc. But for the unbounded credulity on this subject it would seem like an insult seriously to discuss the question, Which are the older writings? and, Which the substantial copies? Unless a man is ready to take assumptions for demonstrated facts, to ignore the museums and libraries, to question the conclusions of the profound-est antiquarians, and to make the stream of history flow backward, he must admit that the Hebrews were the borrowers.

The substance of this chapter was published in March, 1890, in An Open Letter to Hon. Edward M. Paxson, Chief-Justice of Pennsylvania, who had affirmed in a lecture before the Law School of the University of Pennsylvania that the “law of Sinai was the first of which we have any knowledge,” and that “Moses was the greatest statesman and lawgiver the world has ever produced.”