A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 06

Did the Jews Immolate Human Victims?

You venture to affirm that you have never immolated human victims to the Lord. What, then, was the murder of Jephthah's daughter, who was really immolated, as we have already shown from your own books?

How will you explain the anathema of the thirty-two virgins, that were the tribute of the Lord, when you took thirty-two thousand Midianitish virgins and sixty-one thousand asses? I will not here tell you, that according to this account there were not two asses for each virgin; but I will ask you, what was this tribute for the Lord? According to your Book of Numbers, there were sixteen thousand girls for your soldiers, sixteen thousand for your priests, and on the soldiers' share there was levied a tribute of thirty-two virgins for the Lord. What became of them? You had no nuns. What was the Lord's share in all your wars, if it was not blood? Did not the priest Samuel hack in pieces King Agag, whose life King Saul had saved? Did he not sacrifice him as the Lord's share?

Either renounce your sacred books, in which, according to the decision of the church, I firmly believe, or acknowledge that your forefathers offered up to God rivers of human blood, unparalleled by any people on earth.

The Thirty-two Thousand Virgins, the Seventy-five Thousand Oxen, and the Fruitful Desert of Midian.

Let your secretary no longer evade – no longer equivocate, respecting the carnage of the Midianites and their villages. I feel great concern that your butcher-priest Eleazar, general of the Jewish armies, should have found in that little miserable and desert country, seventy-five thousand oxen, sixty-one thousand asses, and six hundred and seventy-five thousand sheep, without reckoning the rams and the lambs.

Now if you took thirty-two thousand infant girls, it is likely that there were as many infant boys, and as many fathers and mothers. These united amount to a hundred and twenty-eight thousand captives, in a desert where there is nothing to eat, nothing to drink but brackish water, and which is inhabited by some wandering Arabs, to the number of two or three thousand at most. You will besides observe, that, on all the maps, this frightful country is not more than eight leagues long, and as many broad.

But were it as large, as fertile, and as populous as Normandy or the Milanese, no matter. I hold to the text, which says, the Lord's share was thirty-two maidens. Confound as you please Midian by the Red Sea with Midian by Sodom; I shall still demand an account of my thirty-two thousand virgins. Have you employed your secretary to calculate how many oxen and maidens the fine country of Midian is capable of feeding?

Gentlemen, I inhabit a canton which is not the Land of Promise; but we have a lake much finer than that of Sodom, and our soil is moderately productive. Your secretary tells me that an acre of Midian will feed three oxen: I assure you, gentlemen, that with us an acre will feed but one. If your secretary will triple the revenue of my lands, I will give him good wages, and will not pay him with drafts on the receivers-general. He will not find a better situation in all the country of Midian than with me; but unfortunately this man knows no more of oxen than he does of golden calves.

As for the thirty-two thousand maidenheads, I wish him joy of them. Our little country is as large as Midian. It contains about four thousand drunkards, a dozen attorneys, two men of sense, and four thousand persons of the fair sex, who are not uniformly pretty. These together make about eight thousand people, supposing that the registrar who gave me the account did not exaggerate by one-half, according to custom. Either your priests or ours would have had considerable difficulty in finding thirty-two thousand virgins for their use in our country. This makes me very doubtful concerning the numberings of the Roman people, at the time when their empire extended just four leagues from the Tarpeian rock, and they carried a handful of hay at the end of a pole for a standard. Perhaps you do not know that the Romans passed five hundred years in plundering their neighbors before they had any historian, and that their numberings, like their miracles, are very suspicious.

As for the sixty-one thousand asses, the fruits of your conquests in Midian – enough has been said of asses.

Jewish Children Immolated by their Mothers.

I tell you, that your fathers immolated their children; and I call your prophets to witness. Isaiah reproaches them with this cannibalish crime: "Slaying the children of the valleys under the clefts of the rocks."

You will tell me, that it was not to the Lord Adonai that the women sacrificed the fruit of their womb – that it was to some other god. But what matters it whether you called him to whom you offered up your children Melkom, or Sadaï, or Baal, or Adonai? That which it concerns us to know is, that you were parricides. It was to strange idols, you say, that your fathers made their offerings. Well, – I pity you still more for being descended from fathers at once both parricidal and idolatrous. I condole with you, that your fathers were idolaters for forty successive years in the desert of Sinai, as is expressly said by Jeremiah, Amos, and St. Stephen.

You were idolaters in the time of the Judges; and the grandson of Moses was priest of the tribe of Dan, who, as we have seen, were all idolaters; for it is necessary to repeat – to insist; otherwise everything is forgotten.

You were idolaters under your kings; you were not faithful to one God only, until after Esdras had restored your books. Then it was that your uninterruptedly true worship began; and by an incomprehensible providence of the Supreme Being, you have been the most unfortunate of all men ever since you became the most faithful – under the kings of Syria, under the kings of Egypt, under Herod the Idumæan, under the Romans, under the Persians, under the Arabs, under the Turks – until now, that you do me the honor of writing to me, and I have the honor of answering you.

SIXTH LETTER.

Beauty of the Land of Promise.

Do not reproach me with not loving you. I love you so much that I wish you were in Hershalaïm, instead of the Turks, who ravage your country; but who, nevertheless, have built a very fine mosque on the foundations of your temple, and on the platform constructed by your Herod.

You would cultivate that miserable desert, as you cultivated it formerly; you would carry earth to the bare tops of your arid mountains; you would not have much corn, but you would have very good vines, a few palms, olive trees, and pastures.

Though Palestine does not equal Provence, though Marseilles alone is superior to all Judæa, which had not one sea-port; though the town of Aix is incomparably better situated than Jerusalem, you might nevertheless make of your territory almost as much as the Provencals have made of theirs. You might execute, to your hearts' content, your own detestable psalmody in your own detestable jargon.

It is true, that you would have no horses; for there are not, nor have there ever been, about Hershalaïm, any but asses. You would often be in want of wheat, but you would obtain it from Egypt or Syria.

You might convey merchandise to Damascus and to Said on your asses – or indeed on camels – which you never knew anything of in the time of your Melchim, and which would be a great assistance to you. In short, assiduous toil, to which man is born, would fertilize this land, which the lords of Constantinople and Asia Minor neglect.

This promised land of yours is very bad. Are you acquainted with St. Jerome? He was a Christian priest, one of those men whose books you do not read. However, he lived a long time in your country; he was a very learned person – not indeed slow to anger, for when contradicted he was prodigal of abuse – but knowing your language better than you do, for he was a good grammarian. Study was his ruling passion; anger was only second to it. He had turned priest, together with his friend Vincent, on condition that they should never say mass nor vespers, lest they should be too much interrupted in their studies; for being directors of women and girls, had they been moreover obliged to labor in the priestly office, they would not have had two hours in the day left for Greek, Chaldee, and the Jewish idiom. At last, in order to have more leisure, Jerome retired altogether, to live among the Jews at Bethlehem, as Huet, bishop of Avranches, retired to the Jesuits, at the house of the professed, Rue St. Antoine, at Paris.

Jerome did, it is true, embroil himself with the bishop of Jerusalem, named John, with the celebrated priest Rufinus, and with several of his friends; for, as I have already said, Jerome was full of choler and self-love, and St. Augustine charges him with levity and fickleness: but he was not the less holy, he was not the less learned, nor is his testimony the less to be received, concerning the nature of the wretched country in which his ardor for study and his melancholy confined him.

Be so obliging as to read his letter to Dardanus, written in the year 414 of our era, which, according to the Jewish reckoning, is the year of the world 4000, or 4001, or 4003, or 4004, as you please.

"I beg of those who assert that the Jewish people, after the coming out of Egypt, took possession of this country, which to us, by the passion and resurrection of our Saviour, has become truly a land of promise – I beg of them, I say, to show us what this people possessed. Their whole dominions extended only from Dan to Beersheba, about one hundred and sixty miles in length. The Holy Scriptures give no more to David and to Solomon… I am ashamed to say what is the breadth of the land of promise, and I fear that the pagans will thence take occasion to blaspheme. It is but forty-six miles from Joppa to our little town of Bethlehem, beyond which all is a frightful desert."

Read also the letter to one of his devotees, in which he says, that from Jerusalem to Bethlehem there is nothing but pebbles, and no water to drink; but that farther on, towards the Jordan, you find very good valleys in that country full of bare mountains. This really was a land of milk and honey, in comparison with the abominable desert of Horeb and Sinai, from which you originally came. The sorry province of Champagne is the land of promise, in relation to some parts of the Landes of Bordeaux – the banks of the Aar are the land of promise, when compared with the little Swiss cantons; all Palestine is very bad land, in comparison with Egypt, which you say you came out of as thieves; but it is a delightful country, if you compare it with the deserts of Jerusalem, Sodom, Horeb, Sinai, Kadesh, etc.

Go back to Judæa as soon as you can. I ask of you only two or three Hebrew families, in order to establish a little necessary trade at Mount Krapak, where I reside. For, if you are (like us) very ridiculous theologians, you are very intelligent buyers and sellers, which we are not.

SEVENTH LETTER.

Charity which God's People and the Christians should entertain for each other.

My tenderness for you has only a few words more to say. We have been accustomed for ages to hang you up between two dogs; we have repeatedly driven you away through avarice; we have recalled you through avarice and stupidity; we still, in more towns than one, make you pay for liberty to breathe the air: we have, in more kingdoms than one, sacrificed you to God; we have burned you as holocausts – for I will not follow your example, and dissemble that we have offered up sacrifices of human blood; all the difference is, that our priests, content with applying your money to their own use, have had you burned by laymen; while your priests always immolated the human victims with their own sacred hands. You were monsters of cruelty and fanaticism in Palestine; we have been so in Europe: my friends, let all this be forgotten.

Would you live in peace? Imitate the Banians and the Guebers. They are much more ancient than you are; they are dispersed like you; they are, like you, without a country. The Guebers, in particular, who are the ancient Persians, are slaves like you, after being for a long while masters. They say not a word. Follow their example. You are calculating animals – try to be thinking ones.

JOB

Good day, friend Job! thou art one of the most ancient originals of which books make mention; thou wast not a Jew; we know that the book which bears thy name is more ancient than the Pentateuch. If the Hebrews, who translated it from the Arabic, made use of the word "Jehovah" to signify God, they borrowed it from the Phoenicians and Egyptians, of which men of learning are assured. The word "Satan" was not Hebrew; it was Chaldæan, as is well known.

Thou dwelledst on the confines of Chaldæa. Commentators, worthy of their profession, pretend that thou didst believe in the resurrection, because, being prostrate on thy dunghill, thou hast said, in thy nineteenth chapter, that thou wouldst one day rise up from it. A patient who wishes his cure is not anxious for resurrection in lieu of it; but I would speak to thee of other things.

Confess that thou wast a great babbler; but thy friends were much greater. It is said that thou possessedst seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, one thousand cows, and five hundred she-asses. I will reckon up their value:

without reckoning thy furniture, rings and jewels.

I have been much richer than thou; and though I have lost a great part of my property and am ill, like thyself I have not murmured against God, as thy friends seem to reproach thee with sometimes doing.

I am not at all pleased with Satan, who, to induce thee to sin, and to make thee forget God, demanded permission to take away all thy property, and to give thee the itch. It is in this state that men always have recourse to divinity. They are prosperous people who forgot God. Satan knew not enough of the world at that time; he has improved himself since; and when he would be sure of any one, he makes him a farmer-general, or something better if possible, as our friend Pope has clearly shown in his history of the knight Sir Balaam.

Thy wife was an impertinent, but thy pretended friends Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuite, and Zophar, the Naamathite, were much more insupportable. They exhorted thee to patience in a manner that would have roused the mildest of men; they made thee long sermons more tiresome than those preached by the knave V – e at Amsterdam, and by so many other people.

It is true that thou didst not know what thou saidst, when exclaiming – "My God, am I a sea or a whale, to be shut up by Thee as in a prison?" But thy friends knew no more when they answered thee, "that the morn cannot become fresh without dew, and that the grass of the field cannot grow without water." Nothing is less consolatory than this axiom.

Zophar of Naamath reproached thee with being a prater; but none of these good friends lent thee a crown. I would not have treated thee thus. Nothing is more common than people who advise; nothing more rare than those who assist. Friends are not worth much, from whom we cannot procure a drop of broth if we are in misery. I imagine that when God restored thy riches and health, these eloquent personages dared not present themselves before thee, hence the comforters of Job have become a proverb.

God was displeased with them, and told them sharply, in chap, xlii., that they were tiresome and imprudent, and he condemned them to a fine of seven bullocks and seven rams, for having talked nonsense. I would have condemned them for not having assisted their friend.

I pray thee, tell me if it is true, that thou livedst a hundred and forty years after this adventure. I like to learn that honest people live long; but men of the present day must be great rogues, since their lives are comparatively so short.

As to the rest, the book of Job is one of the most precious of antiquity. It is evident that this book is the work of an Arab who lived before the time in which we place Moses. It is said that Eliphaz, one of the interlocutors, is of Teman, which was an ancient city of Arabia. Bildad was of Shua, another town of Arabia. Zophar was of Naamath, a still more eastern country of Arabia.

But what is more remarkable, and which shows that this fable cannot be that of a Jew, is, that three constellations are spoken of, which we now call Arcturus, Orion, and the Pleiades. The Hebrews never had the least knowledge of astronomy; they had not even a word to express this science; all that regards the mental science was unknown to them, inclusive even of the term geometry.

The Arabs, on the contrary, living in tents, and being continually led to observe the stars, were perhaps the first who regulated their years by the inspection of the heavens.

The more important observation is, that one God alone is spoken of in this book. It is an absurd error to imagine that the Jews were the only people who recognized a sole God; it was the doctrine of almost all the East, and the Jews were only plagiarists in that as in everything else.

In chapter xxxviii. God Himself speaks to Job from the midst of a whirlwind, which has been since imitated in Genesis. We cannot too often repeat, that the Jewish books are very modern. Ignorance and fanaticism exclaim, that the Pentateuch is the most ancient book in the world. It is evident, that those of Sanchoniathon, and those of Thaut, eight hundred years anterior to those of Sanchoniathon; those of the first Zerdusht, the "Shasta," the "Vedas" of the Indians, which we still possess; the "Five Kings of China"; and finally the Book of Job, are of a much remoter antiquity than any Jewish book. It is demonstrated that this little people could only have annals while they had a stable government; that they only had this government under their kings; that its jargon was only formed, in the course of time, of a mixture of Phœnician and Arabic. These are incontestable proofs that the Phœnicians cultivated letters a long time before them. Their profession was pillage and brokerage; they were writers only by chance. We have lost the books of the Egyptians and Phœnicians, the Chinese, Brahmins, and Guebers; the Jews have preserved theirs. All these monuments are curious, but they are monuments of human imagination alone, in which not a single truth, either physical or historical, is to be learned. There is not at present any little physical treatise that would not be more useful than all the books of antiquity.

The good Calmet, or Dom Calmet (for the Benedictines like us to give them their Dom), that simple compiler of so many reveries and imbecilities; that man whom simplicity has rendered so useful to whoever would laugh at antique nonsense, faithfully relates the opinion of those who would discover the malady with which Job was attacked, as if Job was a real personage. He does not hesitate in saying that Job had the smallpox, and heaps passage upon passage, as usual, to prove that which is not. He had not read the history of the smallpox by Astruc; for Astruc being neither a father of the Church nor a doctor of Salamanca, but a very learned physician, the good man Calmet knew not that he existed. Monkish compilers are poor creatures!

BY AN INVALID,At the Baths of Aix-la-Chapelle.