CHAPTER III.

HEBREW MORALITY.

II. Is the divine origin of Hebrew morality attested by superiority to all human systems of ethics?

Popular piety assumes that the Ten Commandments are the superhuman source of all the virtues; and that the ancient Hebrews possessed in their precepts a divine revelation of the whole duty of man. Their annalists, however, record individual and national conceptions of morality which never rose above the measure of their progress in civilisation; and a comprehensive study of universal history tells us that modern ideals of morality are the product of the ages, reaching us rather through Aryan than Semitic channels.

The first three commandments, in which Jehovah admits their existence through his jealousy of other gods, are addressed, not to mankind, but to the chosen race of a tribal Deity. The fourth involves no principle of morality, and is simply an arbitrary decree of the Mosaic dispensation based on the fiction of six days' creation. We moderns all feel grateful to Moses if he, indeed, was the original inventor of a weekly holiday; but if this welcome rest now involved loss of all individual freedom of action for four-and-twenty hours under penalty of capital punishment, we would

assuredly prefer working seven days in the week to incurring the risk of being stoned to death by our friends and neighbours.

It is recorded that the children of Israel found a man gathering sticks on the Sabbath day, and brought him to Moses, who consulted Jehovah, and received the inexorable command to have the poor wretch stoned to death. 1 Was there no plea of extenuating circumstances? Was the unhappy culprit young and foolish, erring without a thought of consequences? Was he in the full vigour of manhood, boldly testing his right to individual opinion on the observance of the Sabbath? Was he feeble and decrepit, wearily gathering fuel to warm the withered hands of age? Had he father or mother, brother or sister, wife or children? From the vast multitude, did no compassionate voice utter a plea for mercy? Vain and irrelevant questions! What matters it who or what the man is, he gathered sticks on the Sabbath day-away with him to summary execution!

But have these amateur executioners never tampered, in the privacy of their tents, with the fourth commandment? Are they all so innocent of Sabbath-breaking that each may hasten with savage piety to cast the first stone? No time is given for inconvenient reflection; the homicidal instinct is awakened; the tragedy hastens to its conclusion; and on the blood-stained sands rests a ghastly form once human, now crushed out of the semblance of humanity. Was there no Seer in Israel who, lifting his eyes from this Mosaic tragedy, could see with prophetic vision the form of the Son of Man

1 Numb. xv. 32–36.

moving through the cornfields, and recording his solemn protest against the judicial murder of the wilderness, through free interpretation of the fourth commandment?

Are Sabbath-breakers liable to summary execution in this nineteenth century? Some zealous preachers of righteousness reply in the affirmative, by assuring us that the Tay Bridge disaster inflicted divine vengeance on Sunday travellers.

The fifth commandment promises longevity to those who honour their parents; but how was this precept understood among the Israelites? If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother; and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them; then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of the city, and unto the gates of his place. And they shall say unto the elders of his city-This our son is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard. And all the men of the city shall stone him with stones that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear and fear.'1

Has human nature so completely changed since the Deuteronomist wrote, that a reign of terror in Hebrew homes was the most effectual means of improving the morals of the nation? Did the abiding fear of impending execution foster filial reverence towards those, who now may speak and act as parents, but anon assume the stern aspect of public prosecutors, demanding the

1 Deut. xxi. 18-21.

blood of their children? Were young and old divinely instructed in righteousness through the ghastly spectacle of ferocious piety inflicting death on naughty children by divine command, in a form which we reserve for some noxious reptile? We might answer that Deuteronomy is a legislative fiction of the reign of Josiah, and these impossible parents merely homicidal phantoms conjured by the anonymous author to frighten little boys into obedience; for is it possible to trace the hand of a veritable legislator, in the untenable assumption that all disobedient sons are gluttons and drunkards? But, whilst Orthodoxy presents us with Deuteronomy as the Word of God, we must still identify its teaching with Mosaic ethics, and thus inquire, whether Semitic views of parental and filial relationship surpass in excellence the uninspired conceptions of our Aryan kinsmen, whose illustrious Master, Sâkya-Muni, anticipated the moral precepts of Jesus of Nazareth, but one century later than the alleged discovery of the Book of Deuteronomy in the Temple?

The last five commandments of the Decalogue, in affirming the rules indispensable to social existence, at once disclose their merely human origin. It is obvious that, in the absence of laws protecting the rights of property, defining the relationship of sex, and prohibiting deeds of fraud and violence, association for tribal or national purposes would have been impossible, and man, driven by lawlessness into savage isolation, would have cultivated in sullen solitude the habits of ferocious brutes.

But apart from the conclusions of theoretic sociology, we learn from papyric and monumental evidence that

the ancient Egyptians had attained a civilisation impossible to men who had not yet learned the moral code of honest and peaceable citizenship. If it be, however, true that a Divine Code, inconceivable to merely human intelligence, was once miraculously revealed to a Chosen Race, may we not reasonably expect, in that highly favoured people, a far more noble conception of social duty than attainable by the less fortunate races deprived of divine enlightenment? And are these anticipations fulfilled in Hebrew versions of the social obligations involved in the last five commandments?

"Thou shalt do no murder.' In what sense are these words understood in Hebrew Scripture? As a startling instance of wholesale murder, committed in cold blood on captive men, women, and children, by the command of Moses in the name of Jehovah, we refer our readers to the Semitic atrocities disclosed in the narrative of the sacred massacre of the Midianites;1 and proceed to illustrate Hebrew views of the sixth commandment through the legalised murder of slaves, and prophetic eulogy of assassination.

And if a man smite his servant or his maid with a rod, and he die under his hand, he shall be surely punished; notwithstanding if he continue a day or two he shall not be punished, for he is his money!'2 This is the language of Jehovah, and by this divine decree slaveowners might beat even female slaves to death with impunity, provided their victims lingered in agony till the second or third day, instead of being mercifully dispatched on the first. An opulent slaveowner with a natural or acquired taste for homicide, skilful in cal2 Exod. xxi. 20, 21.

1 Numb. xxxi.