Mistakes of Moses — Chapters 19 & 20
XIX. BACCHUS AND BABEL
As soon as Noah had disembarked, he proceeded to plant a vineyard, and began to be a husbandman; and when the grapes were ripe he made wine and drank of it to excess; cursed his grandson, blessed Shem and Japheth, and after that lived for three hundred and fifty years.
What he did during these three hundred and fifty years, we are not told.
We never hear of him again.
For three hundred and fifty years he lived among his sons, and daughters, and their descendants.
He must have been a venerable man.
He was the man to whom God had made known his intention of drowning the world.
By his efforts, the human race had been saved.
He must have been acquainted with Methuselah for six hundred years, and Methuselah was about two hundred and forty years old, when Adam died.
Noah must himself have known the history of mankind, and must have been an object of almost infinite interest; and yet for three hundred and fifty years he is neither directly nor indirectly mentioned.
When Noah died, Abraham must have been more than fifty years old; and Shem, the son of Noah, lived for several hundred years after the death of Abraham;
and yet he is never mentioned.
Noah when he died, was the oldest man in the whole world by about five hundred years; and everybody living at the time of his death knew that they were indebted to him, and yet no account is given of his burial.
No monument was raised to mark the spot.
This, however, is no more wonderful than the fact that no account is given of the death of Adam or of Eve, nor of the place of their burial.
This may all be accounted for by the fact that the language of man was confounded at the building of the tower of Babel, whereby all tradition may have been lost, so that even the sons of Noah could not give an account of their voyage in the ark; and, consequently, some one had to be directly inspired to tell the story, after new languages had been formed.
It has always been a mystery to me how Adam, Eve, and the serpent were taught the same language.
Where did they get it?
We know now, that it requires a great number of years to form a language; that it is of exceedingly slow growth.
We also know that by language, man conveys to his fellows the impressions made upon him by what he sees, hears, smells and touches.
We know that the language of the savage consists of a few sounds, capable of expressing only a few ideas or states of the mind, such as love, desire, fear, hatred, aversion and contempt.
Many centuries are required to produce a language capable of expressing complex ideas.
It does not seem to me that ideas can be manufactured by a deity and put in the brain of man.
These ideas must be the result of observation and experience.
Does anybody believe that God directly taught a language to Adam and Eve, or that he so made them that they, by intuition spoke Hebrew, or some language capable of conveying to each other their thoughts?
How did the serpent learn the same language?
Did God teach it to him, or did he happen to overhear God, when he was teaching Adam and Eve?
We are told in the second chapter of Genesis that God caused all the animals to pass before Adam to see what he would call them.
We cannot infer from this that God named the animals and informed Adam what to call them.
Adam named them himself.
Where did he get his words?
We cannot imagine a man just made out of dust, without the experience of a moment, having the power to put his thoughts in language.
In the first place, we cannot conceive of his having any thoughts until he has combined, through experience and observation, the impressions that nature had made upon him through the medium of his senses.
We cannot imagine of his knowing anything, in the first instance, about different degrees of heat, nor about darkness, if he was made in the day-time, nor about light, if created at night, until the next morning.
Before a man can have what we call thoughts, he must have had a little experience.
Something must have happened to him before he can have a thought, and before he can express himself in language.
Language is a growth, not a gift.
We account now for the diversity of language by the fact that tribes and nations have had different experiences, different wants, different surroundings, and, one result of all these differences is, among other things, a difference in language.
Nothing can be more absurd than to account for the different languages of the world by saying that the original language was confounded at the tower of Babel.
According to the bible, up to the time of the building of that tower, the whole earth was of one language and of one speech, and would have so remained until the present time had not an effort been made to build a tower whose top should reach into heaven.
Can any one imagine what objection God would have to the building of such a tower?
And how could the confusion of tongues prevent its construction?
How could language be confounded?
It could be confounded only by the destruction of memory.
Did God destroy the memory of mankind at that time, and if so, how?
Did he paralyze that portion of the brain presiding over the organs of articulation, so that they could not speak the words, although they remembered them clearly, or did he so touch the brain that they could not hear?
Will some theologian, versed in the machinery of the miraculous, tell us in what way God confounded the language of mankind?
Why would the confounding of the language make them separate?
Why would they not stay together until they could understand each other?
People will not separate, from weakness.
When in trouble they come together and desire the assistance of each other.
Why, in this instance, did they separate?
What particular ones would naturally come together if nobody understood the language of any other person?
Would it not have been just as hard to agree when and where to go, without any language to express the agreement, as to go on with the building of the tower?
Is it possible that any one now believes that the whole world would be of one speech had the language not been confounded at Babel?
Do we not know that every word was suggested in some way by the experience of men?
Do we not know that words are continually dying, and continually being born; that every language has its cradle and its cemetery--its buds, its blossoms, its fruits and its withered leaves?
Man has loved, enjoyed, hated, suffered and hoped, and all words have been born of these experiences.
Why did "the Lord come down to see the city and the tower?"
Could he not see them from where he lived or from where he was?
Where did he come down from?
Did he come in the daytime, or in the night?
We are taught now that God is everywhere; that he inhabits immensity; that he is in every atom, and in every star.
If this is true, why did he "come down to see the city and the tower?"
Will some theologian explain this?
After all, is it not much easier and altogether more reasonable to say that Moses was mistaken, that he knew little of the science of language, and that he guessed a great deal more than he investigated?
XX. FAITH IN FILTH
No light whatever is shed upon what passed in the world after the confounding of language at Babel, until the birth of Abraham.
But, before speaking of the history of the Jewish people, it may be proper for me to say that many things are recounted in Genesis, and other books attributed to Moses, of which I do not wish to speak.
There are many pages of these books unfit to read, many stories not calculated, in my judgment, to improve the morals of mankind.
I do not wish even to call the attention of my readers to these things, except in a general way.
It is to be hoped that the time will come when such chapters and passages as cannot be read without leaving the blush of shame upon the cheek of modesty, will be left out, and not published as a part of the bible.
If there is a God, it certainly is blasphemous to attribute to him the authorship of pages too obscene, beastly and vulgar to be read in the presence of men and women.
The believers in the bible are loud in their denunciation of what they are pleased to call the immoral literature of the world; and yet few books have been published containing more moral filth than this inspired word of God.
These stories are not redeemed by a single flash of wit or humor.
They never rise above the dull details of stupid vice.
For one, I cannot afford to soil my pages with extracts from them; and all such portions of the Scriptures I leave to be examined, written upon, and explained by the clergy.
Clergymen may know some way by which they can extract honey from these flowers.
Until these passages are expunged from the Old Testament, it is not a fit book to be read by either old or young.
It contains pages that no minister in the United States would read to his congregation for any reward whatever.
There are chapters that no gentleman would read in the presence of a lady.
There are chapters that no father would read to his child.
There are narratives utterly unfit to be told; and the time will come when mankind will wonder that such a book was ever called inspired.
I know that in many books besides the bible there are immodest lines.
Some of the greatest writers have soiled their pages with indecent words.
We account for this by saying that the authors were human; that they catered to the taste and spirit of their times.
We make excuses, but at the same time regret that in their works they left an impure word.
But what shall we say of God?
Is it possible that a being of infinite purity--the author of modesty, would smirch the pages of his book with stories lewd, licentious and obscene?
If God is the author of the bible, it is, of course, the standard by which all other books can, and should be measured.
If the bible is not obscene, what book is?
Why should men be imprisoned simply for imitating God?
The christian world should never say another word against immoral books until it makes the inspired volume clean.
These vile and filthy things were not written for the purpose of conveying and enforcing moral truth, but seem to have been written because the author loved an unclean thing.
There is no moral depth below that occupied by the writer or publisher of obscene books, that stain with lust, the loving heart of youth.
Such men should be imprisoned and their books destroyed.
The literature of the world should be rendered decent, and no book should be published that cannot be read by, and in the hearing of the best and purest people.
But as long as the bible is considered as the work of God, it will be hard to make all men too good and pure to imitate it; and as long as it is imitated there will be vile and filthy books.
The literature of our country will not be sweet and clean until the bible ceases to be regarded as the production of a god.
We are continually told that the bible is the very foundation of modesty and morality; while many of its pages are so immodest and immoral that a minister, for reading them in the pulpit, would be instantly denounced as an unclean wretch.
Every woman would leave the church, and if the men stayed, it would be for the purpose of chastising the minister.
Is there any saving grace in hypocrisy?
Will men become clean in speech by believing that God is unclean?
Would it not be far better to admit that the bible was written by barbarians in a barbarous, coarse and vulgar age?
Would it not be safer to charge Moses with vulgarity, instead of God?
Is it not altogether more probable that some ignorant Hebrew would write the vulgar words?
The christians tell me that God is the author of these vile and stupid things?
I have examined the question to the best of my ability, and as to God my verdict is:--Not guilty.
Faith should not rest in filth.
Every foolish and immodest thing should be expunged from the bible.
Let us keep the good.
Let us preserve every great and splendid thought, every wise and prudent maxim, every just law, every elevated idea, and every word calculated to make man nobler and purer, and let us have the courage to throw the rest away.
The souls of children should not be stained and soiled.
The charming instincts of youth should not be corrupted and defiled.
The girls and boys should not be taught that unclean words were uttered by "inspired" lips.
Teach them that these words were born of savagery and lust.
Teach them that the unclean is the unholy, and that only the pure is sacred.
