THE most telling criticism against the bible as an ethical work is that, while every one of its moral commandments are deliberately countermanded and cancelled and allowed to be, yes, ordered to be, broken, not one of the ceremonial or theological commandments was for a single time even suspended, or its neglect winked at, by the all-seeing Jehovah. The man who gathered kindling wood on the seventh day, or called on other gods, or ate his totem, or forgot his taboo, or omitted the Abrahamic rite, or ate fat, or forgot his blood offerings, or married a Gentile, or ate leavened bread on certain days, or approached too near to a priest or the candlesticks, was never allowed to escape punishment; while the thief, the murderer, the debauchee, the falsifier, the traitor, the assassin, was again and again applauded and rewarded with special favors. The commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," was barely spelled out in full when the Lord orders a saturnalia of murder.

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... even every man upon his son. *

Who can have patience with such a book? What has become of the intellect of Europe that it can go to such a book for its morality? In one of Napoleon's unpublished letters, addressed to Junot, after giving secret instructions about the movement against Lisbon, he adds, "Shoot, say, sixty persons." ** If that makes him a monster, what shall we say of a being who asks fathers to murder their sons, and sons their fathers, in cold blood, and that, too, immediately after he had said, "Thou shalt not kill." But why was this bacchanalia of bloodshed ordered? The answer will cause a shudder: "That he (Jehovah) may bestow upon you a blessing this day." *** To kill was an act of worship. To please God was better than to spare one's children from the edge of the sword. God demanded murder, and not until he was obeyed would he "bless" them! Do we need any further proof that there is only one commandment in the bible: "Thou shalt obey the Lord thy God," that is to say, the priest. If he forbids murder, obey him; if he commands murder, obey him. But the most important point about all this is that both the giving and the breaking of a "moral" commandment is for the purpose of furthering the theological and ritualistic interests. "And the Lord plagued the people," that is to say, he ordered this internecine murder—why? Not because they had violated any of the "moral" commandments, but, mark the excuse given, "because they made the calf." **** The most abominable thing in the sight of this priest-made God, is not immorality, but infidelity.

It would be easy to enumerate the so-called "moral" commandments, one after the other, and show how every one of them was ordered broken when the interests of the creed required it. "Thou shalt not steal" was revoked again and again, and a thousand encouragements offered to seize the land and goods of others. The commandment "Thou shalt not commit adultery" was made a mockery of by the express instruction to make a raid on neighboring countries and carry off the young girls by force. * We have reason to be ashamed of Europe, of the Aryan races, for wanting to place such a book into the hands of young and old as the Word of God.

Indeed, without any violence, either to the letter or to the spirit of the bible, we may offer the following as the real Ten Commandments given by God to Moses:

1. Thou shalt steal everything thou canst—thou shalt plunder, and practice usury.

2. Thou shalt murder the alien and the heathen as well as thy own brother.

3. Thou shalt bear false witness.

4. Thou shalt commit adultery.

5. Thou shalt covet.

6. Thou shalt hate thy neighbor of another faith.

7. Thou shalt persecute.

8. Thou shalt be cruel, and buy and sell human beings.

9. Thou shalt be superstitious.

10. Thou shalt despise woman, but permit a man to marry as many wives, and keep as many concubines as his fancy dictates. And let a man divorce his wife whenever it shall please him to do so.

Space fails us to quote all the texts in the bible which support the above commandments. It would be like reproducing the greater portions of the bible to offer even a partial list of the direct and indirect ways in which the bible lends its authority, as well as encouragement, to the commission of what we would consider criminal acts. Moreover, it would be a very unpleasant task to repeat, or to call attention to, those parts of the bible which this phase of my subject leads me into. And yet I do not see how I can altogether shirk the disagreeable task. The reader has no idea how big a part of the bible is unreadable. If anybody undertook to bring out a cleanly version of the bible for family use, he would soon find that the Old Testament, at least, would have to be left out, almost completely. Dr. Thomas Inman says: "A long experience in life and a retentive memory would lead me to say that the bible, as we have it, is the first book which leads many youths astray." *

That Jehovah ordered his people to steal, is clearly indicated by the following text:

When ye go, ye shall not go empty: But every woman shall borrow of her neighbour, and of her that sojourneth in her house, jewels of silver and jewels of gold, and raiment: and ye shall put them upon your sons and upon your daughters; and ye shall spoil the Egyptians!

What they were ordered to do to the Egyptians, they were ordered to do to all the nations they could lay their hands upon. The lands and goods of others were to be seized by force. Stealing was forbidden if the property belonged to a Jew; it was sanctioned if the property belonged to the "heathen."

Murder is plainly commanded in the following text:

Slay every man his brother, and every man his companion and every man his neighbour. **

There is hardly a page in the Old Testament which is not red with bloodshed.

Lying was approved by the deity. Moses was commanded to tell a falsehood to Pharaoh, as were many of the other prophets advised to practice deception. Despite all the plagues which God is said to have sent upon the Egyptians to prove his might and power to deliver his people out of bondage, it was found necessary, as a last resort, to tell a lie to the king of Egypt to induce him to permit their departure. Upon being asked by Pharaoh why and where they wanted to go, Moses answered:

The God of the Hebrews hath met with us: let us go, we pray thee, three days' journey into the desert, and sacrifice unto the Lord our God; lest he fall upon us with pestilence, or with the sword. *

While planning to go on an expedition to seize the lands which their God had promised them, they tell Pharaoh that they only desire to hold some kind of a prayer-meeting in the desert, after which they would come back, supposedly to return the jewels of gold and silver they had borrowed from the neighbors. The falsehood was effective when all the miracles had failed. The Egyptians actually, if the story is true, allowed the Jews to rob them before they left.

God also commanded Samuel to lie:

And the Lord said unto Samuel... I will send thee to Jesse the Bethlemite: for I have provided me a king among his sons. And Samuel said, How can I go? if Saul hear it, he will kill me. And the Lord said, Take a heifer with thee, and say, I am come to sacrifice to the Lord. **

In the same way, the bible, it is to be regretted, sanctions sexual immorality.

And the Lord said to Hosea, Go take unto thee a wife of whoredom. ***

Again, the Lord commands:

When thou goest forth to war against thine enemies, and the Lord thy God hath delivered them into thine hands, and thou hast taken them captive, and seest among the captives a beautiful woman, and hast a desire unto her... thou shalt go in unto her, and be her husband, and she shall be thy wife. And it shall be, if thou have no delight in her, then thou shalt let her go whither she will. ****

Not a word is said about obtaining the woman's consent. And the following:

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

Such texts show how indifferent the bible is to what we understand by morality.

As to coveting: The whole of the biblical instructions was nothing more than a continuous encouragement to the Jews to covet everything that was their neighbors, from the jewelry of the Egyptian, to the lands, the cattle, the homes and daughters of the nations of the earth:

And Abram fell on his face: and God talked with him, saying... I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession. *

For all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever. **

But it will be impossible to command people to rob and slay their neighbors, and to covet their homes and women, without at the same time, commanding them to hate them.

Ye shall not eat of anything that dieth of itself; thou shalt give it unto the stranger... that he may eat it; or thou mayest sell it unto an alien. ***

Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother.... unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury. ****

Jesus improved upon the Old Testament by calling upon his followers to include in their hatred the members of their own family:

If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. (v)

Religious persecution is openly sanctioned both in the Old and the New Testaments. Every expression of independence, or disagreement with the priesthood, was blasphemy, and punishable by death.

And he that blasphemeth the name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him: as well the stranger, as he that is born in the land, when he blasphemeth the name of the Lord, shall be put to death. *

The Bible gives a very long list of "blasphemies" for which the death penalty is ordered—from failing to circumcise one's children, to gathering sticks on the Sabbath. And as to those professing a different faith, the commandment was as follows:

These are the statutes and judgments, which ye shall observe to do in the land, which the Lord God of thy fathers giveth thee to possess it, all the days that ye live upon the earth.

Ye shall utterly destroy all the places, wherein the nations which ye shall possess served their gods, upon the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree:

And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place. **

Could intolerance go further than that! Other peoples are not to have any gods at all. Even as their lands will be taken away from them, so shall their gods. And since their Jehovah never intended to be the god of anybody else but a Hebrew, it followed that the Jews were the only people privileged to own a god.

Why should "all the high places," where the other nations served their gods, be destroyed? Did not Moses go to Mount Sinai, a high place, to worship Jehovah? Why may not a Gentile have his own high place, as well as a Jew? Surely, the heathen gods on their mountains could not possibly have given a more unmerciful set of commandments than those which Jehovah dictated to Moses. There was no breadth in the God of the Jews. Live and let live, or Think and let think, is the conquest of modern thought for which we are indebted to Rationalism. We say it, reluctantly, but say it we must, Jehovah was a bigot. How long will the Jews continue to profess a religion which requires of them to live in Europe and America, and in the twentieth century, according to the ways of the desert? If Gentiles, in every country, are in great numbers forsaking Christianity, let the exodus of the Jews from the synagogue be equally earnest and pronounced.

Cruelty was to be the accompaniment of religious persecution.

The descriptions of acts of cruelty against the stranger seem to have given positive pleasure to the writers of the bible, for they enter into the most repulsive details in narrating them:

For the Lord shall sell Sisera into the hand of a woman.... Howbeit Sisera fled away on his feet to the tent of Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite: for there was peace between Jabin the king of Hazor and the house of Heber the Kenite.

And Tael went out to meet Sisera, and said unto him, Turn in, my lord, turn in to me; fear not. And when he had turned in unto her into the tent, she covered him with a mantle... Then Jael Heber's wife took a nail of the tent, and took an hammer in her hand, and went softly unto him, and smote the nail into his temples, and fastened it into the ground: for he was fast asleep and weary. So he died.... Behold, Sisera lay dead, and the nail was in his temples. *

For this act of treacherous cruelty Jael was sainted:

Blessed above women shall Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite be, blessed shall she be above women in the tent.... She put her hand to the nail, and her right hand to the workmen's hammer; and with the hammer she smote Sisera, she smote off his head, when she had pierced and stricken through his temples.... So let all thine enemies perish, O Lord. *

Superstitions of the most degrading type are recommended and their daily practice sanctioned. Though they claimed to be on talking terms with the deity, they had, nevertheless, to cast lots, and resort to sorcery and divination, to find out the mind of the Lord.

Take me an heifer of three years old, and a she goat of three years old, and a ram of three years old, and a turtledove, and a young pigeon.

And he took unto him all these, and divided them in the midst, and laid each piece one against another: but the birds divided he not.... And it came to pass, that, when the sun went down, and it was dark, behold a smoking furnace, and a burning lamp that passed between those pieces.

In the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abram. **

Could anything be more meaningless?

... And it came to pass, when Moses held up his hand, that Israel prevailed: and when he let down his hand, Amalek prevailed.

But Moses' hands were heavy; and they took a stone, and put it under him, and he sat thereon; and Aaron and Hur stayed up his hands, the one on the one side, and the other on the other side; and his hands were steady until the going down of the sun.

And Joshua discomfited Amalek and his people with the edge of the sword. **

Only the most hopeless ignorance could credit such a performance.

And Jesus thought that by self-mutilation one could become a candidate for heaven:

For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother's womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.

And the four beasts said, Amen.