_MOSES' CHARACTER AND DEATH_
It has been often said, and it has even become a principle of
the critical school, that the historical notices in the earlier
documents of the Old Testament represent nothing but the ideas
current at the time when they were written. Whether they depict
an Abraham, a Jacob, or a Moses, all they really tell us is the
kind of character which at such times was held to be heroic. In
this way the value of the historic parts of Deuteronomy have been
called in question, and we have been told that all we can gather
from them about Moses is the kind of character which the pious, in
the age of Manasseh, would feel justified in attributing to their
great religious hero. But it is manifestly unfair to estimate the
statements of men who write in good faith, as if they were only
projecting their own desires and prejudices upon a past which is
absolutely dark. It may be true that such writers might be unwilling
to narrate stories concerning the great men of the past which were
inconsistent with the esteem in which they were held; but it is much
more certain that their narratives will represent the tradition and
the current knowledge of their time regarding the heroes of their
race. Unless this be true, no reliance could be placed upon anything
but absolutely contemporary documents; even these would be open to
suspicion, if the human mind were so lawless as to have no scruple
in filling up all gaps in its knowledge by imaginations. We must
protest, therefore, against the notion that what J and E and D tell
us concerning the life and character of Moses must be discounted in
any effort we make to represent to ourselves the life and thought of
that great leader of Israel. They tell us much more than what was
thought fitting for a leader of the people in the ninth and eighth
and seventh centuries B.C. They tell us what was _believed_ in those
times about Moses; and much of what was believed about him must have
rested upon good authority, upon entirely reliable tradition, or
upon previous written narratives concerning him.
Up till recently it was held, by men as eminent even as Reuss,
that writing was unknown in the days of Moses, and that for long
afterwards oral tradition alone could be a source of knowledge of
the past. But recent discoveries have shown that this is an entire
mistake. Long before Moses writing was a common accomplishment in
Canaan; and it seems almost ridiculous to suppose that the man
who left his mark so indelibly upon this nation should have been
ignorant of an art with which every master of a village or two
was thoroughly conversant. Moreover the fact that the same root
(_k-t-b_) occurs in every Semitic tongue with the meaning "to
write," would seem to indicate that before their separation from
one another the art of writing was known to all the Semitic tribes.
The new facts enormously strengthen that probability, and make the
arguments advanced by those who hold the opposite view look even
absurd. But if writing were known and practised in Moses' day in
Canaan, it would be marvellous if many of the great events of the
early days had not been recorded. It would be still more marvellous
if the comparatively late writings, which alone we have at our
disposal had not embodied and absorbed much older documents.
But for still another reason the critical dictum must be held to be
false. Applied in other fields and in regard to other times, this
same principle would deprive us of almost every character which has
been considered the glory of humanity. Zarathustra and Buddha have
alike been sacrificed to this prejudice, and there are men living
who say that we know so little about our Lord Jesus Christ that it
is doubtful whether He ever existed. A method which produces such
results _must_ be false. The great source of progress and reform has
always been some man possessed by an idea or a principle. Even in
our own days, when the press and the facilities for communication
have given general tendencies a power to realise themselves which
they never had in the world's history before, great men are the
moving factors in all great changes. In earlier ages this was still
more the case. It is an utterly unjustifiable scepticism which
makes men contradict the grateful recollection of mankind, in
regard to those who have raised and comforted humanity. Through all
obscurities and confusions we can reach that Indian Prince for whom
the sight of human misery embittered his own brilliant and enjoyable
life. We refuse to give up Zarathustra, though his story is more
obscure and entangled than that of almost any other great leader
of mankind. Especially in a history like that of Israel, which
purports to have been guided in a special manner by revelations of
the will of God, the individual man filled with God's spirit is
quite indispensable. Even if mythical elements in the story could
be proved, that would not shake our faith in the existence of
Moses; for as Steinthal, who holds the very "advanced" opinion that
solar myths have strayed into the history of Moses, wisely says, it
is quite as possible to distinguish between the mythical and the
historical Moses as it is to distinguish between the historical
Charlemagne and the mythical. Because of the general reliability
of tradition regarding great men therefore, and because also of
the proofs we have that writing was common before Moses' day, we
need not burden ourselves with the assumption or the fear that the
Deuteronomic character of Moses may be unreliable.
But in endeavouring to set forth this conception of the character
of Moses, we cannot confine ourselves to what appears in this book.
It is generally acknowledged that the author had at least the
Yahwist and the Elohist documents in their entirety before him, and
regarded them with respect, not to say reverence. Consequently we
must believe that he accepted what they said of Moses as true. The
only document in the Pentateuch that he may not have known in any
shape was the Priest Codex, but that makes no attempt to depict the
inner or outer life of Moses. All the personal life and colour in
the Biblical narrative belongs to the other sources. For a personal
estimate, therefore, we lose little by excluding P. Only one other
cause of suspicion in regard to the historical parts of Deuteronomy
_could_ arise. If it, comparatively modern as it is, contained much
that was new, if it revealed aspects of character for which no
authority was quoted, and of which there was no trace in the earlier
narratives, there might be reasonable doubt whether these new
details were the product of imagination. But there is very little
more in Deuteronomy than there is in the historical parts of the
other books, though the older narratives are repeated with a vivid
and insistive pathos which almost seems to make them new.
Combining then what the Deuteronomist himself says with what the
Yahwist and Elohist documents contain, we find that the claim
usually made for Moses, that he was the founder of an entirely new
religion, is not sustained. Again and again it is asserted that
Yahweh had been the God of their fathers, of Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob--so that Moses was simply the renewer of a higher faith
which for a time had been corrupted. Some have even asserted that
there had been all down the ages to Moses the memory of a primeval
revelation. But if there ever was such a thing, we learn from
Josh. xxiv. 2, a verse acknowledged to be from the Elohist, that
that "fair beginning of a time" had been entirely eclipsed, for
Terah, the father of Abraham, had served other gods beyond the
flood. Abraham, therefore, rather than Moses, is regarded as the
founder of the religion of Yahweh. Whether the word Yahweh (Exod.
vi. 3) was known or not makes little difference, for all our four
authorities teach that Moses' work was the revival of faith in
that which Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had believed. But the bulk of
the people would appear to have been ignorant regarding the God
of their fathers; and probably the conception which Deuteronomy
shares with J and E is that in Moses' day Yahweh was the special
God of a small circle, perhaps of the tribe of Levi, among whom
a more spiritual conception of God than was common among their
countrymen had either been retained, or had arisen anew. Probably
then we ought to conceive the circumstances of Moses' early life
somewhat in this way. A number of Semitic tribes, more or less
nearly related to each other and to Edom and Moab, had settled in
Egypt as semi-agricultural nomads. At first they were tolerated;
but they were now being worn down and oppressed by forced labour of
the most brutal sort. Either a tribe or a clan among them had the
germs of a purer conception of God, and in this tribe or clan Moses,
the deliverer of his people, was born. Providentially he escaped
the death which awaited all Israelite boys in those days, and grew
up in the camp of the enemies of his people. By this means he
received all the culture that the best of the oppressors had, while
the tie to Israel was neither obscured nor weakened in his mind.
At the court of Pharaoh he could not fail to acquire some notions
of state-craft, and he must have seen that the first step towards
anything great for his people must be their union and consolidation.
But his earliest effort on their behalf showed that he had not
really considered and weighed the magnitude of his task. Killing
an Egyptian oppressor might conceivably have served as a signal
for revolt. But in point of fact it frustrated any plans Moses
might have had for the good of his people, and drove him into the
wilderness. Here the germs of various thoughts which education and
experience of life had deposited in his mind had time to develop and
grow. According to the narrative, it was only at the end of his long
sojourn in Midian that he had direct revelation from God. But amid
the wide and awful solitudes of that wilderness land, as General
Gordon said of himself in the kindred solitudes of the Soudan,
he learned himself and God. Whatever deposits of higher faith he
had received from his family, no doubt the long, silent broodings
inseparable from a shepherd's life had increased and vivified it.
Every possible aspect of it must have been reckoned with, all its
consequences explored; and his great and solitary soul, we may be
sure, had many a time let down soundings into the deeps which were,
as yet, dark to him. And then--for it is to souls that have yearned
after Him in the travail of intellectual and spiritual longing
that God gives His great and splendid revelations--Yahweh revealed
Himself in the flame of the bush, and gave him the final assurance
and the first impulse for his life's work. It is a touch of reality
in the narrative which can hardly be mistaken, that it represents
Moses as shrinking from the responsibility which his call must lay
upon him. Behind the few and simple objections in the narrative, we
must picture to ourselves a whole world of thoughts and feelings
into which the call of God had brought tumult and confusion. One
would need to be a dry-as-dust pedant not to see here, as in the
case of Isaiah's call, the triumphant issue of a long conflict and
the decisive moment of a victory over self, which had had already
many stages of defeat and only partial success. It is perennially
true to human nature and to the Divine dealings with human nature,
that help from on high comes to establish and touch to finer issues
that which the true man has striven for with all his powers.
Enlightened and assured by this great revelation of God, Moses left
the quiet of the desert to undertake an extraordinarily difficult
task. He had to weld jealous tribes into a nation; he had to
rouse men whose courage had been broken by slavery and cruelty to
undertake a dangerous revolt; and he had to prepare for the march of
a whole population, burdened with invalids and infants, the feeble
and the old, through a country which even to-day tries all but the
strongest. These things had to be done; and the mere fact that they
were accomplished would be inexplicable, without the domination of
a great personality inspired by great ideas of a religious kind.
For, in antiquity, the only bond able to hold incongruous elements
together in one nationality was religion. With the people whom
Moses had to lead the necessity would be the same, or even greater.
But the political work which must have preceded any common action
likewise demanded a great personality. Though no doubt a common
misery might silence jealousies and make men eager to listen to any
promises of deliverance, yet many troublesome negotiations must have
been carried through successfully before these sentences could have
been written with truth: "And Moses and Aaron went and gathered
together all the elders of the children of Israel, and the people
believed, and bowed their heads and worshipped."
Many conjectures have been hazarded as to what the centre of Moses'
message at this time really was. Some, like Stade, bring it down
to this, that Yahweh was the God of Israel. Others add to this
somewhat meagre statement another equally meagre, that Israel was
the people of Yahweh. But unless the character of Yahweh had been
previously expounded to the people, there seems little in these
two declarations to excite any enthusiasm or to kindle faith. The
mere fact of inducing the tribes to put all other gods aside is
insufficient to account for any of the results that followed, if to
Moses Yahweh had remained simply a tribal God, of the same type as
the gods of the Canaanites. On the other hand, if he had risen to
the conception of God as a spirit, of Yahweh as the only living God,
as the inspirer and defender of moral life, or even if he had made
any large approach to these conceptions, it is easy to understand
how the hearts of the mass of the people were stirred and filled,
even though things so high were not, by the generality, thoroughly
understood or long retained. But the hearts of all the chosen, the
spiritually elect, would be moved by them as the leaves are moved
by the wind. These, with Moses at their head, formed a nucleus
which bore the people on through all their trials and dangers, and
gradually leavened the mass to some extent with the same spirit.
Even after this had been accomplished, the main work remained to
be done. We cannot agree indeed with many writers who seem to
think that the whole life of the Israelite people was started anew
by Moses. That would involve that every regulation for the most
trivial detail of ordinary life was directly revealed, and that
Moses made a _tabula rasa_ of their minds, rubbing out all previous
laws and customs, and writing a God-given constitution in their
place. Obviously, that could hardly be; but still a task very
different, yet almost as difficult, remained for Moses after his
first success. His final aim was to make a virtually new nation
out of the Hebrew tribes; and their whole constitution and habits
had, consequently, to be revised from the new religious standpoint.
He and the nation alike had inherited a past, and it was no part of
his mission to delete that. Reforms, to be stable, must have a root
in the habits and thoughts of the people whom they concern. Moses
would, consequently, uproot nothing that could be spared; he would
plant nothing anew which was already flourishing, and was compatible
with the new and dominant ideas he had introduced. A great mass
of the laws and customs of the Hebrews must have been good, and
suitable to the stage of moral advancement they had reached before
Moses came to them. Any measure of civilised life involves so much
as that. Another great mass, while lying outside of the religious
sphere, must have been at least compatible with Yahwism. All laws
and customs coming under these two categories, Moses would naturally
adopt as part of the legislation of the new nation, and would stamp
them with his approval as being in accord with the religion of
Yahweh. They would thus acquire the same authority as if they were
entirely new, given for the first time by the Divinely inspired
lawgiver.
But besides these two classes of laws and customs there must have
been a number which were so bound up with the lower religion that
they could not be adopted. They would either be obstructive of the
new ideas, or they would be positively hostile to them; for on any
supposition heathenism of various sorts was largely mingled with the
religion of the Israelite people before their deliverance, and even
after it. To sift these out, and to replace them by others more in
accord with the will of Yahweh as now revealed, must have been the
chief work of the lawgiver. In that more or less protracted period
before Israel came to Sinai, during which Moses burdened himself
with judging the people personally, he must have been doing this
work. His reflections in the wilderness had doubtless prepared
him for it. In a mind like his, the fruitful principles received
by the inspiration of the Almighty could not be merely passively
held. Like St. Paul in his Arabian sojourn, we must believe that
Moses in Midian would work out the results of these principles in
many directions; and when he led Israel forth, he must have been
clearly conscious of changes that were indispensable. But it needed
close every-day contact with the life of the people to bring out
all the incompatibilities which he would have to remove. Every day
unexpected complications would arise; and the people at any rate, if
Moses himself be supposed to be raised by his inspiration above the
needs of experience, would be able to receive the instruction they
needed only in concrete examples, here a little and there a little.
When they came to "seek Yahweh" in any matter which perplexed them,
Moses gave them Yahweh's mind on the subject; and each decision
tended to purify and render innocuous to their higher life some
department of public or private affairs. Every day at that early
time must have been a day of instruction how to apply the principles
of the higher faith just revived. The better minds among the chiefs
were thereby trained to an appreciation of the new point of view;
and when Jethro suggested that the burden of this work should be
divided, quite a sufficient number were found prepared to carry it
on. After this it must have gone on with tenfold speed, and we may
believe that when Sinai was reached the preliminaries on the human
side to the great revelation had been thoroughly elaborated. The
Divine presence had been with Moses day by day, judging, deciding,
inspiring in all their individual concerns as well as in their
common affairs. But that would only bring out more clearly the
extent of the reformation that remained to be wrought; doubtless
too it had revealed the dulness of heart in regard to the Divine
which has always characterised the mass of men. The need for a more
complete revelation, a more extended and detailed legislation on the
new basis, must have been greatly felt. In the great scene at Sinai,
a scene so strange and awe-inspiring that to the latest days of
Israel the memory of it thrilled every Israelite heart and exalted
every Israelite imagination, this need was adequately met.
In connection with it Moses rose to new heights of intimacy with the
Divine. What he had already done was ratified, and in the Decalogue
the great lines of moral and social life were marked out for the
people. But the most remarkable thing to us, in the narrative of
the circle of events which made the mountain of the law for ever
memorable, is the sublimity attributed to the character of Moses.
From the day when he smote the Egyptian, at every glimpse we have
of him we find him always advancing in power of character. The
shepherd of Midian is nobler, less self-assertive, more overawed by
communion with God, than the son of Pharaoh's daughter, noble as he
was. Again, the religious reformer, the popular leader, who needs
the very insistence of God to make him lead, who speaks for God
with such courageous majesty, who teaches, inspires, and manages a
turbulent nation with such conspicuous patience, self-repression,
and success, is greatly more impressive than the Moses of Midianite
days. But it is here, at Sinai, that his rank among the leaders of
men is fixed for ever. To the people of that time God was above
all things terrible; and when they came to the mount and found
that "there were thunders and lightnings and a thick cloud upon
the mount, and the voice of the trumpet exceeding loud," they
could only tremble. Their very fear made it impossible for them to
understand what God desired to reveal concerning Himself. But in
Moses love had cast out fear. Even to him, doubtless, the darkness
was terrible, because it expressed only too well the mystery which
enwrapped the end of the Divine purposes of which he alone had seen
the beginnings; even his mind must have been clouded thick with
doubts as to whither Yahweh was leading him and his people; yet he
went boldly forth to seek God, venturing all upon that errand.
In previous perplexities the narrative represents Moses as calling
instantly upon Yahweh; but now, when experience had taught him the
formidable nature of his task, when difficulties had increased
upon him, when his perplexities of all kinds must have been simply
overwhelming, he heard the voice of Yahweh calling him to Himself.
Straightway he went into solitary communion with Him; and when he
passed with satisfied heart from that communion, he brought with him
those immortal words of the Decalogue which, amid all changes since,
have been acknowledged to be the true foundation for moral and
spiritual life. He brought too a commission authorising him to give
laws and judgments to his people in accord with what he had heard
and seen on the mount. However we are to understand the details of
the narrative therefore, its meaning is that at this time, and under
these circumstances, Moses attained his maximum of inspiration as a
seer or prophet, and from that time onward stood in a more intimate
relation to God than any of the prophets and saints of Israel who
came after him. He had found God; and from where he stood with God
he saw the paths of religious and political progress plainly marked
out.
Henceforth he was competent to guide the nation he had made as he
had not yet been, and with his power to help them his eagerness to
do so grew. Twice during this great crisis of his life the people
broke away into evil, and national death was threatened. But with
passionate supplications for their pardon he threw himself down
between God and them. At precisely the moment when his communion
with God was most complete, he rose to the loving recklessness of
desiring that if they were to be destroyed he might perish with
them. Strangely enough, though the author of Deuteronomy had this
before him, he does not mention it. It cannot have struck even him
as the crowning point of Moses' career, as it does us. Even in
his day the fitness, nay, the necessity, of this self-sacrificing
spirit as the fruit of deeper knowledge of God, was not yet felt;
much less could it have been felt in the days of the earlier
historians. There must, therefore, be reliable information here as
to what Moses actually did. Such love as this was not part of the
Israelite ideal at the time of our narrative, and from nothing but
knowledge of the fact could it have been attributed to Moses. We
may rank this enthusiasm of love, therefore, as a reliable trait
in his character. But if it be so, how far must he in his highest
moments have transcended his contemporaries, and even the best
of his successors, in knowledge of the inmost nature of God! His
thought was so far above them that it remained fruitless for many
centuries. Jeremiah's life and death first prepared the way for its
appreciation, but only in the character of the Servant of Yahweh in
Second Isaiah is it surpassed. Now if in this deepest part of true
religion Moses possessed such exceptional spiritual insight, it is
vain to attempt to show that his conception of God was so low, and
his aim for man so limited, as modern theorists suppose. The truth
must lie rather with those who, like Dr. A. B. Davidson,[136] see in
him "a profoundly reverential ancient mind with thoughts of God so
broad that mankind has added little to them. Nothing in the way of
sublimity of view would be incongruous with such a character, while
nothing could be more grotesque than to shut it up within the limits
of the gross conceptions of the mass of the people. He was their
guiding star, not their fellow, in all that concerned God, and his
religious conceptions were by a whole heaven removed from theirs.
The entire tragedy of his life just consisted in this, that he had
to strive with a turbulent and gainsaying people, had to bear with
them and train them, had to be content with scarcely perceptible
advances, where his strenuous guidance and his patient love should
have kindled them to _run_ in the way of God's commandments. But
though their progress was lamentably slow, he gave them an impulse
they were never to lose. Under the inspiration of the Almighty he so
fixed their fundamental ideas about God that they never henceforth
could get free of his spiritual company. In all their progress
afterwards they felt the impress of his mind, moulding and shaping
them even when they knew it not, and through them he started in the
world that redemptive work of God which manifested its highest power
in Jesus Christ."
[136] "Moses' God," _British Weekly_, February 2, 1893.
From this point onward the idea of Moses that Deuteronomy gives
us is that of a great popular leader, meeting with extraordinary
calmness all the crises of government, and guiding his people with
unwavering steadfastness. Without power, except that which his
relation to God and the choice of the people gave him, without
any official title, he simply dominated the Israelites as long as
he lived. And the secret of his success is plainly told us in the
narrative. He would not move a single step without Divine guidance
(Exod. xxxiii. 12): "And Moses said unto the Lord, See, Thou sayest
unto me, Bring up this people: but Thou hast not let me know whom
Thou wilt send with me." (Ver. 14) "And He said, Must I go in person
with thee and bring thee to thy place of rest? And Moses said,
If Thou dost not go with us in person, then rather lead us not
away hence." That can only mean that he laid aside self-will, that
he put away personal sensitiveness, that he had learned to feel
himself unsafe when vanity or self-regard asserted themselves in his
decisions, that he sought continually that detachment of view which
absolute devotion to the Highest always gives. It means also that he
knew how dark and dull his own vision was, that clouds and darkness
would always be about him, and that it would be impossible for him
to choose his path, unless he knew what the Divine plan for his
people was. And all that is narrated of him afterward shows that his
prayer was granted. His patience under trial has been handed down
to us as a marvel. Though his brother and sister rebelled against
him, he won them again entirely to himself. Though a faction among
the people rose against his authority under Dathan and Abiram, his
power was not even shaken. Amid all the perversity and childish
fickleness of Israel he kept them true to their choice of the
desert, "that great and terrible wilderness," as against Egypt with
the flesh-pots. He kept alive their faith in the promise of Yahweh
to give them a land flowing with milk and honey, and what was more
and greater than that, their faith in Him as their Redeemer. By his
intercourse with Yahweh he was upheld from falling away from his own
ideals, as so many leaders of nations have done, or from despairing
of them.
The complaints and perversities of the people did however force him
into sin; and perhaps we may take it that the outbreak of petulance
when he smote the rock was only one instance of some general decay
of character on that side, or perhaps one should rather say, of some
general falling away from the self-restraint which had distinguished
him. It seems strange that this one failure should have been
punished in him, by exclusion from the land he had so steadfastly
believed in, the land which most of those who actually entered it
would never have seen but for him. And it is pathetic to find him
among that great company of martyrs for the public good, those who
in order to serve their people have neglected their own characters.
Under the stress of public work and the pressure of the stupidity
and greed of those whom they have sought to guide, many leaders of
men have been tempted, and have yielded to the temptation, to forget
the demands of their better nature. But whatever their services
to the world, such unfaithfulness does not pass unpunished. They
have to bear the penalty, whosoever they be; and Moses was no more
an exception than Cromwell or Savonarola was, to mention only
some of the nobler examples. He had been courageous when others
had faltered. He had been pre-eminently just; for in founding the
judicial system of Israel he had guarded alike against the tyranny
of the great and against unjust favour to the small. He had laid
a firm hand upon the education of youth, determined that the best
inheritance of their people, the knowledge of the laws of Yahweh and
of His providences, should not be lost to them. He had cleared their
religion in principle of all that was unworthy of Yahweh, and he
had by resolute valour, and by uncompromising sternness to enemies,
brought his great task to a successful issue. But the reward of it
all, the entrance into the land he had virtually won for his people,
was denied to him. It is one of the laws of the Divine government of
the world, that with those to whom God specially draws near He is
more rigorous than with others. Amos clearly saw and proclaimed this
principle (Amos iii. 2). "Hear this word that Yahweh hath spoken
against you, children of Israel," he says; "You only have I known of
all the families of the earth: _therefore_ I will visit upon you
all your iniquities." The pathetic picture of the aged lawgiver,
judge, and prophet, beseeching God in vain that he might share in
the joy which was freely bestowed upon so many less known and less
worthy than he, pushes home that strenuous teaching. For his sin
he died with his last earnest wish unfulfilled, and it was sadly
longing eyes that death's finger touched. We remember also that, so
far as we can judge, he had no certain hope of a future life other
than the shadowy existence of Hades. "Though he slay me yet will I
trust him" had a much more tragic meaning for Old Testament saints
than it can ever have for us, for whom Christ has brought life and
immortality to light. Yet, with a so much heavier burden, and with
so much less of gracious support, they played their high part.
That solitary figure on the mountain-top, about to die with the
fulfilment of his passionate last wish denied him by his God, must
shame us into silence when we fret because our hopes have perished.
All those nations which have had that figure on their horizon have
been permanently enriched in nature by it. In a thousand ways it has
shot forth instructions; but, above all, it has made men worthy in
their own eyes; for it has been a continuous reminder that God can
and ought to be served unfalteringly, even when the reward we wish
is denied us, and when every other consolation is dim.
But the question may now arise, Is not this character of Moses
which the author of Deuteronomy partly had before him and partly
helped to elaborate, too exalted to be reliable? Can we suppose
that a man in Moses' day and circumstances could actually have
entertained such thoughts, and have possessed such a character as
we have been depicting? In essentials it would appear to be quite
possible. Putting aside all distracting questions about details,
and remembering that it is a mere superstition to suppose that the
wants and appliances of civilisation are necessary to loftiness
of character and depth of thought, where is there anything in the
situation of Moses which should make this view of him incredible?
No doubt there was a rudeness in his surroundings which must
necessarily have affected his nature; and the forms of his thinking
in that early, though by no means primitive, time must have differed
greatly from ours. Moreover, as an instrument for scientific inquiry
and for the verification of facts, the human mind must have been
greatly less effective then than it is to-day. But none of these
things have much influence upon a man's capacity to receive a new
and inspiring revelation as to God. Otherwise no child could be a
Christian. As regards the rudeness of his surroundings, we must not
consciously or unconsciously degrade him to the level of a modern
Bedouin. Among the host he led, some doubtless were at that level;
but the bulk of Israel must have been above it; and Moses himself,
from his circumstances and his natural endowment, must have stood
side by side with the most cultured men of his time. Whatever
ignorance or error in science he may have been capable of, and
however rude, according to our ideas, his manner of life, there was
nothing in these to shut him out from spiritual truth. That which
Prof. Henry Morley has finally said of Dante[137] must have been
true, _mutatis mutandis_, of a man like Moses. "Dante's knowledge is
the knowledge of his time," but "if spiritual truth only came from
right and perfect knowledge, this would have been a world of dead
souls from the first to now, for future centuries in looking back at
us will wonder at the little faulty knowledge that we think so much.
But let the _known_ be what it may, the true soul rises from it to a
sense of the Divine mysteries of wisdom and love. Dante's knowledge
may be full of ignorance, and so is ours. But he fills it as he can
with the spirit of God." In the East this is even more conspicuously
true, even to this day. What an Israelite under similar conditions
might be is seen in the prophet Amos. His external condition was
of the poorest--a gatherer of sycamore fruit must have been poor
even for the East--yet he knew accurately the history, not only of
his own people, but of the surrounding nations, and brooded on the
purpose of God in regard to his own people and the world, till he
became a fit recipient of prophetic inspirations. But indeed the
whole history of Christianity is a demonstration of this truth. From
the first days, when "not many mighty, not many noble were being
called," when it was specially the message to listening slaves, the
religion of Christ has had its greatest triumphs among the "poor
of the world, rich in faith," but in nothing else. These have not
only believed it, but they have lived it, and amid the meanest and
rudest surroundings, with the most limited outlook, have built up
characters often of even resplendent virtue. Whatever primitiveness
we may fairly ascribe, therefore, to the life and surroundings of
Moses, that is no reason why we should think it incredible that
he had received lofty spiritual truth from God. If he did such
things for Israel as we have seen, if, as almost all admit, he
actually made a nation, and planted the seeds of a religion of which
Christianity is the natural complement and crown, then the view
that he had a greatly higher idea of God than those about him is
not only credible but necessary. If his teaching concerning Yahweh
had amounted only to this, that He was the only God Israel was to
worship, and that they were to be solely His people, then on such a
basis nothing more than the ordinary heathen civilisations of the
Semitic people could have been built. But if he had the thought of
God which is embodied in the Decalogue, that could bring with it
everything in the character of Moses that seems too high for those
early days. The knowledge of God as a spiritual and moral being
could not fail to moralise and spiritualise the man. The lofty
conception of human duty, the submission to the will of God, the
passionate love for his nation which made personal loss nothing to
Moses, may well have been evoked by the great truth which formed his
prophetic revelation.
[137] _Convito of Dante_, Morley's _Universal Library_,
Introduction, pp. 6 ff.
But the narrative itself, considered merely as a history, is of
such a nature as to give confidence that it rests upon some record
of an actual life. Ideal sketches of great men (setting aside
the products of modern fictive art) are much more uniform and
superficially coherent than this character of Moses. The purpose
of the writer either to exalt or to decry carries all before it,
and we get from such a source pictures of character so consistent
that they cannot possibly be true. Here, however, we have nothing
of that kind. Rashnesses and weaknesses are narrated, and even
Moses' good qualities are manifested in unexpected ways in response
to unexpected evils in the people. The mere fact, also, that his
grave was unknown is indicative of truth. Though it would be absurd
to say that wherever we have the graves of great men pointed out,
there we have a mythical story, it is nevertheless true that in the
case of every name or character which has come largely under the
influence of the myth-making spirit, the grave has been made much
of. The Arabian imagination here seems to be typical of the Semitic
imagination; and in all Moslem lands the graves of the prophets and
saints of the Old Testament are pointed out with great reverence,
even, or perhaps we should say especially, if they be eighty feet
long. Though a well-authenticated tomb of Moses, therefore, would
have been a proof of his real existence and life among men, the
absence of any is a stronger proof of the sobriety and truth of
the narrative. That with the goal in sight, and with his great
work about to come to fruition, he should have turned away into
the solitude of the mountains to die, is so very unlikely to occur
to the mind of the writer of an ideal life of an ideal leader,
that only some tradition of this as a fact can account for it. The
unexpectedness of such an end to a hero's career is the strongest
evidence of its truth.
The result of all the indications is that the story of Moses, as
the author of Deuteronomy knew it, rests upon authentic information
handed down somehow, probably in written documents, from the
earliest time. Apart from the question of inspiration, therefore,
we may rest upon it as reliable in all essentials. Only in him, and
the revelation he received, have we an adequate cause for the great
upheaval of religious feeling which shaped and characterised all the
after-history of Israel.
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