When Moses descended from Sinai, he there found his true servant
Joshua, who had awaited him on the slope of the mountain throughout all
the forty days during which Moses stayed in heaven, [277] and together
they repaired to the encampment. On approaching it, they heard cries of
the people, and Joshua remarked to Moses: "There is a noise of war in
the camp," but Moses replied: "Is it possible that thou, Joshua, who
art one day destined to be the leader of sixty myriads of people, canst
not distinguish among the different kinds of dins? This is no cry of
Israel conquering, nor of their defeated foe, but their adoration of an
idol." [278] When Moses had now come close enough to the camp to see
what was going on there, he thought to himself: "How now shall I give
to them the tables and enjoin upon them the prohibition of idolatry,
for the very trespassing of which, Heaven will inflict capital
punishment upon them?" Hence, instead of delivering to them the tables,
he tried to turn back, but the seventy elders pursued him and tried to
wrest the tables from Moses. But his strength excelled that of the
seventy others, and he kept the tables in his hands, although these
were seventy Seah in weight. All at once, however, he saw the writing
vanish from the tables, and at the same time became aware of their
enormous weight; for while the celestial writing was upon them, they
carried their own weight and did not burden Moses, but with the
disappearance of the writing all this changes. Now all the more did
Moses feel loath to give the tables without their contents to Israel,
and besides he thought: "If God prohibited one idolatrous Israelite
from partaking of the Passover feast, how much more would He be angry
if I were now to give all the Torah to an idolatrous people?" Hence,
without consulting God, he broke the tables. God, however, thanked
Moses for breaking the tables. [279]
Hardly had Moses broken the tables, when the ocean wanted to leave its
bed to flood the world. Moses now "took the Calf which they had made,
and burnt it in the fire, and ground it to powder, and strewed it upon
the water," saying to the waters: "What would ye upon the dry land?"
And the waters said: "The world stands only through the observance of
the Torah, but Israel has not been faithful to it." Moses hereupon said
to the water" "All that have committed idolatry shall be yours. Are you
now satisfied with these thousands?" But the waters were not to be
appeased by the sinners that Moses cast into them, and the ocean would
not retreat to its bed until Moses made the children of Israel drink of
it. [280]
The drinking of these waters was one of the forms of capital punishment
that he inflicted upon the sinners. When, in answer to Moses' call:
"Who is on the Lord's side? Let him come unto me," all the sons of Levi
gathered themselves together unto him - they who had not taken part in
the adoration of the Golden Calf, - Moses appointed these Levites as
judges, whose immediate duty it was to inflict the lawful punishment of
decapitation upon all those who had been seen by witnesses to be
seduced to idolatry after they had been warned not to do so. Moses gave
the command as though he had been commissioned to do so by God. This
was not actually so, but he did it in order to enable the judges
appointed by him to punish all the guilty in the course of one day,
which otherwise, owing to the procedure of Jewish jurisprudence, could
not well have been possible. Those who, according to the testimony of
witnesses, had been seduced to idolatry, but who could not be proven to
have been warned beforehand, were not punished by temporal justice,
they died of the water that Moses forced them to drink; for this water
had upon them the same effect as the curse-bringing water upon the
adulterous woman. But those sinners, too, against whom no witnesses
appeared, did not escape their fate, for upon them God sent the plague
to carry them off. [281]