(1571-1451 B.C.)
[Footnote 1: Copyright. 1894. by Selmar Hess.]
[Illustration: Moses. [TN]]
Three great religions place the leader of the Exodus upon the highest
plane they allot to man. To Christendom and to Islam, as well as to
Judaism, Moses is the mouthpiece of the Most High; the medium, clothed
with supernatural powers, through which the Divine Will has spoken. Yet
this very exaltation, by raising him above comparison, may prevent the
real grandeur of the man from being seen. It is amid his brethren that
Saul stands taller and fairer.
On the other hand, the latest school of Biblical criticism asserts that
the books and legislation attributed to Moses are really the product of
an age subsequent to that of the prophets. Yet to this Moses, looming
vague and dim, of whom they can tell us almost nothing, they, too,
attribute the beginning of that growth which flowered centuries after in
the humanities of Jewish law, and again, higher still and fairer,
gleamed forth in that star of spiritual light which rested over the
stable of Bethlehem, in Judea.
But whether wont to look on Moses in this way or in that, it may be
sometimes worth our while to take the point of view in which all shades
of belief may find common ground, and accepting the main features of
Hebrew record,[2] consider them in the light of history, and of human
nature as it shows itself to-day. Here is a case in which sacred history
may be treated as we would treat profane history without any shock to
religious feeling. The keenest criticism cannot resolve Moses into a
myth. The fact of the Exodus presupposes such a leader.
[Footnote 2: Moses, the lawgiver of the Hebrew people, was,
according to the Biblical account, an Israelite of the tribe of
Levi, and the son of Amram and Jochebed. He was born in Egypt,
in the year 1571 B.C., according to the common chronology. To
evade the edict of Pharaoh, the King of Egypt, that all the
male children of the Hebrews should be killed, he was hid by
his mother three months, and then exposed in an ark of rushes
on the banks of the Nile. Here the child was found by Pharaoh's
daughter, who adopted him for her son, entrusting him to his
own mother to nurse, by which circumstance he was preserved
from being entirely separated from his own people. He was
probably educated at the Egyptian court, where he became
"learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians." At the age of
forty years Moses conceived the idea of freeing his Hebrew
brethren from their bondage in Egypt, and on one occasion,
seeing an Egyptian maltreating an Israelite, he interfered,
slew the Egyptian, and buried him in the sand. The next day,
upon his attempting to reconcile two Hebrews who had
quarrelled, his services were scornfully rejected, and he was
upbraided with the murder of the Egyptian. Finding that his
secret was known, he fled from Egypt, and took refuge with a
tribe of Midianites in Arabia Petraea, among whom he lived as a
shepherd forty years, having married the daughter of their
priest Jethro or Reuel.
As Moses led his father-in-law's flocks in the desert of Sinai,
God appeared to him at Mount Horeb in a bush which burnt with
fire, but was not consumed, and commanded him to return to
Egypt and lead out his people thence into the land of Canaan.
On his arrival in Egypt, the Israelites accepted him as their
deliverer and after bringing ten miraculous plagues upon the
land of Egypt before he could gain Pharaoh's consent to the
departure of the people, he led them out through the Red Sea,
which was miraculously divided for their passage, into the
peninsula of Sinai. While the people were encamped at the foot
of Sinai, God delivered to them through Moses the law which,
with some additions and alterations, was ever after observed as
their national code. After leading the Israelites through the
wilderness for forty years, Moses appointed Joshua as his
successor in the command over them, and died at the age of one
hundred and twenty years, on Mount Pisgah, on the east side of
the River Jordan, having first been permitted to view the land
of Canaan from its summit. God buried him in the valley of
Bethpeor, in the land of Moab, but his tomb was never made
known.]
To lead into freedom a people long crushed by tyranny; to discipline and
order such a mighty host; to harden them into fighting men, before whom
warlike tribes quailed and walled cities went down; to repress
discontent and jealousy and mutiny; to combat reactions and reversions;
to turn the quick, fierce flame of enthusiasm to the service of a steady
purpose, require some towering character--a character blending in
highest expression the qualities of politician, patriot, philosopher,
and statesman.
Such a character in rough but strong outline the tradition shows us--the
union of the wisdom of the Egyptians with the unselfish devotion of the
meekest of men. From first to last, in every glimpse we get, this
character is consistent with itself, and with the mighty work which is
its monument. It is the character of a great mind, hemmed in by
conditions and limitations, and working with such forces and materials
as were at hand--accomplishing, yet failing. Behind grand deed, a
grander thought. Behind high performance, the still nobler ideal.
Egypt was the mould of the Hebrew nation--the matrix in which a single
family, or, at most, a small tribe, grew to a people as numerous as the
American people at the time of the Declaration of Independence. For four
centuries, according to the Hebrew tradition--a period as long as
America has been known to Europe--this growing people, coming a
patriarchal family from a roving, pastoral life, had been placed under
the dominance of a highly developed and ancient civilization--a
civilization symbolized by monuments that rival in endurance the
everlasting hills; a civilization so ancient that the Pyramids, as we
now know, were hoary with centuries ere Abraham looked on them.
[Illustration: Moses in the bulrushes.]
No matter how clearly the descendants of the kinsmen who came into Egypt
at the invitation of the boy-slave become prime minister, maintained the
distinction of race, and the traditions of a freer life, they must have
been powerfully affected by such a civilization; and just as the Hebrews
of to-day are Polish in Poland, German in Germany, and American in the
United States, so, but far more clearly and strongly, the Hebrews of the
Exodus must have been Egyptian.
It is not remarkable, therefore, that the ancient Hebrew institutions
show in so many points the influence of Egyptian ideas and customs. What
is remarkable is the dissimilarity. To the unreflecting nothing may seem
more natural than that a people, in turning their back upon a land where
they had been long oppressed, should discard its ideas and institutions.
But the student of history, the observer of politics, know that nothing
is more _un_natural. For "institutions make men." And when amid a people
used to institutions of one kind, we see suddenly arise institutions of
an opposite kind, we know that behind them must be that active, that
initiative force--the "men who in the beginnings make institutions."
This is what occurs in the Exodus. The striking differences between
Egyptian and Hebrew policy are not of form but of essence. The tendency
of the one is to subordination and oppression; of the other, to
individual freedom. Strangest of recorded births! from out the strongest
and most splendid despotism of antiquity comes the freest republic. From
between the paws of the rock-hewn Sphinx rises the genius of human
liberty, and the trumpets of the Exodus throb with the defiant
proclamation of the rights of man.
Consider what Egypt was. The very grandeur of her monuments testify to
the enslavement of the people--are the enduring witnesses of a social
organization that rested on the masses an immovable weight. That narrow
Nile Valley, the cradle of the arts and sciences, the scene, perhaps, of
the greatest triumphs of the human mind, is also the scene of its most
abject enslavement. In the long centuries of its splendor its lord,
secure in the possession of irresistible temporal power, and securer
still in the awful sanctions of a mystical religion, was as a god on
earth, to cover whose poor carcass with a tomb befitting his state
hundreds of thousands toiled away their lives. For the classes who came
next to him were all the sensuous delights of a most luxurious
civilization, and high intellectual pleasures which the mysteries of the
temple hid from vulgar profanation. But for the millions who constituted
the base of the social pyramid there was but the lash to stimulate their
toil, and the worship of beasts to satisfy the yearnings of the soul.
From time immemorial to the present day the lot of the Egyptian peasant
has been to work and to starve, that those above him might live
daintily. He has never rebelled. The spirit for that was long ago
crushed out of him by institutions which made him what he is. He knows
but to suffer and to die.
Imagine what opportune circumstances we may, yet to organize and carry
on a movement resulting in the release of a great people from such a
soul-subduing tyranny, backed by an army of half a million highly
trained soldiers, requires a leadership of most commanding and
consummate genius. But this task, surpassingly great though it is, is
not the measure of the greatness of the leader of the Exodus. It is not
in the deliverance from Egypt, it is in the constructive statesmanship
that laid the foundations of the Hebrew commonwealth that the
superlative grandeur of that leadership looms up. As we cannot imagine
the Exodus without the great leader, neither can we account for the
Hebrew polity without the great statesman. Not merely intellectually
great, but morally great--a statesman aglow with the unselfish
patriotism that refuses to grasp a sceptre or found a dynasty.
It matters not when or by whom were compiled the books popularly
attributed to Moses; it matters not how much of the code there given may
be the survivals of more ancient usage or the amplifications of a later
age; its great features bear the stamp of a mind far in advance of
people and time, of a mind that beneath effects sought for causes, of a
mind that drifted not with the tide of events, but aimed at a definite
purpose.
The outlines that the record gives us of the character of Moses--the
brief relations that wherever the Hebrew scriptures are read have hung
the chambers of the imagination with vivid pictures--are in every way
consistent with this idea. What we know of the life illustrates what we
know of the work. What we know of the work illumines the life.
It was not an empire such as had reached full development in Egypt or
existed in rudimentary patriarchal form in the tribes around, that Moses
aimed to found. Nor was it a republic where the freedom of the citizen
rested on the servitude of the helot, and the individual was sacrificed
to the state. It was a commonwealth based upon the individual; a
commonwealth whose ideal it was that every man should sit under his own
vine and fig-tree, with none to vex him or make him afraid; a
commonwealth in which none should be condemned to ceaseless toil; in
which, for even the bond slave, there should be hope; in which, for even
the beast of burden, there should be rest. A commonwealth in which, in
the absence of deep poverty, the manly virtues that spring from personal
independence should harden into a national character; a commonwealth in
which the family affections might knit their tendrils around each
member, binding with links stronger than steel the various parts into
the living whole.
It is not the protection of property, but the protection of humanity,
that is the aim of the Mosaic code. Its sanctions are not directed to
securing the strong in heaping up wealth, so much as to preventing the
weak from being crowded to the wall. At every point it interposes its
barriers to the selfish greed that, if left unchecked, will surely
differentiate men into landlord and serf, capitalist and workman,
millionaire and tramp, ruler and ruled. Its Sabbath day and Sabbath year
secure, even to the lowliest, rest and leisure. With the blast of the
Jubilee trumpets the slave goes free, the debt that cannot be paid is
cancelled, and a re-division of the land secures again to the poorest
his fair share in the bounty of the common Creator. The reaper must
leave something for the gleaner; even the ox cannot be muzzled as he
treadeth out the corn. Everywhere, in everything, the dominant idea is
that of our homely phrase--"Live and let live!"
And the religion with which this civil policy is so closely intertwined
exhibits kindred features--from the idea of the brotherhood of man
springs the idea of the fatherhood of God. Though the forms may resemble
those of Egypt, the spirit is that which Egypt had lost; though a
hereditary priesthood is retained, the law in its fulness is announced
to all the people. Though the Egyptian rite of circumcision is
preserved, and the Egyptian symbols reappear in all the externals of
worship, the tendency to take the type for the reality is sternly
repressed. It is only when we think of the bulls and the hawks, of the
deified cats and sacred ichneumons of Egypt, that we realize the full
meaning of the command--"Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven
image!"
And if we seek, beneath form and symbol and command, the thought of
which they are but the expression, we find that the distinctive feature
of the Hebrew religion, that which separates it by such a wide gulf from
the religions amid which it grew up, is its utilitarianism, its
recognition of divine law in human life. It asserts, not a God whose
domain is confined to the far-off beginning or the vague future, who is
over and above and beyond men, but a God who in His inexorable laws is
here and now; a God of the living as well as of the dead; a God of the
market-place as well as of the temple; a God whose judgments wait not
another world for execution, but whose immutable decrees will, in this
life, give happiness to the people that heed them and bring misery upon
the people that forget them.
The absence in the Mosaic books of any reference to a future life is
only intelligible by the prominence into which this truth is brought.
Nothing could have been more familiar to the Hebrews of the Exodus than
the doctrine of immortality. The continued existence of the soul, the
judgment after death, the rewards and punishments of the future state,
were the constant subjects of Egyptian thought and art. But a truth may
be hidden or thrown into the background by the intensity with which
another truth is grasped. And the truth that Moses brought so
prominently forward, the truth his gaze was concentrated upon, is a
truth that has often been thrust aside by the doctrine of immortality,
and that may perhaps, at times, react on it in the same way. This is the
truth that the actions of men bear fruit in this world, that though on
the petty scale of individual life wickedness may seem to go unpunished
and wrong to be rewarded, there is yet a Nemesis that with tireless feet
and pitiless arm follows every national crime, and smites the children
for the father's transgression; the truth that each individual must act
upon and be acted upon by the society of which he is a part; that all
must in some degree suffer for the sin of each, and the life of each be
dominated by the conditions imposed by all.
It is the intense appreciation of this truth that gives the Mosaic
institutions so practical and utilitarian a character. Their genius, if
I may so speak, leaves the abstract speculations where thought so easily
loses and wastes itself, or finds expression only in symbols that
become finally but the basis of superstition, in order that it may
concentrate attention upon laws that determine the happiness or misery
of men upon this earth. Its lessons have never tended to the essential
selfishness of asceticism, which is so prominent a feature in Brahmanism
and Buddhism, and from which Christianity and Islamism have not been
exempt. Its injunction has never been, "Leave the world to itself that
you may save your own soul," but rather, "Do your duty in the world that
you may be happier and the world be better." It has disdained no
sanitary regulation that might secure the health of the body. Its
promise has been of peace and plenty and length of days, of stalwart
sons and comely daughters.
It may be that the feeling of Moses in regard to a future life was that
expressed in the language of the Stoic, "It is the business of Jupiter,
not mine;" or it may be that it partook of the same revulsion that shows
itself in modern times, when a spirit essentially religious has been
turned against the forms and expressions of religion, because these
forms and expressions have been made the props and bulwarks of tyranny,
and even the name and teachings of the Carpenter's Son perverted into
supports of social injustice--used to guard the pomp of Caesar and
justify the greed of Dives.
Yet, however such feelings influenced Moses, I cannot think that such a
soul as his, living such a life as his--feeling the exaltation of great
thoughts, feeling the burden of great cares, feeling the bitterness of
great disappointments--did not stretch forward to the hope beyond; did
not rest and strengthen and ground itself in the confident belief that
the death of the body is but the emancipation of the soul; did not feel
the assurance that there is a power in the universe upon which it might
confidently rely, through wreck of matter and crash of worlds. But the
great concern of Moses was with the duty that lay plainly before him:
the effort to lay foundations of a social state in which deep poverty
and degrading want should be unknown--where men, released from the
meaner struggles that waste human energy, should have opportunity for
intellectual and moral development.
Here stands out the greatness of the man. What was the wisdom and
stretch of the forethought that in the desert sought to guard in advance
against the dangers of a settled state, let the present speak.
In the full blaze of the nineteenth century, when every child in our
schools may know as common truths things of which the Egyptian sages
never dreamed; when the earth has been mapped, and the stars have been
weighed; when steam and electricity have been pressed into our service,
and science is wresting from nature secret after secret--it is but
natural to look back upon the wisdom of three thousand years ago as the
man looks back upon the learning of the child.
And yet, for all this wonderful increase of knowledge, for all this
enormous gain of productive power, where is the country in the civilized
world in which to-day there is not want and suffering--where the masses
are not condemned to toil that gives no leisure, and all classes are not
pursued by a greed of gain that makes life an ignoble struggle to get
and to keep? Three thousand years of advance, and still the moan goes
up, "They have made our lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar and in
brick, and in all manner of service!" Three thousand years of advance!
Yet the piteous voices of little children are in the moan.
We progress and we progress; we girdle continents with iron roads and
knit cities together with the mesh of telegraph wires; each day brings
some new invention; each year marks a fresh advance--the power of
production increased, and the avenues of exchange cleared and broadened.
Yet the complaint of "hard times" is louder and louder: everywhere are
men harassed by care, and haunted by the fear of want. With swift,
steady strides and prodigious leaps, the power of human hands to satisfy
human wants advances and advances, is multiplied and multiplied. Yet the
struggle for mere existence is more and more intense, and labor is
cheapest of commodities. Beside glutted warehouses human beings grow
faint with hunger and shiver with cold; under the shadow of churches
festers the vice that is born of want.
Trace to their root the causes that are thus producing want in the midst
of plenty, ignorance in the midst of intelligence, aristocracy in
democracy, weakness in strength--that are giving to our civilization a
one-sided and unstable development; and you will find it something which
this Hebrew statesman three thousand years ago perceived and guarded
against. Moses saw that the real cause of the enslavement of the masses
of Egypt was, what has everywhere produced enslavement, the possession
by a class of the land upon which and from which the whole people must
live. He saw that to permit in land the same unqualified private
ownership that by natural right attaches to the things produced by
labor, would be inevitably to separate the people into the very rich and
the very poor, inevitably to enslave labor--to make the few the masters
of the many, no matter what the political forms, to bring vice and
degradation no matter what the religion.
And with the foresight of the philosophic statesman he sought, in ways
suited to his times and conditions, to guard against this error.
Everywhere in the Mosaic institutions is the land treated as the gift of
the Creator to His common creatures, which no one has the right to
monopolize. Everywhere it is, not your estate, or your property; not the
land which you bought, or the land which you conquered, but "the land
which the Lord thy God giveth thee"--"the land which the Lord lendeth
thee." And by practical legislation, by regulations to which he gave the
highest sanctions, he tried to guard against the wrong that converted
ancient civilizations into despotisms--the wrong that in after centuries
ate out the heart of Rome, and produced the imbruting serfdom of Poland
and the gaunt misery of Ireland, the wrong that is to-day crowding
families into single rooms and filling our new States with tramps. He
not only provided for the fair division of the land among the people,
and for making it fallow and common every seventh year, but by the
institution of the jubilee he provided for a redistribution of the land
every fifty years and made monopoly impossible.
I do not say that these institutions were, for their ultimate purpose,
the best that might even then have been devised, for Moses had to work,
as all great constructive statesmen have to work, with the tools that
came to his hand, and upon materials as he found them. Still less do I
mean to say that forms suitable for that time and people are suitable
for every time and people. I ask, not veneration of the form, but
recognition of the spirit.
Yet how common it is to venerate the form and to deny the spirit! There
are many who believe that the Mosaic institutions were literally
dictated by the Almighty, yet who would denounce as irreligious and
"communistic" any application of their spirit to the present day. And
yet to-day how much we owe to these institutions! This very day, the
only thing that stands between our working classes and ceaseless toil is
one of these Mosaic institutions. Let the mistakes of those who think
that man was made for the Sabbath, rather than the Sabbath for man, be
what they may; that there is one day in the week on which hammer is
silent and loom stands idle, is due, through Christianity, to
Judaism--to the code promulgated in the Sinaitic wilderness.
It is in these characteristics of the Mosaic institutions that, as in
the fragments of a Colossus, we may read the greatness of the mind whose
impress they bear--of a mind in advance of its surroundings, in advance
of its age; of one of those star souls that dwindle not with distance,
but, glowing with the radiance of essential truth, hold their light
while institutions and languages and creeds change and pass.
That the thought was greater than the permanent expression it found, who
can doubt? Yet from that day to this that expression has been in the
world a living power.
From the free spirit of the Mosaic law sprang that intensity of family
life that amid all dispersions and persecutions has preserved the
individuality of the Hebrew race; that love of independence that under
the most adverse circumstances has characterized the Jew; that burning
patriotism that flamed up in the Maccabees and bared the breasts of
Jewish peasants to the serried steel of Grecian phalanx and the
resistless onset of Roman legion; that stubborn courage that in exile
and in torture has held the Jew to his faith. It kindled that fire that
has made the strains of Hebrew seers and poets phrase for us the highest
exaltations of thought; that intellectual vigor that has over and over
again made the dry staff bud and blossom. And passing outward from one
narrow race it has exerted its power wherever the influence of the
Hebrew scriptures has been felt. It has toppled thrones and cast down
hierarchies. It strengthened the Scottish Covenanter in the hour of
trial, and the Puritan amid the snows of a strange land. It charged with
the Ironsides at Naseby; it stood behind the low redoubt on Bunker Hill.
But it is in example as in deed that such lives are helpful. It is thus
that they dignify human nature and glorify human effort, and bring to
those who struggle hope and trust. The life of Moses, like the
institutions of Moses, is a protest against that blasphemous doctrine,
current now as it was three thousand years ago; that blasphemous
doctrine preached ofttimes even from Christian pulpits: that the want
and suffering of the masses of mankind flow from a mysterious
dispensation of Providence, which we may lament, but can neither quarrel
with nor alter.
Adopted into the immediate family of the supreme monarch and earthly
god; standing almost at the apex of the social pyramid which had for its
base those toiling millions; priest and prince in a land where prince
and priest might revel in all delights--everything that life could offer
to gratify the senses or engage the intellect was open to him.
What to him the wail of them who beneath the fierce sun toiled under the
whips of relentless masters? Heard from granite colonnade or beneath
cool linen awning, it was mellowed by distance, to monotonous music. Why
should _he_ question the Sphinx of Fate, or quarrel with destinies the
high gods had decreed? So had it always been, for ages and ages; so must
it ever be. The beetle rends the insect, and the hawk preys on the
beetle; order on order, life rises from death and carnage, and higher
pleasures from lower agonies. Shall the man be better than nature?
Soothing and restful flows the Nile, though underneath its placid
surface finny tribes wage cruel war, and the stronger eat the weaker.
Shall the gazer who would read the secrets of the stars turn because
under his feet a worm may writhe?
Theirs to make bricks without straw; his a high place in the glorious
procession that with gorgeous banners and glittering emblems, with clash
of music and solemn chant, winds its shining way to dedicate the
immortal edifice their toil has reared. Theirs the leek and the garlic;
his to sit at the sumptuous feast. Why should he dwell on the
irksomeness of bondage, he for whom the chariots waited, who might at
will bestride the swift coursers of the Delta, or be borne on the bosom
of the river with oars that beat time to songs? Did he long for the
excitement of action?--there was the desert hunt, with steeds fleeter
than the antelope and lions trained like dogs. Did he crave rest and
ease?--there was for him the soft swell of languorous music and the
wreathed movements of dancing girls. Did he feel the stir of
intellectual life?--in the arcana of the temples he was free to the lore
of ages; an initiate in the society where were discussed the most
engrossing problems; a sharer in that intellectual pride that centuries
after compared Greek philosophy to the babblings of children.
It was no sudden ebullition of passion that caused Moses to turn his
back on all this, and to bring the strength and knowledge acquired in a
dominant caste to the life-long service of the oppressed. The
forgetfulness of self manifested in the smiting of the Egyptian shines
through the whole life. In institutions that moulded the character of a
people, in institutions that to this day make easier the lot of toiling
millions, we may read the stately purpose.
Through all that tradition has given us of that life runs the same grand
passion--the unselfish desire to make humanity better, happier, nobler.
And the death is worthy of the life. Subordinating to the good of his
people the natural disposition to found a dynasty, which in his case
would have been so easy, he discards the claims of blood and calls to
his place of leader the fittest man. Coming from a land where the rites
of sepulture were regarded as all-important, and the preservation of the
body after death was the passion of life; among a people who were even
then carrying the remains of their great ancestor, Joseph, to rest with
his fathers, he yet conquered the last natural yearning and withdrew
from the sight and sympathy of men to die alone and unattended, lest the
idolatrous feeling, always ready to break forth, should in death accord
him the superstitious reverence he had refused in life.
"No man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day." But while the despoiled
tombs of the Pharaohs mock the vanity that reared them, the name of the
Hebrew who, revolting from their tyranny, strove for the elevation of
his fellow-men, is yet a beacon light to the world.
[Signature of the author.]