Continuing his researches, the Martian notices a number of passages in
the Old Testament that lead him to the conclusion that the Hebrews were
originally polytheists. The name Elohim, he finds, is plural (singular,
Eloah), meaning the gods. Again, in another passage of Genesis, God is
described as saying, "Let us make man in our image (I, 26)," and further
on, "The man is become as one of us." It becomes evident to him that
the Hebrews, like their neighbors, worshiped "baalim" or the gods of the
heathens. The "teraphim," the etymology of which is unknown, were little
portable idols which seem to have been the Lares of the ancient Hebrews.
David owned some (I Samuel XIX, 13-16), and the prophet Hosea, in the
eighth century before Christ, seems still to have considered the
"teraphim" as indispensable in worship (Hos. III, 4). These evidences of
polytheism and fetichism in the people of Israel destroy, in the mind of
the Martian, the claim of these people to have been faithful from their
earliest origin to a spiritual monotheism. Rather does he find that they
took the religions of other peoples with whom they came in contact.
The Old Testament contains numerous instances of the practice of magic.
Moses and Aaron were magicians who rivalled Pharaoh's magicians (Ex.
VII, 11-20); and Balaam was a magician who pronounced incantations
against Israel and afterwards passed over to the service of Jehovah.
Jacob resorted to a kind of sympathetic magic to procure the birth of a
speckled sheep (Gen. XXX, 39). "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,"
is written in Exodus XXII, 18, and this phrase offered an affirmation of
the reality of witchcraft during the period of the Witchcraft Delusion.
The Martian notes that the sentence, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to
live," has caused more suffering, torture, and death than probably any
other sentence ever framed. His mind revolts at the stupidity and the
slavish adherence to so-called authority of the human mind, which is
manifested in this example of what occurred in the period of the
Witchcraft Delusion, when the words of an ignorant and barbaric Hebrew
were taken by Christian followers to be the words of a god. And yet our
Martian guest recognizes that in this day all men are aware of the
fallacy of this utterance in a book which is still claimed to be
infallible.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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