Eben-Ezra was the first who undertook to prove that the Pentateuch—or the five books of Moses—was written in the times of the Kings. Wollaston, Collins, Tindal, Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke, and many others have asserted that in those ages men had no other way of committing their thoughts to writing but by engraving them upon polished stone, brick, lead, or wood; and tell us that in the time of Moses the Chaldæans and Egyptians had no other way of writing, and that then they could engrave but in a very abridged manner, and by hieroglyphics, the substance only of such things as they thought worthy of being transmitted to posterity, and could never form any regular histories; then it was next to an impossibility to engrave books of any considerable bulk in the wilderness, where they were continually changing their habitation; where they had no person to furnish them with clothing, to make that clothing for them, or even to mend their sandals, and where God was obliged to perform a miracle to preserve the garments of His people entire. They say that it is hardly probable that there should have been so many engravers among them, at the time that they were so deficient in the more necessary arts of life, and did not know even how to make bread; and if we answer to this, that the pillars of the tabernacle were of brass, and their chapiters of massy silver they reply, that though the order for this might have been given in the wilderness, it was not executed till after they were settled in perfect tranquillity. They cannot conceive, they say, how the Israelites, who were a poor and vagabond people, could have asked for a calf of massy gold to be erected for the object of their adoration, at the foot of the very mountain where God was then talking with Moses, and in the very midst of the thunder and lightning, and the sound of the heavenly trumpet, which were heard and seen by all present. They profess their astonishment that it should have been only the day before Moses descended from the mountain, that all the people should have addressed themselves to his brother Aaron to raise this golden calf; or how it was possible for Aaron to have cast such an image in one single day; and still more, how Moses could have reduced it into an impalpable powder. They say that it is impossible for any artist to make a statue of gold in less than three months, and that not all the possible efforts of the chemical art are sufficient to reduce such a mass into a powder that may be swallowed, and consequently, that the prevarication of Aaron and this operation of Moses must have been two miracles.