A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 08 — Voltaire — John Shaqi
A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 08
Voltaire · en
All the Jewish prophets, who prophesied in the name of the Lord from the
time of Moses till that of King Josiah, would they not have been
supported in all their prophecies by the laws of Moses? Would they not a
thousand times have quoted his own words? Would they not have commented
upon them? None of them, however, quote two lines--no one follows the
text of Moses--they even oppose them in several places.
According to these unbelievers, the books attributed to Moses were only
written among the Babylonians during the captivity, or immediately
afterwards by Esdras. Indeed, we see only Persian and Chaldæan
terminations in the Jewish writings: "_Babel,_" gate of God;
"_Phegor-beel,_" or "_Beel-phegor,_" god of the precipices;
"_Zebuth-beel,_" or "_Beel-zebuth,_" god of insects; "_Bethel,_" house
of God; "_Daniel,_" judgment of God; "_Gabriel,_" man of God; "_Jahel,_"
afflicted of God; "_Jael,_" the life of God; "_Israel,_" seeing God;
"_Oviel,_" strength of God; "_Raphael,_" help of God; "_Uriel,_" fire of
God.
Thus, all is foreign in the Jewish nation, a stranger itself in
Palestine; circumcision, ceremonies, sacrifices, the ark, the cherubim,
the goat Hazazel, baptism of justice, simple baptism, proofs,
divination, interpretation of dreams, enchantment of serpents--nothing
originated among these people, nothing was invented by them.
The celebrated Lord Bolingbroke believed not that Moses ever existed; he
thought he saw in the Pentateuch a crowd of contradictions and puzzling
chronological and geographical faults; names of towns not then built,
precepts given to kings at a time when not only the Jews had no kings,
but in which it is probable there were none, since they lived in
deserts, in tents, in the manner of the Bedouin Arabs.
What appears to him above all the most palpable contradiction is the
gift of forty-eight cities with their suburbs, made to the Levites in a
country in which there was not a single village; and it is principally
on these forty-eight cities that he refutes Abbadie, and even has the
cruelty to treat him with the aversion and contempt of a lord of the
Upper Chamber, or a minister of state towards a petty foreign priest who
would be so impertinent as to reason with him.
I will take the liberty of representing to Viscount Bolingbroke, and to
all those who think with him, not only that the Jewish nation has always
believed in the existence of Moses, and in that of his books, but that
even Jesus Christ has acknowledged him. The four Gospels, the Acts of
the Apostles, recognize him. St. Matthew says expressly, that Moses and
Elias appeared to Jesus Christ on the mountain during the night of the
transfiguration, and St. Luke says the same.