Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/555

 breach of which was to be punished with death, there is the the same confusion of theological and natural duties as in the Hebrew Bible. The Parsees were forbidden—

1. To kill a pure man (i. e., a Parsee). 2. To put out the fire Behram. 3. To throw the impurity from dead bodies into fire or water. 4. To commit adultery. 5. To practice magic or contribute to its being practiced. 6. To throw the impurity of menstruating women into fire or water. 7. To commit sodomy with boys. 8. To commit highway-robbery or suicide (Av., vol. ii. p. lx).

Besides these commandments, Jehovah gave his people a vast mass of laws, amounting in fact to a complete criminal code, through his mouthpiece Moses. Among these laws were those which were written on the two tables of stone, commonly though erroneously supposed to have been the ten commandments of the twentieth chapter. The express statement of Exodus forbids such a supposition. It is there stated that when God had finished communing with Moses he gave him "two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God." This most valuable autograph Moses had the folly to break in his anger at finding that the Israelites, led by his brother Aaron, had taken to worshiping a golden calf in his absence (Ex., xxxi. 18, and xxxii, 19). God, however, desired him to prepare other tables like those he had destroyed, and kindly undertook to write upon them the very words that had been on the first. Apparently, however, he only dictated them to Moses, who is said to have written upon the tables "the words of the covenant, the ten commandments." What these words were there can be no doubt, for he had begun his address to Moses by saying, "Behold, I make a covenant;" and had concluded it by the expression, "Write thou these words: for after the tenor of these words have I made a covenant with thee and with Israel" (Ex. xxxiv. 1-28). Now the commandments thus asserted to have been written on the tables of stone were very different from the ten given before on Mount Sinai, and resemble more closely still the style of those quoted from the Parsee