Page:God and His Book.djvu/18

8 whether the Ghost wrote them or not. The Christians say he did not, and the Jews say he did. The Rabbins contend that, when Jehovah, amid an extraordinary, but quite unnecessary, display of thunder and lightning, gave out the decalogue at Sinai, he issued, at the same time, the Targums of Onkelos and Jonathan. If he did so, it explains what has been otherwise always inexplicable to me—viz., why Moses spent forty days on the mountain over such a trifling job as engraving the decalogue. It has frequently struck me that God and he must have had an idle time of it, if it took the two of them forty days to do as much engraving as is now-a-days found on the tombstone of an ordinary tailor, when his virtues are well set out. But, if they actually produced, in addition to the Decalogue, the Targums of Onkelos and Jonathan, that alters the matter; they cannot have been so very idle after all.

Be this as it may, God must have been very idle in heaven when he came down to earth and spent forty days on the top of a mountain in Arabia over such a poor affair as the Decalogue and the Targums. The "Have no other God save me" business was, perhaps, new; but all the rest was as old as the basis of society. To tell men to honour their father and mother, for instance, was poor work for a god, it being quite unnecessary. All men worthy of the name have honoured their father and mother. Did Jehovah never hear of Troy? Has it not reached his ears how Æneas took his aged father on his shoulders and rushed through the roaring flames, saving the life of his parent at the peril of his own? This was a thousand years before the nomadic carpenter had begun to preach in the villages of Galilee, and I know not how many centuries before Ezra had written a line of the Bible. Æneas had never heard of Jehovah and his Decalogue, and, even if he had, would most likely have laughed at both.

But the most noteworthy thing about Jehovah and his Decalogue is this: He, as the Bible shows, broke every "commandment" in it save one. That one was, Thou shalt have no other God before me. Through all his