SECTION II.. _the Jewish Law._

The Jewish Law.

Their law must appear, to every polished people, as singular as their conduct; if it were not divine, it would seem to be the law of savages beginning to assemble themselves into a nation; and being divine, one cannot understand how it is that it has not existed from all ages, for them, and for all men.

But it is more strange than all that the immortality of the soul is not even intimated in this law, entitled "Vaicrah and Addebarim," Leviticus and Deuteronomy.

In this law it is forbidden to eat eels, because they have no scales; and hares, because they chew the cud, and have cloven feet. Apparently, the Jews had hares different from ours. The griffin is unclean, and four-footed birds are unclean, which animals are somewhat rare. Whoever touches a mouse, or a mole is unclean. The women are forbidden to lie with horses or asses. The Jewish women must have been subject to this sort of gallantry. The men are forbidden to offer up their seed to Moloch; and here the term seed is not metaphorical. It seems that it was customary, in the deserts of Arabia, to offer up this singular present to the gods; as it is said to be usual in Cochin and some other countries of India, for the girls to yield their virginity to an iron Priapus in a temple. These two ceremonies prove that mankind is capable of everything. The Kaffirs, who deprive themselves of one testicle, are a still more ridiculous example of the extravagance of superstition.

Another law of the Jews, equally strange, is their proof of adultery. A woman accused by her husband must be presented to the priests, and she is made to drink of the waters of jealousy, mixed with worm-wood and dust. If she is innocent, the water makes her more beautiful; if she is guilty, her eyes start from her head, her belly swells, and she bursts before the Lord.

We shall not here enter into the details of all these sacrifices, which were nothing more than the operations of ceremonial butchers; but it of great importance to remark another kind of sacrifice too common in those barbarous times. It is expressly ordered, in the twenty-seventh chapter of Leviticus, that all men, vowed in anathema to the Lord, be immolated; they "shall surely be put to death"; such are the words of the text. Here is the origin of the story of Jephthah, whether his daughter was really immolated, or the story was copied from that of Iphigenia. Here, too, is the source of the vow made by Saul, who would have immolated his son, but that the army, less superstitious than himself, saved the innocent young man's life.

It is then but too true that the Jews, according to their law, sacrificed human victims. This act of religion is in accordance with their manners; their own books represent them as slaughtering without mercy all that came in their way, reserving only the virgins for their use.

It would be very difficult--and should be very unimportant--to know at what time these laws were digested into the form in which we now have them. That they are of very high antiquity is enough to inform us how gross and ferocious the manners of that antiquity were.