ON THE SPURIOUS BIBLE 219 



was walking in the Garden of Eden, like a human 

 being, enjoying the cool of the day, and suddenly he 

 missed Adam and Eve, for they had hidden themselves. 

 So God sought them out and found they had been eating 

 of the fruit of a certain tree which God had prohibited, 

 and for this deadly sin Adam and Eve were cursed, even 

 the ground was cursed, for u cursed is the ground for 

 thy sake : in toil shalt thou eat of it all the days 

 of thy life," and so on. And this is the curse which 

 priests have made us believe is a curse upon the whole 

 of the human race. And upon this childish and silly 

 legend do the priests establish the crime of original 

 sin ! L 



] " Apart from statistics, however, the Books of the Pentateuch 

 ascribed to Moses are full of the most flagrant contradictions and 

 absurdities. It is evident that, instead of being the production of 

 some one contemporary writer, they have been compiled and edited, 

 probably many times over, by what I have called the ' scissors and 

 paste method,' of clipping out extracts from old documents and 

 traditions, and piecing them together in juxtaposition or succession, 

 without regard to their being contradictory or repetitions. 



" Thus in Exodus xxxiii. 20, God says to Moses : ' Thou canst not 

 see my face and live ; for there shall no man see me and live ' ; and 

 accordingly he shows Moses only his * back parts ' ; while in ver. 11 in 

 the very same chapter we read, ' And the Lord spoke unto Moses face 

 to face, as a man speaketh unto a friend.' Again, in Exodus xxiv., 

 the Lord says to Moses, ' that he alone shall come near the Lord ' 

 (ver. 2), while in vers. 9-11 of the same chapter, we are told that 

 ' Moses, Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of 

 Israel went up ; and they saw the God of Israel, and there was under 

 his feet as it were a paved work of a sapphire stone,' and although 

 they saw God, were none the worse for it, but survived and ' did eat 

 and drink.' Is it possible to believe that these excessively crude 

 representations of the Deity, and these flagrant inconsistencies, were 

 all written at the same time, by the same hand, and that the hand of 

 a man who, if not a holy inspired prophet, was at any rate an 



