You next proceed to show the propriety of the angel ordering Moses to pull off his shoes, which you say is a mark of reverence to God. Is it then by such ridiculous customs that you reconcile your omnipotent and all-wise God? Too long have men substituted rites for morality. O superstition! that makes the Asiatics eat the excrements of the lama, the Papists devour their God; that persuades all Christians that water washeth away sin; and, that if a child happens to die before his face is sprinkled, he must inevitably suffer everlasting torments: led by this, men despise society, and tremble at ceremonies invented by their priests.
I shall not go at great length into the particular contradictions which are found in the enumeration of the families that returned from Babylon. There certainly are great mistakes in the sums; and where precision was to be expected more than in any thing preserved in the record of the people of God, we find them committing the most gross errors, even when they attempt to be peculiarly exact. It is curious, that the individual sums are altogether different in the different accounts, and, therefore, that there must have been a much greater number of errors than you would persuade your readers.
You come to the book of Job; and confine your remarks to disprove the objection of Mr. Paine, drawn from the name Satan, which, he says, is there for the first and only time mentioned in the Bible. Your answer, that it is repeatedly to be found elsewhere in the Old Testament, is just but it certainly does not prove Job to be a Jewish book. We know that _Sathan_, as well as the names of all the angels, are Chaldean; and as I have already shown, that the Scriptures are compilations written after the captivity, it is not wonderful that this name, together with many others, should be found in the Hebrew Bible. As you say nothing in favour of the book of Job, I shall only observe, that it is not only the opinion of Abenezra, but even of Jerome, the author of the Vulgate, that it is not a Hebrew book, the idiom being in many instances altogether different from the style of that language, and very frequently bearing marks of its Arabic and Syriac origin, as the reader may see in his preface to Job in the Vulgate edition of the Bible. The resemblance between Job's Satan and Momus is so striking, that we cannot help recognising the author to have been a Gentile; and thus are the Jews deprived of a book, which, at least, contains no murders, and shows more knowledge than that nation ever possessed. Your remark as to the generality of the belief of a benevolent and a malevolent being, certainly does not prove that the Gentiles borrowed this notion from the Jews; you ought to have known history better, and that the wars of the Gods and angels formed part of the creed of many nations, not only before a book of the Bible existed, but even before the birth of Moses. Dionysius and Osiris had already fought against the evil genii: the famous Vishnu has been from the highest antiquity the enemy of Chiven. That the numerous mythological systems which have ever existed, sprang from the report of the fathers of the Jewish nation, may appear probable to a clergyman; it is but a pious whim; to me it is a proof, that all religious systems have sprung from the fancy of men. The philosophers among the heathens understood by the evil and bad genii nothing more than the influence of the good or bad seasons, which, personified by ignorant or cunning priests, have by the vulgar been deemed real personages. Besides, where do you find in the Pentateuch any accounts of the Devil? I only see the serpent, an emblem I have already said, copied from the Egyptians, but by the Jews considered a real snake, which talked and walked upright. It was but a poor imitation of the Ahrimanes of Zoroaster.