The writer begins his enrolment in the following manner (ii.3): "The children of Parosh, two thousand one hundred seventy and four." Ver.4, "The children of Shephatiah, three hundred seventy and two." And in this manner he proceeds through all the families; and in the 64th verse, he makes a total, and says, the whole congregation together was forty and two thousand three hundred and threescore.
But whoever will take the trouble of casting up the several particulars, will find that the total is but 29,818; so that the error is 12,542.What certainty then can there be in the Bible for any thing?
[Here Mr.Paine includes the long list of numbers from the Bible of all the children listed and the total thereof.This can be had directly from the Bible.]
Nehemiah, in like manner, gives a list of the returned families, and of the number of each family.He begins as in Ezra, by saying (vii.8):
"The children of Parosh, two thousand three hundred and seventy-two; "and so on through all the families.(The list differs in several of the particulars from that of Ezra.) In ver.66, Nehemiah makes a total, and says, as Ezra had said, "The whole congregation together was forty and two thousand three hundred and threescore." But the particulars of this list make a total but of 31,089, so that the error here is 11,271.These writers may do well enough for Bible-makers, but not for any thing where truth and exactness is necessary.
The next book in course is the book of Esther.If Madam Esther thought it any honour to offer herself as a kept mistress to Ahasuerus, or as a rival to Queen Vashti, who had refused to come to a drunken king in the midst of a drunken company, to be made a show of, (for the account says, they had been drinking seven days, and were merry,) let Esther and Mordecai look to that, it is no business of ours, at least it is none of mine; besides which, the story has a great deal the appearance of being fabulous, and is also anonymous.I pass on to the book of Job.
The book of Job differs in character from all the books we have hitherto passed over.Treachery and murder make no part of this book; it is the meditations of a mind strongly impressed with the vicissitudes of human life, and by turns sinking under, and struggling against the pressure.
It is a highly wrought composition, between willing submission and involuntary discontent; and shows man, as he sometimes is, more disposed to be resigned than he is capable of being.Patience has but a small share in the character of the person of whom the book treats; on the contrary, his grief is often impetuous; but he still endeavours to keep a guard upon it, and seems determined, in the midst of accumulating ills, to impose upon himself the hard duty of contentment.
I have spoken in a respectful manner of the book of Job in the former part of the 'Age of Reason,' but without knowing at that time what I have learned since; which is, that from all the evidence that can be collected, the book of Job does not belong to the Bible.
I have seen the opinion of two Hebrew commentators, Abenezra and Spinoza, upon this subject; they both say that the book of Job carries no internal evidence of being an Hebrew book; that the genius of the composition, and the drama of the piece, are not Hebrew; that it has been translated from another language into Hebrew, and that the author of the book was a Gentile;that the character represented under the name of Satan (which is the first and only time this name is mentioned in the Bible) [In a later work Paine notes that in "the Bible" (by which be always means the Old Testament alone)the word Satan occurs also in 1 Chron.xxi.1, and remarks that the action there ascribed to Satan is in 2 Sam.xxiv.1, attributed to Jehovah ("Essay on Dreams").In these places, however, and in Ps.cix.6, Satan means "adversary,"and is so translated (A.S.version) in 2 Sam.xix.22, and 1 Kings v.4, xi.25.As a proper name, with the article, Satan appears in the Old Testament only in Job and in Zech.iii.1, 2.But the authenticity of the passage in Zechariah has been questioned, and it may be that in finding the proper name of Satan in Job alone, Paine was following some opinion met with in one of the authorities whose comments are condensed in his paragraph.--Editor.] does not correspond to any Hebrew idea; and that the two convocations which the Deity is supposed to have made of those whom the poem calls sons of God, and the familiarity which this supposed Satan is stated to have with the Deity, are in the same case.
It may also be observed, that the book shows itself to be the production of a mind cultivated in science, which the Jews, so far from being famous for, were very ignorant of.The allusions to objects of natural philosophy are frequent and strong, and are of a different cast to any thing in the books known to be Hebrew.The astronomical names, Pleiades, Orion, and Arcturus, are Greek and not Hebrew names, and it does not appear from any thing that is to be found in the Bible that the Jews knew any thing of astronomy, or that they studied it, they had no translation of those names into their own language, but adopted the names as they found them in the poem.[Paine's Jewish critic, David Levi, fastened on this slip ("Detence of the Old Testament," 1797, p.152).In the original the names are Ash (Arcturus), Kesil' (Orion), Kimah' (Pleiades), though the identifications of the constellations in the A.S.V.have been questioned.-- Editor.]
That the Jews did translate the literary productions of the Gentile nations into the Hebrew language, and mix them with their own, is not a matter of doubt; Proverbs xxxi.i, is an evidence of this: it is there said, The word of king Lemuel, the prophecy which his mother taught him.
