Note 52 — Chapter XII · IF NON-TOL­ERA­TION WAS PART OF THE DI­VINE LAW A­MONG THE JEWS, AND WHETH­ER IT WAS AL­WAYS PUT IN PRAC­TICE.

Those who are unacquainted with the customs of antiquity, and who judge only from what they see about them, may possibly be astonished at this odd command; but they should reflect, that at those times it was the custom in Egypt, and most part of Assyria, to express things by hieroglyphical figures, signs, and types. The prophets, who were called seers by the Egyptians and Jews, not only expressed themselves in allegories, but also represented by signs those events which they foretold. Thus we find Isaiah, the chief of the four greater prophets, taking a roll and writing therein, “Maher-Shalal-Hashbaz,” that is, “Make haste to the spoil”; and going in unto the prophetess, she conceived and bare a son, whom the Lord called Maher-Shalal-Hashbaz. This is a type of the evils which were to be brought upon the Jews by the people of Egypt and Assyria. The prophet also says: “Before that the child shall be of an age to eat butter and honey, to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land that they abhorred shall be delivered of both her kings; and the Lord will hiss to the flies of Egypt, and for the bees of Assyr, and the Lord will shave with a razor that is hired, the beard and the hair of the feet of the king of Assyria.”* This prophecy of the bees, and of the shaving of the beard, and of the hair of the feet, can be understood only by those who know that it was a custom to call the swarms of bees together by the sound of a flageolet or pipe, or some other rustic instrument; that the greatest affront that could be done to any man was to cut off his beard; and that the hair on the private parts was called the hair of the feet, which was never shaven but in cases of leprosy, or other unclean disorders. All these figures, which would appear so strange in our style, signify nothing more than that the Lord will, in the course of a few years, deliver His people from captivity. We find the same prophet walking naked and barefoot to show that the king of Assyria shall lead away the Egyptians and Ethiopians captives, without their having wherewithal to cover their nakedness.† The prophet Ezekiel eats the roll of parchment which God had given him; afterwards he eats his bread covered with excrement, and continues to lie on his left side three hundred and ninety days, and forty days on his right side, to show that the Jews should want bread, and as a type of the number of years they were to remain in captivity. He loads himself with chains, as a figure of those that they are to wear; and he cuts off the hair of his head and of his beard, and divides them into three parts; the first of these portions is a type of those who are to perish in the city of Jerusalem; the second, of such as are to be slain without the walls; and the third, of those who are to be carried away to Babylon.‡ The prophet Hosea takes to himself a woman who is an adulteress, and whom he purchases for fifteen pieces of silver, and for an homer and a half of barley, and says unto her: “Thou shalt abide for me many days, thou shalt not play the harlot, and thou shalt not be for another man, for so shall the children of Israel abide many days without a king, and without a prince, and without an image, and without an ephod, and without teraphim”;§ in a word, the seers or pro­phets scarcely ever foretell any­thing with­out using a type or sign of the thing fore­told. Jeremiah therefore only conformed to the usual cus­tom when he bound him­self with cords, and put bonds and yokes * Isaiah vii. 15–18. † Isaiah xx. ‡ Ezek. iv. seq. § Hosea iii. upon his neck, as fig­ures of the ap­proach­ing slav­ery of those to whom he sent them, and if we at­tend prop­er­ly to these things, we shall find the times here spoken of to be like those of an old world, dif­fer­ing in ev­ery­thing from the new so­cie­ty. The laws, the man­ner of ma­king war, were all ab­so­lute­ly dif­fer­ent; and if we on­ly open Homer and the first book of Hero­do­tus, we need no­thing more to con­vince us that there is not the least re­semb­lance be­tween the peo­ple of early an­tiq­ui­ty and our­selves; hence we ought to dis­trust our own judgment, when we attempt to compare their manners with ours. Even nature herself is not now the same she was then; magicians and sorcerers had at that time a power over her which they no longer possess; they enchanted serpents, they raised the dead out of their tombs, etc. God sent dreams, and men interpreted them. The gift of prophecy was common. And we read of several metamorphoses, such as of Nebuchadnezzar into an ox, of Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt, and of five whole cities changed in an instant into a burning lake. There were likewise several species of men that no longer exist. The race of giants, Rephaim, Emim, Nephilim, and Enacim, have totally disappeared. St. Augustine, in his fifth book “De Civitate Dei,” says that he saw a tooth of one of those ancient giants that was at least a hundred times as large as one of our grinders. Ezekiel speaks of pygmies (Gamadim), not above a cubit high, who fought at the siege of Tyre; and almost all writers, sacred and profane, have agreed in the truth of these relations. In fine, the ancient world was so different from ours that there is no drawing any rule for our conduct from it; and if in the earliest ages of antiquity we find mankind mutually persecuting and destroying one another on account of their different faiths, far be it from us, who live under the enlightened law of grace, to copy after such originals.