Note 57 — Chapter XIII · THE GREAT TOL­ER­A­TION EX­ER­CISED A­MONG THE JEWS.

There is but one passage in the whole Mosaic law from which one might conclude that Moses was acquainted with the reigning opinion among the Egyptians, that the soul did not die with the body. This passage is very particular, and is in the eighteenth chapter of Deuteronomy: “There shall not be found among you any one that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits (Python), or a wizard, or a necromancer.” From this passage it appears that by invoking the souls of the dead this pretended necromancy supposed a permanency of the soul. It might also happen that the necromancers of whom Moses speaks, being but ignorant deceivers, might not have a distinct idea of the magic they operated. They made people believe that they forced the dead to speak, and by the power of their art restored the body to the same state as when living; without once examining whether their ridiculous operations might authorize the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The ancient magicians were never philosophers; they were at best but a set of stupid jugglers, who played their tricks before as illiterate spectators. But what is very strange and worthy of observation is that the word “python” should be found in Deuteronomy so long before that Greek term was known to the Hebrews; and indeed this word is not to be found in the Hebrew, of which we have never had a good translation. There are many insurmountable difficulties in this language; it is a mixture of Phœnician, Egyptian, Syriac, and Arabic, and has undergone many alterations to the present time. The Hebrew verbs had only two moods, the present and the future; the rest were to be guessed at by the sense. The different vowels were frequently expressed by the same characters, or rather, indeed, they were not expressed at all; and the inventors of points have only increased the difficulties they meant to remove. Every adverb had twenty different significations, and the same word had frequently several contrary senses. Add to this that the language was in itself very dry and barren; for the Jews, not being acquainted with the arts, could not express what they knew nothing of. In a word, the Hebrew is to the Greek what the language of a pedant is to that of an academic.