Pocket Philosophical Dictionary by Voltaire; Fletcher John; Cronk Nicholas

Pocket Philosophical Dictionary by Voltaire; Fletcher John; Cronk Nicholas

Author:Voltaire; Fletcher, John; Cronk, Nicholas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2011-12-06T16:00:00+00:00


ON EZEKIEL (D’ÉZÉCHIEL)

On some singular passages in this prophet, and on some ancient customs

IT’S generally agreed today that ancient customs must not be judged in the light of present practice. Anyone wishing to reform Alcinous’ court on the lines of that of the Sultan or of Louis XIV would get a poor reception from scholars, and anyone finding fault with Virgil for showing King Evander receiving ambassadors dressed in a bearskin and accompanied by two dogs would be considered a bad critic.

The customs of the ancient Jews were even more different from our own than those of King Alcinous or his daughter Nausicaa or that chap Evander. While a slave in Chaldea Ezekiel had a vision near the small river Chebar that flows into the Euphrates.

It’s no surprise that he saw animals with four faces, four wings, and calves’ feet, and wheels that turned all by themselves and possessed the spirit of life: these symbols are even pleasing to the imagination, but several critics have expressed their disgust at the Lord’s command that for three hundred and ninety days he had to eat barley, wheat, and millet bread covered with shit.*

The prophet cried out ‘Ugh! Up till now my soul has not been polluted’, and the Lord replied, ‘All right, I’ll give you cow dung rather than human excrement, and you’ll knead your bread with that’.

Since it’s not customary to eat preserves of that kind on one’s bread, most people find these orders unworthy of the Divine Majesty. It has to be admitted, though, that all the Great Mogul’s diamonds and a cowpat enjoy exactly the same status in the eyes not only of a divine being but of any true philosopher; and as for God ordering such a lunch for the prophet, it’s not for us to reason why.

It’s enough for us to demonstrate that these commandments which seem strange to us did not seem so strange to the Jews. It’s true that in St Jerome’s time the synagogue did allow anyone under thirty to read Ezekiel, but that was because in chapter 18 he says ‘the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father’, and that it will no longer be said ‘the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge’.

In saying that he was expressly contradicting Moses who, in Numbers, chapter 28, assures us that ‘the iniquity of the fathers shall be visited upon the children unto the third and the fourth generation’.

In chapter 20 Ezekiel attributes to the Lord the statement that he gave the Jews ‘statutes that were not good’. That’s why the synagogue forbade the young to read something that could make them doubt the irrefragability of the laws of Moses.

The critics of today are even more surprised by Ezekiel chapter 16: this is how the prophet sets about informing people of Jerusalem’s misdeeds: he introduces the Lord speaking to a girl and saying, ‘as for thy nativity, thy navel was not cut, thou wast not salted at



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