Moses, Lawgiver and General

So much, then, for the dates, as many have given them and as we have now set them down. It is said that the scriptures of the law and of the prophets were translated out of the language of the Hebrews into Greek in the reign of Ptolemy the son of Lagos — or, as others say, of the Ptolemy called Philadelphus. Demetrius of Phalerum brought the greatest eagerness to the work and took painstaking care over the materials for the translation. The Macedonians still held Asia, and the king, who was ambitious to stock the library he had at Alexandria with every writing there was, asked the people of Jerusalem to translate the prophecies they possessed into the Greek tongue. Being subjects of the Macedonians, they chose out seventy elders from among the men of highest standing, men who knew the scriptures and were skilled in Greek, and sent them to him with the sacred books. Each man translated each prophetic book separately; then all the versions were compared, and they agreed in sense and in wording alike. This was God’s own plan, carried out for the benefit of Greek ears. It was not foreign to the working of God, who gave the prophecy, to produce the translation as well and to make it, so to speak, a Greek prophecy. For when the scriptures had been lost in the captivity under Nebuchadnezzar, Ezra the Levite, the priest, in the time of Artaxerxes king of the Persians, was filled with the spirit of prophecy and restored the whole of the ancient scriptures. [a]

Aristobulus, in the first book of his work addressed to Philometor, writes in these words: “And Plato followed the laws that were given to us, and had plainly studied everything that is said in them.” And before Demetrius, someone else had already translated — before the rule of Alexander and of the Persians — the account of how our own people the Hebrews left Egypt, and the story of everything that happened to them, and their taking possession of the land, and the whole body of the law. So it is perfectly clear that the philosopher I have just mentioned drew a great deal from this source, for he was a very learned man; and so did Pythagoras, who carried many things over from our books into his own teaching. Numenius, the Pythagorean philosopher, writes it out plainly: “For what is Plato but Moses speaking Attic Greek?” This Moses was a man who spoke of God, and a prophet, and, as some say, an interpreter of sacred laws. His family, his deeds and his life are told by the scriptures themselves, which deserve every confidence; but we must give an account of them too, as well as we can.

Moses came of a Chaldean family and was born in Egypt, his forefathers having moved from Babylon into Egypt because of a long famine. He was born in the seventh generation, and he was given a royal upbringing. His story runs as follows. The Hebrews had multiplied in Egypt into a great host, and the king of the country, afraid of a rising because of their numbers, gave orders that every girl born to the Hebrews should be reared — a woman being no use for war — but that every boy should be destroyed, since he was suspicious of sturdy young men. The child, however, was beautiful, and his parents nursed him in secret for three months; natural affection proved stronger than the king’s cruelty. At last, afraid they would be destroyed along with the child, they made a basket out of the papyrus that grew there, put the child in it, and laid it on the bank of the marshy river. The child’s sister stood at a distance and watched to see what would happen. Just then the king’s daughter, who had long been childless and wanted a child, came down to the river that day to bathe and wash herself. She heard the baby crying, had him brought to her, and, moved with pity, looked for a nurse. At that moment the child’s sister ran up and said that, if the princess wished, she could get her a nurse from among the Hebrew women who had recently had a child. The princess agreed and told her to do it, and the girl brought the child’s own mother to nurse him for an agreed fee, as though she were somebody else. So the queen gave the baby the name Moses, and named him aptly, from his having been drawn out of the water — for the Egyptians call water mou — the water in which he had been put out to die. For their word means a man who drew breath after being taken from the water. It is clear that his parents had already given the child a name at his circumcision: he was called Joachim. And he had a third name in heaven, after he was taken up — so those who hand on the secret traditions say — Melchi. [h]

When he reached the proper age he was taught arithmetic, geometry, poetry and harmony, and besides these medicine and music, by the men who excelled in those arts among the Egyptians; and he was taught as well the philosophy that is carried in symbols, which they display in the writing of the hieroglyphs. The rest of the ordinary course of study Greeks gave him in Egypt, as a royal child, as Philo says in his life of Moses. He learned besides the literature of the Egyptians, and the knowledge of the heavenly bodies from the Chaldeans and the Egyptians — which is why in Acts he is said “to have been instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.” And Eupolemus, in his book On the Kings in Judea, says that “Moses was the first wise man, and the first to hand grammar on to the Jews; the Phoenicians received it from the Jews, and the Greeks from the Phoenicians.” He threw himself into their philosophy and grew in wisdom, being passionately attached to the training he had from his own kin and forefathers — until he struck and killed the Egyptian who was wrongfully attacking the Hebrew. And those who hand on the secret traditions say that he killed the Egyptian by a word alone, just as Peter in Acts is said to have killed by speech the pair who kept back part of the price of the field and lied. So too Artapanus, in his work On the Jews, relates that Moses was shut up in prison by Chenephres, king of the Egyptians, because the people were demanding to be let go from Egypt; that the prison was opened in the night by God’s doing, and Moses went out, reached the palace, stood over the king as he slept, and woke him; that the king, shaken by what had happened, told Moses to say the name of the God who had sent him; and that Moses leaned forward and told it to him in his ear, and the king, on hearing it, fell speechless, but was held up by Moses and came round again. And on the education of Moses we shall find an account that agrees with this in Ezekiel, who composed Jewish tragedies, in the play called The Exodus. He writes as follows, in the person of Moses:

Then, after telling of the fight between the Hebrew and the Egyptian, and the burying of the Egyptian in the sand, he says of the other quarrel:

Then he fled from Egypt and kept sheep, and so was trained beforehand for a shepherd’s kind of rule. For the life of a shepherd is a preparation for kingship in a man who is meant to rule over the peaceable flock of human beings, as hunting is for men who are warlike by nature. From there God brought him to lead the Hebrews. The Egyptians were warned again and again and went on being fools, while the Hebrews looked on at the disasters that fell on other people, learning the power of God in safety. And when the Egyptians paid no attention to what that power was doing, and in their senseless folly refused to believe, then, as it is said, “the children knew” what had been done. Afterward the Hebrews went out and left carrying a great deal of plunder from the Egyptians — not out of greed, as the fault-finders say, for God did not talk them into coveting what belonged to other people. In the first place, they took wages for the work they had done for the Egyptians all that time; and then they paid the Egyptians back after a fashion, punishing their greed by carrying off the goods, as the Egyptians had punished them by enslaving them. So whether they thought it right — as men are said to do in war — to take their enemies’ property by a conqueror’s right, the way winners take from losers (and there was a just cause for hostilities: the Hebrews had come to the Egyptians as suppliants because of famine, and the Egyptians reduced their guests to slavery and made them serve like prisoners of war, giving them nothing in return); or whether, as in peacetime, they took the goods as wages against the will of men who for a long time had given them nothing in return but had robbed them instead — it comes to the same thing.

Our Moses, then, is a prophet, a lawgiver, a man skilled in tactics and strategy, a statesman, a philosopher. In what sense he was a prophet will be told by and by, when we come to deal with prophecy. Tactics belong to command in the field, and the ability to command an army is one of the marks of kingly rule. Lawmaking, again, is also one of the functions of the kingly office, and so is judging. [t]

Of the kingly office one kind is divine — the kind exercised according to God and his holy Son, by whom both the good things of earth and the outward things and perfect happiness besides are supplied. “Seek what is great,” it is said, “and the little things will be added to you.” There is a second kind of royal rule, lower than that purely reasonable and divine administration, which brings to the work of governing nothing but the high spirit of the soul; that is how Hercules ruled the Argives and Alexander the Macedonians. The third kind aims at one thing only, to conquer and overthrow; whether the conquest is turned to a good end or a bad one is no concern of such rule. That was the aim of the Persians in their campaign against Greece. For love of strife is nothing but the work of passion, and gets power only for the sake of domination; while love of the good belongs to a soul that puts its high spirit to noble ends. The fourth kind, and the worst of all, is the rule that acts at the prompting of the passions, like that of Sardanapalus and of men who set themselves no other end than to gratify the passions to the utmost. But the instrument of royal sway — the instrument alike of the rule that overcomes by excellence and of the rule that overcomes by force — is the art of management, and it varies with the nature and the material it works on. With weapons and with fighting animals, the ordering power is soul and mind, working through things living and lifeless; and with the passions of the soul, which we master by virtue, the ordering power is reason, which stamps them with the seal of continence and self-restraint, together with holiness, and with sound knowledge along with truth, so that the whole thing ends in reverence toward God. For it is wisdom that keeps order in men who practice virtue in this way; divine things are set in order by wisdom and human affairs by statesmanship, and all of them by the kingly faculty. So a king is a man who governs according to the laws and has the skill to rule willing subjects. Such is the Lord, who receives all who trust in him and through him. For the Father has handed all things over to Christ our King and put them under him, “so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven and things on earth and things under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

Now generalship covers three things: caution, enterprise, and the two together. Each of these consists of three, since they act either by word, or by deeds, or by both at once. And all of it can be carried out by persuasion, or by force, or by doing harm in the way of taking vengeance on men who deserve punishment; and that either by doing what is right, or by saying what is untrue, or by saying what is true, or by using several of these means together at the same time. Now the Greeks had the advantage of receiving all of this from Moses, along with the knowledge of how to use each of them. And for the sake of example I will cite an instance or two of his leadership.

When Moses led the people out, he suspected the Egyptians would pursue, so he left the short and direct road, turned aside into the desert, and marched mostly by night. For it was another kind of arrangement as well, by which the Hebrews were trained in the great wilderness over a long stretch of time to believe that one God alone exists, being hardened by the wise discipline of endurance they were put through. So the strategy of Moses shows how necessary it is to see what will be of service before the dangers arrive, and to meet them that way. It turned out exactly as he suspected. The Egyptians pursued with horses and chariots, and were quickly destroyed when the sea broke over them and overwhelmed them with their horses and chariots, so that not one of them was left. Afterward the pillar of fire that traveled with them — for it went ahead of them as a guide — led the Hebrews by night through country no one had walked, training and bracing them by toil and hardship into manliness and endurance, so that after their experience of what looked like impossible difficulties the good things of the land he was bringing them to out of the trackless desert would stand out plainly. Furthermore he put to flight and killed the hostile occupants of the land, falling on them from a desert and rugged line of march — such was the excellence of his generalship. For the taking of the land of those hostile tribes was a work of skill and strategy.

Miltiades, the Athenian general who beat the Persians in the battle at Marathon, saw this and copied it in the following way. He marched over trackless waste, leading the Athenians on by night, and slipped past the foreigners who were set to watch him. For Hippias, who had deserted from the Athenians, had brought the foreigners into Attica and had seized and held the points of vantage, since he knew the ground. The task, then, was to get past Hippias. And so Miltiades was right to cross the waste and attack by night the Persians commanded by Datis, and he led his men to victory. But further, when Thrasybulus was bringing the exiles back from Phyle and wanted to escape notice, a pillar became his guide as he marched over trackless country. To Thrasybulus by night, when the sky was moonless and stormy, a fire appeared going on ahead; and after bringing them through safely it left them near Munychia, where the altar of the Light-bringer stands today. From a case like that, then, let our own accounts become believable to the Greeks: that it was possible for God, who can do all things, to make the pillar of fire that was their guide on the march go ahead of the Hebrews by night. There is a line in a certain oracle too:

— and it comes from the history of the Hebrews. Euripides too says, in the Antiope:

The pillar signifies that God cannot be portrayed. And the pillar of light, besides pointing out that God cannot be represented, shows as well the steadiness and the lasting permanence of the Deity, and his unchangeable and inexpressible light. So before images in human shape were invented, the ancients set up pillars and revered them as statues of the god. Accordingly the man who composed the Phoronis writes:

Further, the author of the Europia relates that the statue of Apollo at Delphi was a pillar, in these words:

Apollo, taken in the hidden sense as “without many,” means the one God. Well then, that fire like a pillar, and the fire in the desert, is the symbol of the holy light which passed through from earth and returned again to heaven by the wood, by which also the gift of seeing with the mind was given to us.