The Mission of Moses by Friedrich Schiller

Translation

Moses And The Brazen Serpent, After Gustav Dore

Featured in New Lyre Spring-Summer 2025

The founding of the Jewish state by Moses is one of the most memorable events recorded in history, significant for the mental fortitude that made it possible, and even more so for its consequences for the world, which continue to this day. Two religions that dominate most of the inhabited earth, Christianity and Islam, both rely on the religion of the Hebrews. Without them, there would never have been either Christianity or the Koran.

Indeed, in a certain sense it is irrefutably true that we owe the Mosaic religion a large part of the enlightenment we enjoy today. For through them a precious truth, which reason, left to itself, would have discovered only after a slow development, the doctrine of the one God, was temporarily spread among the people and maintained among them as an object of blind faith until it could finally mature into a concept of reason in the brighter minds. As a result, a large part of the human race was spared all the sad, misleading paths to which belief in polytheism must ultimately lead, and the Hebrew constitution received the exclusive advantage that the religion of the wise did not stand in direct contradiction to the popular religion, as was the case with the enlightened pagans. In this light, the nation of the Hebrews must appear to us as an important universal-historical people, and all the evil commonly attributed to this people, all the efforts of witty minds to belittle it, will not prevent us from being just towards it. The unworthiness and depravity of a nation cannot obliterate the sublime merit of its lawgiver, nor can they destroy the great influence this nation rightfully maintains in world history.

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We must value it as an impure and common vessel, in which, however, something very precious has been preserved; we must revere in it the channel which, impure though it was, Providence chose to convey to us the noblest of all goods, the truth, but which Providence also scattered as soon as it had accomplished its end. In this way, we shall avoid imposing on the Hebrew people a value it never possessed, and from robbing it of a merit which cannot be disputed.

The Hebrews, as is well known, came to Egypt as a single nomadic family, numbering no more than 70 souls, and only became a people in Egypt. During a period of approximately 400 years, which they spent in that country, they multiplied to almost two million, among whom 6,000 warrior men were counted when they left that kingdom. During this long stay, they lived separated from the Egyptians, separated both by the place of their own habitation, which they occupied, and by their nomadic status, which made them an abomination to all the natives of the country and excluded them from any participation in the civil rights of the Egyptians. They governed themselves in a nomadic manner, the head of the household governing the family, the chieftain the tribes, and thus constituted a state within a state, which, through its prodigious growth, finally aroused the concern of the kings.

Such a segregated crowd in the heart of the empire, idle due to their nomadic way of life, tightly knit among themselves, but having no interest in common with the state, could become dangerous in the event of a hostile invasion and easily tempted to exploit the weakness of the state, of which they were idle spectators. Political wisdom therefore advised that they should be closely monitored, kept busy, and their numbers reduced. They were thus subjected to hard labor, and just as they had learned in this way to make them even useful to the state, self-interest now combined with politics to increase their burdens. They were inhumanly forced into public serfdom and special bailiffs were appointed to drive and mistreat them. This barbaric treatment, however, did not prevent them from spreading even further. A sound policy would therefore naturally have led to distributing them among the other inhabitants and granting them equal rights with them; But the general contempt the Egyptians felt towards them did not permit this. This abhorrence was further increased by the consequences it inevitably had. When the king of Egypt granted the province of Goshen (on the east bank of the lower Nile) to Jacob's family as a place of residence, he hardly reckoned that it would accommodate two million descendants. The province was therefore probably not particularly large, and the gift had always been generous enough, even if only a hundredth of this offspring had been taken into account. Since the Hebrews' habitation did not expand in proportion to their population, they had to live closer and closer together with each generation, until finally, in a way that was highly detrimental to their health, they crowded together in the smallest possible space. What was more natural than the consequences that are inevitable in such a case?—extreme uncleanliness and contagious diseases. Here, therefore, the first foundation was laid for the evil that has remained characteristic of this nation to the present day; but at that time it must have raged on a terrible scale. The most terrible plague of this part of the world, leprosy, swept among them and was passed down through many generations. The sources of life and procreation were slowly poisoned by it, and from an accidental evil there finally arose a hereditary tribal constitution. How widespread this evil was is evident from the multitude of provisions the legislator made against it; and the unanimous testimony of secular writers, the Egyptian Manetho, Diodorus of Sicily, Tacitus, Lysimachus, Strabo, and many others, who knew almost nothing of the Jewish nation except this widespread disease of leprosy, proves how widespread and how deep the impression it made on the Egyptians.

This leprosy, a natural consequence of their cramped quarters, their poor and meager food, and the mistreatment they suffered, became a new cause of it. Those who were initially despised as shepherds and avoided as strangers were now fled from and detested as plague-ridden. Thus, to the fear and aversion that had always been felt in Egypt, there was added disgust and a deep, repulsive contempt. They considered anything permissible against a people so terribly marked by the wrath of the gods, and there were no qualms about depriving them of their most sacred human rights.

No wonder that barbarism against them only increased as the consequences of this barbaric treatment became more visible, and that they were punished ever more severely for the misery wrought upon them.

The Egyptians knew of no other way to correct their disastrous policy than to enact new and more heinous ones. Since, despite all pressure, they failed to stop the population's growth at its source, they resorted to a solution as inhumane as it was miserable: to have newborn sons immediately strangled by midwives. But thanks to the better nature of man! Despots are not always well obeyed when they command abominations. The midwives in Egypt knew how to mock this unnatural command, and the government could not enforce its violent measures except by violent means. By royal command, hired assassins roamed the Hebrews' dwellings and murdered every male in their cribs. In this way, however, the Egyptian government was ultimately bound to achieve its goal and, unless a savior intervened, see the Jewish nation completely exterminated within a few generations.

But where would the savior of the Hebrews come from? Hardly from among the Egyptians themselves, for how could one of them stand up for a nation that was foreign to him, whose language he did not even understand and certainly did not take the trouble to learn, a nation that must have seemed to him as incapable and unworthy of a better fate. And even less so from their own midst, for what had the inhumanity of the Egyptians, over the course of several centuries, ultimately made of the Hebrew people? The most brutal, the most malicious, the most depraved people on earth, debauched by three hundred years of neglect, made despondent and embittered by such prolonged servile oppression, degraded in their own sight by a hereditary infamy, unnerved and paralyzed from all heroic resolve, finally reduced almost to the level of animals by such prolonged stupidity. How could a free man, an enlightened mind, a hero, or a statesman emerge from such a depraved race? Where could a man be found among them who could give respect to such a deeply despised mob of slaves, a sense of self to such a long-oppressed people, or superiority to such an ignorant, rude herdsmen over their refined oppressors? A bold and heroic spirit could no more arise among the Hebrews of that time than among the depraved caste of pariahs among the Hindus.

Here we must be moved to admiration by the mighty hand of Providence, which unravels the most intricate knot by the simplest means—not the foresight which interferes with the economy of nature by the violent means of miracles, but the foresight which has prescribed for nature itself such an economy as to accomplish extraordinary things by the most tranquil means. A native Egyptian lacked the necessary impetus, the national interest for the Hebrews, to set himself up as their savior. A mere Hebrew must have lacked the strength and spirit for this undertaking. What solution did fate choose, then? It took a Hebrew, but snatched him early from his own downtrodden people and gave him the benefit of Egyptian wisdom; and thus a Hebrew, raised in Egypt, became the instrument by which this nation escaped from slavery.