“The Old Testament was compiled and arranged from oral tradition; the masses never knew its real meaning, for Moses was ordered to impart the “hidden truths” but to his seventy elders on whom the “Lord” put of the spirit which was upon the legislator.
Maimonides, whose authority and whose knowledge of the sacred history can hardly be rejected, says: “Whoever shall find out the true sense of the book of Genesis ought to take care not to divulge it. …If a person should discover the true meaning of it by himself, or by the aid of another, then he ought to be silent; or, if he speaks of it, he ought to speak of it but obscurely and in an enigmatical manner.”
This confession, that what is written in the Holy Writ is but an allegory, was made by other Jewish authorities besides Maimonides; for we find Josephus stating that Moses “philosophized” (spoke riddles in figurative allegory), when writing the book of Genesis.
Therefore modern science, by neglecting to unriddle the true sense of the Bible, and by allowing the whole of Christendom to go on believing in the dead letter of the Jewish theology, tacitly constitutes herself the confederate of the fanatical clergy. She has no right to ridicule the records of a people who never wrote them with the idea that they would receive such a strange interpretation at the hands of an inimical religion. That there holiest texts should be turned against them and that the dead men’s bones could have smothered the spirit of truth, is the saddest feature of Christianity!”
H. P. Blavatsky
