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When Moses descended from Sinai, he there found his true servant Joshua, who had awaited
him on the slope of the mountain throughout all the forty days during which Moses stayed
in heaven, 277 and together they repaired to the encampment. On approaching it, they
heard cries of the people, and Joshua remarked to Moses: "There is a noise of war in
the camp," but Moses replied: "Is it possible that thou, Joshua, who art one day
destined to be the leader of sixty myriads of people, canst not distinguish among the
different kinds of dins? This is no cry of Israel conquering, nor of their defeated foe,
but their adoration of an idol." 278 When Moses had now come close enough to the
camp to see what was going on there, he thought to himself: "How now shall I give to
them the tables and enjoin upon them the prohibition of idolatry, for the very trespassing
of which, Heaven will inflict capital punishment upon them?" Hence, instead of
delivering to them the tables, he tried to turn back, but the seventy elders pursued him
and tried to wrest the tables from Moses. But his strength excelled that of the seventy
others, and he kept the tables in his hands, although these were seventy Seah in weight.
All at once, however, he saw the writing vanish from the tables, and at the same time
became aware of their enormous weight; for while the celestial writing was upon them, they
carried their own weight and did not burden Moses, but with the disappearance of the
writing all this changes. Now all the more did Moses feel loath to give the tables without
their contents to Israel, and besides he thought: "If God prohibited one idolatrous
Israelite from partaking of the Passover feast, how much more would He be angry if I were
now to give all the Torah to an idolatrous people?" Hence, without consulting God, he
broke the tables. God, however, thanked Moses for breaking the tables. 279
Hardly had Moses broken the tables, when the ocean wanted to leave its bed to flood the
world. Moses now "took the Calf which they had made, and burnt it in the fire, and
ground it to powder, and strewed it upon the water," saying to the waters: "What
would ye upon the dry land?" And the waters said: "The world stands only through
the observance of the Torah, but Israel has not been faithful to it." Moses hereupon
said to the water" "All that have committed idolatry shall be yours. Are you now
satisfied with these thousands?" But the waters were not to be appeased by the
sinners that Moses cast into them, and the ocean would not retreat to its bed until Moses
made the children of Israel drink of it. 280
The drinking of these waters was one of the forms of capital punishment that he inflicted
upon the sinners. When, in answer to Moses' call: "Who is on the Lord's side? Let him
come unto me," all the sons of Levi gathered themselves together unto him - they who
had not taken part in the adoration of the Golden Calf, - Moses appointed these Levites as
judges, whose immediate duty it was to inflict the lawful punishment of decapitation upon
all those who had been seen by witnesses to be seduced to idolatry after they had been
warned not to do so. Moses gave the command as though he had been commissioned to do so by
God. This was not actually so, but he did it in order to enable the judges appointed by
him to punish all the guilty in the course of one day, which otherwise, owing to the
procedure of Jewish jurisprudence, could not well have been possible. Those who, according
to the testimony of witnesses, had been seduced to idolatry, but who could not be proven
to have been warned beforehand, were not punished by temporal justice, they died of the
water that Moses forced them to drink; for this water had upon them the same effect as the
curse-bringing water upon the adulterous woman. But those sinners, too, against whom no
witnesses appeared, did not escape their fate, for upon them God sent the plague to carry
them off. 281
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