Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Nor, I think, need we argue over whether God has good reason to forbid his name and honor from being lent out to a lie, whether he has good reason not to want those he has torn free from the error of superstition to slide back again into Egypt, whether he has good reason not to allow those he has chosen for himself to break away from him. So neither should it be expected that we go back over whether he willed the discipline he set out to institute to be observed, and whether he justly avenges its abandonment when he willed it observed — since it would have been pointless to institute it if he had not willed it observed, and pointless to will it observed if he had not been willing to vindicate it. [2] It follows, then, that I should prove these determinations of God against acts of superstition — determinations both established as binding and actually enforced — since on these the entire logic of martyrdom rests. Moses was away from the people, up on the mountain with God, when the people, unable to bear so necessary an absence, sought to produce gods for themselves — the very move by which they ruined themselves all the more thoroughly. [3] Aaron is pressed, and orders the earrings of their women to be thrown into the fire. For they were about to lose, to their own judgment, their true ornaments of the ear — the words of God. The clever fire poured out for them the shape of a calf, mocking those who kept their heart where their treasure was — in Egypt, that is — among whose other animals a certain ox, too, had its own consecratress. [4] And so three thousand men, cut down by their nearest kin — because they had offended so near a Kinsman as God — dedicated, in themselves, both the beginnings and the deserts of that transgression. In Numbers, when Israel had turned aside and camped at Shittim, they went off to fornicate with the daughters of Moab, and were invited to idols, so that they might play the harlot in spirit as well; they even ate of things polluted by them, and then worshiped the gods of that nation and were initiated into Baal of Peor. [5] For this idolatry, sister of adultery, twenty-three thousand were cut down by the swords of their own households and offered up to appease the divine wrath. When Joshua son of Nun had died, they abandoned the God of their fathers and served the idols of the Baals and the Astartes, and the Lord, in anger, handed them over into the hands of plunderers, and they were plundered by them and sold to their enemies, and could not so much as stand their ground before their enemies' faces. [6] Wherever they went out, the hand of the Lord was against them for evil, and they were sorely crushed. After this God raised up over them Judges — whom we understand as Censors. But not even to these did they persist in giving heed. As soon as each judge had died, they turned to wrongdoing worse than their fathers, chasing after gods not their own, giving them service and homage. [7] And so the Lord, in his anger, said: "Since this people has transgressed my covenant, which I laid down for their fathers, and has not listened to my voice, I too will no longer trouble myself to drive out before them a single man of the nations that Joshua left behind when he died." And so, through nearly the whole record of the judges and, afterward, of the kings, Israel — the strength of the surrounding nations having been kept in reserve — paid out God's wrath by war and captivity and the yoke of foreigners, every time it strayed from him, above all into idolatry.