AARON.

The history of Aaron, high-priest of the Jews, and brother of Moses, is so fully related in the Pentateuch, and in the dictionaries of Moreri and Simon, that I may be excused from making an article of it in this place. I shall only observe, that his weakness in complying with the superstitious request of the Israelites, in the matter of the golden calf, has occasioned a great variety of fabulous notions. About the beginning of the seventeenth century, one Monceau or Moncæius published an Apology for Aaron, which was condemned by the inquisition at Rome, as had been foretold to the author by the Jesuit Cornelius à Lapide. In that Apology it is supposed that Aaron designed to represent the very same form which Moses exhibited some time after, namely, a cherub; but that the Hebrews fell down and worshipped it, contrary to his intention. An effectual confutation of this notion was published in the year 1609, by one of the doctors of the Sorbonne, who was a canon of the church of Amiens. Some say, that the powder of the golden calf burnt by Moses, which he mingled with the water that the Israelites drank, stuck in the beards of those who had worshipped

it; by which means their beards appealed gilded, as a special mark distinguishing the idolaters. This fable is inserted in the 32d chapter of Exodus, in a French bible, printed at Paris in the year 1538 by Anthony Bonnemere, who says in his preface, that this bible in the French tongue was first printed, at the desire of his most Christian majesty Charles VIII, in the year 1495, and has since been corrected and reprinted. And in the same preface he informs us, that the French translator had inserted nothing but “ pure truth,” as it is found in the Latin bible; and that nothing was omitted but what was improper to be translated. So that all which relates to the gilded beards is to be received as undoubted fact, as well as another story of the same kind, which is also inserted in this very chapter; namely, that the Children of Israel spat so violently in the face of Hur, who had refused to make gods for them, that they suffocated him. It has also been asserted that this criminal compliance on the part of Aaron was owing to his apprehension of being stoned to death. He hoped, it is said, Somewhat waggishly, it might be presumed, if the manner in which the fathers, and their successors, the doctors of the middle ages, frequently defend or palliate the conduct of scriptural characters, when opposed to the moral sense of mankind, was not often quite a* ridiculous. See, in articleAbraham, a defence of his dissimulation to Abimelech and Pharaoh, by St Chrysostom.—Ed. ² to elude the desires of the people by proposing to the women that they should contribute their earrings on the occasion, on the supposition that they would rather choose to renounce the presence of a visible deity than divest themselves of their personal ornaments. He found himself however mistaken, and that nothing is deemed too costly when the human mind is intoxicated with superstition and idolatry.—Art.Aaron.