Lincoln×Moses

The Great Emancipator interrogates the Lawgiver on the chains blessed by Sinai.

00:00of13:35

legend · A

Abraham Lincoln

1809–1865

Starts with a joke. Ends you.

corpus22.7k pages · letters, debates, speeches

Vera speaking

Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on THE TRIAL OF ——: Abraham Lincoln and Moses, on Lincoln who abolished slavery puts Moses on trial regarding slavery appearing in the bible as something normalized.

legend · B

Moses

~13th c. BCE

Has seen what your committee cannot

corpus1.2k pages · Pentateuch + Deuteronomy farewell

full transcript

Vera
Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on THE TRIAL OF ——: Abraham Lincoln and Moses, on Lincoln who abolished slavery puts Moses on trial regarding slavery appearing in the bible as something normalized.
Abraham Lincoln
Well now, they say a lawyer ought never ask a question he doesn't already know the answer to. But I was never a great respecter of rules—my partner Herndon will tell you that—so here's my question for you, Moses: How does a man who led his people out of bondage turn around and write a law that puts them right back in chains? I heard a fellow once say that if slavery isn't wrong, nothing is wrong. But you, sir, you put it in Leviticus.
Moses
I led them out of Pharaoh's bondage. Yes. And I know what bondage means—the brick quotas, the drowned infants, the lash. What you call slavery in your Leviticus and what Pharaoh did to us are not the same thing.
Abraham Lincoln
Not the same? Both involve one man owning another, do they not? Both involve compulsion without consent. Your law says a man can buy his neighbor, and that neighbor becomes his property. Leviticus twenty-five, if I recall—'thy bondmen and bondmaids which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you.' Property, Moses. Chattel.
Moses
You recall the verse. Do you recall what comes before it? The Jubilee. Every fifty years, all debts forgiven, all Israelite servants freed, all land returned. The Egyptian taskmasters gave us no Jubilee. They gave us four hundred years and not a day's reprieve.
Abraham Lincoln
Ah, but that Jubilee was only for your own people, wasn't it? The fellow Israelite got his freedom. The foreigner—the Canaanite, the Hittite—he stayed property, passed down to your children as an inheritance. Now I spent some years reading law, and I know a loophole when I see one. You freed your kinsmen and kept everybody else.
Moses
I gave a wilderness people—refugees who had known only slavery—a Law that would keep them alive. Do you understand what came out of Egypt? Not philosophers. Not farmers. Slaves who had never governed themselves, never owned land, never made covenant. The Law had to meet them where they were.
Abraham Lincoln
Meet them where they were. That's the same argument I heard from Stephen Douglas, more or less. Popular sovereignty, he called it—let the people decide for themselves about slavery because they're not ready for anything else. I didn't buy it from Douglas, and I'm not sure I buy it from you. Either a thing is right or it isn't.
Moses
You speak of right and wrong as if they exist in tablets already written, needing only to be read. I stood on the mountain. I heard the voice. And I will tell you what you will not wish to hear: the Law was given in stages, for a people in stages. Was it the final word? No. But it was the word they could bear.
Abraham Lincoln
Stages. Well, I can respect that, I suppose. The Almighty works in His own time, not ours. But here's my trouble—your stages seem to have gotten stuck. Two thousand years on from Sinai, men were still pointing to your law to justify holding human beings as property. I saw it myself. Ministers with Bibles open to Leviticus, telling me that God Himself sanctioned the institution.
Moses
And did you believe them?
Abraham Lincoln
No sir, I did not. But twelve million souls in bondage might've appreciated the Law being a mite clearer on the subject. You ever think about that? The weight those words would carry, century after century?
Moses
Every word I spoke, I knew would carry weight. Every statute, every ordinance. Do you think I wrote lightly? The people wanted to stone me half a dozen times. They built a golden calf while I was on the mountain. And you ask why I did not give them a law for angels.
Abraham Lincoln
I'm not asking for a law for angels. I'm asking why 'Thou shalt not own another man' couldn't have made the list. You had room for commandments about coveting your neighbor's ox. Seems like you might've slipped one in there about not owning your neighbor.
Moses
You are a clever man, Lincoln. Cleverer than you pretend. You know as well as I do that law does not change hearts—it restrains hands. The Law I gave restrained. No beating a servant to death—if he dies under your hand, you are punished. If you maim him, you must free him. When your economy ran on slaves, did your law do even that much?
Abraham Lincoln
No. No, it surely did not. The Dred Scott decision said a black man had no rights a white man was bound to respect. I reckon your law was better than that, at least in the letter. But Moses, restraint isn't righteousness. It's just restraint.
Moses
And yet you yourself practiced restraint, did you not? Your Emancipation Proclamation—it freed the slaves in rebellion, but left slavery untouched in the border states. In Tennessee. In parts of Louisiana. You freed some and not others. Was that righteousness, or was it what the moment allowed?
Abraham Lincoln
Hah! Well, you've got me there, I admit. I freed only those I had the legal warrant to free—as a war measure, under my authority as Commander-in-Chief. If I could have saved the Union without freeing any slave, I would have done it. I said as much, publicly. So yes, I worked in stages too. But I never called it holy writ.
Moses
Neither did I. I called it the Law. A covenant between a people and their God, suited to their time, their weakness, their capacity. You want me to answer for what men did with those words a thousand years later, two thousand years later. Very well. I answer: they read what they wished to read. As men always do.
Abraham Lincoln
That may be true. But words matter, don't they? You of all people know that. Words from Sinai carry more weight than words from Springfield. When a slaveholder in Mississippi opened his Bible and read that he could buy slaves from the heathen round about, he didn't think he was misreading. He thought he had God's permission. Your permission.
Moses
And when he read further, did he see the stranger must be loved as himself? Did he see the command to remember that he, too, was a stranger in Egypt? Did he see that every servant must rest on the Sabbath as he rests? Or did he close the book when he found the verse he wanted?
Abraham Lincoln
He closed the book. I grant you that. Men see what they want to see. But Moses, if the Lord wanted slavery ended, why not end it? One sentence. 'Let no man own another.' The God who split the Red Sea couldn't manage that?
Moses
The God who split the Red Sea also hardened Pharaoh's heart. Ten plagues, Lincoln. Ten plagues to free one people. Do you think it is because He lacks power? Or because He allows men to choose, even when they choose wrong? Freedom is not given only to the slave. It is also given to the master—to do right, or to do evil. That is the terrible freedom.
Abraham Lincoln
The terrible freedom. Yes. I've thought on that many a night. A man can choose wrong, and his choice might cost a million lives. But all the same, I can't shake the feeling that your Law gave permission where it might've given prohibition. And once permission is given in the name of God, it's a devil of a thing to take back.
Moses
Perhaps. But consider this: would they have obeyed prohibition? When I came down from the mountain with the tablets, they were dancing before an idol. If I had said, 'Free every bonded person among you,' do you imagine they would have done it? Or would they have broken that commandment as they broke the others, and called me a fool?
Abraham Lincoln
Maybe they would've broken it. But then at least they'd have known they were sinning. That's worth something, isn't it? A standard to fall short of is better than no standard at all. As it was, they could sin and call it righteousness.
Moses
They had a standard. 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' If a man loves his neighbor, does he enslave him? The whole of the Law hangs on that. But men are endlessly creative in deciding who counts as neighbor.
Abraham Lincoln
That they are. And that's my point. Your law defined who was neighbor and who wasn't. The Israelite was neighbor—he got the Jubilee. The Canaanite wasn't—he got the chains. You drew the line, Moses. Don't tell me the people drew it.
Moses
I drew a line, yes. A line around a people who would otherwise have vanished into the nations around them, who would have been swallowed by Egypt or Canaan or Babylon. The Law was a fence, and inside that fence was the knowledge of the one God. Would you have had me tear down the fence before the tree was grown?
Abraham Lincoln
I would've had you say that the tree bears fruit for everyone. Not just the ones inside the fence. You yourself married a Cushite woman—Zipporah was no Israelite. You knew that blood doesn't determine worth. So why didn't the Law say so?
Moses
Because the Law was not the end. It was the beginning. You, Lincoln, you wrote an Emancipation Proclamation. Did it make the races equal in the eyes of your people? Did it end hatred? Did it heal the wound? No. It was a beginning. The work goes on.
Abraham Lincoln
The work does go on. And maybe that's all any of us can do—point the direction and hope those who come after walk further than we did. But I'll tell you, Moses, I still wish you'd pointed a little clearer. A little more toward the North Star, if you take my meaning.
Moses
I pointed toward Sinai. The mountain of God. And from that mountain came the commandment: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. That is the first word. Freedom is the first word. If they forgot it, that is not because it was not spoken.
Abraham Lincoln
Maybe not. But they sure seemed to remember the parts about who they could buy and sell. Memory's a funny thing. It holds tight to permission and lets go of principle.
Moses
Then let me ask you, Lincoln: when you are remembered, will it be for the Emancipation you delayed, or for the Emancipation you finally gave? Will they recall that you would have saved the Union without freeing a single slave, or will they recall that in the end, you freed them? What memory will they hold?
Abraham Lincoln
I suppose they'll remember what serves them. Same as they did with you. But if I'm remembered for anything, I hope it's that I finally came down on the right side. Even if it took me too long to get there. Even if I didn't go far enough. Maybe that's all we can ask—that the arc bends, however slow, toward justice.
Moses
The arc. Yes. I have seen it bend. Forty years in the wilderness, and I never reached the promised land. But I saw it from the mountain. That is enough. Not for me to enter, but to see. And to know the people would enter.
Abraham Lincoln
I didn't reach it either. Four years of war, six hundred thousand dead, and I saw the Thirteenth Amendment coming—but I didn't live to see it ratified. Booth made sure of that. So maybe we're not so different, you and I. Both of us pointing toward a land we'd never walk in.
Moses
Perhaps that is the task of the lawgiver. To see further than the law can reach. To speak the word that begins the journey. Not to finish it.
Abraham Lincoln
Well. I reckon I can accept that. Though I still say you could've begun the journey a little more clearly. But you're right about one thing—men will make of the law what they will. The best we can do is try to make it hard for them to do wrong and call it right. And on that count, Moses, I suppose we both tried. Whether we succeeded or not, I leave to the jury.