nakedness of thy
daughter-in-law, thy brother's wife, the nakedness of a woman and her
daughter, thou shalt not uncover. And unto a woman separated by her
uncleanliness thou shalt not approach to uncover her nakedness. Thou
shalt not be carnally with thy neighbor's wife, to defile thyself with
her. Thou shalt not be with mankind as with womankind. And thou shalt
not be with any beast to defile thyself thereto; neither shall any woman
stand before a beast to lie down thereto; it is confusion."

The Martian, totally aghast, is constrained to exclaim that he cannot
believe that a Deity should find it necessary to place this in a divine
revelation. The Hebrew Zealot relents somewhat to explain that perhaps
this was not revealed, but found its way into the divine text as a
moral lesson to the primitive tribes for which it was written. To this,
our guest counters with the remark that if this be a parable of manners
and morals, then, from what he observes on the earth, we, Earthlings,
have certainly outgrown the need for such coarse and obscene statements
made some 2000 years ago; and that on Mars, although the inhabitants are
not blessed with such divine revelations, common sense and reason have
taught their most primitive men the same lessons in morality while they
were yet in their infancy.

Reflecting on this maze of contradictions, the Martian determines to
analyze the Old Testament and the Hebrew religion in the same manner
that he would investigate any other problem presented to him.

Thirty-five hundred years ago, the Hebrews were a pastoral, primitive
people inhabiting the wilderness known today as the Arabian Desert.
Their religion was that of all other primitive peoples--Animism, an
illusion which made primitive man recognize everywhere spirits similar
to his own spirit. They worshiped the spirits of the sun and the moon,
the mountains and rocks, as well as the spirits of the dead.

It appears certain that the barrenness of this desert land necessitated
these wandering tribes to migrate to adjacent areas of greater
fertility. To the north lay the fertile valleys of the Tigris and
Euphrates and the coast of the Mediterranean Sea; to the west lay the
land of the Egyptians. Time and time again, these Bedouin tribes hurled
themselves against the inhabitants of the northern fertile valleys.
Babylonia, to the northeast, was the first country to be invaded, and
later Canaan to the northwest. Successful at times in estab