Books: The Lawgiver

The Lawgiver MOSES (505 pp.)—Sholem Asch—Putnam ($3.75).

As a boy in Kutno, Poland, Sholem Asch used to pester his mother with the question: “Why has God divided mankind into Jew and Gentile?” With a rollicking brood of ten boys and five girls on her hands, Mother Asch had “other things to think about.” But the question plagued Sholem Asch, eventually led him to become a religious novelist.

In his fictionalized lives of Christ (The Nazarene), Saint Paul (The Apostle), and Mary, he stretched Gospel truth, stressed the ties of faith linking Jew and Christian, “in the hope that mutual understanding might bring about a better world.” For his pains, pious Novelist Asch caught a crossfire of criticism from both camps—and scored bull’s-eyes on the bestseller lists every time.

Moses, his first Old Testament novel, should be another bestseller, even though it contains little to scandalize anybody. Novelist Asch does try to rationalize a few of the Pentateuch stories, e.g., the “pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night” becomes a pall of light-refracting dust raised by the tramping Israelites and their cattle. Yet nothing can dim the essential grandeur of Moses and his mission.

“Falcon-eyed,” upright and just, he stalks the pages of Asch’s novel in many moods: rapt and docile before God’s voice in the burning bush, prophetic and lordly as he pronounces plagues on Egypt, exalted as he receives the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai, toweringly wrathful as he descends after 40 days and nights to find the children of Israel cavorting idolatrously before the golden calf. Humbly indomitable in faith, he is most moving when he prays for his wayward and wandering people.

Moses has one major flaw. By page 505, the waxy, unctuous prose with which Novelist Asch has Simonized the King James version will leave many an eye glazed, not with sanctity but with sleep.