2 Who called them to their sacrifices. And they ate of them, and adored their gods.
3 And Israel was initiated to Beelphegor: upon which the Lord being angry,
4 Said to Moses: Take all the princes of the people, and hang them up on gibbets against the sun: that my fury may be turned away from Israel.
5 And Moses said to the judges of Israel: Let every man kill his neighbours, that have been initiated to Beelphegor.
6 And behold one of the children of Israel went in before his brethren to a harlot of Madian, in the sight of Moses and of all the children of Israel, who were weeping before the door of the tabernacle.
7 And when Phinees the son of Eleazar the son of Aaron the priest saw it, he rose up from the midst of the multitude, and taking a dagger,
8 Went in after the Israelite into the brothel house, and thrust both of them through together, to wit, the man and the woman in the genital parts. And the scourge ceased from the children of Israel.
9 And there were slain four and twenty thousand men.
And when Moses saw that the people were naked, (for Aaron had stripped them by occasion of the shame of the filth, and had set them naked among their enemies)
26 Then standing in the gate of the camp, he said: If any man be on the Lord's side, let him join with me. And all the sons of Levi gathered themselves together unto him:
27 And he said to them: Thus saith the Lord God of Israel: Put every man his sword upon his thigh: go, and return from gate to gate through the midst of the camp, and let every man kill his brother, and friend, and neighbour.
28 And the sons of Levi did according to the words of Moses, and there were slain that day about three and twenty thousand men.
29 And Moses said: You have consecrated your hands this day to the Lord, every man in his son and in his brother, that a blessing may be given to you.
And what about the time the First Inquisitor became angry because his warriors did not kill the wimmin & chirren. He sent them back to kill all the male children and all the women 'cept for the virgins, whom they saved for themselves.
In two days Moses bumped-off more individuals, wimmin & chiren included-than did the Inquisition in 300 years.
<>[Respected non-Catholic historian Edward Peters, in his work, Inquisition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, p. 87), states:
The Spanish Inquisition, in spite of wildly inflated estimates of the numbers of its victims, acted with considerable restraint in inflicting the death penalty, far more restraint than was demonstrated in secular tribunals elsewhere in Europe that dealtwith the same kinds of offenses. The best estimate is that around 3000 death sentences were carried out in Spain by Inquisitorial verdict between 1550 and 1800, a far smaller number than that in comparable secular courts.
Fray Tomas de Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor whose very name is now a symbol of ruthless cruelty, actually checked the excessive zeal of the earlier inquisitors in many ways, including the limiting and mitigating of torture. Walsh thinks that torture under Torquemada was no worse than that used by American police in the 1930s. Also, under Torquemada's entire tenure as Grand Inquisitor (1483-1498), 100,000 prisoners passed before his various tribunals throughout Spain. Of this number, less than 2% were executed. In Barcelona, from 1488 to 1498, "one prisoner out of 20 was put to death" (23 executions). Torquemada is not the monster of the Black Legend; still, he was responsible for, as an estimation, between 1,000 and 1,500 deaths. And by burning, the common method for those times.<>
Compared to Moses, The Torque was Alan Alda on Valium and Progesterone.