Freud - Complete Works (779 page)

   With Moses things were quite
different. In his case the first family, elsewhere the aristocratic
one, was sufficiently modest. He was the child of Jewish Levites.
But the place of the second family, elsewhere the humble one, was
taken by the royal house of Egypt; the princess brought him up as
her own son. This deviation from type has puzzled many people.
Eduard Meyer, and others following him, assumed that originally the
legend was different. Pharaoh, according to them, had been warned
by a prophetic dream¹ that a son born to his daughter would
bring danger to him and his kingdom. He therefore had the child
exposed in the Nile after his birth. But he was rescued by Jewish
people and brought up as their child. For ‘nationalist
motives’ (as Rank puts it²) the legend would then have
been given the modified form in which we know it.

  
¹
This is also mentioned in the account given
by Flavius Josephus.

  
²
Rank, 1909, 80
n
.

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4845

   A moment’s reflection,
however, tells us that an original legend of Moses like this, one
no longer deviating from the other legends, cannot have existed.
For it was either of Egyptian or of Jewish origin. The first
alternative is ruled out: the Egyptians had no motive for
glorifying Moses, since he was no hero to them. We are to suppose,
then, that the legend was created among the Jewish people - that is
to say, that it was attached in its familiar form to the figure of
their leader. But it was totally unsuitable for that purpose, for
what would be the use to a people of a legend which made their
great man into a foreigner?

   The legend of Moses, in the form
in which we have it to-day, falls notably short of its secret
intention. If Moses was not of royal birth, the legend could not
stamp him as a hero; if it left him as a Jewish child, it had done
nothing to raise his social standing. Only one small fragment of
the entire myth remains effective: the assurance that the child had
survived in the face of powerful external forces. (This feature
recurs in the story of the childhood of Jesus, in which King Herod
takes over the role of Pharaoh.) Thus we are in fact free to
suppose that some later and clumsy adapter of the material of the
legend found an opportunity for introducing into the story of his
hero Moses something which resembled the classical exposure legends
marking out a hero, but which, on account of the special
circumstances of the case, was not applicable to Moses,

   Our investigations might have had
to rest content with this inconclusive and, moreover, uncertain
outcome, and they might have done nothing towards answering the
question of whether Moses was an Egyptian. There is, however,
another and perhaps more hopeful line of approach to an assessment
of the legend of exposure.

   Let us return to the two families
of the myth. At the level of analytic interpretation they are, as
we know, identical; whereas at the level of the myth they are
differentiated into an aristocratic family and a humble one. Where,
however, the figure to whom the myth is attached is a historical
one, there is a third level - that of reality. One of the families
is the real one, in which the person in question (the great man)
was actually born and grew up; the other is fictitious, fabricated
by the myth in pursuit of its own intentions. As a rule the humble
family is the real one and the aristocratic family the fabricated
one. The situation in the case of Moses seemed somehow different.
And here the new line of approach will perhaps lead to a
clarification: in every instance which it has been possible to
test, the first family, the one from which the child was exposed,
was the invented one, and the second one, in which he was received
and grew up, was the real one. If we have the courage to recognize
this assertion as universally true and as applying also to the
legend of Moses, then all at once we see things clearly: Moses was
an Egyptian - probably an aristocrat - whom the legend was designed
to turn into a Jew. And that would be our conclusion. The exposure
in the water was at its correct point in the story; but, in order
to fit in with the fresh purpose, its aim had to be somewhat
violently twisted. From being a way of sacrificing the child, it
was turned into a means of rescuing him.

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4846

   The deviation of the legend of
Moses from all the others of its kind can be traced back to a
special feature of his history. Whereas normally a hero, in the
course of his life, rises above his humble beginnings, the heroic
life of the man Moses began with his stepping down from his exalted
position and descending to the level of the Children of Israel.

   We started on this brief enquiry
in the expectation of deriving a fresh argument from it in support
of the suspicion that Moses was an Egyptian. We have seen that the
first argument, based on his name, failed with many people to carry
conviction.¹ We must be prepared to find that this new
argument, based on an analysis of the legend of exposure, may have
no better success. It will no doubt be objected that the
circumstances of the construction and transformation of legends
are, after all, too obscure to justify a conclusion such as ours
and that the traditions surrounding the heroic figure of Moses -
with all their confusion and contradictions and their unmistakable
signs of centuries of continuous and tendentious revisions and
superimpositions - are bound to baffle every effort to bring to
light the kernel of historical truth that lies behind them. I do
not myself share this dissenting attitude but neither am I in a
position to refute it.

  
¹
Thus Eduard Meyer writes (1905, 651):
‘The name "Moses" is probably Egyptian, and the
name "Pinchas" in the priestly family of
Shiloh . . . is undoubtedly Egyptian. Of course this
does not prove that these families were of Egyptian origin, but, no
doubt, that they had connections with Egypt.’ We may ask, to
be sure, what sort of connections this is supposed to make us think
of.

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4847

   If no more certainty could be
reached than this, why, it may be asked, have I brought this
enquiry into public notice at all? I am sorry to say that even my
justification for doing so cannot go beyond hints. For if one
allows oneself to be carried away by the two arguments which I have
put forward here, and if one sets out to take the hypothesis
seriously that Moses was an aristocratic Egyptian, very interesting
and far-reaching prospects are opened up. With the help of some not
very remote assumptions, we shall, I believe, be able to understand
the motives which led Moses in the unusual step he took and,
closely related to this, to obtain a grasp of the possible basis of
a number of the characteristics and peculiarities of the laws and
religion which he gave to the Jewish people; and we shall even be
led on to important considerations regarding the origin of
monotheist religions in general. Such weighty conclusions cannot,
however, be founded on psychological probabilities alone. Even if
one accepts the fact of Moses being an Egyptian as a first
historical foothold, one would need to have at least a second firm
fact in order to defend the wealth of emerging possibilities
against the criticism of their being a product of the imagination
and too remote from reality. Objective evidence of the period to
which the life of Moses and with it the Exodus from Egypt are to be
referred would perhaps have fulfilled this requirement. But this
has not been obtainable, and it will therefore be better to leave
unmentioned any further implications of the discovery that Moses
was an Egyptian.

Moses And Monotheism

4848

II

IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN . . .

In an earlier contribution to this
periodical,¹ I attempted to bring up a fresh argument in
support of the hypothesis that the man Moses, the liberator and
law-giver of the Jewish people, was not a Jew but an Egyptian. It
had long been observed that his name was derived from the Egyptian
vocabulary, though the fact had not been properly appreciated. What
I added was that the interpretation of the myth of exposure which
was linked with Moses necessarily led to the inference that he was
an Egyptian whom the needs of a people sought to make into a Jew. I
remarked at the end of my paper that important and far-reaching
implications followed from the hypothesis that Moses was an
Egyptian, but that I was not prepared to argue publicly in favour
of these implications, since they were based only on psychological
probabilities and lacked any objective proof. The greater the
importance of the views arrived at in this way, the more strongly
one feels the need to beware of exposing them without a secure
basis to the critical assaults of the world around one - like a
bronze statue with feet of clay. Not even the most tempting
probability is a protection against error; even if all the parts of
a problem seem to fit together like the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle,
one must reflect that what is probable is not necessarily the truth
and that the truth is not always probable. And lastly, it did not
seem attractive to find oneself classed with the schoolmen and
Talmudists who delight in exhibiting their ingenuity without regard
to how remote from reality their thesis may be.

   Notwithstanding these
hesitations, which weigh as much with me to-day as they did before,
the outcome of my conflicting motives is a decision to produce the
present sequel to my earlier communication. But once again this is
not the whole story nor the most important part of the whole
story.

  
¹
Imago
,
23
(1937).

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4849

(1)

   If, then, Moses was an Egyptian -
our first yield from this hypothesis is a fresh enigma and one
which it is hard to solve. If a people or a tribe¹ sets out
upon a great undertaking, it is only to be expected that one of its
members will take his place as their leader or will be chosen for
that post. But it is not easy to guess what could induce an
aristocratic Egyptian - a prince, perhaps, or a priest or high
official - to put himself at the head of a crowd of immigrant
foreigners at a backward level of civilization and to leave his
country with them. The well known contempt felt by the Egyptians
for foreign nationals makes such a proceeding particularly
unlikely. Indeed I could well believe that this has been precisely
why even those historians who have recognized that the man’s
name was Egyptian, and who have ascribed to him all the wisdom of
the Egyptians, have been unwilling to accept the obvious
possibility that Moses was an Egyptian.

   This first difficulty is promptly
followed by another. We must not forget that Moses was not only the
political leader of the Jews settled in Egypt but was also their
law-giver and educator and forced them into the service of a new
religion, which to this very day is known after him as the Mosaic
one. But is it so easy for one single man to create a new religion?
And if anyone wishes to influence another person’s religion,
would he not most naturally convert him to his own? The Jewish
people in Egypt were certainly not without a religion of some form
or other; and if Moses, who gave them a new one, was an Egyptian,
the presumption cannot be put aside that this other new religion
was the Egyptian one.

   There is something that stands in
the way of this possibility: the fact of there being the most
violent contrast between the Jewish religion which is attributed to
Moses and the religion of Egypt. The former is a rigid monotheism
on the grand scale: there is only one God, he is the sole God,
omnipotent, unapproachable; his aspect is more than human eyes can
tolerate, no image must be made of him, even his name may not be
spoken. In the Egyptian religion there is an almost innumerable
host of deities of varying dignity and origin: a few
personifications of great natural forces such as heaven and earth,
sun and moon, an occasional abstraction such as Ma’at (truth
or justice) or a caricature such as the dwarf-like Bes; but most of
them local gods, dating from the period when the country was
divided into numerous provinces, with the shape of animals, as
though they had not yet completed their evolution from the old
totem animals, with no sharp distinctions between them, and
scarcely differing in the functions allotted to them. The hymns in
honour of these gods say almost the same things about all of them,
and identify them with one another unhesitatingly, in a manner
hopelessly confusing to us. The names of gods are combined with one
another, so that one of them may almost be reduced to being an
epithet of the other. Thus, in the heyday of the ‘New
Kingdom’ the principal god of the city of Thebes was called
Amen-Re’; the first part of this compound stands for the
ram-headed god of the city, while Re’ is the name of the
falcon-headed sun-god of On. Magical and ceremonial acts, charms
and amulets dominated the service of these gods as they did the
daily life of the Egyptians.

  
¹
We have no notion of what numbers were
concerned in the Exodus from Egypt.

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   Some of these differences may
easily be derived from the fundamental contrast between a strict
monotheism and an unrestricted polytheism. Others are evidently the
result of a difference in spiritual and intellectual level, since
one of these religions is very close to primitive phases, while the
other has risen to the heights of sublime abstraction. It may be
due to these two factors that one occasionally has an impression
that the contrast between the Mosaic and the Egyptian religions is
a deliberate one and has been intentionally heightened - when, for
instance, one of them condemns magic and sorcery in the severest
terms, while in the other they proliferate with the greatest
luxuriance, or when the insatiable appetite of the Egyptians for
embodying their gods in clay, stone and metal (to which our museums
owe so much to-day) is confronted with the harsh prohibition
against making an image of any living or imagined creature.