Freud - Complete Works (780 page)

   But there is still another
contrast between the two religions which is not met by the
explanations we have attempted. No other people of antiquity did so
much to deny death or took such pains to make existence in the next
world possible. And accordingly Osiris, the god of the dead, the
ruler of this other world, was the most popular and undisputed of
all the gods of Egypt. On the other hand the ancient Jewish
religion renounced immortality entirely; the possibility of
existence continuing after death is nowhere and never mentioned.
And this is all the more remarkable since later experiences have
shown that belief in an after-life is perfectly well compatible
with a monotheist religion.

   It was our hope that the
hypothesis that Moses was an Egyptian would turn out to be fruitful
and illuminating in various directions. But the first conclusion we
drew from that hypothesis - that the new religion which he gave to
the Jews was his own Egyptian one - has been invalidated by our
realization of the different, and indeed contradictory, character
of the two religions.

Moses And Monotheism

4851

(2)

   Another possibility is opened to
us by a remarkable event in the history of the Egyptian religion,
an event which has only lately been recognized and appreciated. It
remains possible that the religion which Moses gave to his Jewish
people was nevertheless his own - that it was
an
Egyptian
religion, though not
the
Egyptian religion.

   In the glorious Eighteenth
Dynasty, under which Egypt first became a world power, a young
Pharaoh came to the throne in about the year 1375 B.C. To begin
with he was called, like his father, Amenophis (IV), but later he
changed his name and not only his name. This king set about forcing
a new religion on his Egyptian subjects - a religion which ran
contrary to their thousands-of-years-old traditions and to all the
familiar habits of their lives. It was a strict monotheism, the
first attempt of the kind, so far as we know, in the history of the
world, and along with the belief in a single god religious
intolerance was inevitably born, which had previously been alien to
the ancient world and remained so long afterwards. The reign of
Amenophis, however, lasted for only seventeen years. Very soon
after his death in 1358 B.C., the new religion was swept away and
the memory of the heretic king was proscribed. What little we know
of him is derived from the ruins of the new royal capital which he
built and dedicated to his god and from the inscriptions in the
rock tombs adjacent to it. Whatever we can learn about this
remarkable and, indeed, unique personality is deserving of the
highest interest.¹

  
¹
Breasted calls him ‘the first
individual in human history’.

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4852

   Every novelty must have its
preliminaries and preconditions in something earlier. The origins
of Egyptian monotheism can be traced back a little way with some
certainty.¹ For a considerable time, tendencies had been at
work among the priesthood of the sun temple at On (Heliopolis) in
the direction of developing the idea of a universal god and of
emphasizing the ethical side of his nature. Ma’at, the
goddess of truth, order and justice, was a daughter of the sun god
Re’. During the reign of Amenophis III, the father and
predecessor of the reformer, the worship of the sun god had already
gained a new impetus - probably in opposition to Amun of Thebes,
who had become too powerful. A very ancient name of the sun god,
Aten or Atum, was brought into fresh prominence, and the young king
found in this Aten religion a movement ready to hand, which he did
not have to be the first to inspire but of which he could become an
adherent.

   The political conditions in Egypt
had begun at this time to exercise a lasting influence on the
Egyptian religion. As a result of the military exploits of the
great conqueror, Tuthmosis III, Egypt had become a world power: the
empire now included Nubia in the south, Palestine, Syria and a part
of Mesopotamia in the north. This imperialism was reflected in
religion as universalism and monotheism. Since the Pharaoh’s
responsibilities now embraced not only Egypt but Nubia and Syria as
well, deity too was obliged to abandon its national limitation and,
just as the Pharaoh was the sole and unrestricted ruler of the
world known to the Egyptians, this must also apply to the
Egyptians’ new deity. Moreover, with the extension of the
empire’s frontiers, it was natural that Egypt would become
more accessible to foreign influences; some of the royal wives were
Asiatic princesses,² and it is possible that direct
incitements to monotheism even made their way in from Syria.

  
¹
What follows is in the main based on the
accounts given by Breasted (1906 and 1934) and in the relevant
sections of the
Cambridge Ancient History
, Vol.
II.

  
²
This may perhaps be true even of Nefertiti,
the beloved wife of Amenophis.

Moses And Monotheism

4853

   Amenophis never denied his
adherence to the sun cult of On. In the two Hymns to the Aten which
have survived in the rock tombs and which were probably composed by
him himself, he praises the sun as the creator and preserver of all
living things both inside and outside Egypt with an ardour which is
not repeated till many centuries later in the Psalms in honour of
the Jewish god Yahweh. He was not content, however, with this
astonishing anticipation of the scientific discovery of the effect
of solar radiation. There is no doubt that he went a step further:
that he did not worship the sun as a material object but as the
symbol of a divine being whose energy was manifested in its
rays.¹

   We should not, however, be doing
justice to the king if we regarded him merely as an adherent or
promoter of an Aten religion already in existence before his time.
His activity was a far more energetic intervention. He introduced
something new, which for the first time converted the doctrine of a
universal god into monotheism - the factor of exclusiveness. In one
of his hymns he declares expressly: ‘O thou sole God, beside
whom there is no other!’² And we must not forget that in
assessing the new doctrine a knowledge of its
positive
contents is not enough: its
negative
side is almost equally
important - a knowledge of what it rejects. It would be a mistake,
too, to suppose that the new religion was completed at a single
blow and sprang to life fully armed, like Athene out of the head of
Zeus. Everything suggests, rather, that in the course of the reign
of Amenophis it increased little by little to ever greater clarity,
consistency, harshness and intolerance. It is likely that this
development came about under the influence of the violent
opposition to the king’s reform which arose among the priests
of Amun. In the sixth year of the reign of Amenophis this
antagonism had reached such a pitch that the king changed his name,
of which the proscribed name of the god Amun formed a part. Instead
of ‘Amenophis’ he now called himself
‘Akhenaten’.³ But it we not only from his own name
that he expunged that of the detested god: he erased it too from
every inscription - even where it occurred in the name of his
father, Amenophis III. Soon after changing his name Akhenaten
abandoned the Amun-dominated city of Thebes and built himself a new
royal capital lower down the river, which he named Akhetaten (the
horizon of the Aten). Its ruined site is now known as Tell
el-’Amarna.
⁴

  
¹
‘But, however evident the
Heliopolitan origin of the new state religion might be, it was not
merely sun-worship; the word Aton was employed in the place of the
old word for "god" (
nuter
), and the god is clearly
distinguished from the material sun.’ Breasted, 1906, 360. -
‘It is evident that what the king was deifying was the force
by which the Sun made himself felt on earth.’ Breasted, 1934,
279. - Erman (1905, 66) makes a similar judgement on a formula in
honour of the god: ‘These are . . . words
which are meant to express as abstractly as possible that it is not
the heavenly body itself that is worshipped but the being which
reveals itself in it.’

  
²
Breasted, 1906, 374
n
.

  
³
  I adopt here the English spelling of
the name (alternatively ‘Akhenaton’). The king’s
new name has approximately the same meaning as his earlier one:
‘The god is satisfied.’ Cf. the German
‘Gotthold’ and ‘Gottfried’.

  
⁴
It
was there that in 1887 the discovery - of such great historical
importance - was made of the Egyptian kings’ correspondence
with their friends and vassals in Asia.

Moses And Monotheism

4854

   The persecution by the king fell
most harshly upon Amun, but not on him alone. Throughout the
kingdom temples were closed, divine service forbidden, temple
property confiscated. Indeed, the king’s zeal went so far
that he had the ancient monuments examined in order to have the
word ‘god’ obliterated in them where it occurred in the
plural.¹ It is not to be wondered at that these measures taken
by Akhenaten provoked a mood of fanatical vindictiveness among the
suppressed priesthood and unsatisfied common people, and this was
able to find free expression after the king’s death. The Aten
religion had not become popular; it had probably remained
restricted to a narrow circle surrounding the king’s person.
Akhenaten’s end remains veiled in obscurity. We hear of a few
short-lived, shadowy successors from his own family. His son-law,
Tut’ankhaten, was already compelled to return to Thebes and
to replace the name of the god Aten in his name by that of Amun.
There followed a period of anarchy till in 1350 B.C. a general,
Haremhab, succeeded in restoring order. The glorious Eighteenth
Dynasty was at an end and simultaneously its conquests in Nubia and
Asia were lost. During this gloomy interregnum the ancient
religions of Egypt were re-established. The Aten religion was
abolished, Akhenaten’s royal city was destroyed and plundered
and his memory proscribed as that of a criminal.

  
¹
Breasted, 1906, 363.

Moses And Monotheism

4855

   It is with a particular purpose
that we shall now emphasize a few points among the negative
characteristics of the Aten religion. In the first place,
everything to do with myths, magic and sorcery is excluded from
it.¹ In the next place, the manner in which the sun-god was
represented was no longer, as in the past, by a small pyramid and a
falcon, but - and this seems almost prosaic - by a round disk with
rays proceeding from it, which end in human hands. In spite of all
the exuberant art of the Amarna period, no other representation of
the sun-god - no personal image of the Aten - has been found, and
it may confidently be said that none will be found.² Lastly,
there was complete silence about the god of the dead, Osiris, and
the kingdom of the dead. Neither the hymns nor the tomb
inscriptions have any knowledge of what perhaps lay closest to the
hearts of the Egyptians. The contrast to the popular religion
cannot be more clearly demonstrated.³

  
¹
Weigall (1922, 120-1) says that Akhenaten
would hear nothing of a Hell against whose terrors people might
protect themselves with innumerable magical formulae:
‘Akhnaton flung all these formulae into the fire. Djins,
bogies, spirits, monsters, demigods, demons, and Osiris himself
with all his court, were swept into the blaze and reduced to
ashes.’

  
²
‘Akhnaton did not permit any graven
image to be made of the Aton. The True God, said the king, had no
form; and he held to this opinion throughout his life.’
(Weigall, 1922, 103.)

  
³
‘Nothing was to be heard any more of
Osiris and his kingdom.’ (Erman, 1905, 70.) - ‘Osiris
is completely ignored. He is never mentioned in any record of
Ikhnaton or in any of the tombs at Amarna.’ (Breasted, 1934,
291.)

Moses And Monotheism

4856

(3)

   I should now like to venture on
this conclusion: if Moses was an Egyptian and if he communicated
his own religion to the Jews, it must have been Akhenaten’s,
the Aten religion.

   I have already compared the
Jewish religion with the popular religion of Egypt and shown the
opposition between them, I must now make a comparison between the
Jewish and the Aten religions in the expectation of proving their
original identity. This, I am aware, will present no easy task.
Thanks to the vindictiveness of the priests of Amun we may perhaps
know too little of the Aten religion. We only know the Mosaic
religion in its final shape, as it was fixed by the Jewish
priesthood some eight hundred years later in post-exilic times. If,
in spite of this unfavourable state of the material, we find a few
indications which favour our hypothesis, we shall be able to set a
high value on them.

   There would be a short path to
proving our thesis that the Mosaic religion was none other than
that of the Aten - namely, if we had a confession of faith, a
declaration. But I fear we shall be told that this path is closed
to us. The Jewish confession of faith, as is well known, runs:
‘Schema Jisroel Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echod.’ If it is
not merely by chance that the name of the Egyptian Aten (or Atum)
sounds like the Hebrew word
Adonai
and the name of the
Syrian deity Adonis, but if it is due to a primaeval kinship of
speech and meaning, then the Jewish formula might be translated
thus: ‘Hear, O Israel: our god Aten (Adonai) is a sole
god.’ Unfortunately I am totally incompetent to answer this
question, and I have been able to find but little about it in the
literature of the subject.¹ But in all probability this is
making things too easy for us. In any case we shall have to come
back once more to the problems concerning the name of the god.