Freud - Complete Works (781 page)

  
¹
Only a few passages in Weigall (1922, 12
and 19), to the effect that ‘the god Atum, the aspect of Ra
as the setting sun, was probably of common origin with Aton who was
largely worshipped in North Syria’, and that a ‘foreign
queen with her retinue may have therefore felt more sympathy with
Heliopolis than with Thebes.’

Moses And Monotheism

4857

   The similarities as well as the
differences between the two religions are easily discernible
without giving us much light. Both of them were forms of a strict
monotheism, and we shall be inclined
a priori
to trace back
what they had in common to this fundamental characteristic. Jewish
monotheism behaved in some respects even more harshly than the
Egyptian: for instance in forbidding pictorial representations of
any kind. The most essential difference is to be seen (apart from
their gods’ names) in the fact that the Jewish religion was
entirely without sun worship, in which the Egyptian one still found
support. When we were making the comparison with the popular
religion of Egypt, we had an impression that, apart from the
fundamental contrast, a factor of
intentional
contradiction
played a part in the difference between the two religions. This
impression seems to be justified if now, in making the comparison,
we replace the Jewish religion by the Aten religion which, as we
know, was developed by Akhenaten in deliberate hostility to the
popular one. We were rightly surprised to find that the Jewish
religion would have nothing to do with the next world or a life
after death, though a doctrine of that kind would have been
compatible with the strictest monotheism. But this surprise
vanishes if we turn back from the Jewish to the Aten religion and
suppose that this refusal was taken over from it, since for
Akhenaten it was a necessity in his fight against the popular
religion, in which Osiris, the god of the dead, played a greater
part, perhaps, than any god in the upper world. The agreement
between the Jewish and the Aten religions on this important point
is the first strong argument in favour of our thesis. We shall
learn that it is not the only one.

Moses And Monotheism

4858

   Moses did not only give the Jews
a new religion; it can be stated with equal certainty that he
introduced the custom of circumcision to them. This fact is of
decisive importance for our problem and has scarcely ever been
considered. It is true that the Biblical account contradicts this
more than once. On the one hand it traces circumcision back to the
patriarchal age as a mark of a covenant between God and Abraham; on
the other hand it describes in a quite particularly obscure passage
how God was angry with Moses for having neglected a custom which
had become holy,¹ and sought to kill him; but that his wife, a
Midianite, saved her husband from God’s wrath by quickly
performing the operation. These, however, are distortions, which
should not lead us astray; later on we shall discover the reason
for them. The fact remains that there is only one answer to the
question of where the Jews derived the custom of circumcision from
- namely, from Egypt. Herodotus, the ‘father of
history’, tells us that the custom of circumcision had long
been indigenous in Egypt, and his statements are confirmed by the
findings in mummies and indeed by pictures on the walls of tombs.
No other people of the Eastern Mediterranean, so far as we know,
practised this custom; it may safely be presumed that the Semites,
Babylonians and Sumerians were uncircumcised. The Bible story
itself says this is so of the inhabitants of Canaan; it is a
necessary premiss to the adventure of Jacob’s daughter and
the prince of Shechem.² The possibility that the Jews acquired
the custom of circumcision during their sojourn in Egypt in some
way other than in connection with the religious teaching of Moses
may be rejected as completely without foundation. Now, taking it as
certain that circumcision was a universal popular custom in Egypt,
let us for a moment adopt the ordinary hypothesis that Moses was a
Jew, who sought to free his compatriots from bondage in Egypt and
lead them to develop an independent and self-conscious national
existence in another country - which was what in fact happened.
What sense could it have, in that case, that he should at the same
time impose on them a troublesome custom which even, to some
extent, made them into Egyptians and which must keep permanently
alive their memory of Egypt - whereas his efforts could only be
aimed in the opposite direction, towards alienating his people from
the land of their bondage and overcoming their longing for the
‘flesh-pots of Egypt’? No, the fact from which we
started and the hypothesis which we added to it are so incompatible
with each other that we may be bold enough to reach this
conclusion: if Moses gave the Jews not only a new religion but also
the commandment for circumcision, he was not a Jew but an Egyptian,
and in that case the Mosaic religion was probably an Egyptian one
and, in view of its contrast to the popular religion, the religion
of the Aten, with which the later Jewish religion agrees in some
remarkable respects.

  
¹
‘
Heilig.
’

  
²
I am very well aware that in dealing so
autocratically and arbitrarily with Biblical tradition - bringing
it up to confirm my views when it suits me and unhesitatingly
rejecting it when it contradicts me - I am exposing myself to
serious methodological criticism and weakening the convincing force
of my arguments. But this is the only way in which one can treat
material of which one knows definitely that its trustworthiness has
been severely impaired by the distorting influence of tendentious
purposes. It is to be hoped that I shall find some degree of
justification later on, when I come upon the track of these secret
motives. Certainty is in any case unattainable and moreover it may
be said that every other writer on the subject has adopted the same
procedure.

Moses And Monotheism

4859

   I have pointed out that my
hypothesis that Moses was not a Jew but an Egyptian created a fresh
riddle. His course of conduct, which seemed easily intelligible in
a Jew, was ununderstandable in an Egyptian. If, however, we place
Moses in the time of Akhenaten and suppose him in contact with that
Pharaoh, the riddle vanishes and the possibility is revealed of
motives which will answer all our questions. Let us start from the
assumption that Moses was an aristocratic and prominent man,
perhaps in fact a member of the royal house, as the legend says of
him. He was undoubtedly aware of his great capacities, ambitious
and energetic; he may even have played with the notion of one day
being the leader of his people, of becoming the kingdom’s
ruler. Being close to the Pharaoh, he was a convinced adherent of
the new religion, whose basic thoughts he had made his own. When
the king died and the reaction set in, he saw all his hopes and
prospects destroyed; if he was not prepared to abjure all the
convictions that were so dear to him, Egypt had nothing more to
offer him - he had lost his country. In this predicament he found
an unusual solution. Akhenaten the dreamer had alienated his people
and let his empire fall to pieces. The more energetic nature of
Moses was more at home with the plan of founding a new kingdom, of
finding a new people to whom he would present for their worship the
religion which Egypt had disdained. It was, we can see, a heroic
attempt to combat destiny, to compensate in two directions for the
losses in which Akhenaten’s catastrophe had involved him.
Perhaps he was at that time Governor of the frontier province
(Goshen) in which certain Semitic tribes had settled (perhaps as
early as in the Hyksos period). These he chose to be his new people
- a historic decision.¹ He came to an agreement with them, put
himself at their head and carried the Exodus through ‘by
strength of hand’. In complete contrast to the Biblical
tradition, we may presume that this Exodus took place peacefully
and unpursued. The authority of Moses made this possible and at
that time there was no central administration which might have
interfered with it.

   According to this construction of
ours, the Exodus from Egypt would have occurred during the period
between 1358 and 1350 B.C. - that is, after Akhenaten’s death
and before Haremhab’s re-establishment of state
authority.² The goal of the migration could only have been the
land of Canaan. After the collapse of the Egyptian domination,
hordes of warlike Aramaeans had irrupted into that region,
conquering and plundering, and had shown in that way where a
capable people might win fresh land for themselves. We learn of
these warriors from the letters found in 1887 in the ruined city of
Amarna. There they are called ‘Habiru’, and the name
was transferred (we do not know how) to the later Jewish invaders -
‘Hebrews’ - who cannot be intended in the Amarna
letters. South of Palestine, too, in Canaan, there lived the tribes
which were the nearest relatives of the Jews who were now making
their way out of Egypt.

  
¹
If Moses was a high official, this makes it
easier to understand the role of leader which he assumed with the
Jews; if he was a priest, then it was natural for him to emerge as
the founder of a religion. In both these cases he would have been
continuing his former profession. A prince of the royal house might
easily have been both - a provincial governor and a priest. In the
account given by Flavius Josephus (in his
Jewish
Antiquities
), who accepts the exposure legend but seems to be
in touch with traditions other than the Biblical one, Moses, as an
Egyptian general, fought a victorious campaign in
Ethiopia.

  
²
This would make the Exodus about a century
earlier than is supposed by most historians, who put it in the
Nineteenth Dynasty under Merenptah. Or it may have happened a
little later, for the official histories seem to have included the
interregnum in the reign of Haremhab.

Moses And Monotheism

4860

   The motives which we have
discovered for the Exodus as a whole apply also to the introduction
of circumcision. We are familiar with the attitude adopted by
people (both nations and individuals) to this primaeval usage,
which is scarcely understood any longer. Those who do not practise
it look on it as very strange and are a little horrified by it, but
those who have adopted circumcision are proud of it. They feel
exalted by it, ennobled, as it were, and look down with contempt on
the others, whom they regard as unclean. Even to this day a Turk
will abuse a Christian as an ‘uncircumcised dog’. It
may be supposed that Moses, who, being an Egyptian, was himself
circumcised, shared this attitude. The Jews with whom he departed
from his country were to serve him as a superior substitute for the
Egyptians he had left behind. On no account must the Jews be
inferior to them. He wished to make them into a ‘holy
nation’, as is expressly stated in the Biblical text, and as
a mark of this consecration he introduced among them too the custom
which made them at least the equals of the Egyptians. And he could
only welcome it if they were to be isolated by such a sign and kept
apart from the foreign peoples among whom their wanderings would
lead them, just as the Egyptians themselves had kept apart from all
foreigners.¹

   Later on, however, Jewish
tradition behaved as though it were put at a disadvantage by the
inference we have been drawing. If it were to be admitted that
circumcision was an Egyptian custom introduced by Moses, that would
be almost as much as to recognize that the religion delivered to
them by Moses was an Egyptian one too. There were good reasons for
denying that fact, so the truth about circumcision must also be
contradicted.

  
¹
Herodotus, who visited Egypt about 450
B.C., enumerates in his account of his journey characteristics of
the Egyptian people which exhibit an astonishing similarity to
traits familiar to us in later Jewry: ‘They are altogether
more religious in every respect than any other people, and differ
from them too in a number of their customs. Thus they practise
circumcision, which they were the first to introduce, and on
grounds of cleanliness. Further they have a horror of pigs, which
is no doubt related to the fact that Seth in the form of a black
pig wounded Horus. And lastly and most markedly, they hold cows in
the greatest honour, and would never eat or sacrifice them, because
this would offend Isis with her cows horns. For that reason no
Egyptian man or woman would ever kiss a Greek or use his knife or
his spit or his cauldron or eat the flesh of an otherwise clean ox
if it had been cut with a Greek knife . . . They
look down in narrow-minded pride on other people, who are unclean
and are not so close to the gods as they are.’ (Erman, 1905,
181.) - We must not, of course, overlook parallels to this in the
life of the Indian people. - And, incidentally, who suggested to
the Jewish poet Heine in the nineteenth century A.D. that he should
complain of his religion as ‘the plague dragged along from
the Nile valley, the unhealthy beliefs of Ancient
Egypt’?

Moses And Monotheism

4861

(4)

   At this point I expect to be met
by an objection to my hypothesis. This placed Moses, an Egyptian,
in the Akhenaten period. It derived his decision to take over the
Jewish people from the political circumstances in the country at
that time, and it recognized the religion that he presented to or
imposed on his
protégés
as the Aten religion,
which had actually collapsed in Egypt itself. I expect to be told
that I have brought forward this structure of conjectures with too
much positiveness, for which there is no basis in the material.
This objection is, I think, unjustified. I have already laid stress
on the factor of doubt in my introductory remarks; I have, as it
were, placed that factor outside the brackets and I may be allowed
to save myself the trouble of repeating it in connection with each
item
inside
them.