Freud - Complete Works (782 page)

   I may continue the discussion
with a few critical remarks of my own. The kernel of my hypothesis
- the dependence of Jewish monotheism on the monotheist episode in
Egyptian history - has been suspected and mentioned by various
writers. I spare myself the trouble of quoting these opinions here,
since none of them is able to indicate how this influence can have
come into operation. Even though in our view that influence remains
linked to the figure of Moses, we ought also to mention some other
possibilities in addition to the one we prefer. It must not be
supposed that the fall of the official Aten religion brought the
monotheist current in Egypt to a complete stop. The priesthood at
On, from which it started, survived the catastrophe and may have
continued to bring under the sway of its trend of ideas generations
after Akhenaten’s. Thus the action taken by Moses is still
conceivable even if he did not live at the time of Akhenaten and
did not fall under his personal influence, if he was only an
adherent or perhaps a member of the priesthood of On. This
possibility would postpone the date of the Exodus and bring it
closer to the date which is usually adopted (in the thirteenth
century); but it has nothing else to recommend it. Our insight into
the motives of Moses would be lost and the facilitation of the
Exodus by the prevailing anarchy in the country would no longer
apply. The succeeding kings of the Nineteenth Dynasty established a
strong
régime
. It was only during the period
immediately after the heretic king’s death that there was a
convergence of all the conditions, external and internal alike,
that were favourable to the Exodus.

Moses And Monotheism

4862

   The Jews possess a copious
literature apart from the Bible, in which the legends and myths are
to be found which grew up in the course of centuries round the
imposing figure of their first leader and the founder of their
religion, and which have both illuminated and obscured it.
Scattered in this material there may be fragments of trustworthy
tradition for which no room was found in the Pentateuch. A legend
of this sort gives an engaging account of how the ambition of the
man Moses found expression even in his childhood. Once when Pharaoh
had taken him in his arms and playfully lifted him high in the air,
the little three-year-old boy snatched the crown from the
king’s head and put it on his own. This portent alarmed the
king, who did not fail to consult his wise men about it.¹
There are stories elsewhere of his victorious military actions as
an Egyptian general in Ethiopia, and, in this connection, how he
fled from Egypt because he had reason to be afraid of the envy of a
party at Court or of Pharaoh himself. The Biblical account itself
attributes some features to Moses to which credence may well be
given. It describes him as being of an irascible nature, flaring up
easily, as when, in indignation, he slew the brutal overseer who
was ill-treating a Jewish workman, or when in his anger at the
people’s apostasy he broke the Tables of the Law which he had
brought down from the Mount of God; indeed God himself punished him
in the end for an impatient deed, but we are not told what it was.
Since a trait of this kind is not one that would serve for his
glorification, it may perhaps correspond to a historical truth. Nor
can the possibility be excluded that some of the character traits
which the Jews included in their early picture of their God -
describing him as jealous, severe and ruthless - may have been at
bottom derived from a recollection of Moses; for in fact it was not
an invisible God but the man Moses who brought them out of
Egypt.

  
¹
This anecdote, in a slightly different
form, also appears in Josephus.

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4863

   Another trait attributed to Moses
has a special claim to our interest. Moses is said to have been
‘slow of speech’: he must have suffered from an
inhibition or disorder of speech. Consequently, in his supposed
dealings with Pharaoh, he needed the support of Aaron, who is
called his brother. This again may be a historical truth and would
make a welcome contribution to presenting a lively picture of the
great man. But it may also have another and more important
significance. It may recall, slightly distorted, the fact that
Moses spoke another language and could not communicate with his
Semitic neo-Egyptians without an interpreter, at all events at the
beginning of their relations - a fresh confirmation, then, of the
thesis that Moses was an Egyptian.

   Now, however, or so it seems, our
work has reached a provisional end. For the moment we can draw no
further conclusions from our hypothesis that Moses was an Egyptian,
whether it has been proved or not. No historian can regard the
Biblical account of Moses and the Exodus as anything other than a
pious piece of imaginative fiction, which has recast a remote
tradition for the benefit of its own tendentious purposes. The
original form of that tradition is unknown to us; we should be glad
to discover what the distorting purposes were, but we are kept in
the dark by our ignorance of the historical events. The fact that
our reconstruction leaves no room for a number of show-pieces in
the Bible story, such as the ten plagues, the passage of the Red
Sea and the solemn law-giving on Mount Sinai - this does not
disconcert us. But we cannot treat it as a matter of indifference
if we find ourselves in contradiction to the findings of the sober
historical researches of the present day.

   These modern historians, of whom
we may take Eduard Meyer (1906) as a representative, agree with the
Bible story on one decisive point. They too are of opinion that the
Jewish tribes, which later developed into the people of Israel,
took on a new religion at a certain point of time. But in their
view this did not take place in Egypt or at the foot of a mountain
in the Sinai Peninsula, but in a certain locality known as Meribah
Kadesh, an oasis distinguished by its wealth of springs and wells
in the stretch of country south of Palestine, between the eastern
exit from the Sinai Peninsula and the western border of Arabia.
There they took over the worship of a god Yahweh, probably from the
neighbouring Arabian tribe of Midianites. It seems likely that
other tribes in the vicinity were also followers of this god.

Moses And Monotheism

4864

   Yahweh was unquestionably a
volcano god. Now, as is well known, Egypt is without volcanoes and
the mountains of the Sinai Peninsula have never been volcanic; on
the other hand, there are volcanoes which may have been active till
recent times along the western border of Arabia. So one of these
mountains must have been the Sinai-Horeb which was regarded as the
home of Yahweh.¹ In spite of all the revisions to which the
Biblical story was subjected, the original picture of the
god’s character can, according to Eduard Meyer, be
reconstructed: he was an uncanny, bloodthirsty demon who went about
by night and shunned the light of day.²

   The mediator between God and the
people in the founding of this religion was named Moses. He was the
son-in-law of the Midianite priest Jethro, and was keeping his
flocks when he received the summons from God. He was also visited
by Jethro at Kadesh and given some advice by him.

   Though Eduard Meyer says, it is
true, that he never doubted that there was some historical core in
the story of the sojourn in Egypt and the catastrophe to the
Egyptians,³ he evidently does not know how to place and what
use to make of this fact which he recognizes. The only thing he is
prepared to derive from Egypt is the custom of circumcision. He
adds two important indications which go to confirm our previous
arguments: first, that Joshua ordered the people to be circumcised
in order to ‘roll away the reproach of Egypt from off
you’, and secondly a quotation from Herodotus saying that
‘the Phoenicians (no doubt the Jews) and the Syrians of
Palestine themselves admit that they learnt the custom of the
Egyptians’.
⁴
But he has
little to say in favour of an Egyptian Moses: ‘The Moses we
know is the ancestor of the priests of Kadesh - that is, a figure
from a genealogical legend, standing in relation to a cult, and not
a historical personality. Thus (apart from those who accept
tradition root and branch as historical truth) no one who treats
him as a historical figure has been able to give any content to
him, to represent him as a concrete individual or to point out what
he may have done and what his historical work may have
been.’
⁵

  
¹
At a few places in the Biblical text it is
still stated that Yahweh came down from Sinai to
Meribah-Kadesh.

  
²
Meyer, 1906, 38 and 58.

  
³
Meyer, 1906, 49.

  
⁴
Meyer, 1906, 449.

  
⁵
Meyer, 1906, 451.

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   On the other hand, Meyer is never
tired of insisting on the relation of Moses to Kadesh and Midian:
‘The figure of Moses, which is intimately bound up with
Midian and the cult-centres in the
desert . . .’¹ and: ‘This figure of
Moses, then, is inseparably linked with Kadesh (Massah and Meribah)
and this is supplemented by his being the son-in-law of the
Midianite priest. His link with the Exodus, on the contrary, and
the whole story of his youth are entirely secondary and simply the
consequence of the interpolation of Moses into a connected and
continuous legendary story.’² Meyer also points out that
the themes included in the story of the youth of Moses were one and
all dropped later: ‘Moses in Midian is no longer an Egyptian
and grandson of Pharaoh, but a shepherd to whom Yahweh revealed
himself. In telling of the plagues there is no longer any talk of
his former connections, though effective use might easily have been
made of them, and the command to kill the sons of the Israelites is
completely forgotten. In the Exodus and the destruction of the
Egyptians Moses plays no part whatever: he is not even mentioned.
The heroic character which the legend of his childhood presupposes
is totally absent from the later Moses; he is only the man of God,
a miracle-worker equipped by Yahweh with supernatural
powers.’³

  
¹
Meyer, 1906, 49.

  
²
Meyer, 1906, 72.

  
³
Meyer, 1906, 47.

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   We cannot dispute the impression
that this Moses of Kadesh and Midian, to whom tradition could
actually attribute the erection of a brazen serpent as a god of
healing, is someone quite other than the aristocratic Egyptian
inferred by us, who presented the people with a religion in which
all magic and spells were proscribed in the strictest terms. Our
Egyptian Moses is no less different, perhaps, from the Midianite
Moses than is the universal god Aten from the demon Yahweh in his
home on the Mount of God. And if we have any faith at all in the
pronouncements of the recent historians, we shall have to admit
that the thread which we have tried to spin from our hypothesis
that Moses was an Egyptian has broken for the second time. And this
time, as it seems, with no hope of mending.

(5)

   Unexpectedly, here once more a
way of escape presents itself. Efforts to see in Moses a figure
that goes beyond the priest of Kadesh, and to confirm the grandeur
with which tradition glorifies him, have not ceased even since
Eduard Meyer. (Cf. Gressmann and others.) Then, in 1922, Ernst
Sellin made a discovery which affected our problem decisively. He
found in the Prophet Hosea (in the second half of the eighth
century B.C.) unmistakable signs of a tradition to the effect that
Moses, the founder of their religion, met with a violent end in a
rising of his refractory and stiff-necked people, and that at the
same time the religion he had introduced was thrown off. This
tradition is not, however, restricted to Hosea; it reappears in
most of the later Prophets, and indeed, according to Sellin, became
the basis of all the later Messianic expectations. At the end of
the Babylonian captivity a hope grew up among the Jewish people
that the man who had been so shamefully murdered would return from
the dead and would lead his remorseful people, and perhaps not them
alone, into the kingdom of lasting bliss. The obvious connection of
this with the destiny of the founder of a later religion does not
concern us here.

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4867

   Once again I am not, of course,
in a position to judge whether Sellin has interpreted the passages
from the Prophets correctly. But if he is right we may attribute
historical credibility to the tradition he has recognized, for such
things are not readily invented. There is no tangible motive for
doing so; but if they have really happened, it is easy to
understand that people will be anxious to forget them. We need not
accept all the details of the tradition. In Sellin’s opinion
Shittim, in the country east of the Jordan, is to be regarded as
the scene of the attack on Moses. But we shall soon see that that
region is not acceptable for our notions.

   We will borrow from Sellin his
hypothesis that the Egyptian Moses was murdered by the Jews and the
religion he had introduced abandoned. This allows us to spin our
threads further without contradicting the authentic findings of
historical research. But apart from this we shall venture to
maintain independence of the authorities and to ‘proceed
along our own track’. The Exodus from Egypt remains our
starting-point. A considerable number of people must have left the
country with Moses; a small collection would not have seemed worth
while to this ambitious man with his large aims in view. The
immigrants had probably been living in Egypt long enough to have
grown into quite a large population. But we shall certainly not be
going wrong if we assume, with the majority of the authorities,
that only a fraction of what was later to be the Jewish people had
experienced the events in Egypt. In other words, the tribe that
returned from Egypt joined up later, in the stretch of country
between Egypt and Canaan, with other kindred tribes, which had been
settled there for a considerable time. This union, from which
sprang the people of Israel, found expression in the adoption of a
new religion, common to all the tribes, the religion of Yahweh - an
event which, according to Eduard Meyer, took place under Midianite
influence at Kadesh. Thereafter, the people felt strong enough to
undertake their invasion of the land of Canaan. It would not tally
with this course of events to suppose that the catastrophe to Moses
and his religion occurred in the country east of the Jordan; it
must have happened long before the union of the tribes.