Freud - Complete Works (784 page)

  
¹
Cf. Yahuda, 1929.

  
²
If they were subject to the prohibition
against pictures they would even have had a motive for abandoning
the hieroglyphic picture writing while adapting its written
characters to expressing a new language. (Cf. Auerbach,
1932.)

Moses And Monotheism

4873

   The distorting purposes which we
are anxious to lay hold of must have been at work already on the
traditions before any of them were committed to writing. We have
already discovered one of them, perhaps the most powerful of all.
As we have said, with the setting-up of the new god, Yahweh, at
Kadesh, it became necessary to do something to glorify him. It
would be more correct to say: it became necessary to fit him in, to
make room for him, to wipe out the traces of earlier religions.
This seems to have been achieved with complete success as regards
the religion of the resident tribes: we hear nothing more of it.
With those returning from Egypt it was not such an easy matter;
they would not let themselves be deprived of the Exodus, the man
Moses or circumcision. It is true that they had been in Egypt, but
they had left it, and thenceforward every trace of Egyptian
influence was to be disavowed. The man Moses was dealt with by
shifting him to Midian and Kadesh, and by fusing him with the
priest of Yahweh who founded the religion. Circumcision, the most
suspicious indication of dependence on Egypt, had to be retained
but no attempts were spared to detach the custom from Egypt - all
evidence to the contrary. It is only as a deliberate denial of the
betraying fact that we can explain the puzzling and
incomprehensibly worded passage in
Exodus
, according to
which on one occasion Yahweh was angry with Moses because he had
neglected circumcision, and his Midianite wife saved his life by
quickly carrying out the operation. We shall presently come across
another invention for making the uncomfortable piece of evidence
harmless.

   The fact that we find signs of
efforts being made to deny explicitly that Yahweh was a new god,
alien to the Jews, can scarcely be described as the appearance of a
fresh tendentious purpose: it is rather a continuation of the
former one. With this end in view the legends of the patriarchs of
the people - Abraham, Isaac and Jacob - were introduced. Yahweh
asserted that he was already the god of these forefathers; though
it is true that he himself had to admit that they had not
worshipped him under that name.¹ He does not add, however,
what the other name was.

  
¹
This does not make the restrictions upon
the use of this new name more intelligible, though it does make
them more suspect.

Moses And Monotheism

4874

   And here was the opportunity for
a decisive blow against the Egyptian origin of the custom of
circumcision: Yahweh, it was said, had already insisted on it with
Abraham and had introduced it as the token of the covenant between
him and Abraham. But this was a particularly clumsy invention. As a
mark that is to distinguish one person from others and prefer him
to them, one would choose something that is not to be found in
other people; one would
not
choose something that can be
exhibited in the same way by millions of other people. An Israelite
who was transplanted to Egypt would have had to acknowledge every
Egyptian as a brother in the covenant, a brother in Yahweh. It is
impossible that the Israelites who created the text of the Bible
can have been ignorant of the fact that circumcision was indigenous
in Egypt. The passage in Joshua quoted by Eduard Meyer admits this
without question but for that very reason it had to be disavowed at
any price.

   We must not expect the mythical
structures of religion to pay too much attention to logical
coherence. Otherwise popular feeling might have taken justified
offence against a deity who made a covenant with their forefathers
with mutual obligations and then, for centuries on end, paid no
attention to his human partners, till it suddenly occurred to him
to manifest himself anew to their descendants. Even more puzzling
is the notion of a god’s all at once ‘choosing’ a
people, declaring them to be his people and himself to be their
god. I believe this is the only instance of its sort in the history
of human religions. Ordinarily god and people are indissolubly
linked, they are one from the very beginning of things. No doubt we
sometimes hear of a people taking on a different god, but never of
a god seeking a different people. We may perhaps understand this
unique event better if we recall the relations between Moses and
the Jewish people. Moses had stooped to the Jews, had made them his
people: they were his ‘chosen people’.¹

  
¹
Yahweh was undoubtedly a volcano god. There
was no occasion for the inhabitants of Egypt to worship him. I am
certainly not the first person to be struck by the resemblance of
the sound of the name ‘Yahweh’ to the root of the other
divine name ‘Jupiter (Jove)
’
. The name ‘Jochanan’ is
compounded with an abbreviation of the Hebrew Yahweh - in the same
kind of way as ‘Gotthold’ and the Carthaginian
equivalent ‘Hannibal’. This name (Jochanan), in the
forms ‘Johann’, ‘John’, ‘Jean’,
‘Juan’, has become the favourite first name in European
Christendom. The Italians, in rendering it ‘Giovanni’
and moreover calling a day of the week ‘Giovedi’, are
bringing to light a resemblance which may possibly mean nothing or
possibly a very great deal. At this point, extensive but very
uncertain prospects open up before us. It seems that, in those
obscure centuries which are scarcely accessible to historical
research, the countries round the eastern basin of the
Mediterranean were the scene of frequent and violent volcanic
eruptions, which must have made the strongest impression on their
inhabitants. Evans assumes that the final destruction of the palace
of Minos at Knossos too was the consequence of an earthquake. In
Crete at that period (as probably in the Aegean world in general)
the great mother-goddess was worshipped. The realization that she
was not able to protect her house against the assaults of a
stronger power may have contributed to her having to give place to
a male deity, and, if so, the volcano god had the first claim to
take her place. After all, Zeus always remains the
‘earth-shaker’. There is little doubt that it was
during those obscure ages that the mother-goddesses were replaced
by male gods (who may originally perhaps have been sons). The
destiny of Pallas Athene, who was no doubt the local form of the
mother-goddess, is particularly impressive. She was reduced to
being a daughter by the religious revolution, she was robbed of her
own mother and, by having virginity imposed on her, was permanently
excluded from motherhood.

Moses And Monotheism

4875

   The bringing-in of the patriarchs
served yet another purpose. They had lived in Canaan, and their
memory was linked with particular localities in that country. It is
possible that they were themselves originally Canaanite heroes or
local divinities, and were then seized on by the immigrant
Israelites for their prehistory. By appealing to the patriarchs
they were as it were asserting their indigenous character and
defending themselves from the odium attaching to an alien
conqueror. It was a clever twist to declare that the god Yahweh was
only giving them back what their forefathers had once
possessed.

   In the later contributions to the
text of the Bible the intention was put into effect of avoiding the
mention of Kadesh. The place at which the religion was founded was
fixed once and for all as the Mount of God, Sinai-Horeb. It is not
easy to see the motive for this; perhaps people were unwilling to
be reminded of the influence of Midian. But all later distortions,
especially of the period of the Priestly Code, had another aim in
view. There was no longer any need to alter accounts of events in a
desired sense - for this had been done long before. But care was
taken to shift back commands and institutions of the present day
into early times - to base them, as a rule, on the Mosaic
law-giving - so as to derive from this their claim to being holy
and binding. However much the picture of the past might in this way
be falsified, the procedure was not without a certain psychological
justification. It reflected the fact that in the course of long
ages - between the Exodus from Egypt and the fixing of the text of
the Bible under Ezra and Nehemiah some eight hundred years elapsed
- the Yahweh religion had had its form changed back into
conformity, or even perhaps into identity, with the original
religion of Moses.

   And this is the essential
outcome, the momentous substance, of the history of the Jewish
religion.

Moses And Monotheism

4876

(7)

   Of all the events of early times
which later poets, priests and historians undertook to work over,
one stood out, the suppression of which was enjoined by the most
immediate and best human motives. This was the murder of Moses, the
great leader and liberator, which Sellin discovered from hints in
the writings of the Prophets. Sellin’s hypothesis cannot be
called fantastic - it is probable enough. Moses, deriving from the
school of Akhenaten, employed no methods other than did the king;
he commanded, he forced his faith upon the people.¹ The
doctrine of Moses may have been even harsher than that of his
master. He had no need to retain the sun-god as a support: the
school of On had no significance for his alien people. Moses, like
Akhenaten, met with the same fate that awaits all enlightened
despots. The Jewish people under Moses were just as little able to
tolerate such a highly spiritualized religion and find satisfaction
of their needs in what it had to offer as had been the Egyptians of
the Eighteenth Dynasty. The same thing happened in both cases:
those who had been dominated and kept in want rose and threw off
the burden of the religion that had been imposed on them. But while
the tame Egyptians waited till fate had removed the sacred figure
of their Pharaoh, the savage Semites took fate into their own hands
and rid themselves of their tyrant.²

  
¹
At that period any other method of
influencing them was scarcely possible.

  
²
It is really remarkable how little we hear
in the thousands of years of Egyptian history of the violent
removal or murder of a Pharaoh. A comparison with Assyrian history,
for instance, must increase our surprise at this. It may, of
course, be accounted for by the fact that Egyptian history was
entirely written to serve official ends.

Moses And Monotheism

4877

   Nor can it be maintained that the
surviving text of the Bible gives us no warning of such an end to
Moses. The account of the ‘wandering in the
wilderness’, which may stand for the period during which
Moses ruled, describes a succession of serious revolts against his
authority which were also, by Yahweh’s command, suppressed
with bloody punishment. It is easy to imagine that one such
rebellion ended in a way different from what the text suggests. The
people’s defection from the new religion is also described in
the text - only as an episode, it is true: namely in the story of
the golden calf. In this, by an ingenious turn, the breaking of the
tables of the law (which is to be understood symbolically:
‘he has broken the law’) is transposed on to Moses
himself, and his furious indignation is assigned as its motive.

   There came a time when people
began to regret the murder of Moses and to seek to forget it. This
was certainly so at the time of the union of the two portions of
the people at Kadesh. But when the Exodus and the foundation of the
religion at the oasis were brought closer together, and Moses was
represented as being concerned in the latter instead of the other
man, not only were the demands of the followers of Moses satisfied
but the distressing fact of his violent end was successfully
disavowed. In actual fact it is most unlikely that Moses could have
taken part in the proceedings at Kadesh even if his life had not
been cut short.

Moses And Monotheism

4878

   We must now make an attempt at
elucidating the chronological relations of these events. We have
put the Exodus in the period after the end of the Eighteenth
Dynasty (1350 B.C.). It may have occurred then or a little later,
since the Egyptian chroniclers have included the succeeding years
of anarchy in the reign of Haremhab, which brought them to an end
and lasted till 1315 B.C. The next (but also the only) fixed point
for the chronology is afforded by the stela of Merenptah (1225-15
B.C.), which boasts of his victory over Isiraal (Israel) and the
laying waste of her seed (?). The sense to be attached to this
inscription is unfortunately doubtful, it is supposed to prove that
the Israelite tribes were already at that time settled in
Canaan.¹ Eduard Meyer rightly concludes from this stela that
Merenptah cannot have been the Pharaoh of the Exodus, as had been
lightly assumed previously. The date of the Exodus must have been
earlier. The question of who was the Pharaoh of the Exodus seems to
me altogether an idle one. There was no Pharaoh of the Exodus, for
it occurred during an interregnum. Nor does the discovery of the
stela of Merenptah throw any light on the possible date of the
union and founding of the religion at Kadesh. All that we can say
with certainty is that it was some time between 1350 and 1215 B.C.
We suspect that the Exodus comes somewhere very near the beginning
of this hundred years and the events at Kadesh not too far away
from its end. We should like to claim the greater part of this
period for the interval between the two occurrences. For we need a
comparatively long time for the passions of the returning tribes to
have cooled down after the murder of Moses and for the influence of
his followers, the Levites, to have become as great as is implied
by the compromise at Kadesh. Two generations, sixty years, might
about suffice for this, but it is a tight fit. What is inferred
from the stela of Merenptah comes too early for us, and since we
recognize that in this hypothesis of ours one supposition is only
based on another, we must admit that this discussion reveals a weak
side of our construction. It is unlucky that everything relating to
the settlement of the Jewish people in Canaan is so obscure and
confused. Our only resort, perhaps, is to suppose that the name on
the ‘Israel’ stela does not relate to the tribes whose
fortunes we are trying to follow and which combined to form the
later people of Israel. After all, the name of ‘Habiru’
(Hebrews) was transferred to these same people in the Amarna
period.