Freud - Complete Works (786 page)

4884

PREFATORY NOTE II

(June, 1938)

   The quite special difficulties
which have weighed on me during my composition of this study
relating to the figure of Moses - internal doubts as well as
external obstacles - have resulted in this third and concluding
essay being introduced by two different prefaces, which contradict
each other and indeed cancel each other out. For in the short space
of time between the two there has been a fundamental change in the
author’s circumstances. At the earlier date I was living
under the protection of the Catholic Church, and was afraid that
the publication of my work would result in the loss of that
protection and would conjure up a prohibition upon the work of the
adherents and students of psycho-analysis in Austria. Then,
suddenly, came the German invasion and Catholicism proved, to use
the words of the Bible, ‘a broken reed’. In the
certainty that I should now be persecuted not only for my line of
thought but also for my ‘race’ - accompanied by many of
my friends, I left the city which, from my early childhood, had
been my home for seventy-eight years.

   I met with the friendliest
reception in lovely, free, magnanimous England. Here I now live, a
welcome guest; I can breathe a sigh of relief now that the weight
has been taken off me and that I am once more able to speak and
write - I had almost said ‘and think’ - as I wish or as
I must. I venture to bring the last portion of my work before the
public.

   There are no external obstacles
remaining, or at least none to be frightened of. In the few weeks
of my stay here I have received countless greetings from friends
who were pleased at my arrival, and from unknown and indeed
uninvolved strangers who only wanted to give expression to their
satisfaction at my having found freedom and safety here. And in
addition there arrived, with a frequency surprising to a foreigner,
communications of another sort, which were concerned with the state
of my soul, which pointed out to me the way of Christ and sought to
enlighten me on the future of Israel. The good people who wrote in
this way cannot have known much about me; but I expect that when
this work about Moses becomes known, in a translation, among my new
compatriots, I shall forfeit enough of the sympathy which a number
of other people as well now feel for me.

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   As regards
internal
difficulties, a political revolution and a change of domicile could
alter nothing. No less than before, I feel uncertain in the face of
my own work; I lack the consciousness of unity and of belonging
together which should exist between an author and his work. It is
not as though there were an absence of conviction in the
correctness of my conclusion. I acquired that a quarter of a
century ago when in 1912 I wrote my book about
Totem and
Taboo
, and it has only grown firmer since. From that time I
have never doubted that religious phenomena are only to be
understood on the pattern of the individual neurotic symptoms
familiar to us - as the return of long since forgotten, important
events in the primaeval history of the human family - and that they
have to thank precisely this origin for their compulsive character
and that, accordingly, they are effective on human beings by force
of the historical truth of their content. My uncertainty sets in
only when I ask myself whether I have succeeded in proving these
theses in the example which I have chosen here of Jewish
monotheism. To my critical sense this book, which takes its start
from the man Moses, appears like a dancer balancing on the tip of
one toe. If I could not find support in an analytic interpretation
of the exposure myth and could not pass from there to
Sellin’s suspicion about the end of Moses, the whole thing
would have had to remain unwritten. In any case, let us now take
the plunge.

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A

THE HISTORICAL PREMISS
¹

   Here, then, is the historical
background of the events which have absorbed our interest. As a
result of the conquests of the Eighteenth Dynasty, Egypt became a
world-empire. The new imperialism was reflected in the development
of the religious ideas, if not of the whole people, at least of its
ruling and intellectually active upper stratum. Under the influence
of the priests of the sun-god at On (Heliopolis), strengthened
perhaps by impulses from Asia, the idea arose of a universal god
Aten to whom restriction to a single country and a single people no
longer applied. In the young Amenophis IV a Pharaoh came to the
throne who had no higher interest than the development of this idea
of a god. He promoted the religion of Aten into the state religion,
and through him the universal god became the
only
god:
everything that was told of other gods was deceit and lies. With
magnificent inflexibility he resisted every temptation to magical
thought, and he rejected the illusion, so dear to Egyptians in
particular, of a life after death. In an astonishing presentiment
of later scientific discovery he recognized in the energy of solar
radiation the source of all life on earth and worshipped it as the
symbol of the power of his god. He boasted of his joy in the
creation and of his life in Ma’at (truth and justice).

   This is the first and perhaps the
clearest case of a monotheist religion in human history; a deeper
insight into the historical and psychological determinants of its
origin would be of immeasurable value. Care has however been taken
that none too much information about the Aten religion should reach
us. Already under Akhenaten’s feeble successors all that he
had created collapsed. The vengeance of the priesthood which he had
suppressed raged against his memory; the Aten religion was
abolished, the capital city of the Pharaoh, who was branded as a
criminal, was destroyed and plundered. In about 1350 B.C. the
Eighteenth Dynasty came to an end; after a period of anarchy, order
was restored by general Haremhab, who reigned till 1315 B.C.
Akhenaten’s reform seemed to be an episode doomed to be
forgotten.

  
¹
I begin with a
résumé
of the findings of my second study on Moses, the purely historical
one. Those findings will not be submitted here to any fresh
criticism, since they form the premiss to the psychological
discussions which start out from them and constantly go back to
them.

Moses And Monotheism

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   Thus far what is established
historically; and now our hypothetical sequel begins. Among those
in Akhenaten’s
entourage
there was a man who was
perhaps called Tuthmosis, like many other people at that time¹
- the name is not of great importance except that its second
component must have been ‘-mose’. He was in a high
position and a convinced adherent of the Aten religion, but, in
contrast to the meditative king, he was energetic and passionate.
For him the death of Akhenaten and the abolition of his religion
meant the end of all his expectations. He could remain in Egypt
only as an outlaw or as a renegade. Perhaps as governor of the
frontier province he had come in contact with a Semitic tribe which
had immigrated into it a few generations earlier. Under the
necessity of his disappointment and loneliness he turned to these
foreigners and with them sought compensation for his losses. He
chose them as his people and tried to realize his ideals in them.
After he had left Egypt with them, accompanied by his followers, he
made them holy by the mark of circumcision, gave them laws and
introduced them into the doctrines of the Aten religion, which the
Egyptians had just thrown off. The precepts which this man Moses
gave to his Jews may have been even harsher than those of his
master and teacher Akhenaten, and he may, too, have given up
dependence on the sun-god of On, to which Akhenaten had continued
to adhere.

   We must take the period of the
interregnum after 1350 B.C. as the date of the Exodus from Egypt.
The interval of time which followed, up to the completion of the
occupation of the land of Canaan, is particularly inscrutable.
Modern historical research has been able to extract two facts from
the obscurity which the biblical narrative has left, or rather
created, at this point. The first of these facts, discovered by
Ernst Sellin, is that the Jews, who, even by the account in the
Bible, were headstrong and unruly towards their law-giver and
leader, rose against him one day, killed him and threw off the
religion of the Aten which had been imposed on them, just as the
Egyptians had thrown it off earlier. The second fact, demonstrated
by Eduard Meyer, is that those Jews who had returned from Egypt
united later on with closely related tribes in the region between
Palestine, the Sinai Peninsula and Arabia, and that there, in a
well-watered locality named Kadesh, under the influence of the
Arabian Midianites, they took on a new religion, the worship of the
volcano god Yahweh. Soon after this they were ready to invade
Canaan as conquerors.

  
¹
Such as, for instance, the sculptor whose
studio was found at Tell el-’Amarna.

Moses And Monotheism

4888

   The chronological relations of
these two events to each other and to the Exodus from Egypt are
very uncertain. The closest historical point of reference is
provided by a stela of the Pharaoh Merenptah (who reigned till 1215
B.C.) which in the course of a report on campaigns in Syria and
Palestine names ‘Israel’ among the defeated enemy. If
we take the date of this stela as a
terminus ad quem
, we are
left with about a century (from after 1350 to before 1215 B.C.) for
the whole course of events, starting from the Exodus. It is
possible, however, that the name ‘Israel’ did not yet
relate to the tribes whose fortunes we are following and that in
fact we have a longer interval at our disposal. The settlement in
Canaan of what was later the Jewish people was certainly no rapidly
completed conquest but took place in waves and over considerable
periods of time. If we free ourselves from the limitation imposed
by the Merenptah stela, we can all the more easily assign one
generation (thirty years) to the period of Moses,¹ and allow
at least two generations, but probably more, to elapse up to the
time of the union at Kadesh.² The interval between Kadesh and
the irruption into Canaan need only be short. The Jewish tradition,
as was shown in the preceding essay, had good grounds for
shortening the interval between the Exodus and the founding of the
religion at Kadesh, while the reverse is in the interest of our
account.

  
¹
This would correspond to the forty years of
wandering in the wilderness of the Bible text.

  
²
Thus we should have about 1350 (or
1340)-1320 (or 1310) B.C. for the Moses period; 1260 B.C., or
preferably later, for Kadesh; the Merenptah stela before 1215
B.C.

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4889

   All this, however, is still
history, an attempt to fill up the gaps in our historical knowledge
and in part a repetition of my second essay in
Imago
. Our
interest follows the fortunes of Moses and of his doctrines, to
which the rising of the Jews had only apparently put an end. From
the account given by the Yahwist, which was written down in about
1000 B.C. but was certainly based on earlier records, we have
discovered that the union and the founding of the religion at
Kadesh were accompanied by a compromise in which the two sides are
still easily distinguishable. The one partner was only concerned to
disavow the novelty and foreign character of the god Yahweh and to
increase his claim to the people’s devotion; the other
partner was anxious not to sacrifice to him precious memories of
the liberation from Egypt and of the grand figure of the leader,
Moses. The second side succeeded, too, in introducing both the fact
and the man into the new account of prehistory, in retaining at
least the external mark of the religion of Moses - circumcision -
and possibly in establishing certain restrictions in the use of the
name of the new god. As we have said, the representatives of these
claims were the descendants of the followers of Moses, the Levites,
who were separated from his contemporaries and compatriots by only
a few generations and were still attached to his memory by a living
recollection. The poetically embellished narrative which we
attribute to the Yahwist, and to his later rival the Elohist, were
like mausoleums beneath which, withdrawn from the knowledge of
later generations, the true account of those early things - of the
nature of the Mosaic religion and of the violent end of the great
man - was, as it were, to find its eternal rest. And if we have
guessed what happened correctly, there is nothing left about it
that is puzzling; but it might very well have signified the final
end of the Moses episode in the history of the Jewish people.

   The remarkable thing, however, is
that that was not the case - that the most powerful effects of the
people’s experience were to come to light only later and to
force their way into reality in the course of many centuries. It is
unlikely that Yahweh differed much in character from the gods of
the surrounding peoples and tribes. It is true that he struggled
with them, just as the peoples themselves fought with one another,
but we cannot suppose that it came into the head of a
Yahweh-worshipper of those days to deny the existence of the gods
of Canaan or Moab or Amalek, and so on, any more than to deny the
existence of the peoples who believed in them.