Freud - Complete Works (787 page)

Moses And Monotheism

4890

   The monotheist idea, which had
flared up with Akhenaten, had grown dark once more and was to
remain in darkness for a long time to come. Finds in the island of
Elephantine, just below the First Cataract of the Nile, have given
us the surprising information that a Jewish military colony had
been settled there for centuries, in whose temple, alongside of the
chief god Yahu, two female deities were worshipped, one of them
named Anat-Yahu. These Jews, it is true, were cut off from their
mother-country and had not taken part in the religious development
there; the Persian government of Egypt (of the fifth century B.C.)
conveyed information to them of the new rules of worship issued
from Jerusalem.¹ Going back to earlier times, we may say that
the god Yahweh certainly bore no resemblance to the Mosaic god.
Aten had been a pacifist like his representative on earth - or more
properly, his prototype - the Pharaoh Akhenaten, who looked on
passively while the world-empire conquered by his ancestors fell to
pieces. No doubt Yahweh was better suited to a people who were
starting out to occupy new homelands by force. And everything in
the Mosaic god that deserved admiration was quite beyond the
comprehension of the primitive masses.

   I have already said - and on that
point I have been glad to be able to claim agreement with other
writers - that the central fact of the development of the Jewish
religion was that in the course of time the god Yahweh lost his own
characteristics and grew more and more to resemble the old god of
Moses, the Aten. It is true that differences remained to which one
would be inclined at a first glance to attribute great importance;
but these can easily be explained.

   In Egypt Aten had begun to
dominate during a fortunate period of established possession, and
even when the empire began to totter, his worshippers had been able
to turn away from the disturbance and continued to praise and to
enjoy his creations. The Jewish people were fated to experience a
series of grave trials and painful events; their god became harsh
and severe and, as it were, wrapped in gloom. He retained the
characteristic of being a universal god, reigning over all
countries and peoples, but the fact that his worship had passed
over from the Egyptians to the Jews found expression in the
additional belief that the Jews were his chosen people whose
special obligations would eventually meet with a special reward as
well. It may not have been easy for the people to reconcile a
belief in being preferred by their omnipotent god with the sad
experiences of their unfortunate destiny. But they did not allow
themselves to be shaken in their convictions; they increased their
own sense of guilt in order to stifle their doubts of God, and it
may be that they pointed at last to the ‘inscrutable decrees
of Providence’, as pious people do to this day. If they felt
inclined to wonder at his allowing one violent aggressor after
another to arise and overthrow and maltreat them - Assyrians,
Babylonians, Persians - they could yet recognize his power in the
fact that all these evil foes were themselves conquered in turn and
that their empires vanished.

   In three important respects the
later god of the Jews became in the end like the old Mosaic god.
The first and decisive point is that he was truly acknowledged as
the only god, beside whom any other god was unthinkable.
Akhenaten’s monotheism was taken seriously by an entire
people; indeed, that people clung so much to this idea that it
became the main content of their intellectual life and left them no
interest for other things. On this the people and the priesthood
who had become dominant among them were at one. But whereas the
priests exhausted their efforts in erecting the ceremonial for his
worship, they came in opposition to intense currents among the
people which sought to revive two others of the doctrines of Moses
about his god. The voices of the Prophets never tired of declaring
that God despised ceremonial and sacrifice and required only that
people should believe in him and lead a life in truth and justice.
And when they praised the simplicity and holiness of life in the
wilderness they were certainly under the influence of the Mosaic
ideals.

  
¹
Auerbach, 2, 1936.

Moses And Monotheism

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   It is time to raise the question
of whether there is any need whatever to call in the influence of
Moses as a cause of the final form taken by the Jewish idea of God,
or whether it would not be enough to assume a spontaneous
development to higher intellectuality during a cultural life
extending over hundreds of years. There are two things to be said
about this possible explanation which would put an end to all our
puzzling conjectures. First, that it explains nothing. In the case
of the Greeks - unquestionably a most highly gifted people - the
same conditions did not lead to monotheism but to a disintegration
of their polytheist religion and to the beginning of philosophical
thought. In Egypt, so far as we can understand, monotheism grew up
as a by-product of imperialism: God was a reflection of the Pharaoh
who was the absolute ruler of a great world empire. With the Jews,
political conditions were highly unfavourable for the development
from the idea of an exclusive national god to that of a universal
ruler of the world. And where did this tiny and powerless nation
find the arrogance to declare itself the favourite child of the
great Lord? The problem of the origin of monotheism among the Jews
would thus remain unsolved, or we should have to be content with
the common answer that it is the expression of the peculiar
religious genius of that people. Genius is well known to be
incomprehensible and irresponsible, and we ought therefore not to
bring it up as an explanation till every other solution has failed
us.¹

   In addition to this, we come upon
the fact that Jewish records and historical writings themselves
point us the way, by asserting most definitely - this time without
contradicting themselves - that the idea of a single god was
brought to the people by Moses. If there is an objection to the
trustworthiness of this assurance, it is that the priestly revision
of the text we have before us obviously traces far too much back to
Moses. Institutions such as the ritual ordinances, which date
unmistakably from later times, are given out as Mosaic commandments
with the plain intention of lending them authority. This certainly
gives us ground for suspicion, but not enough for a rejection. For
the deeper motive for an exaggeration of this kind is obvious. The
priestly narrative seeks to establish continuity between its
contemporary period and the remote Mosaic past; it seeks to disavow
precisely what we have described as the most striking fact about
Jewish religious history, namely that there is a yawning gap
between the law-giving of Moses and the later Jewish religion - a
gap which was at first filled by the worship of Yahweh, and was
only slowly patched up afterwards. It disputes this course of
events by every possible means, though its historical correctness
is established beyond any doubt, since, in the particular treatment
given to the Biblical text, superabundant evidence has been left to
prove it. Here the priestly revision has attempted something
similar to the tendentious distortion which made the new god Yahweh
into the god of the Patriarchs. If we take this motive of the
Priestly Code into account, we shall find it hard to withhold our
belief from the assertion that Moses really did himself give the
monotheist idea to the Jews. We should be all the readier to give
our assent since we can say where Moses derived this idea from,
which the Jewish priests certainly knew no longer.

  
¹
This same consideration applies, too, to
the remarkable case of William Shakespeare of Stratford.

Moses And Monotheism

4892

   And here someone might ask what
we gain by tracing Jewish to Egyptian monotheism. It merely pushes
the problem a little way further back: it tells us nothing more of
the genesis of the monotheist idea. The answer is that the question
is not one of gain but of investigation. Perhaps we may learn
something from it if we discover the real course of events.

B

THE LATENCY PERIOD AND TRADITION

   We confess the belief, therefore,
that the idea of a single god, as well as the rejection of
magically effective ceremonial and the stress upon ethical demands
made in his name, were in fact Mosaic doctrines, to which no
attention was paid to begin with, but which, after a long interval
had elapsed, came into operation and eventually became permanently
established. How are we to explain a delayed effect of this kind
and where do we meet with a similar phenomenon? It occurs to us at
once that such things are not infrequently to be found in the most
various spheres and that they probably come about in a number of
ways which are understandable with greater or less ease. Let us
take, for instance, the history of a new scientific theory, such as
Darwin’s theory of evolution. At first it met with embittered
rejection and was violently disputed for decades; but it took no
longer than a generation for it to be recognized as a great step
forward towards truth. Darwin himself achieved the honour of a
grave or cenotaph in Westminster Abbey. A case such as that leaves
us little to unravel. The new truth awoke emotional resistances;
these found expression in arguments by which the evidence in favour
of the unpopular theory could be disputed; the struggle of opinions
took up a certain length of time; from the first there were
adherents and opponents; the number as well as the weight of the
former kept on increasing till at last they gained the upper hand;
during the whole time of the struggle the subject with which it was
concerned was never forgotten. We are scarcely surprised that the
whole course of events took a considerable length of time; and we
probably do not sufficiently appreciate that what we are concerned
with is a process in group psychology.

Moses And Monotheism

4893

   There is no difficulty in finding
an analogy in the mental life of an individual corresponding
precisely to this process. Such would be the case if a person
learnt something new to him which, on the ground of certain
evidence, he ought to recognize as true, but which contradicts some
of his wishes and shocks a few convictions that are precious to
him. Thereupon he will hesitate, seek for reasons to enable him to
throw doubts on this new thing, and for a while will struggle with
himself, till finally he admits to himself: ‘All the same it
is
so, though it’s not easy for me to accept it,
though it’s distressing to me to have to believe it.’
What we learn from this is merely that it takes time for the
reasoning activity of the ego to overcome the objections that are
maintained by strong affective cathexes. The similarity between
this case and the one we are endeavouring to understand is not very
great.

   The next example we turn to
appears to have even less in common with our problem. It may happen
that a man who has experienced some frightful accident - a railway
collision, for instance - leaves the scene of the event apparently
uninjured. In the course of the next few weeks, however, he
develops a number of severe psychical and motor symptoms which can
only be traced to his shock, the concussion or whatever else it
was. He now has a ‘traumatic neurosis’. It is a quite
unintelligible - that is to say, a new - fact. The time that has
passed between the accident and the first appearance of the
symptoms is described as the ‘incubation period’, in a
clear allusion to the pathology of infectious diseases. On
reflection, it must strike us that, in spite of the fundamental
difference between the two cases - the problem of traumatic
neurosis and that of Jewish monotheism - there is nevertheless one
point of agreement: namely, in the characteristic that might be
described as ‘latency’. According to our assured
hypothesis, in the history of the Jewish religion there was a long
period after the defection from the religion of Moses during which
no sign was to be detected of the monotheist idea, of the contempt
for ceremonial or of the great emphasis on ethics. We are thus
prepared for the possibility that the solution of our problem is to
be looked for in a particular psychological situation.

Moses And Monotheism

4894

   We have already repeatedly
described what happened at Kadesh when the two portions of what was
later to be the Jewish people came together to receive a new
religion. In those, on the one hand, who had been in Egypt,
memories of the Exodus and of the figure of Moses were still so
strong and vivid that they demanded their inclusion in an account
of early times. They were grandchildren, perhaps, of people who had
known Moses himself, and some of them still felt themselves
Egyptians and bore Egyptian names. But they had good motives for
repressing the memory of the fate with which their leader and
lawgiver had met. The determining purpose of the other portion of
the people was to glorify the new god and to dispute his being
foreign. Both portions had the same interest in disavowing the fact
of their having had an earlier religion and the nature of its
content. So it was that the first compromise came about, and it was
probably soon recorded in writing. The people who had come from
Egypt had brought writing and the desire to write history along
with them; but it was to be a long time before historical writing
realized that it was pledged to unswerving truthfulness. To begin
with it had no scruples about shaping its narratives according to
the needs and purposes of the moment, as though it had not yet
recognized the concept of falsification. As a result of these
circumstances a discrepancy was able to grow up between the written
record and the oral transmission of the same material -
tradition
. What had been omitted or changed in the written
record might very well have been preserved intact in tradition.
Tradition was a supplement but at the same time a contradiction to
historical writing. It was less subjected to the influence of
distorting purposes and perhaps at some points quite exempt from
them, and it might therefore be more truthful than the account that
had been recorded in writing. Its trustworthiness, however,
suffered from the fact that it was less stable and definite than
the written account and exposed to numerous changes and alterations
when it was handed on from one generation to another by oral
communication. A tradition of such a kind might meet with various
sorts of fate. What we should most expect would be that it would be
crushed by the written account, would be unable to stand up against
it, would become more and more shadowy and would finally pass into
oblivion. But it might meet with other fates: one of these would be
that the tradition itself would end in a written record, and we
shall have to deal with yet others as we proceed.