Moses and Monotheism

By Sigmund Freud

2. If Moses was an Egyptian...

(1) If Moses was an Egyptian, Freud addresses the problem of what would induce an aristocratic Egyptian - a prince perhaps, or a priest or high official - to put himself at the head of a crowd of immigrant foreigners at a backward level of civilisation and to leave his country with them. The well-known contempt felt by Egyptians for foreign nationals makes such a move unlikely - probably why historians have accepted that his name was Egyptian, and ascribed to him all the wisdom of the Egyptians, but felt that Moses was not actually Egyptian. How did this single man create a new religion? Let alone one so different from the Egyptian religion of many deities. So from this first analysis that the religion that Moses gave to the Jews, was far removed from the Egyptian one, implies that he did more than simply try to educate them into the ways of the Egyptians.

(2) A second possibility is that Moses gave the Jews, a religion that was nevertheless his own, that it was an Egyptian religion, though not the Egyptian religion. This is supported by the fact that the Pharaoh of about 1375 B.C. set about forcing a new religion on his Egyptian subjects - a strict monotheism, however his reign only lasted for seventeen years, and after his death in 1358 B.C. the new religion was swept away. In his religion however he had simply taken the very ancient name of the sun God Aten, or Atum and developed the already developing idea of a universal god. Indeed the king even changed his name from 'Amenophis' to 'Akhenaten' to incorporate this name, and eradicate that of a detested god 'Amun'. Freud continues to emphasise the contrasts between this new religion and the popular Egyptian religion.

(3) On the basis of what has been discussed before, Freud proposes that if Moses was an Egyptian and communicated his own religion to the Jews, then it must have been Akhenaten's, the Aten religion. So having looked at the opposition between the Jews religion and the popular Egyptian religion, he now looks at the similarities and differences between that of Aten and that of the Jews. At a glance he notes that the name Aten (or Atum) sounds very like the Hebrew word for Lord Adonai. Both are forms of strict monotheism, their fundamental shared characteristic. Their essential difference is to be seen (apart from the God's names) in the fact that the Jewish religion was entirely without sun worship, in which the Egyptian one still found support. Furthermore, in the same way that Akhenaten formed his religion in deliberate hostility to the popular one, in the case of its attitude to death and life after death, we find that the Jewish one also has nothing to do with the next world, though a doctrine of that kind would have been compatible with monotheism. Freud takes this as a very strong point of agreement between the two religions.

A second strong point of agreement is that Moses not only gave the Jews a religion, but he also gave them circumcision. The evidence shows that the Jews could only have got the custom of circumcision from one place - namely Egypt, since it had long been indigenous there and no other Eastern Mediterranean people seem to have practised it. This circumcision would also play a similar role for Moses and his new people, as it had for the Egyptians - as a sign to keep them apart from the foreign people among whom their wanderings would take them, just as the Egyptians themselves had kept apart from all foreigners. Additionally, since it seems likely then that circumcision was an Egyptian custom introduced by Moses, that would be as much as to recognise that the religion delivered to them by Moses was an Egyptian one too - since there were good reasons for denying that fact, there were good reasons for contradicting the truth about circumcision too.

(4) At this point Freud acknowledges an objection to his hypothesis, namely that this would place Moses, an Egyptian, in the Akhenaten period - his decision to take over the Jewish people derived from the political circumstances in the country at the time. However Freud argues that it must not be supposed that the fall of the Aten religion brought the monotheist current in Egypt to a complete stop - thus the action of Moses is still conceivable even if he did not live at the time of Akhenaten, but rather in the time of a follower of the priesthood of On (the other name of the sun god) who survived the fall. Thus the Exodus is brought back to its usual date (around the 13th century B.C.).

In contrast, Meyer (1906) proposes that Moses is the ancestor of the priests of Kadesh, and intimately bound up with Midian and the cult-centres in the desert. Furthermore he proposes that Moses, being the son-in-law of the Midianite priest, is secondary to the interpolation of Moses in the legendary story - since the themes in these stories are dropped later - 'Moses in Midian is no longer an Egyptian and grandson of the Pharaoh, but a shepherd to whom Yahweh (their name for God) revealed himself. In the Exodus and the destruction of the Egyptians Moses plays no part whatever. This description of Moses of Kadesh and Midian, a miracle- worker equipped by Yahweh with supernatural powers, is just as different from the aristocratic Egyptian inferred by Freud, as Aten is from Yahweh, their demon Mountain God. So it seems that Freud's theory cannot reconcile all accounts so far, and meets a break in its thread.

(5) However, Freud discovers a possibility that could accommodate this apparent split in the theory. As Sellin reports, the Egyptian Moses was murdered by the Jews and the religion he had introduced abandoned, however the immigrants that had moved with him were now a rather large population, furthermore they probably joined up with other kindred tribes in the area between Egypt and Canaan, finding expression in a new religion - the religion of Yahweh (according to Meyer -1906- this took place under the influence of the Midianites at Kadesh - not incompatible with the current hypothesis). With regard to this point, Freud suggests that the nation arose out of a union of two component parts, and it fits in that, after a short period of political unity, it split into two pieces - the kingdom of Israel and the kingdom of Judah. This is further supported by the fact that the Kadesh Yahweh tribes, who had been around before their union with the Levites from Egypt, also had an obligatory adoption of circumcision, as well as imposition of a prohibition against saying 'Yahweh' and instead saying 'Adonai' (Lord). The problem of god's name also affords further evidence - since it appears variously as Jochanan, Jehu and Joshua etc. (probably from Yahweh) and as 'Elohim'. The different names are quite a clear indication of two originally different gods.

(6) In this section Freud re-addresses the problem of the distortions in history with which he was faced at the outset of this work. He tries to explain them. He proposes that the tribe of Yahweh, may have wiped out other religions up to the arrival of these refugees from Egypt, however these Egyptians may have been more resistant, not letting themselves be deprived of the Exodus, the man Moses or circumcision. The man Moses was dealt with by shifting him to Midian and Kadesh and fusing him with the priest of Yahweh, circumcision, had to be retained, in conjunction however with various attempts to detach it from its Egyptian roots. However the key problem here is the fact that, circumcision may not have been of Egyptian origin - rather 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 (Genesis), so why would these Israelites leaving Egypt want to acknowledge every Egyptian as a brother in the covenant? This remains puzzling, however a possible explanation is that the fact that those leaving Egypt had become Yahweh's (or Moses') 'chosen' people, could compensate for the re-invention of circumcision as their indigenous sign once more. So Yahweh was only giving them back what their forefathers had once possessed. Furthermore to accommodate the exodus, they ascribed all thanks for it to Yahweh rather than to Moses.

(7) Freud then addresses the murder of Moses, both in terms of the ways in which it has been furiously worked over by historians and suppressed by immediate human motives. It seems that much like Akhenaten, whose end was inevitable to terminate the resistance to his favoured religion, the savage Semites, took fate into their own hands and rid themselves of their tyrant. The most likely reason behind their merciless murder of their leader, seems to be the fact that while the god that Moses of Egypt was trying to impose was all-loving and all-powerful, Yahweh, on the other hand was a more local, narrow-minded, violent and blood thirsty god. Therefore it is no surprise that again the idea of no sacrificial ceremonies and (they were to considered as magic and sorcery) was resisted against, in the only way that they knew how - through the violence and bloodthirstiness that their god Yahweh endorsed. However it does seem true to say that despite killing Moses, the tradition at least of his teaching did remain, since despite giving Yahweh the undeserved honour of the deed of liberation eventually Moses' god became stronger than Yahweh, and enabled the people of Israel to survive the blows which fate had in store for them.

In conclusion it seems that in introducing the figure of an Egyptian Moses into the nexus of Jewish history, Freud has found many dualities - two groups of people, two kingdom's into which this nation fell apart, two god's names, furthermore, two religions, the first suppressed by the second but later emerging victoriously behind it and two religious founders, both by the name of Moses, with different personalities. However as we have seen, historians faced with the problem of dissociating the Jews from the Egyptians, has resulted in various distortions and unexpected revelations.