Moses, Freud and monotheistic religion (1 of 2)

Review of Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (1997) by Jan Assmann

Jan Assmann's Moses the Egyptian is not one that you'll find very often alongside books  about the Da Vinci Code or imaginative volumes about the Knights Templar.  But for those of us who actually have an interest in religious history, it is more fascinating than the bogus scholarship and (intentional) fiction that comes with a fad like thye one around the Da Vinci Code.

Moses the Egyptian adds a great deal of background material and the perspective of a modern Egyptologist for thinking through one of Sigmund Freud's most surprising books, Moses and Monotheism (1939), which he completed late in life.

Freud's book examined "the man Moses" in the light of psychoanalytic theories about history and culture.  He starts from the position that Moses was an Egyptian prince who became the leader of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt.  According to Freud's historical reconstruction, the Exodus from Egypt must have taken place around 1350 BCE.  Moses became the leader of the Hebrews and required them to adopt his monotheistic religion, i.e., one assuming a single deity.  His adopted people, however, revolted against Moses and killed him.

But Moses' influence on his people was so strong that they later came to identify Moses with a later leader who was a devotee of the god Yahweh, who merged in cultural and religious memory with the one god of Moses.  Freud, with his habitual fondness for challenging believers to take a critic perspective on their faith, described Yahweh as a "rude, narrow-minded local god, violent and bloodthirsty", who must have originally been a "volcano-god" whose original nature shows through in parts of the Hebrew Bible where he appears as "an uncanny, bloodthirsty demon who walks by night and shuns the light of day".  Freud was an atheist.

A key element of Freud's reconstruction is the idea that  Moses was a devoted adherent to what Egyptologists call the Amarna religion.  The Egyptian Pharoah Akhenaten (the husband of the famous Nefertiti), who ruled 1370-1353 BCE, imposed a single religion on all of Egypt, supposing the worship of other deities.  Akhenaten religion was based on the worship of the sun-god Aton (or Aten).  This was a different cult than that of the sun-god Amun-Re.  After Akhenaten's death and his young son-in-law Tutankhamon ("King Tut") took over, the old religion was restored and the Amarna religion of Aton was suppressed to the point of destroying much of the physical evidence of it, such as monuments to Aton.

Freud, basing his analysis on the work of archaeologist James Henry Breasted (1865-1935), noted strong similarities between the Amarna religion and the later Jewish monotheism, argued that the Jewish religion developed out of the Aton religion that Moses brought to his adopted Hebrew people.

Assmann's Moses the Egyptian is not exclusively focused on Freud's version of the Moses story.  But a main result of his history of the "Moses/Egypt discourse" is that he shows there is a great deal of plausibility in the theory that Akhenaten's Amarna religion had a large effect on early Judaism.  And that despite the considerable problems with the theory, which I mention below.

It's important to remember in this regard that ancient Palestine in the days of Moses and Aaron was part of a cultural sphere that extended from Egypt to Greece.  So in an historical sense, it almost unthinkable that Egyptian religion had no influence on Jewish religious ideas in those centuries.  Cyrus Gordon and Gary Rendsburg described the Amarna Age (early 14th century BCE) in The Bible and the Ancient Near East (4th edition; 1997):

The Amarna Age is the focal period of the ancient Near East, when extensive and unprecedented international contacts produced a fusion of cultures from Babylonia in the east to Egypt in the west, and from Anatolia and the Aegean in the north to the Arabian border and the Upper Nile in the south.  Into the Amarna Age flowed the cultural resources of the Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, Hurrians, Caphtorians, Canaanites, Egyptians, and numerous other ethnic elements of pre-Amarna antiquity.  Out of their synthesis emerged, first and foremost, the historical Greeks and Hebrews: two primary fountainheads of Western civilization; and also the post-Amarna Phoenicians, Arameans, Neo-Assyrians, Neo-Babylonians, Late Egyptians, and many others.  The hub of the Amarna Age was Canaan, so that the Hebrews appeared at the right time and in the best place to fall heir to the maximum cultural legacy of the ancient Near East.  Between the international Amarna Age in the fourteenth century and the international Hellenistic Age in the fourth century B.C.E. fell a period of nationalism during which the distinctive course of Hebrew nationhood was historically possible.  The Hebrews of the Bible ran their entire course between the Amarna and Hellenistic Ages.

The Exodus is conventionally dated around 1290 BCE during the reign of Ramses II.  Akhenaten's "Amarna revolution" was a little more than 60 years in the past, as far away in time as the Great Depression is from us.  Assmann accepts the view on which Freud relied that the Aton religion under Akhenaten was history's first monotheistic religion.  If the Jews who fled Egypt developed or took with them a belief in one God, then surely their idea must have been influenced by the Amarna religion.  Gordon and Rendsburg argue strenuously to the contrary:

Akhenaton is certainly to be ranked as a genius in the history of religion.  Aton monotheism, although it had behind it the long history of Re theology and worship, owed much to the fanatical planning and implementation of the pharaoh.  The purity of the monotheism far exceeded that in biblical Hebrew circles for centuries to come.  The hymns to Aton reach heights of beauty eclipsed only by much later Hebrew Psalms.  Yet we must recognize that Akhenaton's reform was stamped out so thoroughly that it had no influence on the subsequent history of religion.  Akhenaton's son-in-law Tutankhaton ("The Living Image of Aton") changed his name to Tutankhamon ("The Living Image of Amon").  Aton monotheism was quickly and thoroughly obliterated from official Egyptian life, including the royal circle.  Accordingly, it is out of the question to assume that Moses (whose career falls a century and a half later) could have shaped Hebrew monotheism directly on the inspiration of Akhenaton's reform.  (my emphasis)

But the arguments they proceed to make in support of their blanket dismissal amount to saying that because the Aton religion of Akhenaten had notable differences from what we know of Jewish monotheism from centuries later, there could have been no influence whatever.  It is scarcely a convincing argument based on their own description of the Amarna age quoated above.  Note also thatthey prefer a late date of around 1200 BCE for the Exodus, which would weaken (though not eliminate) the likelihood of  influence of the Amarna religion on Moses.

(continued in Part 2)