Moses and Monotheism by Sigmund Freud
Reading through the many wonderful reviews here, one gets the picture of what it is with this book: love it or hate it, believer or skeptic, even telling people the gist of the thesis and the story (the book is magnificently both), this work never fails to evoke a strong reaction. Look at the reviews. What is evident is that the book is truly provocative - rare for any book - no less a slight, speculative work of less than 200 pages, written somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century. Who would really care? But as you can see from this representative sample, people do.
Despite the ongoing controversy regarding, increasing skepticism towards, and perhaps dismissal of his major ideas, Freud still engages us as one of the most influential thinkers of the past century, and this work, which, surprisingly, may come to be regarded as his masterpiece (it is a masterpiece - do not doubt that), written as he was dying of cancer of the jaw and fleeing from the Nazis (Freud was Jewish - and among all the things that it is, the book is his response to that singular experience), is his signal contribution to religious studies.
The story is that:
1) Moses was an Egyptian, likely of royal birth, that he learned monotheism from the renegade Egyptian monarch, Akenaton, who, during his brief and probably aborted reign, unsuccessfully attempted to displace the long-standing polytheism and its attendant institutions with a unitary sole deity - a sun god - not represented in any form or art .
2) - That he may have been the proprietor or governor of a fringe province, the Biblical "land of Goshen" with a population of Hebraic or Semitic descent, to whom he taught the new religion. At some point during the exodus, Moses was murdered by his followers. The new God was rejected in favor of a tribal deity, a bloodthirsty, local lunar God, Jahve. However, his immediate entourage, also of the Egyptian court or priesthood, were established as the Levites, or priestly caste, and their descendents eventually revived the ancient monotheism, which we know as the religion of the ancient Hebrews.
The thesis (more complex) quite briefly is:
Akenaton possibly adopted monotheism as adjunct to Egypt's imperialist expansion in the 18th century B.C. Circumcision, which first evolved among the Egyptians (there is the pictoral evidence, as far back as it goes), is rooted in the idea of prehistoric enforced fidelity to the clan father under threat of castration thus symbolized (the primal "covenant" between father and sons). Moses was murdered because he restricted access to the women of the tribe, in repetition of the totemic archetype. The Pentateuch is a palimpsest, references the original monotheistic religion inscribed under references to the later religion of Jahve, and then again, the revival, written over those references in the Levitical Law. The revival was spurred by long, pent up guilt over the collective memory of the death of Moses. And well, Papa don't take no mess! The religion of the Levites, developed during the Babylonian exile, represents a return to the Father dominance. The Messianic trend represents yet another turn away from this father dominance toward the Son, away from circumcision, and toward social decentralization, eventually a priesthood of all believers. There's a lot more to it - but these are the bare bones.
I don't believe anyone would want to make absolute claims as to what went down thirty-eight centuries ago - but, all considered, Freud's thesis has its moment, and that moment is now. Could it be that the Jews and Arabs are one people - Semites - who have been divided over time by those with ulterior motives? Resoundingly, yes, the possibility must be considered. Freud wrote this remarkable text at a time when the Nazis were beginning to fund the Islamic Brotherhood (after they themselves had been funded by Prescott Bush and the Union Bank). Ironically, Freud's thesis suggests that the current situation in the Middle East has apparently brought this world to the edge of annihilation, may involve combatants who have no conception of their true origins or the basis of what they are fighting for, but, from the standpoint of carefully fostered illusions, merely believe, in an all too human way, that they do. Freud argues closely and pervasively enough to raise and honest doubt in our minds. Well worth the read.
