Moses and Monotheism

Moses and Monotheism was Freud's last book before he died in 1939. Freud claims that Moses was actually an Egyptian who brought the monotheistic sun worship of Akhenaton to the Hebrew slaves after the fall of the eighteenth dynasty and the restoration of the old Egyptian pagan religion. Monotheism then is the invention of the priest class of ancient Egypt. The specific God of the Jewish people Yahweh is adopted from aspects of a volcanic God worshiped by Semitic peoples the Hebrews reunited with. This occurred after Freud claims Moses was murdered by his own people while they were in the desert, a claim which is central to the book. The murder of Moses became the defining event of the Jewish religion. Through guilt for this repressed event, Moses became the central figure of the Yahweh religion and was adopted as Hebrew by birth, rather than Egyptian. Additionally the idea of the messiah promised a return of the murdered savior. The adoption of monotheism shaped Jewish culture away from worship of God in anthropomorphic or animist forms and led to a unique culture.

The evidence marshaled for this revision of history is mostly historical, with insights from Freud's own psychoanalytic theory.

Egypt did have a monotheistic sun god religion under Akhenaton in the 14th century BCE, and the exodus did occur during the eighteenth dynasty, though the dates don't coincide from official interpretations. Nevertheless given how along ago the event was, it is possible. The lack of an afterlife in early Judaism is also shared with the Egyptian religion. Osiris the ruler of the underworld was omitted as it undermined the rule of a single deity.

A major piece of evidence, given Freud's preoccupation with the phallus and castration, is that of the Jewish tradition of circumcision, which the Egyptians did first and he argues was carried over by Moses and his monotheistic religion. The Babylonians and Semites he points out weren't circumcised. Circumcision for Freud is a sign of being the children of Egyptian religion and adds to the sense of being a chosen people, who alone continued Egyptian monotheism.

Moses' name Freud claims is Egyptian, coming from mose which means child. This is in contrast to the mainstream interpretation that Moses is Hebrew for "drawn from the water." However it was an Egyptian princess who supposedly discovered Moses in the Nile, and it is unlikely she would have a knowledge of Hebrew for such a specific name, making the story mythical. This story is very similar to that of Sargon the founder of Babylon 2800 BC who was also put in a basket by his mother into a river to be discovered by Akki, the drawer of water  (Genesis and Exodus was probably written after the Jews were taken to Babylon. A parallel of Noah's ark is also found in the Epic of Gilgamesh). Founding patriarchs like Romulus and Cyrus usually have incredible legends attached to them. So rather than being of Hebrew birth, Moses was born into Egyptian nobility.

The claim that Yahweh is patterned on a volcanic God is still held by some atheists today. Moses supposedly came in contact with this religion while in exile at Qades after killing an Egyptian who he witnessed beating a Hebrew slave. While there he married the daughter of Jethro, a Midian priest and spoke to Yahweh alone at the burning bush. When the Hebrews left Egypt and reunited with the other Semitic people's they adopted aspects of the volcanic God with the Egyptian God. The imagery of a pillar of fire by night and pillar of smoke by day leading them through the desert speaks to volcanic activity. There aren't any active volcanoes in the Sinai however, so it would have been imported from somewhere else, making the argument speculative.

The claim that Moses was murdered by his people in exile came from biblical scholar Ernst Sellin who found indirect evidence in scripture, but it is mostly speculation. Moses died without entering the promised land, though he was allowed to peer at it. His death was at the hands of God. Apparently the reason Moses wasn't to enter the promised land was that he disobeyed God's order to speak to a rock to deliver water, and instead hit it with his staff. "Because you did not believe in me, to uphold me as holy in the eyes of the people of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land that I have given them” (Numbers 20:8-12). He was 120 years old, but still in good health. It is not known where Moses' body is buried, so we don't know the cause of death.

The reason for Moses' murder would be that the Semitic people were tired of the strict monotheism foisted on them from Egypt and would prefer to reunite with the other Semitic people and their volcanic religion. The worship of the idol when Moses received the Ten Commandments was a sign of this fatigue of a strict religion. The bible says that the 40 years in the desert was due to a lack of faith that they could conquer the people living in Canaan. God planned on wiping them out, but upon intervention by Moses instead decided that none of this doubting generation would be allowed into the promised land. After forty years they all died in exile. As the first generation died off he would have less support and more resentment from the young from having to live under harsh conditions.

The murder of Moses would have been forgotten except among the literate priest class. A distortion of his death, the circumstances which are unusual, would allow Moses' memory to be preserved among the population as the liberator or the Jewish people from bondage and lawgiver. At some point the Semitic Yahweh would become the God of the Aton religion and so its and Moses' origins would be concealed. This would make the only God of monotheism belong to a single people, rather than being universal.

The murder of Moses by his people on the desert is central to Freud's larger theory of the murder of the primordial father as the origin of religion, which takes up a good portion of the book. For Freud the power of religion could only be due to neurosis from the traumatic event of the murder of the father to keep reoccurring throughout myths and art, just as neurotics cannot get over past trauma and engage in repetitive irrational behaviors. Back in our evolutionary history, humans lived in a polygamous horde headed by an alpha male who had exclusive access to females. Freud got this from remarks of Darwin about gorillas who live in such a social structure. One day, the sons including those in exile and castrated joined together and murdered the father. Though freed from oppressive rule, they felt tremendous remorse for the act and the lack of a single authority figure. And so religion was established from the longing for the father though without his actual existence. Presumably every boy grows up with this hatred of the father due to this evolutionary heritage, and so the conflict is born again and again to be socialized away. Nevertheless these feelings power the need for religion and manifest in different ways.

Judaism is unique because it claimed God had a chosen people, who defined the religion by their adherence to moral principles and not by graven images. Freud claims that this allowed the Jews to repress the aggression and remorse which inspire external wish fulfillment and instead advance culturally and intellectually. This is also what made monotheism a mass religion instead of an elite one as in Egypt, as the transcendent God of monotheism is an intellectual advance to the pagan gods.

Christianity which is not tied to a single ethnic group brings back the repressed memory of the death of the father and offers individual salvation. Christianity originated the doctrine of original sin and made confrontation with the repressed necessary. Because of this Freud thinks Christianity is regressive but potentially progressive if the repressed can be dealt with properly. Islam is mentioned only briefly, as a less profound imitation of Judaism. Gaining an all powerful God inspired self-confidence and great successes for the Arab people given the rapidity of its spread. But Islam came to be in recent history and lacks the mystery of its own origins (Judaism) or the centrality of the death of its founder (Christianity).

It is helpful to consider Nietzsche's writings on the Jewish religion in comparison to Moses and Monotheism to account for the spread of monotheism. In the Antichrist Nietzsche argues that the Jewish religion was originally essentially a tribal religion reflecting the pride and achievements of their own people, much like Freud's opinion of Islam. This Judaism reflected "master morality." But the subjugation under Rome made the Jews an oppressed, powerless people. The Jewish religion became resentful of power and adopted slave morality, the worship of the poor, the weak, and the oppressed reflecting their own condition. Asceticism, a mark of slave morality, comes naturally from monotheism with its transcendent nature. The monotheist God is incompatible with the pagan pantheon and so could not be assimilated. This incompatibility of values created a division between absolute good and evil removed from the superiority of their own people versus others, and turned into a moralistic creed of slave values masquerading as God's law. That Judaism was originally a tribal religion accords with Freud's account of Yahweh's origin in volcanic god worship. Drawing from the monotheist idea would've justified the repression necessary to impart slave values to former master civilizations like Rome, which Nietzsche talks about in Genealogy of Morals. Monotheism does seem to be an intellectual product of a comfortable ruling/priest class, seen in ancient Egypt and neo-Platonism, and adding slave morality would have made it truly universal and account for its rapid spread. 

Monotheism seems to be a combination of the intellect and power of self restraint of the upper class with the morals and lifestyle of the lower class, meant for a universal audience. This is how monotheism took over much of he world.

Freud was an atheist as well as ethnically Jewish, so maybe his purpose in writing this book was to exonerate Jews as an ethnic group from a religion he argues originated as an imposition from another people under impulses which govern us all. Freud was not a Zionist but was sensitive towards the treatment of Jewish people in Europe. The Vienna of his time saw rising anti-Semitism by the end of the century which closed off the opportunities hoped for with liberal political rule after the revolutions of 1848. Freud intensely disliked the Catholic Church and the Hapsburg monarchy, refusing to toff his hat to the emperor while at university. The church was the successor to the Roman Empire which destroyed the Jewish temple and defeated the Semitic Hannibal in the Punic war (Freud himself thought he was fated to never see Rome like Hannibal). It had been the feudal successors to Rome which oppressed the Jews and resisted the scientific revolution and the enlightenment. The French Revolution freed Jews from the ghettos and the conquests of Napoleon spread enlightenment ideals to Central Europe. Freud thought of his ideas as continuing what Copernicus and Darwin had done to undermine the medieval worldview. Through his psychological theories, Freud hoped to replace religion with a scientific human nature which would justify a social order based on reason, in fulfillment of the enlightenment.

Unfortunately Freud had to flee Vienna at the end of his life when Hitler invaded Austria and spent his last days in Britain, whose freedom raised the hopes of Voltaire for a new social order. Several of Freud's relatives died in concentration camps. The year World War II began, Freud died of a doctor assisted suicide of morphine injection. Had he lived, he would have seen great destruction in Europe but also the fall of fascism and the tremendous impact of his ideas.