Book Preview : Moses and Monotheism 1939

 

The English Translation done by: Katherine Jones.

In a clear well established English Translation, shocking truth, or some historical premises are to be established.

 

The first part of the book answers the question of the origins of Moses, whether he was an Egyptian or not? How?, accompanied with some proves from the old Egyptian language.

 

Moving on to the second part, comes the question of whether the previously proven fact has to do anything with the Egyptian king Ikhnaton. What is the relation between Moses and the later king? This is what Freud tried to answer.

Then smoothly he draws a conclusion, that if Moses was an Egyptian he must have transmitted his religion to the Jews, which was the religion of Aton.

Undeniably a comparison here had to be established first to prove the previous conclusion, which is a comparison between the Jewish religion and the religion of Aton. This comparison draws the attention of one of the oldest Egyptian customs, circumcision.

Simultaneously, he moves to the bible, to the texts telling of the exodus from Egypt, and whether this departure from Egypt does not contradict of the proven nationality of Moses. Here lies the question of:

How did the proven Aton-Jewish religion change to the worship of the god of Jahve, a volcano god while Egypt has no volcanoes? That is what the writer tried to put in detail analyzing the historical journey of the Jews.

And finally, in the third and the last part, Freud talks more about the people of Moses and what happened to the monotheistic religion after the death of Moses.

Here Freud explains the idea of the dormant tradition and how such a tradition and the latency period play a role in the changes that occurred to the Jewish religion, and he doesn’t fail in illustrating good examples from early history.

In such an explanation, he divides his study into 3 parts:

Analogy-application-difficulties.

First analogy, he compares the neurotic process and the religious events then applies such a comparison to the case of the Jews-here, he fails to concentrate his study on the subject and starts exploring the idea of the totem throughout history.

Here the part which I did not enjoy myself, where he moves much further and deeper into the idea of sacrifice, chosen people, and the awaited Messiah, by including all those distracting details the reader might forget what the book is about and indulges in  purely Jewish hypotheses till the end of the book.

Otherwise- I myself admired- the possibility or the connection between the two religions, from a historical and psychological perspective.