Freud was right that this was indeed strange. One would think that practically everyone who wrote about Moses and the exodus would have brought this point up—even to reject it. But instead, practically no one had raised it. So Freud did. Now what did Freud have besides Moses’ name to support the possibility that, if Moses was historical, he was an Egyptian? Freud zeroed in on the story of Moses’ birth, the story we have seen that starts with the baby in the basket. Born to a family of slaves, the infant floats along the river to the king’s daughter, he grows up among royalty, but eventually he comes to be back leading his enslaved people. Freud noted that we have many stories like this in world folklore and literature. We know them from the legend of Sargon to the stories of Oedipus and King Arthur.34 These stories have a common, three-step pattern:
1.The hero is born into a royal or noble family.
2.Because of some crisis or threat, the hero is separated from his family and is raised by some other family, usually a family from a lower class.
3.Through the hero’s gifts of strength or wisdom, the hero arrives back at his rightful place in royalty or nobility.
There are many variations on this pattern. (Oedipus, for example, is raised by a different royal family from his own, rather than by a poor family.) But the essential pattern is so common that most of us have encountered it at least once or twice.
From where do such stories come? At least some of them must reflect the realities of history: that individuals of a lower class occasionally do rise to very high stations in life, even making it all the way to king. Now, some countries might take pride in such a rags-to-riches story: look, our king was born a pauper, but he was so wise and strong that he deserved to become our king. Other countries, however, might not be so proud, especially in the face of their neighbor kingdoms, that their king had no royal blood. So the hero myth is born. You thought our king came from a lower-class family? Oh no. Our king came from a royal family, but he was torn from them when he was an infant. His nobility came out, however, and he earned his way back to the royal place that he rightfully occupies today.
In such a scenario, the three-step hero myth is formed to promote and defend the king. But which step in the pattern is the historical reality? Answer: step 2. The royal person in question really was from the lower class. People invented the story to veil that fact.
But, Freud pointed out, the Moses story reverses the usual pattern. Moses starts in the lower class, moves to royalty, and then comes back to the lower class. The pattern here is inside out. But the question is still: which step is the historical reality? And the answer is still: step 2. Moses was an Egyptian, possibly of the royal house. The slave people who left Egypt would be uncomfortable with the idea that their leader was an Egyptian, as uncomfortable as those other cultures would be with the idea that their king was a pauper. The baby-in-the-basket story has all the earmarks of these folktales. They are etiologies: stories that people fashioned to deal with and explain an embarrassing reality. The Egyptologist Jan Assman referred to Freud’s treatment of the reversal of the usual pattern as “Freud’s ingenious observation.”35 It is not a proof. It is a serious possibility. The hero of the exodus story has an Egyptian name, and the story seems designed possibly to camouflage his Egyptian roots. Even as we acknowledge that the Bible story about his early life may be invented, we are bound to consider the possibility that the story behind it—the story that made it necessary—was real. Freud’s treatment was not cavalier. It was a sober and ingenious defense of the possibility that Moses was an Egyptian.
Moses and Akhenaten
Moses an Egyptian: that was Freud’s step one. His second step was no less sensational. He confronted the question: if Moses, the founding teacher of what became Israelite religion, was an Egyptian, how do we explain the fact that Israel’s religion was so obviously and profoundly different from Egyptian religion? Israelite religion was monotheistic, it was far less concerned with the afterlife, it rejected magic, it was against idols. What we know of ancient Israel’s religion does not look like it came out of an Egyptian source. This was more than just a good question. It would appear to be a deal-breaker for Freud’s hypothesis.
But an archaeological discovery changed all that. This time it was not a goat. It was a woman in Egypt digging up material to use for fertilizer. This was in 1887, during Freud’s lifetime, about fifty years before he wrote about Moses and monotheism. What that woman found was more than fertilizer. It was some three hundred tablets that we now know as the Amarna Letters. The discovery of the Amarna Letters also led to archaeological excavations of that site. Amarna now is a region about 190 miles south of Cairo. But around thirty-four hundred years ago it was not called Amarna. It was Akhetaten, and it was the capital of Egypt. It was built by King Akhenaten. The similarity of his name and the name of his royal city is not coincidental. They both reflect the name Aten, the name of his god, who was symbolized by the sun. The king’s name had been Amenophis IV, but he changed it to Akhenaten to incorporate his god’s name in a new religion. That religion is widely identified as the first known monotheism. The literature on Akhenaten and monotheism is now vast.36 I recall being introduced to the subject already as a child when I saw the Hollywood extravaganza The Egyptian in 1954—two years before The Ten Commandments. As in the movie version, so in history: Akhenaten’s monotheism ended soon after he died. With his monuments effaced and his name erased, his religious revolution was practically lost to history until the Amarna discoveries gave it back to us.
Akhenaten and Amarna were becoming known in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Freud made the connection: if Moses was an Egyptian, the problem was that the religion that we associate with him had next to nothing to do with Egyptian religion. But, Freud saw, it was much more like Akhenaten’s religion! Was it coincidence that the first two known monotheisms on earth both came out of Egypt? And within a couple of centuries of each other? Assman wrote: “Akhenaten must have appeared to Freud as the ultimate solution to the riddle.”37 Freud speculated that Moses was a follower of Akhenaten, perhaps a noble in that king’s court. With the demise of Akhenaten and his religious revolution, this Moses took a band of followers from among Egypt’s slaves, and he led them to a new life in a new faith. Not only did connecting Moses to Akhenaten provide an answer to a deal-breaking problem. It bolstered the case that Moses was historical and was an Egyptian. Moses as an Egyptian offered a link in a chain from one monotheism to the other.
There were other elements as well. (1) Freud admitted that he was no linguist of ancient languages, but he wondered if there might be a link between the god’s name Aten and the Hebrew word for lord: ’ădōnay. Actually, they are not linked linguistically. (2) Many scholars after Freud perceived a similarity between a prayer praising Aten and a prayer in the Bible praising Yahweh. They claimed that a number of parallels of ideas and wording occur between the Amarna text known as the Hymn to the Aten and the biblical text Psalm 104. To many, including me, those parallels are not compelling enough to prove a connection, and the hymn and the psalm are, after all, centuries apart.38 (The two texts are readily available for anyone to examine.39) So I would not include them or the Aten/’ădōnāy terms as proofs in the mix of evidence.
I should acknowledge here that scholars have argued over whether Akhenaten’s religion was truly monotheistic.40 It may have been henotheistic: recognizing the existence of other gods but focusing worship on just one. And scholars have long argued over when Israel’s religion became truly monotheistic as well.41 We shall see the evidence in Chapter 5 for when Israel’s religion was monotheistic. But for now we can say that to whatever degree each religion approached what we mean by monotheism, and whether or not each religion was “pure” monotheism, still, at minimum, practically everyone has recognized the conceptual similarity of the two.
Timing: From Akhenaten to Israel
So more people today take Freud’s proposal seriously and respond to it, but still its essential poin
t—the connection between Akhenaten’s religion and the religion of Moses or Israel—has not been persuasive. And that is not because of a bias against Freud. The main argument against this connecting of Akhenaten’s religion and Israel’s is the timing.42 Akhenaten lived in the mid-fourteenth century BCE. The earliest known reference to Israel as a people, as we have seen, is not until over a hundred years later, in the Merneptah stele around 1205 BCE. So where were Moses’ people for nearly two centuries? That is a fair question, and I have raised it myself whenever I was asked about Freud’s idea over the years. This argument about timing, however, was responding to a picture of Moses’ and the original Israelites’ having been in Egypt around Akhenaten’s time. So, yes, that leaves a nearly two-hundred-year gap until they show up in Israel. But that is not our picture of the history any longer. Once we think in terms of the Levites and the establishment of Israel as two separate things, the dating argument evaporates—just as we saw it evaporate in the entire matter of the exodus in Chapter 2. If Moses and the Levites arrived at monotheism sometime after Akhenaten, it could have been soon after his reign, or it could have been some generations later if the memory of Akhenaten’s religious adventure was still in the air in ancient Egypt. Their departure—the exodus—could have been for religious freedom or for liberation from slavery or for some other political or social reason. Their route could have included a brief stop in the region of Midian-Edom-Seir, or it could have been a period of residence for years, decades, or centuries. Whatever they called their god when they left Egypt, they knew Him as Yahweh—a name we know from that region—by the time they came to Israel.
We can speculate about whether events followed these or other steps, just as we speculated about the possible steps of a Midianite origin. The point is that, like a Midianite origin, an Egyptian origin of Israel’s religion is possible historically. Both are possible, and both have some points of substance to be considered in making a historical judgment. Indeed the most likely historical possibility may be that it is both: Moses and his people, the Levites, learned their monotheism from Akhenaten’s Egypt, and then they identified that monotheism with the God named Yahweh during their residence in Midian. In fact, Freud went so far as to formulate a two-Moses model, with two leaders at two stages: both Moses the Egyptian and Moses the Midianite. That is further than most scholars (and I) are prepared to go, but at minimum it means that Freud shared an instinct that some scholars (and I) have that the trail includes time in both Egypt and Midian.
The Levites may have acquired the worship of Yahweh from Midian. They may have acquired it from Egypt. They may have formed it through the influence of both. But we should consider at least one more possibility. They may not have learned it from anybody. They may have come to their religion themselves.
3. MOSES THE LEVITE
Could it not be that Moses and/or the Levites just came to it on their own?! Scholars have a tendency to take any parallel between ancient Israel’s culture and other cultures and assume that Israel took it from the others.43 Why? I see no good reason at all. Did Moses get this religion from the Midianites? All right then, where did the Midianites get it? Did Moses get it from Akhenaten? All right then, where did Akhenaten get it? If Akhenaten thought of it on his own, why could an Israelite not have done it on his (or her) own as well? Is it a far-out thought that sometimes more than one person thinks of an idea—without influencing each other, without knowing each other?
And we have another crucial consideration. The difference between Israel’s monotheism and whatever preceded it is more than arithmetic. It is not just one god versus many. Biblical religion involves a different conception of what this one God is. In pagan religion, the gods and goddesses were identified with forces in nature: the sun, the sky, the sea, death, fertility, the storm wind.44 Even in Akhenaten’s religion, whether it was fully monotheistic or not, Aten was identified closely with the sun. In Israelite religion, no force in nature can tell you more about God than any other. Yahweh is above nature and beyond it. One cannot learn more about this God’s essence by contemplating the sky than by contemplating the sun or anything else. Yahweh is not a god who is known through nature. Yahweh is known through His acts (and words) in history. Possibly some event that the people experienced and perceived to be extraordinary—for example, the exodus—gave birth to such a view of God. Or possibly it was an insight by an extraordinary individual—for example, Moses—which this person then taught to his people. But it need not have come from some other, preexisting people or individual. We simply do not know of any people or any individual—Midianites or Akhenaten—who had such an idea of who and what God was. As my teacher George Ernest Wright put it:
We can never be certain of the true reason for this particular Israelite view of nature and history. It is the one primary, irreducible datum of Biblical theology, without antecedents in the environment whence it might have evolved.45
Wright favored the event of the exodus as most probably the impetus. The Israeli scholar Yehezkel Kaufmann favored the insight of an exceptional individual. He wrote:
The spiritual revolution, that gave historic moment to these ideas, must have been, like all similar events in history, the working of a creative genius and leader of men. Following the biblical saga, we call this pioneer creative spirit by the name Moses.46
It may have been some of both: an event and an individual with the insight to interpret it. We are all part of chains of events, persons, and ideas that precede and surround us. I can testify to this from my own experience. One of the first convergences of evidence that I brought in this book was that the Song of Deborah does not mention Levi, and the Song of the Sea does not mention Israel. I was proud when I thought of that, but then, when I was going through some old notes, I found that my colleague David Noel Freedman had said it in a seminar back when I was at the University of California, San Diego, years earlier. If Noel had not made the Song of Sea and Song of Deborah distinction, I might not have landed on any of this. I want to acknowledge David Noel Freedman’s important contribution, and I also want to make a broader point. If one looks back at the evidence assembled above that the exodus was historical and involved the Levites, one finds an array of scholars from several fields and several continents. Each contributed a piece of the puzzle. We are all links in chains of a tradition of knowledge. We take our place in the sequence and add what we can. If that doesn’t teach us humility, I don’t know what can.
4. MOSES THE LEVITE ISRAELITE
I suppose we should at least consider the possibility that the Israelites themselves came to the worship of Yahweh back in Israel without the help of the Levites. But then we are left back at the question of why it is the Levite sources that tell the story of God telling Moses that His name is Yahweh though He used to be called El. That fits too well with a history of Levites who arrive and identify Yahweh with the Israelites’ god El. And there are the two earliest references to the name Yahweh, and they are both from Egypt and both refer to the land of the Shasu of Yahweh.
True, there is still the Song of Deborah, which comes from Israel and does not mention the Levites. It calls God by the name Yahweh. So does that argue that Israel had come to Yahweh on its own, before the Levites showed up? How can we explain the presence of Yahweh’s name in the song? (1) The appearance of the name Yahweh in the song could be an editor’s later change or addition, though I do not like to resort to such arguments. We must be very circumspect about when we solve a problem by imagining that an unknown editor changed a text. Sometimes editors do that, and we are right to consider it as a possibility, but we should do so with caution and preferably where there is evidence that such editorial emending actually took place. (2) The Levites’ arrival in Israel and the merger of El and Yahweh could have already taken place before the time of the Song of Deborah. One might ask, then, why the Levites are not included among the tribes in the song. But that may be because they were the clergy, not a tribe. We had recognized that this was one of the pos
sibilities back in Chapter 2. (3) The two references to Yahweh in the Egyptian texts, identifying Yahweh with the region of Midian/Edom, are from long before the time of the Song of Deborah. And the song itself says, “Yahweh, in your coming out from Seir, in your marching from a field of Edom” (Judges 5:4). So it seems that the Israelites themselves understood their acquaintance with Yahweh to have come from that region—the region where Moses and the Levites had been. So, in the end, I think we still have to see the merger of El and Yahweh as directly related to the merger of Israel and the arriving Levites.47
THE LORD IS ONE
Whether it was the Levites first, as suggested here, or the Israelites or their ancestors in the land first, then that still leaves the question of where this people got their idea of monotheism. Their own story is that Yahweh Himself revealed it to them: to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob, to Joseph, to Moses. That is the Bible’s story, and it is a matter of faith, not to be proven by archaeology and scholarship. What the evidence has shown us is that historically it started with the Levites, probably with a leader named Moses. They may have gotten it from Midian. They may have gotten it from Egypt. They may have gotten it on their own. But, whatever their source, we know this much: they got it.
So with around thirty-four hundred years of perspective we have our pick of possibilities of where the Levite group from Egypt may have gotten Yahweh as their deity. For all we know, it could have been a combination of all or some of the above. After all, even if the Levites did learn of Yahweh in Midian, that does not mean that they came by the idea there that only Yahweh existed. The idea of monotheism may have been in the air in Egypt after the demise of Pharaoh Akhenaten’s religion of Aten. The majority of Egypt’s population may have rejected that idea. A minority may have been attracted to it. The Levite community that left Egypt may have been led by an Egyptian man, Moses, who was attracted to that one-God idea, and when they arrived at Midian he married a priest’s daughter and learned of the God Yahweh, whom he identified as the one God. Or the Levites may have left Egypt and then met a Midianite man, Moses, and were attracted to identify his God Yahweh as the one God. Or maybe Moses and/or the Levites found the idea of one God on their own, and they were then influenced either by the Egyptian monotheism in the air or by the Midianite faith of Yahweh. We can arrange these puzzle pieces in a number of possible ways. The bottom line, though, one way or another, is that the Levites had spent time in both Egypt and Midian, their God was Yahweh, and then they came to Israel.
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