and more
spiritual conception of God, a single
God who embraces the whole world, one as all-
loving as he was all-powerful, who averse to all
ceremonial and
magic set humanity as its
highest aim a life of truth and justice. For,
incomplete as our information about the ethical
side of the Aton
religion may be, it is surely
significant that Ikhnaton regularly described
himself in his
inscriptions as " living in Maat "
(truth, justice).
1
In the
long run it did not matter
that the
people, probably after a very short time,
renounced the
teaching of Moses and removed
the man himself. The tradition itself remained
and its influence reached though only slowly,
in the course of centuries the aim that was
denied to Moses himself. The
god Jahve attained
undeserved honour when, from Qades onward,
Moses
5
deed of liberation was
put down to his
account; but he had to pay dear for this usurpa-
tion. The shadow of the
god whose place he had
taken became
stronger than himself; at the end
of the historical
development there arose beyond
his
Being that of the forgotten Mosaic God.
None can doubt that it was only the idea of this
1
His hymns
lay stress on not only the universality and oneness of
God, but also His loving kindness for all creatures; they invite
believers to
enjoy nature and its beauties. Gp. Breasted, The
Dawn of Conscience.
F
82 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
other God that enabled the
people of Israel to
surmount all their
hardships and to survive until
our time.
It is no
longer possible to determine the part
the Levites
played in the final victory of the
Mosaic God over Jahve. When the
compromise
at
Qades was effected they had raised their voice
for Moses, their
memory being still green of the
master whose followers and
countrymen they
were.
During the centuries since then the Levites
had become one with the
people or with the
priesthood and it had become the main task of
the
priests to develop and supervise the ritual,
besides
caring for the holy texts and revising them
in accordance with their
purposes. But was not
all this sacrifice and ceremonial at bottom
only
magic and black art, such as the old doctrine of
Moses had
unconditionally condemned ? There
arose from the midst of the
people an unending
succession of
men, not necessarily descended from
Moses
5
people, but seized by the great and power-
ful tradition which had
gradually grown in dark-
ness, and it was these men, the prophets, who
sedulously preached the old Mosaic doctrine:
the
Deity spurns sacrifice and ceremonial; He
demands
only belief and a life of truth and
justice (Maat)
. The efforts of the
prophets met
with
enduring success; the doctrines with which
they re-established the old belief became the
permanent content of the Jewish religion. It is
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN
83
honour
enough for the Jewish people that it has
kept alive such a tradition and produced men who
lent it their voice even if the stimulus had first
come from outside, from a great stranger.
This
description of events would leave me with
a
feeling of uncertainty were it not that I can refer
to the
judgement ofother, expert, research workers
who see the importance of Moses for the history of
Jewish religion in the same light, although they
do not
recognize his Egyptian origin. Sellin says,
for
example:
I "
Therefore we have to
picture
the true
religion of Moses, the belief he proclaimed
in
one, ethical god, as being from now on, as a
matter of course, the
possession of a small circle
within the
people. We cannot expect to find it
from the start in the official cult, the
priests
3
religion, in the general belief of the people. All
we can expect is that here and there a spark flies
up from the spiritual fire he had kindled, that
his ideas have not died out, but have
quietly
influenced beliefs and customs until, sooner or
later, under the influence of special events, or
through some personality particularly immersed
in this
belief, they broke forth again more strongly
and
gained dominance with the broad mass of
the
people. It is from this point of view that we
have to
regard the early religious history of
the old Israelites. Were we to reconstruct the
Mosaic
religion after the pattern laid down in the
1
Sellin, I.e., p. 52.
84 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
historical documents that describe the
religion of
the first five centuries in Canaan we should fall
into the worst methodical error.
55
Volz 1
expresses
himself still more
explicitly. He says
: " that
the heaven
-soaring work of Moses was at first
hardly understood and feebly carried out, until
during the course of centuries it penetrated more
and more into the
spirit of the people and at last
found kindred souls in the
great prophets who
continued the work of the
lonely Founder."
With this I have come to an end, my sole
purpose having been to fit the figure of an
Egyptian Moses into the framework of Jewish
history. I may now express my conclusion in the
shortest formula: To the well-known
duality of
that
history two peoples who fuse together to
form one nation, two
kingdoms into which this
nation divides, two names for the
Deity in the
source of the Bible we add two new ones : the
founding of two new religions, the first one ousted
by the second and yet reappearing victorious,
two founders of
religions, who are both called by
the same name Moses and whose
personalities
we have to
separate from each other. And all
these dualities are
necessary consequences of the
first: one section of the
people passed through
what may
properly be termed a traumatic
experience which the other was spared. There
still remains much to
discuss, to explain and to
1
Paul Volz: Mose, 1907,
p. 64.
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN
85
assert.
Only then would the interest in our
purely historical study be fully warranted. In
what exactly consists the intrinsic nature of a
tradition, and in what resides its peculiar power,
how impossible it is to deny the personal influence
of individual great men on the
history of the
world, what profanation of the grandiose multi-
formity of human life we commit if we recognize
as sole motives those
springing from material
needs, from what sources certain ideas, especially
religious ones, derive the power with which they
subjugate individuals and peoples to study all
this on the
particular case ofJewish history would
be an
alluring task. Such a continuation of my
essay would link up with conclusions laid down
twenty-five years ago in Totem and Taboo. But
I
hardly trust my powers any further.