To deny a people the man whom it praises as
the
greatest of its sons is not a deed to be under-
taken
light-heartedly especially by one belong-
ing to that people. No consideration, however,
will move rne to set aside truth in favour
of
supposed national interests. Moreover, the
elucidation of the mere facts of the
problem may
be
expected to deepen our insight into the
situation with which
they are concerned.
The man Moses, the liberator of his people, who
gave them their religion and their laws, belonged
to an
age so remote that the preliminary question
arises whether he was an historical
person or a
legendary figure. If he lived, his time was the
thirteenth or fourteenth
century B.C.; we have
no word of him but from the Holy Books and
the written traditions of the
Jews. Although
the decision lacks final historical
certainty, the
great majority of historians have expressed the
opinion that Moses did live and that the exodus
from
Egypt, led by him, did in fact take place.
12 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
It has been maintained with
good reason that
the later history of Israel could not be understood
if this were not admitted. Science
to-day has
become much more cautious and deals much
more leniently with tradition than it did in the
early days of historical investigation.
What first attracts our interest in the person of
Moses is his name, which is written Mosche in
Hebrew. One may well ask: Where does it
come from ? What does it mean ? As is well
known, the story in Exodus, Chapter ii, already
answers this
question. There we learn that the
Egyptian princess who saved the babe from the
waters of the Nile
gave him his name, adding the
etymological explanation: because I drew him
out of the water. But this
explanation is obviously
inadequate. " The biblical interpretation of the
name
'
He that was drawn out of the water
5 "
thus an author of the
Judisches Lexikon
1
"is folk
etymology; the active Hebrew form itself of the
name (Mosche can at best mean only
'
the
drawer out
5
) cannot be reconciled with this
solution." This
argument can be supported by
two further reflections : first, that it is nonsensical
to credit an
Egyptian princess with a knowledge
of Hebrew
etymology, and, secondly, that the
water from which the child was drawn was most
probably not the water of the Nile.
1
Judisches Lexikon, founded by Herlitz und Kirschner, Bd. IV,
1930, Jiidischer Verlag, Berlin.
MOSES AN EGYPTIAN
13
On the other hand the suggestion has long been
made and by many different people that the name
Moses derives from the Egyptian
vocabulary.
Instead of
citing all the authors who have voiced
this
opinion I shall quote a passage from a recent
work
by Breasted,
1
an author whose
History of
Egypt is regarded as authoritative. "It is
important to notice that his name, Moses, was
Egyptian. It is simply the Egyptian word
'
mose
'
meaning
*
child/ and is an abridgement of a
fuller form of such names as
'
Amen -mose
'
meaning
c
Amon-a-child
5
or
'
Ptah-mose,
5
mean-
ing
c
Ptah -a -child,
5
these forms themselves
being
likewise abbreviations for the
complete form
*
Amon-(has-given)-a child
5
or Ptah
-(has -given) -
a -child.
5
The abbreviation
'
child
5
early became
a convenient
rapid form for the cumbrous full
name, and the name Mose,
c
child,
5
is not un-
common on the Egyptian monuments. The father
of Moses without doubt
prefixed to his son
5
s name
that of an
Egyptian god like Amon or Ptah, and
this divine name was
gradually lost in current
usage, till the boy was called
'
Mose.
5
(The final
s is an addition drawn from the Greek translation
of the Old Testament. It is riot in the Hebrew,
which has
'
mosheh
5
).
55
I have
given this
passage literally and am by no means prepared
to share the
responsibility for its details. I am
a little
surprised, however, that Breasted in
1
The Dawn of Conscience, London, 1934, p. 350.
14 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
citing related names should have passed over the
analogous theophorous names in the list of
Egyptian kings, such as Ah-mose, Thut-mose
(Thothmes) and Ra-mose (Ramses).
It
might have been expected that one of the
many authors who recognized Moses to be an
Egyptian name would have drawn the con-
clusion, or at least considered the possibility,
that the bearer of an
Egyptian name was himself
an
Egyptian. In modern times we have no
misgiving in drawing such conclusions, although
to-day a person bears two names, not one, and
although a change of name or assimilation of it
in new conditions cannot be ruled out. So we
are not at all
surprised to find that the poet
Chamisso was of French extraction,
Napoleon
Buonaparte on the other hand of Italian, and
that
Benjamin Disraeli was an Italian Jew as
his name would lead us to
expect. And such an
inference from the name to the race should be
more reliable and indeed conclusive in respect
of
early and primitive times. Nevertheless to the
best of
my knowledge no historian has drawn this
conclusion in the case of Moses, not even one of
those who, like
Breasted, are ready to suppose
that Moses " was
cognizant of all the wisdom of
the
Egyptians."
l
What hindered them from doing so can only
be guessed at.
Perhaps the awe of Biblical
1
Loc. cit.
9 p. 334.
MOSES AN EGYPTIAN
15
tradition was
insuperable. Perhaps it seemed
monstrous to imagine that the man Moses could
have been
anything other than a Hebrew. In
any event, what happened was that the recogni-
tion of the name
being Egyptian was not a factor
in
judging the origin of the man Moses, and that
nothing further was deduced from it. If the
question of the nationality of this great man is
considered
important, then any new material for
answering it must be welcome.
This is what
my little essay attempts. It may
claim a
place in Imago
1
because the contribution
it
brings is an application of psycho-analysis.
The considerations thus reached will impress only
that
minority of readers familiar with analytical
reasoning and able to appreciate its conclusions.
To them I hope it will appear of significance.
In
1909 Otto Rank, then still under my influ-
ence, published at my suggestion a book entitled
:
Der
Mythus von der Geburt des Helden.
2
It deals with
the fact " that almost all
important civilized
peoples have early on woven myths around and
glorified in poetry their heroes, mythical kings
and
princes, founders of religions, of dynasties,
empires and cities in short their national heroes.
Especially the history of their birth and of their
early years is furnished with phantastic traits;
1
See
Glossary.
2
Funftes Heft der
Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde, Fr.
Deuticke, Wien. It is far from my mind to depreciate the value
of Rank's
original contributions to this work.
1 6 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
the
amazing similarity, nay, literal identity, of
those tales, even if
they refer to different, com-
pletely independent peoples, sometimes geo-
graphically far removed from one another, is well
known and has struck many an investigator.
55
Following Rank we reconstruct on the lines of
Galton's
technique an "^average myth
55
that
makes prominent the essential features of all these
tales, and we then get this formula.
"
The hero is the son of parents of the highest
station, most often the son of a king.
"
His
conception is impeded by difficuJties,
such as abstinence or
temporary sterility; or else
his
parents practise intercourse in secret because
of
prohibitions or other external obstacles. During
his mothers
pregnancy or earlier an oracle or a
dream warns the father of the child
5
s birth as
containing grave danger for his safety.
"
In
consequence the father (or a person
representing him) gives orders for the new-born
babe to be killed or
exposed to extreme danger;
in most cases the babe is
placed in a casket and
delivered to the waves.
"
The child is then saved by animals or poor
people, such as shepherds, and suckled by a
female animal or a woman of humble birth.
"
When full grown he rediscovers his noble
parents after many strange adventures, wreaks
vengeance on his father and, recognized by his
people, attains fame and greatness.
55
MOSES AN EGYPTIAN 1
7
The most remote of the historical personages
to whom this
myth attaches is Sargon of Agade,
the founder of
Babylon about 2800 B.C. From the
point of view of what interests us here it would
perhaps be worth while to reproduce the account
ascribed to himself:
"
I am
Sargon, the mighty king, King of
Agade. My mother was a Vestal; my father I
knew not; while my father's brother dwelt in
the mountains. In
my town Azupirani it lies
on the banks of
Euphrates my mother, the
Vestal, conceived me. Secretly she bore me. She laid
me in a basket of sedge, closed the
opening with
pitch and lowered me into the river. The stream did
not drown me, but carried me to Akki, the
drawer of water. Akki, the drawer of water, in
the
goodness of his heart lifted me out of the
water. Akki, the drawer
of water, as his own son he
brought me up. Akki, the drawer of water, made
me his gardener. When I was a gardener Istar
fell in love with me. I became
king and for forty-
five
years I ruled as king.
5 '
The best known names in the series beginning
with
Sargon of Agade are Moses, Cyrus and
Romulus. But besides these Rank has enumerated
many other heroes belonging to myth or poetry
to whom the same
youthful story attaches either
in its
entirety or in well recognizable parts, such as
(Edipus, Kama, Paris, Telephos, Perseus, Heracles,
Gilgamesh, Amphion, Zethos and others.
B
1 8 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
The source and the tendency of such myths are
familiar to us
through Rank's work. I need only
refer to his conclusions with a few short hints.
A hero is a man who stands up manfully against
his father and in the end
victoriously overcomes
him. The myth in
question traces this struggle
back to the very dawn of the hero's life,
by having
him born against his father's will and saved in
spite of his father's evil intentions. The exposure
in the basket is
clearly a symbolical representa-
tion of birth
; the basket is the womb, the stream
the water at birth. In innumerable dreams the
relation of the child to the
parents is represented
by drawing or saving from the water. When the
imagination of a people attaches this myth to a
famous
personage it is to indicate that he is
recognized as a hero, that his life has conformed
to the
typical plan. The inner source of the myth
is the so-called "
family romance " of the child,
in which the son reacts to the
change in his inner
relationship to his parents, especially that to his
father. The child's first
years are governed by
grandiose over-estimation of his father; kings
and
queens in dreams and fairy tales always
represent, accordingly, the parents. Later on,
under the influence of
rivalry and real disappoint-
ments, the release from the parents and a critical
attitude towards the father sets in. The two
families of the
myth, the noble as well as the
humble one, are therefore both
images of his own
MOSES AN EGYPTIAN 1
9
family as they appear to the child in successive
periods of his life.
It is not too much to
say that these observations
fully explain the similarity as well as the far-
spread occurrence of the myth of the birth of the
hero. It is all the more
interesting to find that
the
myth of Moses
5
birth and
exposure stands
apart; in one essential point it even contradicts
the others.
We start with the two families between which
the
myth has cast the child's fate. We know that
analytic interpretation makes them into one
family, that the distinction is only a temporal
one. In the
typical form of the myth the first
family, into which the child is born, is a noble and
mostly a royal one; the second family, in which
the child
grows up, is a humble and degraded
one, corresponding with the circumstances to
which the
interpretation refers. Only in the
story of (Edipus is this difference obscured. The
babe
exposed by one kingly family is brought up
by another royal pair. It can hardly be an
accident that in this one
example there is in the
myth itself a glimmer of the original identity of
the two families. The social contrast of the two
families
meant, as we know, to stress the heroic
nature of a
great man gives a second function
to our
myth, which becomes especially significant
with historical
personages. It can also be used
to
provide for our hero a patent of nobility to
2O MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
elevate him to a
higher social rank. Thus Cyrus
is for the Medes an alien
conqueror; by way of
the
exposure myth he becomes the grandson of
their
king. A similar trait occurs in the myth of
Romulus : if such a man ever lived he must have
been an unknown adventurer, an
upstart; the
myth makes him a descendant of, and heir to,
the
royal house of Alba Longa.
It is
very different in the case of Moses. Here
the first
family usually so distinguished is
modest
enough. ^He is the child of Jewish
Leyites. But the second family the humble one
in which as a rule heroes are
brought up is
replaced by the Royal house of Egypt; the
princess brings him up as her own son. This
divergence from the usual type has struck many
research workers as
strange. E. Meyer and others
after him
supposed the original form of the myth
to have been different. Pharaoh had been warned
by a prophetic dream
1
that his
daughter's son
would become a danger to him and his kingdom.
This is
why he has the child delivered to the
waters of the Nile
shortly after his birth. But the
child is saved
by Jewish people and brought up
as their own. " National motives " in Rank's
terminology
2
had transformed the
myth into the
form now known
by us.
However, further thought tells us that an
1
Also mentioned in Flavius Josephus's narration.
2
Loc. tit., p. 80, footnote.
MOSES AN EGYPTIAN 21
original Moses myth of this kind, one not diverg-
ing from other birth myths, could not have
existed. For the
legend is either of Egyptian or
of
Jewish origin. The first supposition may be
excluded. The
Egyptians had no motive to
glorify Moses; to them he was not a hero. So
the
legend should have originated among the
Jewish people; that is to say, it was attached in
the usual version to the
person of their leader.
But for that
purpose it was entirely unfitted;
what good is a legend to a
people that makes
their hero into an alien ?
The Moses myth as we know it to-day lags
sadly behind its secret motives. If Moses is not
of
royal lineage our legend cannot make him into
a hero ; if he remains a
Jew it has done nothing
to raise his status.
Only one small feature of the
whole myth remains effective : the assurance that
the babe survived in
spite of strong outside forces
to the
contrary. This feature is repeated in the
early history of Jesus, where King Herod assumes
the role of Pharaoh. So we
really have a right
to assume that in a later and rather
clumsy
treatment of the legendary material the
adapter
saw fit to
equip his hero Moses with certain
features
appertaining to the classical exposure
myths characteristic of a hero, and yet unsuited
to Moses
by reason of the special circumstances.
With this unsatisfactory and even uncertain
result our
investigation would have to end,
22 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
without having contributed
anything to answering
the"
question whether Moses was Egyptian, were
there not another and
perhaps more successful
way of approaching the exposure myth itself.
Let us return to the two families in the
myth.
As we know, on the level of analytic
interpreta-
tion
they are identical. On a mythical level they
are
distinguished as the noble and the humble
family. With an historical person to whom the
myth has become attached there is, however, a
third level, that of
reality. One of the families is
the real one, the one into which the
great man
was really born and in which he was brought
up.
The other is fictitious, invented by the myth in
pursuance of its own motives. As a rule the real
family corresponds with the humble one, the
noble
family with the fictitious one. In the case
of Moses
something seemed to be different. And
here the new
point of view may perhaps bring
some illumination. It is that the first family,
the one from which the babe is
exposed to danger,
is in all
comparable cases the fictitious one; the
second
family, however, by which the hero is
adopted and in which he grows up is his real one.
If we have the
courage to accept this statement
as a
general truth to which the Moses legend also
is