IN Part I of this book I have tried to
strengthen by a new argument the suggestion that
the man Moses, the liberator and
law-giver of
the
Jewish people, was not a Jew, but an Egypt-
ian. That his name derived from the
Egyptian
vocabulary had long been observed, though not
duly appreciated. I added to this consideration
the further one that the
interpretation of the
exposure myth attaching to Moses necessitated
the conclusion that he was an
Egyptian whom a
people needed to make into a Jew.VAt the end of
my essay I said that important and far-reaching
conclusions could be drawn from the
suggestion
that Moses was an
Egyptian; but I was not
prepared to uphold them publicly, since they were
based only on
psychological probabilities and
lacked
objective proof. The more significant the
possibilities thus discerned the more cautious is
one about
exposing them to the critical attack of
the outside world without
any secure foundation
like an iron monument with feet of
clay. No
29
30 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
probability, however seductive, can protect us
from error; even if all parts of a problem seem
to fit
together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle,
one has to remember that the probable need not
necessarily be the truth and the truth not always
probable. And, lastly, it is not attractive to be
classed with the scholastics and talmudists who
are satisfied to exercise their
ingenuity uncon-
cerned how far removed their conclusions
may
be from the truth.
Notwithstanding these misgivings, which weigh
as
heavily to-day as they did then, out of the
conflict of
my motives the decision has emerged
to follow
up my first essay by this contribution.
But once again it is only a
part of the whole, and
not the most
important part.
If, then, Moses was an Egyptian, the first gain
from this
suggestion is a new riddle, one difficult
to answer. When a
people of a tribe
1
prepares
for a
great undertaking it is to be expected that
one of them should make himself their leader or
be chosen for this role. But what could have
induced a
distinguished Egyptian perhaps a
prince, priest or high official to place himself at
1
We have no inkling what numbers were concerned in the
Exodus.
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN
31
the head of a
throng of culturally inferior immi-
grants, and to leave the country with them, is
not
easy to conjecture. The well-known contempt
of the
Egyptians for foreigners makes such a
proceeding especially unlikely. Indeed, I am
inclined to think this is
why even those historians
who recognized the name as Egyptian, and
ascribed all the wisdom of
Egypt to him, were not
willing to entertain the obvious possibility that
Moses was an
Egyptian.
This first
difficulty is followed by a second. We
must not
forget that Moses was not only the
political leader of the Jews settled in Egypt, he
was also their law -giver and educator and the
man who forced them to adopt a new religion,
which is still to-day called Mosaic after him.
But can a single
person create a new religion so
easily ? And when someone wishes to influence
the
religion of another would not the most
natural
thing be to convert him to his own ?
The Jewish people in Egypt were certainly
not without some kind of
religion, and if
Moses, who gave them a new religion, was an
Egyptian, then the surmise cannot be rejected
that this other new
religion was the Egyptian
one.
This
possibility encounters an obstacle: the
sharp contrast between the Jewish religion
attributed to Moses and the
Egyptian one.
The former is a grandiosely rigid monotheism.
32 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
There is
only one God, unique, omnipotent,
unapproachable. The sight of his countenance
cannot be borne; one must not make an image
of him, not even breathe his name. In the
Egyptian religion, on the other hand, there is
a
bewildering mass of deities of differing impor-
tance and
provenance. Some of them are per-
sonifications of
great natural powers like heaven
and earth, sun and moon. Then we find an
abstraction such as Maat
(Justice, Truth) or a
grotesque creature like the dwarfish Bes. Most
of them, however, are local
gods from the time
when the land was divided into numerous
provinces. They have the shapes of animals as
if
they had not yet overcome their origin from
the old totem animals.
They are not clearly
differentiated, barely distinguished by special
functions attributed to some of them. The
hymns
in
praise of these gods tell the same thing about
each of them, identify them with one another
without
any misgivings in a way that would
confuse us
hopelessly. Names of deities are
combined with one another, so that one becomes
degraded almost to an epithet of the other. Thus
in the best
period of the " New Empire " the
main
god of the city of Thebes is called Amon-Re
in which combination the first