Jan Assmann > Quotes

“In decreeing the Decalogue, moreover, YHWH bypasses Moses to address the people as a whole, communicating his will to them in quasi-democratic openness, without the need for any royal or prophetic intermediary. That is not only without precedent in the history of religion; it is also unparalleled in the Hebrew Bible. God’s proclamation of the Decalogue accordingly lies at the heart of the theme of revelation.”
― Jan Assmann, The Invention of Religion: Faith and Covenant in the Book of Exodus

“Disciplines develop questions of their own and by doing so function as a mnemotechnique of forgetting with regard to concerns of a more general and fundamental character.”
― Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism

“Through the “transference” of the king-god relationship and the king-people relationship to the relationship between God and his people, Assyrian state ideology is converted into Israelite covenant theology. The fact that God makes his covenant with the people as a whole, rather than through the intercession of royalty, priesthood, or some other representative authority, becomes the basis for a new, specific, emphatic, and to some extent “democratic” conception of the people. The people—not Moses, not the seventy elders, not Aaron, not the Levites—assume the role of a sovereign partner in the covenant. This directness of access to God is what lends the biblical concept its democratic force.”
― Jan Assmann, The Invention of Religion: Faith and Covenant in the Book of Exodus

“All world religions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Confucianism, Taoism—are founded on a canon of sacred scriptures that codifies the will of their founder and the superior truth of his revelation. This step of canonization was invented only twice in the world: with the Hebrew and the Buddhist canons.”
― Jan Assmann