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Exodus: Die Revolution der Alten Welt
Die Geschichte vom Auszug aus Ägypten ist eine der wirkmächtigsten Erzählungen der Menschheit. Sie steht für die Befreiung aus Sklaverei, aber auch für die Erfindung des Glaubens an den einen Gott. Jan Assmann verfolgt die Spuren der Exodus-Erzählung zurück bis ins Alte Ägypten und nach vorne bis ins 20. Jahrhundert. Er entfaltet eine neue Theorie des Monotheismus und zeigt, warum die Geschichte vom Auszug aus Ägypten auch die Gründungserzählung der modernen Welt ist.
Das Buch Exodus enthält Schlüsselszenen der Heilsgeschichte, die in Judentum, Christentum und Islam, aber auch in Kunst und Literatur eine vielfältige Wirkung entfaltet haben: von der Fron der Israeliten in Ägypten über die Offenbarung Gottes in einem brennenden Dornbusch, die zehn Plagen, die Stiftung des Passa-Festes und den Durchzug durchs Schilfmeer bis zum Empfang der Zehn Gebote und den Tanz ums Goldene Kalb. Wann sind diese Geschichten entstanden? Welche ägyptischen und altorientalischen Parallelen oder Wurzeln haben sie, und was an ihnen ist radikal anders und neu? Wer hat diese Erzählungen schließlich zusammen mit verschiedenen Gesetzestexten zu dem Buch Exodus, dem Gründungsdokument einer neuen Religion, verbunden? Jan Assmann geht diesen Fragen auf dem neuesten archäologischen und bibelwissenschaftlichen Forschungsstand nach. Er präzisiert seine viel diskutierte Monotheismus-Theorie und erklärt die revolutionären, weltgeschichtlichen Folgen des Auszugs aus Ägypten
Das Buch Exodus enthält Schlüsselszenen der Heilsgeschichte, die in Judentum, Christentum und Islam, aber auch in Kunst und Literatur eine vielfältige Wirkung entfaltet haben: von der Fron der Israeliten in Ägypten über die Offenbarung Gottes in einem brennenden Dornbusch, die zehn Plagen, die Stiftung des Passa-Festes und den Durchzug durchs Schilfmeer bis zum Empfang der Zehn Gebote und den Tanz ums Goldene Kalb. Wann sind diese Geschichten entstanden? Welche ägyptischen und altorientalischen Parallelen oder Wurzeln haben sie, und was an ihnen ist radikal anders und neu? Wer hat diese Erzählungen schließlich zusammen mit verschiedenen Gesetzestexten zu dem Buch Exodus, dem Gründungsdokument einer neuen Religion, verbunden? Jan Assmann geht diesen Fragen auf dem neuesten archäologischen und bibelwissenschaftlichen Forschungsstand nach. Er präzisiert seine viel diskutierte Monotheismus-Theorie und erklärt die revolutionären, weltgeschichtlichen Folgen des Auszugs aus Ägypten
493 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 24, 2015
33 people are currently reading
247 people want to read
About the author
Jan Assmann
123 books101 followersAssmann studied Egyptology and classical archaeology in Munich, Heidelberg, Paris, and Göttingen. In 1966-67, he was a fellow of the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo, where he continued as an independent scholar from 1967 to 1971. After completing his habilitation in 1971, he was named a professor of Egyptology at the University of Heidelberg in 1976, where he taught until his retirement in 2003. He was then named an honorary professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Constance, where he is today.
In the 1990s Assmann and his wife Aleida Assmann developed a theory of cultural and communicative memory that has received much international attention. He is also known beyond Egyptology circles for his interpretation of the origins of monotheism, which he considers as a break from earlier cosmotheism, first with Atenism and later with the Exodus from Egypt of the Israelites.
In the 1990s Assmann and his wife Aleida Assmann developed a theory of cultural and communicative memory that has received much international attention. He is also known beyond Egyptology circles for his interpretation of the origins of monotheism, which he considers as a break from earlier cosmotheism, first with Atenism and later with the Exodus from Egypt of the Israelites.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 12, 2018
Very, very good--I recommend this to anyone who's teaching Exodus, or is interested in the story. Usually I'm irritated by the kind of asides that Assmann uses (did we need quite so many pages on Schoenberg's work?), but here, for whatever reason, they're charming; perhaps it's because everything is so authoritative and generous that I actually care what he thinks about things that he is slightly less expert in.
March 9, 2023
Review of Exodus: Die Revolution der Alten Welt by Jann Assmann, München: C.H. Beck, 2015
Elena S. Danielson, 2023
Jan Assmann belongs to a centuries-old tradition, long cultivated by German universities, in which ancient manuscripts have been studied with an extreme intensity that can only be described as an obsession. The knowledge these professors have extracted from fragmentary old documents, written in largely forgotten languages, is phenomenal. Fortunately, Assmann diverges enough from the tradition to make his findings accessible and interesting to lay readers such as myself. He even provides translations of Latin quotations. (Well, most of the time he doesn’t forget that not everyone reads ancient languages.) The title of his 2015 book, Exodus: Die Revolution der Alten Welt, encapsulates his thesis that the biblical book of Exodus,--most likely codified sometime in the 6th century BCE, using sources from a period hundreds of years, some think a millennium, earlier,--represents a radical shift of thinking in the ancient world, hence the word “revolution” in the title. And that radical shift in world view found its way into Christianity and Islam and persists to this day. I'll try to summarize his view: Assmann presents the text describing the exodus from slavery as a radically new contract directly between god and his people, not dictated by any king. And of course, this perspective was only possible in a historical moment when there was no king, such as the Babylonian exile of the 6th century BCE. Assmann builds his argument carefully, repeating the thesis with new evidence in each chapter. (I’m glad that I decided to read the text in the original German as some of the key terms, such as “der Bund,” used repeatedly throughout, are more transparent than the English equivalent, such as “the covenant.”)
Few scholars are more qualified to make this argument about an ancient shift in thinking than Jan Assmann, who has mastered the literatures of ancient Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon, as well as the increasing wealth of archeological evidence. He provides intriguing quotations from the rich textual history of these three cultures, and then shows how the parallel passages in Exodus diverge from the templates in the older literature. For an erudite German Egyptologist, the differences between the Hebrew wording and the versions in other languages are striking, revolutionary, but to a lay person such as myself, it is astonishing to learn how many themes and motifs, topoi I think is the technical term, from ancient Egypt and the Mesopotamia, are incorporated into the Hebrew text, and almost always with intriguing variations and especially interesting inversions. So I appreciate his thesis of something radically new, but actually marveled at the similarities in the exodus story with the other traditions of the ancient world. The Hebrew Bible seems to borrow freely from the common themes in the literature of adjacent cultures in a welter of languages. There is an analog to Jewish memory ritual of the seder in an earlier Assyrian text. Here the earlier template is a ritual of consuming water and bread in remembrance, instead of wine and unleavened bread, but the parallel to both Jewish Passover ceremonies and Christian communion is obvious. The story about the birth of Moses, how he is set adrift on the Nile and adopted by an Egyptian princess, also has numerous analogs in much older texts from other cultures, but the usual theme is that of the king’s child adopted by a commoner, not the other way around. And several of the Hebrew psalms appear to be direct translations from an older Egyptian source. The quotations from Egyptian texts are quite beautiful, one of the rewards for taking on this daunting book.
Assmann is also an excellent guide to the history of Egyptology and recognizes the contributions made by scholars and interpreters going back to the work of Sir John Marsham, the English scholar who in 1672, long before hieroglyphics were deciphered, pointed out the striking congruence between the Ten Commandmants and the moral code incorporated into the Egyptian Book of the Dead. (Marsham based his work on a Greek excerpt from the 3rd century BCE. It seems the German scholars were not the only ones obsessed with ancient texts.) With his extraordinary erudition, Assmann, of course, finds holes in many of the theories that scholars have floated such as the notion that the Achnaton worship in the Amarna period of Egyptian history established a model of monotheism that the ancient Israelites recycled. He sees too many substantive and chronological inconsistencies to connect the two religions. Assmann does provide intriguing snapshots of responses to Exodus by writers such as Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Nietzsche, Freud, Thomas Mann, as well as composers, Bach, Hӓndel, Schönberg. These sketches from the reception history are another reward for the reader’s hard work.
In all of these analyses, Assmann consistently praises the brilliance of the ancient writers and compilers. His treatment of the text is respectful to the point of reverence, but in asides he concedes that there is absolutely no evidence that the ancient Israelis actually were in Egypt in significant numbers during that archaic period. In this he is in agreement with Robert Alter, whose magisterial annotated translation of the Hebrew Bible was completed in 2019. Assmann presents the evidence of an entirely different semitic tribe, the Hyksos, who did dwell in the Nile Delta, and who ruled that region in about 1620-1510 BCE until they were driven out. While some ancient authors mistakenly identified the Hyksos with the biblical Israelites, the story is inside out as the Hyksos were rulers not slaves, and they were expelled not liberated. However, the possibility exists that the shreds of this historical memory may have persisted and been repurposed and inverted. And Assmann’s reverential treatment of the Hebrew Bible does concede that the compelling stories include a “dark” side, such as call for the extermination of the competing ethnic groups in Canaan. He concedes that there are archaic traces of a divine claim on the first born, and that would most likely have included at least the threat of human sacrifice, such as found in the story of Isaac. Robert Alter on the other hand tersely considers this out of the question. These questions about the darker side should not overshadow the immense overall achievement of the narrative and its grand purpose. The leadership returning from Babylonian exile faced an immense task: rebuilding and reorienting a culture that had suffered total catastrophic defeat. They needed a compelling narrative to overcome the inevitable obstacles and the inevitable opposition, and, according to Assmann, the story of Exodus accomplished this and created a revolution that reverberates in various ways to this day. As Assmann points out in his concluding chapter: “Die Exodus Erzӓhlung schreibt nicht Geschichte, sondern sie macht Geschichte”: The Exodus story does not write history, rather it makes history.
Elena S. Danielson, 2023
Jan Assmann belongs to a centuries-old tradition, long cultivated by German universities, in which ancient manuscripts have been studied with an extreme intensity that can only be described as an obsession. The knowledge these professors have extracted from fragmentary old documents, written in largely forgotten languages, is phenomenal. Fortunately, Assmann diverges enough from the tradition to make his findings accessible and interesting to lay readers such as myself. He even provides translations of Latin quotations. (Well, most of the time he doesn’t forget that not everyone reads ancient languages.) The title of his 2015 book, Exodus: Die Revolution der Alten Welt, encapsulates his thesis that the biblical book of Exodus,--most likely codified sometime in the 6th century BCE, using sources from a period hundreds of years, some think a millennium, earlier,--represents a radical shift of thinking in the ancient world, hence the word “revolution” in the title. And that radical shift in world view found its way into Christianity and Islam and persists to this day. I'll try to summarize his view: Assmann presents the text describing the exodus from slavery as a radically new contract directly between god and his people, not dictated by any king. And of course, this perspective was only possible in a historical moment when there was no king, such as the Babylonian exile of the 6th century BCE. Assmann builds his argument carefully, repeating the thesis with new evidence in each chapter. (I’m glad that I decided to read the text in the original German as some of the key terms, such as “der Bund,” used repeatedly throughout, are more transparent than the English equivalent, such as “the covenant.”)
Few scholars are more qualified to make this argument about an ancient shift in thinking than Jan Assmann, who has mastered the literatures of ancient Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon, as well as the increasing wealth of archeological evidence. He provides intriguing quotations from the rich textual history of these three cultures, and then shows how the parallel passages in Exodus diverge from the templates in the older literature. For an erudite German Egyptologist, the differences between the Hebrew wording and the versions in other languages are striking, revolutionary, but to a lay person such as myself, it is astonishing to learn how many themes and motifs, topoi I think is the technical term, from ancient Egypt and the Mesopotamia, are incorporated into the Hebrew text, and almost always with intriguing variations and especially interesting inversions. So I appreciate his thesis of something radically new, but actually marveled at the similarities in the exodus story with the other traditions of the ancient world. The Hebrew Bible seems to borrow freely from the common themes in the literature of adjacent cultures in a welter of languages. There is an analog to Jewish memory ritual of the seder in an earlier Assyrian text. Here the earlier template is a ritual of consuming water and bread in remembrance, instead of wine and unleavened bread, but the parallel to both Jewish Passover ceremonies and Christian communion is obvious. The story about the birth of Moses, how he is set adrift on the Nile and adopted by an Egyptian princess, also has numerous analogs in much older texts from other cultures, but the usual theme is that of the king’s child adopted by a commoner, not the other way around. And several of the Hebrew psalms appear to be direct translations from an older Egyptian source. The quotations from Egyptian texts are quite beautiful, one of the rewards for taking on this daunting book.
Assmann is also an excellent guide to the history of Egyptology and recognizes the contributions made by scholars and interpreters going back to the work of Sir John Marsham, the English scholar who in 1672, long before hieroglyphics were deciphered, pointed out the striking congruence between the Ten Commandmants and the moral code incorporated into the Egyptian Book of the Dead. (Marsham based his work on a Greek excerpt from the 3rd century BCE. It seems the German scholars were not the only ones obsessed with ancient texts.) With his extraordinary erudition, Assmann, of course, finds holes in many of the theories that scholars have floated such as the notion that the Achnaton worship in the Amarna period of Egyptian history established a model of monotheism that the ancient Israelites recycled. He sees too many substantive and chronological inconsistencies to connect the two religions. Assmann does provide intriguing snapshots of responses to Exodus by writers such as Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Nietzsche, Freud, Thomas Mann, as well as composers, Bach, Hӓndel, Schönberg. These sketches from the reception history are another reward for the reader’s hard work.
In all of these analyses, Assmann consistently praises the brilliance of the ancient writers and compilers. His treatment of the text is respectful to the point of reverence, but in asides he concedes that there is absolutely no evidence that the ancient Israelis actually were in Egypt in significant numbers during that archaic period. In this he is in agreement with Robert Alter, whose magisterial annotated translation of the Hebrew Bible was completed in 2019. Assmann presents the evidence of an entirely different semitic tribe, the Hyksos, who did dwell in the Nile Delta, and who ruled that region in about 1620-1510 BCE until they were driven out. While some ancient authors mistakenly identified the Hyksos with the biblical Israelites, the story is inside out as the Hyksos were rulers not slaves, and they were expelled not liberated. However, the possibility exists that the shreds of this historical memory may have persisted and been repurposed and inverted. And Assmann’s reverential treatment of the Hebrew Bible does concede that the compelling stories include a “dark” side, such as call for the extermination of the competing ethnic groups in Canaan. He concedes that there are archaic traces of a divine claim on the first born, and that would most likely have included at least the threat of human sacrifice, such as found in the story of Isaac. Robert Alter on the other hand tersely considers this out of the question. These questions about the darker side should not overshadow the immense overall achievement of the narrative and its grand purpose. The leadership returning from Babylonian exile faced an immense task: rebuilding and reorienting a culture that had suffered total catastrophic defeat. They needed a compelling narrative to overcome the inevitable obstacles and the inevitable opposition, and, according to Assmann, the story of Exodus accomplished this and created a revolution that reverberates in various ways to this day. As Assmann points out in his concluding chapter: “Die Exodus Erzӓhlung schreibt nicht Geschichte, sondern sie macht Geschichte”: The Exodus story does not write history, rather it makes history.
March 9, 2023
Jan Assmann belongs to a centuries-old tradition, long cultivated by German universities, in which ancient manuscripts have been studied with an extreme intensity that can only be described as an obsession. The knowledge these professors have extracted from fragmentary old documents, written in largely forgotten languages, is phenomenal. Fortunately, Assmann diverges enough from the tradition to make his findings accessible and interesting to lay readers such as myself. He even provides translations of Latin quotations. (Well, most of the time he doesn’t forget that not everyone reads ancient languages.) The title of his 2015 book, Exodus: Die Revolution der Alten Welt, encapsulates his thesis that the biblical book of Exodus,--most likely codified sometime in the 6th century BCE, using sources from a period hundreds of years, some think a millennium, earlier,--represents a radical shift of thinking in the ancient world, hence the word “revolution” in the title. And that radical shift in world view found its way into Christianity and Islam and persists to this day. I'll try to summarize his view: Assmann presents the text describing the exodus from slavery as a radically new contract directly between god and his people, not dictated by any king. And of course, this perspective was only possible in a historical moment when there was no king, such as the Babylonian exile of the 6th century BCE. Assmann builds his argument carefully, repeating the thesis with new evidence in each chapter. (I’m glad that I decided to read the text in the original German as some of the key terms, such as “der Bund,” used repeatedly throughout, are more transparent than the English equivalent, such as “the covenant.”)
Few scholars are more qualified to make this argument about an ancient shift in thinking than Jan Assmann, who has mastered the literatures of ancient Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon, as well as the increasing wealth of archeological evidence. He provides intriguing quotations from the rich textual history of these three cultures, and then shows how the parallel passages in Exodus diverge from the templates in the older literature. For an erudite German Egyptologist, the differences between the Hebrew wording and the versions in other languages are striking, revolutionary, but to a lay person such as myself, it is astonishing to learn how many themes and motifs, topoi I think is the technical term, from ancient Egypt and the Mesopotamia, are incorporated into the Hebrew text, and almost always with intriguing variations and especially interesting inversions. So I have bypassed his thesis of something radically new and actually marveled at the similarities in the exodus story with the other traditions of the ancient world. To me the Hebrew Bible seems fully embedded in the common themes of the ancient world. There is an analog to Jewish memory ritual of the seder’s wine and unleavened bread in an earlier Assyrian text. Here the early template is a ritual of consuming water and bread in remembrance, instead of wine, but the parallel to both Jewish Passover ceremonies and Christian communion is obvious. The story about the birth of Moses, how he is set adrift on the Nile and adopted by an Egyptian princess, also has numerous analogs in much older texts from other cultures, but the usual theme is that of the king’s child adopted by a commoner, not the other way around. And several of the Hebrew psalms appear to be direct translations from an older Egyptian source. The quotations from Egyptian texts are quite beautiful, one of the rewards for taking on this daunting book.
Assmann is also an excellent guide to the history of Egyptology and recognizes the contributions made by scholars and interpreters going back to the work of Sir John Marsham, the English scholar who in 1672, long before hieroglyphics were deciphered, pointed out the striking congruence between the Ten Commandmants and the moral code incorporated into the Egyptian Book of the Dead. (Marsham based his work on a Greek excerpt from the 3rd century BCE. It seems the German scholars were not the only ones obsessed with ancient texts.) With his extraordinary erudition, Assmann, of course, finds holes in many of the theories that scholars have floated such as the notion that the Achnaton worship in the Amarna period of Egyptian history established a model of monotheism that the ancient Israelites recycled. He sees too many substantive and chronological inconsistencies to connect the two religions. Assmann does provide intriguing snapshots of responses to Exodus by writers such as Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Nietzsche, Freud, Thomas Mann, as well as composers, Bach, Hӓndel, Schönberg. These sketches from the reception history are another reward for the reader’s hard work.
In all of these analyses, Assmann consistently praises the brilliance of the ancient writers and compilers. His treatment of the text is respectful to the point of reverence, but in asides he concedes that there is absolutely no evidence that the ancient Israelis actually were in Egypt in significant numbers during that archaic period. In this he is in agreement with Robert Alter, whose magisterial annotated translation of the Hebrew Bible was completed in 2019. Assmann presents the evidence of an entirely different semitic tribe, the Hyksos, who did dwell in the Nile Delta, and who ruled that region in about 1620-1510 BCE until they were driven out. While some ancient authors mistakenly identified the Hyksos with the biblical Israelites, the story is inside out as the Hyksos were rulers not slaves, and they were expelled not liberated. However, the possibility exists that the shreds of this historical memory may have persisted and been repurposed and inverted. And Assmann’s reverential treatment of the Hebrew Bible does concede that the compelling stories include a “dark” side, such as call for the extermination of the competing ethnic groups in Canaan. He concedes that there are archaic traces of a divine claim on the first born, and that would most likely have included at least the threat of human sacrifice, such as found in the story of Isaac. Robert Alter on the other hand tersely considers this out of the question. These questions about the darker side should not overshadow the immense overall achievement of the narrative and its grand purpose. The leadership returning from Babylonian exile faced an immense task: rebuilding and reorienting a culture that had suffered total catastrophic defeat. They needed a compelling narrative to overcome the inevitable obstacles and the inevitable opposition, and, according to Assmann, the story of Exodus accomplished this and created a revolution that reverberates in various ways to this day. As Assmann points out in his concluding chapter: “Die Exodus Erzӓhlung schreibt nicht Geschichte, sondern sie macht Geschichte”: The Exodus story does not write history, rather it makes history.
Few scholars are more qualified to make this argument about an ancient shift in thinking than Jan Assmann, who has mastered the literatures of ancient Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon, as well as the increasing wealth of archeological evidence. He provides intriguing quotations from the rich textual history of these three cultures, and then shows how the parallel passages in Exodus diverge from the templates in the older literature. For an erudite German Egyptologist, the differences between the Hebrew wording and the versions in other languages are striking, revolutionary, but to a lay person such as myself, it is astonishing to learn how many themes and motifs, topoi I think is the technical term, from ancient Egypt and the Mesopotamia, are incorporated into the Hebrew text, and almost always with intriguing variations and especially interesting inversions. So I have bypassed his thesis of something radically new and actually marveled at the similarities in the exodus story with the other traditions of the ancient world. To me the Hebrew Bible seems fully embedded in the common themes of the ancient world. There is an analog to Jewish memory ritual of the seder’s wine and unleavened bread in an earlier Assyrian text. Here the early template is a ritual of consuming water and bread in remembrance, instead of wine, but the parallel to both Jewish Passover ceremonies and Christian communion is obvious. The story about the birth of Moses, how he is set adrift on the Nile and adopted by an Egyptian princess, also has numerous analogs in much older texts from other cultures, but the usual theme is that of the king’s child adopted by a commoner, not the other way around. And several of the Hebrew psalms appear to be direct translations from an older Egyptian source. The quotations from Egyptian texts are quite beautiful, one of the rewards for taking on this daunting book.
Assmann is also an excellent guide to the history of Egyptology and recognizes the contributions made by scholars and interpreters going back to the work of Sir John Marsham, the English scholar who in 1672, long before hieroglyphics were deciphered, pointed out the striking congruence between the Ten Commandmants and the moral code incorporated into the Egyptian Book of the Dead. (Marsham based his work on a Greek excerpt from the 3rd century BCE. It seems the German scholars were not the only ones obsessed with ancient texts.) With his extraordinary erudition, Assmann, of course, finds holes in many of the theories that scholars have floated such as the notion that the Achnaton worship in the Amarna period of Egyptian history established a model of monotheism that the ancient Israelites recycled. He sees too many substantive and chronological inconsistencies to connect the two religions. Assmann does provide intriguing snapshots of responses to Exodus by writers such as Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Nietzsche, Freud, Thomas Mann, as well as composers, Bach, Hӓndel, Schönberg. These sketches from the reception history are another reward for the reader’s hard work.
In all of these analyses, Assmann consistently praises the brilliance of the ancient writers and compilers. His treatment of the text is respectful to the point of reverence, but in asides he concedes that there is absolutely no evidence that the ancient Israelis actually were in Egypt in significant numbers during that archaic period. In this he is in agreement with Robert Alter, whose magisterial annotated translation of the Hebrew Bible was completed in 2019. Assmann presents the evidence of an entirely different semitic tribe, the Hyksos, who did dwell in the Nile Delta, and who ruled that region in about 1620-1510 BCE until they were driven out. While some ancient authors mistakenly identified the Hyksos with the biblical Israelites, the story is inside out as the Hyksos were rulers not slaves, and they were expelled not liberated. However, the possibility exists that the shreds of this historical memory may have persisted and been repurposed and inverted. And Assmann’s reverential treatment of the Hebrew Bible does concede that the compelling stories include a “dark” side, such as call for the extermination of the competing ethnic groups in Canaan. He concedes that there are archaic traces of a divine claim on the first born, and that would most likely have included at least the threat of human sacrifice, such as found in the story of Isaac. Robert Alter on the other hand tersely considers this out of the question. These questions about the darker side should not overshadow the immense overall achievement of the narrative and its grand purpose. The leadership returning from Babylonian exile faced an immense task: rebuilding and reorienting a culture that had suffered total catastrophic defeat. They needed a compelling narrative to overcome the inevitable obstacles and the inevitable opposition, and, according to Assmann, the story of Exodus accomplished this and created a revolution that reverberates in various ways to this day. As Assmann points out in his concluding chapter: “Die Exodus Erzӓhlung schreibt nicht Geschichte, sondern sie macht Geschichte”: The Exodus story does not write history, rather it makes history.
December 10, 2019
An excellent, detailed (sometimes painstakingly) analysis of the historical origins of Exodus, and more importantly, the covenant between God and the Israelites. Assmann wonderfully crafts an argument centered upon the uniqueness of this covenant and its foundational implications for religion, politics, and human rights today.
January 10, 2020
Das war harte Arbeit, ich habe lange gebraucht, und ich weiß nicht genug über das Feld, um Assmanns Deutungen bewerten zu können. Ich habe aber parallel einiges im Internet nachgeschlagen und so viel Neues und Interessantes erfahren und glaube jetzt, die Wurzeln des Monotheismus etwas besser zu verstehen.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews