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Moses the Egyptian #1
Egiptlane Mooses: Mälestus Egiptusest lääne monoteismis
«Egiptlane Mooses» (1997) analüüsib Moosese kui omaette «mälufiguuri» retseptsiooni Lääne kultuuris Vana-Kreekast Sigmund Freudini, rõhuasetusega 17.–18. sajandil. Selle analüüsi käigus avab uurimus aga monoteistliku mõtlemise juuri ja loomust üldiselt. Autor nimetab monoteistlikku pööret inimkonna ajaloos, mis asus vastandama ainuõige ainujumala usku kõigile ülejäänutele, Moosese eristuseks, tuues välja selle olulised tagajärjed Lääne kultuurile. Uurimus liigitub autori sõnutsi mitte ajaloo, vaid mäluajaloo valdkonda: erinevalt tavapärasest ajaloost ei huvitu mäluajalugu mitte minevikust kui sellisest, vaid minevikust, nii nagu seda on mäletatud, mineviku faktuaalsuse asemel uurib mäluajalugu mineviku aktuaalsust.
Jan Assmann (snd 1938) on tänapäeva tuntumaid egüptolooge ja religiooniajaloolasi, kes on avaldanud suure hulga uurimusi nii Vana-Egiptuse kultuurist kui ka selle retseptsioonist hilisematel sajanditel. Viimasel paarikümnel aastal on tema huvi fookuses olnud monoteismiuurimine. Assmann töötas alates 1976. aastast kuni emeriteerumiseni 2003 Heidelbergi ülikooli egüptoloogiaprofessorina. Ta on valitud mitme ülikooli audoktoriks ja pälvinud palju hinnalisi tunnustusi.
Jan Assmann (snd 1938) on tänapäeva tuntumaid egüptolooge ja religiooniajaloolasi, kes on avaldanud suure hulga uurimusi nii Vana-Egiptuse kultuurist kui ka selle retseptsioonist hilisematel sajanditel. Viimasel paarikümnel aastal on tema huvi fookuses olnud monoteismiuurimine. Assmann töötas alates 1976. aastast kuni emeriteerumiseni 2003 Heidelbergi ülikooli egüptoloogiaprofessorina. Ta on valitud mitme ülikooli audoktoriks ja pälvinud palju hinnalisi tunnustusi.
446 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
21 people are currently reading
759 people want to read
About the author
Jan Assmann
124 books103 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 - 22 of 22 reviews
June 26, 2010
Believe it or not once I started this book I just didn't want to put it down. It is a good survey of what the people in the 17th and 18th century thought of monotheism and polytheism and how they reacted to it. The emphasis here of course is on Moses, and his connection to biblical texts and to Egypt.
I have read some criticism of this book and the author being called Anti-Semetic, I don't see it when reading this book. The author has shown and very well I think what he calls cosmothism and monotheism and how one is a reaction to another. Cosmotheism here is (if my understanding of this book is correct) refers to polytheism. He calls it Cosmotheism because he feels that even though the gods differ in name and shape they don't really differ in FUNCTION. He sees monotheism as a counter-religion. And it is the starting point of the concept of the "other". It was interesting to read about possibly the first monotheist, Akhenaton, and how his religion and what happened after it from plagues was the starting point of the concept of "other" in religion.
If you are studying religion then this book is one that should be read if not for the content about religion, then for the survey of what people thought of the connection between Egypt and monotheism in the 17th and 18th century.
I have read some criticism of this book and the author being called Anti-Semetic, I don't see it when reading this book. The author has shown and very well I think what he calls cosmothism and monotheism and how one is a reaction to another. Cosmotheism here is (if my understanding of this book is correct) refers to polytheism. He calls it Cosmotheism because he feels that even though the gods differ in name and shape they don't really differ in FUNCTION. He sees monotheism as a counter-religion. And it is the starting point of the concept of the "other". It was interesting to read about possibly the first monotheist, Akhenaton, and how his religion and what happened after it from plagues was the starting point of the concept of "other" in religion.
If you are studying religion then this book is one that should be read if not for the content about religion, then for the survey of what people thought of the connection between Egypt and monotheism in the 17th and 18th century.
May 16, 2024
There are a number of interesting perspectives on the Moses/Exodus myth:
• Its generally fictional nature. Lack of confirmation in archaeology, and Egyptian and other bronze age historical records (The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts). This contrasts with the Exodus' status as a sort of "archetypal narrative" of Jewish identity—solemnly retold by parents to children for thousands of years at the passover seder. It's interesting to consider the ramifications given that the story is a fiction.
• The seemingly connected invention of monotheistic religion by Akhenaten (whose reign was roughly contemporaneous with Rabbinical dates for Moses). Frequent historical/narrative connections between Moses/Akhenaten and some sort of epidemic illness or plague.
• The expulsion of the Hyksos (believed by Josephus and many modern historians to be the historical event whose garbled/politicized memory became the Exodus story). If Josephus was right, then the "Israelites" of the Exodus (i.e., the Hyksos) were not slaves in Egypt, but rather foreign conquerors. They did not escape from Egypt; they were expelled by a resurgent Egyptian nativist movement. In this case, the Biblical narrative turns the story upside down—portraying expelled conquerors as downtrodden slaves. In a similar vein, as soon as YHWH frees his chosen people from bondage in Egypt, he instructs them on handling their own slaves: slaves purchased with money must not eat the passover meal (Exodus 12:44). As Richard Friedman writes in his wonderful Commentary on the Torah: "It is extraordinary that, just two verses after reporting that Israel went free from Egypt, there is a reference to the possibility of an Israelite having a slave!"
• The strange ancient counter-narratives of Exodus. One example is that recorded by Manetho (recounted in Against Apion), in which Moses was a renegade Egyptian priest named Osarseph (seemingly a mashup of 'Osiris' and 'Joseph') who became the leader of an army of lepers. These lepers took over Egypt for a time but were later expelled and established Jerusalem. It's a thought-provoking story, in part due to the odd connections between Moses and leprosy in the Pentateuch (i.e., Moses turning his hand white with leprosy as a magical sign (Exodus 4:5-7), or Miriam becoming leprous when she criticizes Moses (Numbers 12)).
• Connections between Egypt and Israelite religion, e.g.: Circumcision and the pork taboo likely derive from Egyptian customs, as described in Herodotus Book II. Or the Egyptian embalming/funerals of Jacob and Joseph which end the book of Genesis (Genesis 50).
• Freud's appreciation of the connection between Akhenaten and Moses, and his weird theory of two Moseses, one of whom was murdered (Moses and Monotheism).
If you're unfamiliar with these perspectives, and have an interest in the subject, you may find Moses the Egyptian quite stimulating. Personally, I was already familiar with much of the material, and found the book to be too long and leisurely for my taste. It spends a lot of time discussing issues in the history of European Egyptology that don't directly pertain to the Moses topic. The most interesting new concept I picked up from Assmann is "normative inversion." The concept arises in response to an obvious question that always bothered me: If Moses was raised as a Egyptian, or was an Egyptian priest (Joseph certainly married into an Egyptian priestly family of On (Heliopolis), Genesis 41:45), why is the religion of the Pentateuch (and 99% of the Hebrew Bible) so hostile (or indifferent) to the idea of an afterlife, when the afterlife was the overwhelmingly dominant idea of Egyptian religion? The "normative inversion" explanation is that Mosaic religion was intentionally drafted as a counter-religion, making an explicit point of rejecting (inverting) Egyptian pieties like the afterlife, idols, sacred animals, and so forth. Apparently "normative inversion" was first systematically deployed as an explanation of Mosaic law by Maimonides (although the basic principle had been noticed by figures like Tacitus and Manetho). It's very interesting, and sheds light on a lot of mysteries about the Pentateuch.
Another interesting tangent I ran across through reading this book was the papyri of the proto-Judaic mercenaries on Elephantine (an island of the Nile in upper Egypt). Writing around 400BC, these "Jews" were polytheistic and had their own temple on Elephantine. Indeed, they even write to the high priest in Jerusalem soliciting support to rebuild their temple after it's destroyed by Egyptian religious zealots. That's an extremely odd request because the book of Deuteronomy explicitly forbids the building of worship sites outside of Jerusalem, and promulgation of the book of Deuteronomy is supposed to date back to King Josiah circa 600 BC, or perhaps to Ezra (480-440 BC) after returning from the Babylonian exile. The upshot is that there were passover-practicing proto-Jews in Egypt in 400 BC who'd (it seems) never heard of the Torah, and never mention it. In fact, none of the proto-Jews mentioned in the papyri bear the name of any person from the Torah, or ever mention any person from the Torah. And yet the Torah was supposedly written by Moses 800 years before! Following up, I was surprised to learn that there are zero references to any Hebrew written scriptures prior to the time of the Septuagint (circa 300-200 BC). That's very odd, and has led a number of scholars (e.g., Niels Peter Lemche, Philippe Wajdenbaum, Russell Gmirkin, and Thomas L. Thompson) to assert that the Torah was actually written very late, in the Hellenic Period. Apparently Gmirkin (Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus: Hellenistic Histories and the Date of the Pentateuch) argues that the Torah and the Septuagint were composed at the same time by Jews associated with the library of Alexandria. That's an intriguing idea. Pre-Christian Jews like Philo and Josephus considered the Septuagint equal to the Hebrew text, and only prioritized the Hebrew after the Septuagint was adopted by Christianity. And the large Jewish population of ancient Alexandria is well-known. What better place to compile a book of ancient Hebrew/Semitic stories than the greatest text repository of the ancient world?
• Its generally fictional nature. Lack of confirmation in archaeology, and Egyptian and other bronze age historical records (The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts). This contrasts with the Exodus' status as a sort of "archetypal narrative" of Jewish identity—solemnly retold by parents to children for thousands of years at the passover seder. It's interesting to consider the ramifications given that the story is a fiction.
• The seemingly connected invention of monotheistic religion by Akhenaten (whose reign was roughly contemporaneous with Rabbinical dates for Moses). Frequent historical/narrative connections between Moses/Akhenaten and some sort of epidemic illness or plague.
• The expulsion of the Hyksos (believed by Josephus and many modern historians to be the historical event whose garbled/politicized memory became the Exodus story). If Josephus was right, then the "Israelites" of the Exodus (i.e., the Hyksos) were not slaves in Egypt, but rather foreign conquerors. They did not escape from Egypt; they were expelled by a resurgent Egyptian nativist movement. In this case, the Biblical narrative turns the story upside down—portraying expelled conquerors as downtrodden slaves. In a similar vein, as soon as YHWH frees his chosen people from bondage in Egypt, he instructs them on handling their own slaves: slaves purchased with money must not eat the passover meal (Exodus 12:44). As Richard Friedman writes in his wonderful Commentary on the Torah: "It is extraordinary that, just two verses after reporting that Israel went free from Egypt, there is a reference to the possibility of an Israelite having a slave!"
• The strange ancient counter-narratives of Exodus. One example is that recorded by Manetho (recounted in Against Apion), in which Moses was a renegade Egyptian priest named Osarseph (seemingly a mashup of 'Osiris' and 'Joseph') who became the leader of an army of lepers. These lepers took over Egypt for a time but were later expelled and established Jerusalem. It's a thought-provoking story, in part due to the odd connections between Moses and leprosy in the Pentateuch (i.e., Moses turning his hand white with leprosy as a magical sign (Exodus 4:5-7), or Miriam becoming leprous when she criticizes Moses (Numbers 12)).
• Connections between Egypt and Israelite religion, e.g.: Circumcision and the pork taboo likely derive from Egyptian customs, as described in Herodotus Book II. Or the Egyptian embalming/funerals of Jacob and Joseph which end the book of Genesis (Genesis 50).
• Freud's appreciation of the connection between Akhenaten and Moses, and his weird theory of two Moseses, one of whom was murdered (Moses and Monotheism).
If you're unfamiliar with these perspectives, and have an interest in the subject, you may find Moses the Egyptian quite stimulating. Personally, I was already familiar with much of the material, and found the book to be too long and leisurely for my taste. It spends a lot of time discussing issues in the history of European Egyptology that don't directly pertain to the Moses topic. The most interesting new concept I picked up from Assmann is "normative inversion." The concept arises in response to an obvious question that always bothered me: If Moses was raised as a Egyptian, or was an Egyptian priest (Joseph certainly married into an Egyptian priestly family of On (Heliopolis), Genesis 41:45), why is the religion of the Pentateuch (and 99% of the Hebrew Bible) so hostile (or indifferent) to the idea of an afterlife, when the afterlife was the overwhelmingly dominant idea of Egyptian religion? The "normative inversion" explanation is that Mosaic religion was intentionally drafted as a counter-religion, making an explicit point of rejecting (inverting) Egyptian pieties like the afterlife, idols, sacred animals, and so forth. Apparently "normative inversion" was first systematically deployed as an explanation of Mosaic law by Maimonides (although the basic principle had been noticed by figures like Tacitus and Manetho). It's very interesting, and sheds light on a lot of mysteries about the Pentateuch.
Another interesting tangent I ran across through reading this book was the papyri of the proto-Judaic mercenaries on Elephantine (an island of the Nile in upper Egypt). Writing around 400BC, these "Jews" were polytheistic and had their own temple on Elephantine. Indeed, they even write to the high priest in Jerusalem soliciting support to rebuild their temple after it's destroyed by Egyptian religious zealots. That's an extremely odd request because the book of Deuteronomy explicitly forbids the building of worship sites outside of Jerusalem, and promulgation of the book of Deuteronomy is supposed to date back to King Josiah circa 600 BC, or perhaps to Ezra (480-440 BC) after returning from the Babylonian exile. The upshot is that there were passover-practicing proto-Jews in Egypt in 400 BC who'd (it seems) never heard of the Torah, and never mention it. In fact, none of the proto-Jews mentioned in the papyri bear the name of any person from the Torah, or ever mention any person from the Torah. And yet the Torah was supposedly written by Moses 800 years before! Following up, I was surprised to learn that there are zero references to any Hebrew written scriptures prior to the time of the Septuagint (circa 300-200 BC). That's very odd, and has led a number of scholars (e.g., Niels Peter Lemche, Philippe Wajdenbaum, Russell Gmirkin, and Thomas L. Thompson) to assert that the Torah was actually written very late, in the Hellenic Period. Apparently Gmirkin (Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus: Hellenistic Histories and the Date of the Pentateuch) argues that the Torah and the Septuagint were composed at the same time by Jews associated with the library of Alexandria. That's an intriguing idea. Pre-Christian Jews like Philo and Josephus considered the Septuagint equal to the Hebrew text, and only prioritized the Hebrew after the Septuagint was adopted by Christianity. And the large Jewish population of ancient Alexandria is well-known. What better place to compile a book of ancient Hebrew/Semitic stories than the greatest text repository of the ancient world?
January 10, 2022
كتاب رائع عن التذكر الحضاري بين موسى واخناتون، يقدم أسمان تطور البحث عن مصرية موسى والتمييز الموسوى من خلال عدة علماء منذ القرن السادس عشر وصولا لرأيه المتكيء لا على التذكر إنما على التاريخ باكتشاف الحروف الهيروغليفية والتي سحقت فيما سحقت تاريخ طويل من الأساطير عن مصر القديمة، لكن يظل التاريخ التذكري لموسى شاهد على كيفية تكون الأساطير بل وبقاءها مقابل التاريخ المدون ونسيانه.
August 1, 2020
WEE WOO WEE WOO MOSAIC DISTINCTION ALERT
April 23, 2024
Basically an attempt to provide a scholarly answer to the questions Freud makes in Moses and Monotheism - what was the relationship between Hebrew monotheism and Egyptian paganism? Does it owe anything to Akhenaten's episode of Egyptian monotheism? And why are these questions that have continued to exercise a fascinating for intellectuals over the centuries?
Beyond Exodus, there is no historical evidence for the existence of Moses. So Assman pursues two strategies: 1) a historical analysis of Atenism and other presences of pantheism/cosmotheism in Egyptian religion and 2) an episodic intellectual history of image of Moses as an Egyptian from classical antiquity through Freud.
Assmann uses (1) to attempt to understand how a monotheistic break could've emerged out of polytheism and also to clarify the revolutionary implications of what he calls "the Mosaic distinction" between true and false in religion. This includes a fascinating reading of Akhenaten's religion, with the suggestive idea that Akhenaten was less establishing a conventional form of monotheism but was instead pursuing a revolutionary secularization of the Egyptian worldview. More broadly Assmann then catalogs the presence of a hidden, pantheistic God within Egyptian religion.
On track (2) (which takes up most of the book), Assmann traces the attempts of authors in classical antiquity, the Renaissance, and Freud to place the origin of Hebrew monotheism within Egyptian religion. These authors were usually speculative and wrong, not knowing hieroglyphics, but their productive misreadings and speculations raise important questions about the broader stakes of the monotheistic religion that Egyptologists have often been too reluctant to investigate. These authors often speculated a kind of secret or natural monotheism lay behind Egyptian polytheism and argued that Moses took this hidden truth and made it a national creed. They had little to no evidentiary basis of their claims, not being able to read hieroglyphics, but this discourse became one of the primary wellsprings of modern attempts to overcome or abandon the Mosaic distinction between true and false in religion. The image of Moses the Egyptian exercised a powerful influence on Enlightenment figures and Romantics seeking to replace orthodox Christianity with a broader-minded spirituality, often outright pantheism. While Assmann is not an expert on these figures, one of the great pleasures of this book is he is able to bring is Egyptological expertise to bear on these writings, often highlighting the surprising insights and accuracy of their speculations. Freud's great originality within this discourse was both to apply the insights of actual Egyptology and discovery of Amarna to these speculations and also to combine it with his psychoanalytical method. Assmann rightfully discards many of Freud's claims but ultimately suggests that Egyptologists and religious scholars have wrongly discarded the foundational questions that have animated this discourse. Assmann suggests that only by understanding the revolutionary break of monotheism at its source can we come to grips with the continuing presence of religious violence in our world today.
Ultimately, Assmann presents too sharp a break between polytheism and Hebrew monotheism in this book, and he often comes off a bit as sloppily romanticizing polytheism, but his intellectual history of the image of Egypt in European religion remains immensely stimulating and fruitful for those trying to comes to grip with the sources and varieties of heterodoxy in 17th, 18th, and 19th century Europe.
Beyond Exodus, there is no historical evidence for the existence of Moses. So Assman pursues two strategies: 1) a historical analysis of Atenism and other presences of pantheism/cosmotheism in Egyptian religion and 2) an episodic intellectual history of image of Moses as an Egyptian from classical antiquity through Freud.
Assmann uses (1) to attempt to understand how a monotheistic break could've emerged out of polytheism and also to clarify the revolutionary implications of what he calls "the Mosaic distinction" between true and false in religion. This includes a fascinating reading of Akhenaten's religion, with the suggestive idea that Akhenaten was less establishing a conventional form of monotheism but was instead pursuing a revolutionary secularization of the Egyptian worldview. More broadly Assmann then catalogs the presence of a hidden, pantheistic God within Egyptian religion.
On track (2) (which takes up most of the book), Assmann traces the attempts of authors in classical antiquity, the Renaissance, and Freud to place the origin of Hebrew monotheism within Egyptian religion. These authors were usually speculative and wrong, not knowing hieroglyphics, but their productive misreadings and speculations raise important questions about the broader stakes of the monotheistic religion that Egyptologists have often been too reluctant to investigate. These authors often speculated a kind of secret or natural monotheism lay behind Egyptian polytheism and argued that Moses took this hidden truth and made it a national creed. They had little to no evidentiary basis of their claims, not being able to read hieroglyphics, but this discourse became one of the primary wellsprings of modern attempts to overcome or abandon the Mosaic distinction between true and false in religion. The image of Moses the Egyptian exercised a powerful influence on Enlightenment figures and Romantics seeking to replace orthodox Christianity with a broader-minded spirituality, often outright pantheism. While Assmann is not an expert on these figures, one of the great pleasures of this book is he is able to bring is Egyptological expertise to bear on these writings, often highlighting the surprising insights and accuracy of their speculations. Freud's great originality within this discourse was both to apply the insights of actual Egyptology and discovery of Amarna to these speculations and also to combine it with his psychoanalytical method. Assmann rightfully discards many of Freud's claims but ultimately suggests that Egyptologists and religious scholars have wrongly discarded the foundational questions that have animated this discourse. Assmann suggests that only by understanding the revolutionary break of monotheism at its source can we come to grips with the continuing presence of religious violence in our world today.
Ultimately, Assmann presents too sharp a break between polytheism and Hebrew monotheism in this book, and he often comes off a bit as sloppily romanticizing polytheism, but his intellectual history of the image of Egypt in European religion remains immensely stimulating and fruitful for those trying to comes to grip with the sources and varieties of heterodoxy in 17th, 18th, and 19th century Europe.
May 7, 2022
It's not so much that the theories presented this book are wrong- it touches on genuine historical information. My problem with the author is that they don't leave room for their presumptions regarding the construction of the Old Testament narratives/scripture.
Of course this particular book is narrowed in on the Exodus story and the figure of Moses (that is, when it is not taking rabbit trails down paths of Egyptian language/heiogriphics). It trots out the familiar assertion that the Exodus story, formative for Jewish identity, was constructed as a counter narrative that establishes Israel as good and Egypt as bad. And we can see this most readily where the construction of monotheism is used to counter polytheism, with the central tenants of Moses' story revolving around the idolatry, or the lawful and forceful removal of idols as a way of suppressing the universally driven religions around them. It then also walks through Freud's Moses, the notion that Israel stole all their ideas from Egypt as a way of subverting them, and establishes the notion of Moses being an Egyptian as the means of purging the Egyptian from him and claiming him on the side of Israel. It suggests to that even the absence of the afterlife, prevalent in Egyptian thought but absent in the early Israelite stories, is an example of how Israel existed to counter Egypt.
And of course this works on the premise that the story of the Exodus is purely fictional and constructed with antithesis. It was through this story that monotheism persists as a necessary counter throughout history. It cannot be anything other but exclusive. This is the same argument lobbied at christianity when it comes to their demonizing of Rome and their dismantling of their polytheism.
The problem is I think many of these assumptions are flat out wrong and driven by biases that lead the historical evidence in particular directions. They are doing the same thing to Israel as they claim Israel did to Egypt and christianity did to Rome. The way it upholds this is through a very low view of the people of Israel, the writers, the scriptures and the stories, let alone a poor awareness of the narrative itself. To see the narratives purely as polemic is simply not what you find in the text. Making their argument all about nature versus revelation (as in, monotheism cannot arise naturally but can only be brought in from the outside with intent) betrays a problematic view of polytheism in ancient Israel as well.
A more careful reading of the narratives and their historical construction I actually think uncovers something that is far more sympathetic to the authors premise than they seem to allow for. When authors seem to have a allergy to the notion that the ancient world shared stories and that this was common and in no way needs to undercut the relevance of these stories is something you can see coming from a mile away.
There is some decent information here, and as I said it's not so much that much of this is wrong. But there are plenty viable and reasonable interpretations that wouldn't read the history the same way this author does, nor is the author at all interested in showing the limitations and abuses found within polytheistic cultures. Noting that actually might bring them closer to the actual point of the biblical narratives focus on idolatry, which was never seem to give one group power over another.
Of course this particular book is narrowed in on the Exodus story and the figure of Moses (that is, when it is not taking rabbit trails down paths of Egyptian language/heiogriphics). It trots out the familiar assertion that the Exodus story, formative for Jewish identity, was constructed as a counter narrative that establishes Israel as good and Egypt as bad. And we can see this most readily where the construction of monotheism is used to counter polytheism, with the central tenants of Moses' story revolving around the idolatry, or the lawful and forceful removal of idols as a way of suppressing the universally driven religions around them. It then also walks through Freud's Moses, the notion that Israel stole all their ideas from Egypt as a way of subverting them, and establishes the notion of Moses being an Egyptian as the means of purging the Egyptian from him and claiming him on the side of Israel. It suggests to that even the absence of the afterlife, prevalent in Egyptian thought but absent in the early Israelite stories, is an example of how Israel existed to counter Egypt.
And of course this works on the premise that the story of the Exodus is purely fictional and constructed with antithesis. It was through this story that monotheism persists as a necessary counter throughout history. It cannot be anything other but exclusive. This is the same argument lobbied at christianity when it comes to their demonizing of Rome and their dismantling of their polytheism.
The problem is I think many of these assumptions are flat out wrong and driven by biases that lead the historical evidence in particular directions. They are doing the same thing to Israel as they claim Israel did to Egypt and christianity did to Rome. The way it upholds this is through a very low view of the people of Israel, the writers, the scriptures and the stories, let alone a poor awareness of the narrative itself. To see the narratives purely as polemic is simply not what you find in the text. Making their argument all about nature versus revelation (as in, monotheism cannot arise naturally but can only be brought in from the outside with intent) betrays a problematic view of polytheism in ancient Israel as well.
A more careful reading of the narratives and their historical construction I actually think uncovers something that is far more sympathetic to the authors premise than they seem to allow for. When authors seem to have a allergy to the notion that the ancient world shared stories and that this was common and in no way needs to undercut the relevance of these stories is something you can see coming from a mile away.
There is some decent information here, and as I said it's not so much that much of this is wrong. But there are plenty viable and reasonable interpretations that wouldn't read the history the same way this author does, nor is the author at all interested in showing the limitations and abuses found within polytheistic cultures. Noting that actually might bring them closer to the actual point of the biblical narratives focus on idolatry, which was never seem to give one group power over another.
March 8, 2025
Muy interesante el uso historiográfico que hace de categorías psicoanalíticas como la represión de la memoria, su latencia y su recurrencia. Según la hipótesis del autor, la religión de Akhenatón, proscrita hasta desaparecer de los registros y las crónicas, sobrevivió como un sustrato cultural hasta llegar transformada a los hebreos. Me parece fascinante el uso del psicoanálisis en la historia social y de los grupos humanos, por mucho que esa escuela esté algo desacreditada.
May 24, 2020
Hen kai pan.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 17, 2015
Great Subject
While I love the subject this book I felt like it added little new scholarship to the discourse. It highlighted other authors in a detailed manner, and while some original ways of looking at data did make an appearance, most of this book, while good, was an exercise in summary (historiography) of past authors. Which there is nothing wrong with I was simply expecting more original interpretation than what I actually felt like I received.
While I love the subject this book I felt like it added little new scholarship to the discourse. It highlighted other authors in a detailed manner, and while some original ways of looking at data did make an appearance, most of this book, while good, was an exercise in summary (historiography) of past authors. Which there is nothing wrong with I was simply expecting more original interpretation than what I actually felt like I received.
May 4, 2023
Though its title would seem to suggest otherwise, this book never says whether Moses existed or whether Israelite monotheism is derived from Akhenaten's religious reforms. Inspired by Sigmund Freud's Moses and Monotheism, Assmann treats both Akhenaten and Moses as emblematic of the shift from flexible polytheism to exclusivist monotheism and labels the monotheistic rejection of other gods "the Mosaic distinction". He never says straight out whether there was any connection between Moses and Akhenaten, and instead he discusses "mnemohistory", the way a culture remembers and adapts its own past.
Manetho, a Hellenistic Egyptian historian, related a story that seems to have conflated events of Akhenaten's reign with the Hyksos. Both Apion and Josephus, writing in Roman times, connected Manetho's account with the Exodus. Real or not, the connection between Moses and Egyptian religion took on a life of its own, and antiquarians in the 17th and 18th centuries created increasingly speculative and frankly silly theories on top of it, particularly once the Freemasons got involved. Some of these theories drew in Isis, the Egyptian goddess who was sometimes treated as an all-encompassing deity in Roman times, as support for the 18th-century authors' pantheistic leanings. The emergence of Egyptology banished these theories to the dustbin. Freud, apparently unaware of the antiquarians' work but armed with early 20th-century understandings of Akhenaten's religious revolution, was the first to bring Akhenaten back into the equation.
In the last chapter, Assmann draws a sharp and oversimplified contrast between the polytheistic and pantheistic worldviews, in which different gods from different cultures can be equated with or "translated" into one another, and exclusive monotheism, in which only one god is valid. He also assumes that monotheism is more intolerant and prone to violence than polytheism. I don't think of these claims as the most important elements of the book, but they're the ones that have drawn the most criticism. Few Egyptologists can claim to have provoked a rebuttal (in Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions) from a future pope! In the academic world, Assmann has produced several more books elaborating the positions he expressed rather offhandedly here, while other scholars, most notably Mark S. Smith in God in Translation, have been spurred by his work to examine divine "translatability" in more depth.
Meanwhile, the concept of mnemohistory, or cultural memory, has proven useful for biblical scholars examining how the Israelites envisioned their origins, in books like Remembering Abraham. Anyone who wants to know whether Israelite monotheism is related to Akhenaten's religion should look at books such as those rather than this one. The short answer is that they are almost certainly not related.
Thus, this book was an important jumping-off point for new areas of research in religious studies, but on those subjects it doesn't stand on its own all that well. It works best as a history of Western perceptions of ancient Egypt, and it complements several other books on that topic. It fleshes out the details of some subjects discussed in The Secret Lore of Egypt and The Wisdom of Egypt; shows some further consequences of the Masonic mythmaking described in Not Out of Africa; and supplied some of the insights used in The Veil of Isis, another study of how ideas derived from Egypt meander and evolve through history.
Manetho, a Hellenistic Egyptian historian, related a story that seems to have conflated events of Akhenaten's reign with the Hyksos. Both Apion and Josephus, writing in Roman times, connected Manetho's account with the Exodus. Real or not, the connection between Moses and Egyptian religion took on a life of its own, and antiquarians in the 17th and 18th centuries created increasingly speculative and frankly silly theories on top of it, particularly once the Freemasons got involved. Some of these theories drew in Isis, the Egyptian goddess who was sometimes treated as an all-encompassing deity in Roman times, as support for the 18th-century authors' pantheistic leanings. The emergence of Egyptology banished these theories to the dustbin. Freud, apparently unaware of the antiquarians' work but armed with early 20th-century understandings of Akhenaten's religious revolution, was the first to bring Akhenaten back into the equation.
In the last chapter, Assmann draws a sharp and oversimplified contrast between the polytheistic and pantheistic worldviews, in which different gods from different cultures can be equated with or "translated" into one another, and exclusive monotheism, in which only one god is valid. He also assumes that monotheism is more intolerant and prone to violence than polytheism. I don't think of these claims as the most important elements of the book, but they're the ones that have drawn the most criticism. Few Egyptologists can claim to have provoked a rebuttal (in Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions) from a future pope! In the academic world, Assmann has produced several more books elaborating the positions he expressed rather offhandedly here, while other scholars, most notably Mark S. Smith in God in Translation, have been spurred by his work to examine divine "translatability" in more depth.
Meanwhile, the concept of mnemohistory, or cultural memory, has proven useful for biblical scholars examining how the Israelites envisioned their origins, in books like Remembering Abraham. Anyone who wants to know whether Israelite monotheism is related to Akhenaten's religion should look at books such as those rather than this one. The short answer is that they are almost certainly not related.
Thus, this book was an important jumping-off point for new areas of research in religious studies, but on those subjects it doesn't stand on its own all that well. It works best as a history of Western perceptions of ancient Egypt, and it complements several other books on that topic. It fleshes out the details of some subjects discussed in The Secret Lore of Egypt and The Wisdom of Egypt; shows some further consequences of the Masonic mythmaking described in Not Out of Africa; and supplied some of the insights used in The Veil of Isis, another study of how ideas derived from Egypt meander and evolve through history.
December 24, 2020
The reason you should read this book is clear. Drop everything else. Nothing is more important than that you take the first halting steps toward true religion. If you fail to do this, you will stumble through your life. I say this out of compassion, as a warning. I seek to edify, not to contradict. These are words loaded with a message from above. Avoid the arid discourse of the academy, a discourse too clever by half. The actual purpose of communication is the assistance and help we can render to you, the one struggling in the darkness of passion. Drop everything, yield to this demand, allow yourself to be subjected to the Eternal.
"Akhenaten...was a figure exclusively of history and not of memory." With this opening "salvo" the author presses the reset button on our collective memory. We've been mistaken for far too long. We've fed on detritus without nourishment. Akhenaten was the most important reformer, he will always come first, because he initiated the beginning of our history. "For centuries no one know anything about his accomplishments." This simple sentence, possibility the most important sentence written in human history, clarifies everything. There has no doubt been a Heideggerian darkness from the beginning. Our wandering. Our wandering in the desert. Our lost condition. You have to recognize that, and the historical reclamation project around Akhenaten is the beginning of our collective salvation. From Akhenaten to Moses to Paul of Tarsus to Luther to Kierkegaard, the arc is clearly visible: return to the Eternal, return to your Soul. Remember the days of Paradise. Worship Yahweh with all your heart. In all your deeds. With all your soul.
The first act, the elimination of the idols: Akhenaten miraculously had the foresight to see the folly of the idols. Augustine recognized in the Greek/Roman world the presence of the demons. They were disguised as deities. They sought the destruction of the human form. And they accomplished much in the way of perdition. The Fall of Rome is itself a lesson for us.
The second act, turn to the God of Light. A "new" god of Light, yet the only true god. God is not only Love, but first and foremost Light. "Let there be illumination." Where? In your own mind reader. That is where the Light must take hold. Resists the temptation to return to this Fallen world. Follow "Adonai," he is our Father.
Third act, reject the cult of Baal. The Hyksos were a Palestinian people who invaded the land of Egypt, god forbid. Yet this occupation caused little in the way of chaos. Instead the polytheistic temper of the times allowed those who worshiped other gods a great deal of latitude. The Hyksos are mentioned only to satisfy the demands of history. They have little to contribute to our discourse.
The fourth act, acceptance of the rejection of tradition. Akhenaten was chosen.
"Akhenaten...was a figure exclusively of history and not of memory." With this opening "salvo" the author presses the reset button on our collective memory. We've been mistaken for far too long. We've fed on detritus without nourishment. Akhenaten was the most important reformer, he will always come first, because he initiated the beginning of our history. "For centuries no one know anything about his accomplishments." This simple sentence, possibility the most important sentence written in human history, clarifies everything. There has no doubt been a Heideggerian darkness from the beginning. Our wandering. Our wandering in the desert. Our lost condition. You have to recognize that, and the historical reclamation project around Akhenaten is the beginning of our collective salvation. From Akhenaten to Moses to Paul of Tarsus to Luther to Kierkegaard, the arc is clearly visible: return to the Eternal, return to your Soul. Remember the days of Paradise. Worship Yahweh with all your heart. In all your deeds. With all your soul.
The first act, the elimination of the idols: Akhenaten miraculously had the foresight to see the folly of the idols. Augustine recognized in the Greek/Roman world the presence of the demons. They were disguised as deities. They sought the destruction of the human form. And they accomplished much in the way of perdition. The Fall of Rome is itself a lesson for us.
The second act, turn to the God of Light. A "new" god of Light, yet the only true god. God is not only Love, but first and foremost Light. "Let there be illumination." Where? In your own mind reader. That is where the Light must take hold. Resists the temptation to return to this Fallen world. Follow "Adonai," he is our Father.
Third act, reject the cult of Baal. The Hyksos were a Palestinian people who invaded the land of Egypt, god forbid. Yet this occupation caused little in the way of chaos. Instead the polytheistic temper of the times allowed those who worshiped other gods a great deal of latitude. The Hyksos are mentioned only to satisfy the demands of history. They have little to contribute to our discourse.
The fourth act, acceptance of the rejection of tradition. Akhenaten was chosen.
March 30, 2025
Despite the title, this book seems to be more about Egypt than about Moses, and more about how intellectuals over the past 2000 years viewed Egypt than about the reality of Egypt. I sometimes found this book difficult, and sometimes found it interesting.
The author begins by discussing Egyptian and Roman legends about Moses; some treat Moses as a dissident Egyptian, and they vary on how different Moses's new religion was from Egyptian religion. The legends also vary as to whether Moses and his followers left Egypt voluntarily or were expelled.
He then discusses medieval and Renaissance-era intellectuals who argue that Jewish rites were a "normative inversion" of Egyptian religion- that is, a way of persuading Jews to disassociate themselves from Egyptian idolatry. (For example, the Torah requires sacrifices of rams and bulls, both of which were symbols of Egyptian deities).
Near the end of the book, the author focuses on actual Egyptian documents, discussing monotheistic tendencies in those documents. For example, a hymn to Amun-re states that he "was not preceded by any god", which implies that maybe he created other gods. It isn't really clear to me whether the author thinks that monotheism evolved from these tendencies, or whether exposure to Semitic monotheism created those tendencies.
The author begins by discussing Egyptian and Roman legends about Moses; some treat Moses as a dissident Egyptian, and they vary on how different Moses's new religion was from Egyptian religion. The legends also vary as to whether Moses and his followers left Egypt voluntarily or were expelled.
He then discusses medieval and Renaissance-era intellectuals who argue that Jewish rites were a "normative inversion" of Egyptian religion- that is, a way of persuading Jews to disassociate themselves from Egyptian idolatry. (For example, the Torah requires sacrifices of rams and bulls, both of which were symbols of Egyptian deities).
Near the end of the book, the author focuses on actual Egyptian documents, discussing monotheistic tendencies in those documents. For example, a hymn to Amun-re states that he "was not preceded by any god", which implies that maybe he created other gods. It isn't really clear to me whether the author thinks that monotheism evolved from these tendencies, or whether exposure to Semitic monotheism created those tendencies.
September 15, 2017
Assmann ist ein brillanter Wissenschaftler. Aber selten war ein Buch so voller wichtiger Inhalte - und zugleich so zäh geschrieben. Fast so, als sollte es geheim bleiben, was sich dort verbirgt.
Man wünschte sich, jemand nähme alle wissenschaftliche Erkenntnis dieses Bandes und fasste sie neu und in gut lesbarer Sprache zusammen.
Man wünschte sich, jemand nähme alle wissenschaftliche Erkenntnis dieses Bandes und fasste sie neu und in gut lesbarer Sprache zusammen.
March 31, 2021
Fascinating look at Moses in the discourse on Egypt since the seventeenth century. This book is more about how ideas about Moses and monotheism have evolved than a direct analysis of primary sources, although that is also present in the first and final chapters.
October 4, 2024
Eksisin ootustega sisu osas - mind huvitas Mooses (ajalooline ja piiblitegelane), autorit retseptsioon ja (a)pertseptsioon läbi sajandite.
Omamoodi tore on ka üle pika aja lugeda teksti, kus tuleb millestki aru saamiseks pidevalt pingutada.
Omamoodi tore on ka üle pika aja lugeda teksti, kus tuleb millestki aru saamiseks pidevalt pingutada.
February 9, 2014
Jó néhány éve már, hogy végigolvastam Jan Assmann ezen könyvét - valóságos mennyország volt a magyar nyelvű kiadást kézbe venni, miután a (kivételesen) angol eredetin sikerült átrágni magam. (Aki ismeri Assmann-t, az tudja, írásai nem kifejezetten a vasárnap délutáni, könnyű, hintaszékes olvasmányokat példázzák.) Most ismét levettem a könyvespolcról, és gyakorlatilag párhuzamosan olvastam egy aktuális könyvével (Religio duplex), mely számos helyen mintegy párbeszédet folytat mind a Mózes, az egyiptomi, mind a Varázsfuvola című opuszokkal.
Valódi intertextualitásról van itt szó, nem csupán ismétlésről. A "mózesi emléknyom" kutatása, melyre Assmann ebben a munkájában vállalkozik, csupán a Religio duplex-ben válik minden részletében érthetővé és értelmessé, innen szemlélve tűnik világosnak és nyilvánvalónak a kapcsolat, mely Mózes alakja, a bécsi szabadkőműves páholyok vagy éppen Mahatma Gandhi vallásról alkotott koncepciója között szövődik.
A Mózes, az egyiptomi a szerző megfogalmazása szerint "egy emléknyom kutatása", melynek kezdete a Kr.e. II. évezred közepére tehető, s egészen Sigmund Freud íróasztaláig nyúlik. Assmann nem azt a kérdést fogja megválaszolni, hogy "Mózes héber volt-e avagy egyiptomi?" - már csak azért sem, mert a Mózes-probléma megközelítésének hagyományos alapkérdése helyesen a "Történeti személy volt-e Mózes, avagy sem?" lenne. Amit ehelyett ajánl, az egy izgalmas intellektuális utazás, mely során - mintegy mellékesen - tanúja lehetünk annak, miképpen varázstalanította a reneszánszon át egészen a felvilágosodásig burjánzó Egyiptom-képet a hieroglifák megfejtése nyomán immár tudományként újjászülető egyiptológia, s miközben utat nyitott egy ókori kultúra autentikus forrásokon keresztül történő feltérképezéséhez, elébb összezavarta, majd szem elől tévesztette a megértés egy (másik) fontos forráscsoportját.
Tényleg csak zárójelben jegyzem meg, hogy az Assmann-művek magyar kiadásait mintha átok kísérné. A kulturális emlékezet index nélkül jelent meg, melynek hiánya borzasztóan megnehezíti a könyv kezelését. A Religio duplex élvezeti értékén sokat ront a számos elírás illetve bizonyos diakritikus jegyek hiánya. A Mózes, az egyiptomi első kiadásának borítóján hibásan tüntették fel a szerző nevét (Assman). Ezek után kíváncsian veszem kézbe a Varázsfuvolát...
Valódi intertextualitásról van itt szó, nem csupán ismétlésről. A "mózesi emléknyom" kutatása, melyre Assmann ebben a munkájában vállalkozik, csupán a Religio duplex-ben válik minden részletében érthetővé és értelmessé, innen szemlélve tűnik világosnak és nyilvánvalónak a kapcsolat, mely Mózes alakja, a bécsi szabadkőműves páholyok vagy éppen Mahatma Gandhi vallásról alkotott koncepciója között szövődik.
A Mózes, az egyiptomi a szerző megfogalmazása szerint "egy emléknyom kutatása", melynek kezdete a Kr.e. II. évezred közepére tehető, s egészen Sigmund Freud íróasztaláig nyúlik. Assmann nem azt a kérdést fogja megválaszolni, hogy "Mózes héber volt-e avagy egyiptomi?" - már csak azért sem, mert a Mózes-probléma megközelítésének hagyományos alapkérdése helyesen a "Történeti személy volt-e Mózes, avagy sem?" lenne. Amit ehelyett ajánl, az egy izgalmas intellektuális utazás, mely során - mintegy mellékesen - tanúja lehetünk annak, miképpen varázstalanította a reneszánszon át egészen a felvilágosodásig burjánzó Egyiptom-képet a hieroglifák megfejtése nyomán immár tudományként újjászülető egyiptológia, s miközben utat nyitott egy ókori kultúra autentikus forrásokon keresztül történő feltérképezéséhez, elébb összezavarta, majd szem elől tévesztette a megértés egy (másik) fontos forráscsoportját.
Tényleg csak zárójelben jegyzem meg, hogy az Assmann-művek magyar kiadásait mintha átok kísérné. A kulturális emlékezet index nélkül jelent meg, melynek hiánya borzasztóan megnehezíti a könyv kezelését. A Religio duplex élvezeti értékén sokat ront a számos elírás illetve bizonyos diakritikus jegyek hiánya. A Mózes, az egyiptomi első kiadásának borítóján hibásan tüntették fel a szerző nevét (Assman). Ezek után kíváncsian veszem kézbe a Varázsfuvolát...
December 1, 2016
A masterpiece that everyone should read who has an interest in: religion, violence, psychoanalysis, politics, philosophy, especially German Idealism, the Enlightenment, the Counter Enlightenment, intellectual history, translation studies, cultural memory, the hermetic tradition, political theology.
It will change the way you see a lot of things. The book is not without weaknesses. His theses have been contested (and he deals with some of the criticism in the follow-up book The Price of Monotheism). I agree with another reviewer that a lot of it is careful interpretation of other authors and perhaps one would have expected more original scholarly contributions. Yet as a work of recovery of certain very important debates and insights this cannot be valued highly enough.
Plus, Assmann is a great writer and makes intellectual, cultural history read like a gripping crime novel (not wholly inappropriately, as might become clear from the chapter on Freud). Required reading for everyone with an interest in humanities.
It will change the way you see a lot of things. The book is not without weaknesses. His theses have been contested (and he deals with some of the criticism in the follow-up book The Price of Monotheism). I agree with another reviewer that a lot of it is careful interpretation of other authors and perhaps one would have expected more original scholarly contributions. Yet as a work of recovery of certain very important debates and insights this cannot be valued highly enough.
Plus, Assmann is a great writer and makes intellectual, cultural history read like a gripping crime novel (not wholly inappropriately, as might become clear from the chapter on Freud). Required reading for everyone with an interest in humanities.
November 21, 2013
Assman is a brilliant writer and scholar in my highly unqualified opinion. You probably won't be able to read for long periods of time; his deeply voluminous data may overwhelm, but you will finish this book. There are 56 pages of footnotes and index, so it is not really 288 pages. He explains the differences in separation/translation; in rejection/silence; in pantheism, panentheism, polytheism, and cosmotheism; in immanence/transcendance; in tradition/repression; and in manifestation/creation: in all of these as they relate to the "memory" of Moses but not his "historicity" in the Egypt/Israel story. Fascinating book, too, because of the other Moses writers that he comments on.
May 12, 2019
The book is full of interesting tidbits regarding history and culture, whether Akhenaten's failed monotheism, examples of how Judaism constructed itself as a counter-religion to Egyptian practice, and Moses meaning "child" in Egyptian. I was a little lost on the Freudian thesis, not having read Freud, but I gleaned that he postulated two Moseses, one from Egypt who was killed by the people and one who was a native Israelite to fit in with his own theories of societal Oedipal activities.
I read this as part of my project to read one book from every aisle of Olin Library at Cornell; a fuller reaction is here: https://jacobklehman.com/2019/05/12/p...
I read this as part of my project to read one book from every aisle of Olin Library at Cornell; a fuller reaction is here: https://jacobklehman.com/2019/05/12/p...
Want to read
August 25, 2007All we are Egyptian!!!
January 1, 2013
Egyptology abandons its positivist bias and returns to interpretation after too long away
April 3, 2015
Too dry to hold one's interest
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews