Moses at the Millennium

Professor Assmann goes on to trace the signification of Egypt in European thought from the radical Enlightenment of the seventeenth century until our own time. Egyptian religion always represented a deist enlightenment, a Spinozist pantheism, which was held to have originated in Egyptian esotericism. A heretical equation of Egypt with anti-Biblical Spinozism saw Moses as the fountainhead of Freemasonry, a radical who sneaked Egypt's natural religion into the Biblical revelation.

According to Assmann, Freud recovered a lost (or suppressed) body of evidence for Egyptian iconoclastic monotheism. Following the American Egyptologist, James Henry Breasted, Freud believed that the Pharaoh Akhenaten had invented a strict monotheism, without magic, idols or a belief in the hereafter and with strong ethical commitments which Breasted called "the birth of conscience" (Assmann, 153). Moses also brought the rite of circumcision from Egypt as a "cultural badge of purity" and eliminated the need for a solar disc to symbolize the one deity. The primal father, Moses, was slain by the very horde he had personally turned into a people, but was remembered or "encrypted" in the people's memory forever. Thus we still bear his image in our own religious consciousness.

But was Akhenaten really a monotheist? For one thing, he himself was worshipped as a god, which undermines the claim of uniqueness for the sun disc. But, more important, the essence of monotheism is not simply numerical. It is not that there exist no other deities: the nature of God is crucial. A thing cannot be a true God; one thing is never the deity of a monotheistic religion. Even Assmann, who heralds the Pharaoh's revolution, has some reservations:

The oneness of Amun, which by no means denies the existence of the other gods, is based on the fact that he is

1. The primeval god, who existed before the entire world;

2. The creator, who transformed the world from the primeval condition into the cosmos;

3. The life god, who gives life and spirit to the world in the form of the three life-giving elements;

4. The sun god, who completes his journey alone and illuminates and guards the world with his eyes;

5. The ruler god, who exercises rule over his creation and is represented by the king on earth;

6. The ethical authority, who watches over right and wrong, the "vizier of the poor," the judge and savior, the lord of time, "favor," and fate;

7. The hidden god, whose symbols, images, and names are the many gods. (Assmann, 194)

It is not the numerical but the theological that is essential to the religion of the Torah. Moses is not simply an inheritor of Egyptian idiosyncratic worship, but the leader of a people and a faith that cannot be captured in the Greek notion of ethical monotheism. It requires categories of its own. Torah and Moses cannot be captured in any non-Jewish schema. As Buber points out, we are, and Moses was, different:

What is important about this God of Moses is the association of qualities and activities which is peculiar to Him. He is the One who brings His own out, He is their leader and advance guard; prince of the people, legislator and the sender of a great message. He acts at the level of history on the peoples and between the peoples. What He aims at and cares for is a people. He makes His demand that the people shall be entirely "His" people, a "holy" people; that means, a people whose entire life is hallowed by justice and loyalty, a people for God and for the world. And He is and does all this as a manifesting, addressing, and revealing God. He is invisible and "lets Himself be seen," whatever may be the natural phenomena or historical process in which He may desire to let Himself be seen on any given occasion. He makes His word known to the men He summons, in such a fashion that it bursts forth in them and they become His "mouth." He lets His spirit possess the one whom He has chosen, and in this and through th is lets him mature the work divine. That Moses experiences Him in this fashion and serves Him accordingly is what has set that man apart as a living and effective force at all times; and that is what places him thus afresh in our own day, which possibly requires him more than any earlier day has ever done. (Buber, 8)