Moses and Monotheism (1939)
by Sigmund Freud

Part II.  If Moses Was an Egyptian

 In Part I of this book I have tried to strengthen by a new
argument the suggestion that the man Moses, the liberator and
lawgiver of the Jewish people, was not a Jew, but an Egyptian. 

That his name derived from the Egyptian vocabulary had long been
observed, though not duly appreciated.  I added to this
consideration the further one that the interpretation of the
exposure myth attaching to Moses necessitated the conclusion that
he was an Egyptian whom a people needed to make into a jew.  At
the end of my essay I said that important and far-reaching
conclusions could be drawn from the suggestion that Moses was an
Egyptian; but I was not prepared to uphold them publicly, since
they were based only on psychological probabilities and lacked
objective proof.  The more the possibilities thus discerned, the
more cautious is one about exposing them to the critical attack
of the outside world without any secure foundation-like an iron
monument with feet of clay.  No probability, however seductive,
can protect us from error; even if all parts of a problem seem to
fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, one has to
remember that the probable need not necessarily be the truth, and
the truth not always probable.  And, lastly, it is not attractive
to be classed with the scholastics and Talmudists who are
satisfied to exercise their ingenuity, unconcerned how far
removed their conclusions may be from the truth.

    Notwithstanding these misgivings, which weigh as heavily
today as they did then, out of the conflict of my motives the
decision has emerged to follow up my first essay by this
contribution.  But once again it is only a part of the whole, and
not the most important part.
 
If, then, Moses was an Egyptian, the first gain from this
suggestion is a new riddle, one difficult to answer.  When a
people of a tribe(1) prepares for a great undertaking, it is to
be expected that one of them should make himself their leader or
be chosen for this role....

(1)  We have no inkling what numbers were concerned in the
Exodus.

...for example, when the one religion severely condemns any kind
of magic or sorcery, which flourishes so abundantly in the other;
or when the insatiable zest of the Egyptian for making images of
his gods in clay, stone, and metal, to which our museums owe so
much, is contrasted with the way in which the making of the image
of any living or visionary being is bluntly forbidden.

There is yet another difference between the two religions which
the explanations I have attempted do not touch.  No other people
of antiquity has done so much to deny death, has made such
careful provision for an after-life; in accordance with this the
death-god Osiris, the ruler of that other world, was the most
popular and indisputable of all Egyptian gods.  The early Jewish
religion, on the other hand, had entirely relinquished
immortality; the possibility of an existence after death was
never mentioned in any place.  And this is all the more
remarkable since later experience has shown that the belief in a
life beyond can very well be reconciled with a monotheistic
religion.

I had hoped the suggestion that Moses was an Egyptian would prove
enlightening and stimulating in many different respects.  But our
first deduction from this suggestion - that the new religion he
gave the Jews was his own, the Egyptian one - has foundered on
the difference - nay, the striking contrast - between the two
religions.

A strange fact in the history of the Egyptian religion, which was
recognized and appraised relatively late, opens up another point
of view.  It is still possible that the religion Moses gave to
his Jewish people was yet his own, an Egyptian religion though
not the Egyptian one.

In the glorious Eighteenth Dynasty, when Egypt became for the
first time a world power, a young Pharaoh ascended the throne
about 1375 BC, who first called himself Amenhotep (IV) like his
father, but later on changed his name - and not only his name. 
This king undertook to force upon his subjects a new religion,
one contrary to their ancient traditions and to all their
familiar habits.  It was a strict monotheism, the first attempt
of its kind in the history of the world, as far as we know; and
religious intolerance, which was foreign to antiquity before this
and for long after, was inevitably born with the belief in one
God.  But Amenhotep's reign lasted only for seventeen years; very
soon after his death in 1358 the new religion was swept away and
the memory of the heretic king proscribed.  From the ruins of his
new capital, which he had built and dedicated to his God, and
from the inscriptions in the rock tombs belonging to it, we
derive the little knowledge we possess of him.  Everything we can
learn about this remarkable, indeed unique person is worthy of
the greatest interest.*

(*) Breasted called him "the first individual in human
history."

Everything new must have its roots in what was before.  The
origin of Egyptian monotheism can be traced back a fair distance
with some certainty (*). In the School of Priests in the Sun
Temple at On (Heliopolis) tendencies had for some time been at
work developing the idea of a universal god and stressing his
ethical aspects.  Maat, the goddess of truth, order, and justice,
was a daughter of the sun-god, Re.  Already under Amenhotep III,
the father and predecessor of the reformer, the worship of the
sun-god was in the ascendant, probably in opposition to the
worship of Amon of Thebes, who had become over-prominent.  An
ancient name of the sun-god, Aton or Atum, was rediscovered, and
in this Aton religion the young king found a movement he had no
need to create, but one which he could join.

Political conditions in Egypt had about that time begun to
exert a lasting influence on Egyptian religion.  Through the
victorious sword of the great conqueror Thothmes III, Egypt had
become a world power.  Nubia in the south, Palestine, Syria, and
a part of Mesopotamia in the north had been added to the Empire. 
This imperialism was reflected in religion as universality and
monotheism.  Since Pharaoh's solicitude now extended beyond Egypt
to Nubia and Syria, deity itself had to give up its national
limitation, and the new god of the Egyptians had to become like
Pharaoh - the unique and unlimited sovereign of the world known
to the Egyptians.  

(*) The account I give here follows closely J. H. Breasted's
History of Egypt (1906) and The Dawn of Conscience (1934), and
the corresponding sections in The Cambridge Ancient History, Vol.
II.

Besides, it was natural that as the frontiers extended, Egypt
should become accessible to foreign influences; some of the
king's wives were Asiatic princesses (*), and possibly even
direct encouragement of monotheism had penetrated from Syria.

(*) Perhaps even Amenhotep's beloved spouse Nofertete.

Amenhotep never denied his accession to the sun cult of On. 
In the two hymns to Aton which have been preserved to us through
the inscriptions in the rock tombs and which were probably
composed by him, he raises the sun as the creator and preserver
of all living beings in and outside Egypt with a fervor such as
recurs many centuries after only in the psalms in honor of the
Jewish God, Jahve.  But he did not stop at this astonishing
anticipation of scientific knowledge concerning the effect of
sunlight.  There is no doubt that he went further: that he
worshipped the sun not as a material object, but as a symbol of a
divine being whose energy was manifested in his rays. (2)

(2)   Breasted:  History of Egypt, P. 360: "But however evident
the Heliopolitan origin of the new state religion might be, it
was not merely sun-worship; the word Aton was employed in the
place of the old word for 'god' (nuter), and the god is clearly
distinguished from the material sun." "It is evident that what
the king was deifying was the force by which the Sun made itself
felt on earth" (Dawn of Conscience, P. 279).  Erman's opinion of
a formula in honor of the god is similar (A.  Erman: Die
Egyptische Religion; 1905): "There are . . . words which are
meant to express in an abstract form the fact that not the star
itself was worshipped, but the Being that manifested itself in
it."

   

But we do scant justice to the king if we see in him only the
adherent and protector of an Aton religion which had already
existed before him.  His activity was much more energetic.  He
added the something new that turned into monotheism the doctrine
of a universal god: the quality of exclusiveness.  In one of his
hymns it is stated in so many words: "O Thou only God, there is
no other God than Thou."  And we must not forget that to appraise
the new doctrine it is not enough to know its positive content
only; nearly as important is its negative side, the knowledge of
what it repudiates.  It would be a mistake, too, to suppose that
the new religion sprang to life ready and fully equipped like
Athene out of Zeus' forehead.  Everything rather goes to show
that during Amenhotep's reign it was strengthened so as to attain
greater clarity, consistency, harshness, and intolerance. 

Probably this development took place under the influence of the
violent opposition among the priests of Amon that raised its
head against the reforms of the king.  In the sixth year of
Amenhotep's reign, this enmity had grown to such an extent that
the king changed his name, of which the now-proscribed name of
the god Amon was a part. Instead of Amenhotep he called himself
Ikhnaton. But not only from his name did he eliminate that of
the hated god, but also from all inscriptions and even where he
found it in his father's name, Amenhotep Ill.  Soon after his
change of name, Ikhnaton left Thebes, which was under Amon's
rule, and built a new capital, lower down the river, which he
called Akhetaton (Horizon of Aton).  Its ruins are now called
Tell-el-Amarna.

The persecution by the king was directed foremost against
Amon, but not against him alone.  Everywhere in the Empire the
temples were dosed, the services forbidden, and the
ecclesiastical property seized.  Indeed, the king's zeal went so
far as to cause an inquiry to be made into the inscriptions on
old monuments in order to efface the word "God" whenever it was
used in the plural. It is not to be wondered that these
orders produced a reaction of fanatical vengeance among the
suppressed priests and the discontented people, a reaction which
was able to find a free outlet after the king's death.  The Aton
religion had not appealed to the people; it had probably been
limited to a small circle round Ikhnaton's person.  His end is
wrapped in mystery.  We learn of a few shortlived, shadowy
successors of his own family.  Already his son-in-law Tutankhaton
was forced to return to Thebes and to substitute Amon in his name
for the god Aton.  Then there followed a period of anarchy until
the general Harembab succeeded in 1350 BC in restoring order. 
The glorious Eighteenth Dynasty was extinguished; at the same
time its conquests in Nubia and Asia were lost.  In this sad
interregnum Egypt's old religions had been reinstated.  The Aton
religion was at an end, Ikhnaton's capital lay destroyed and
plundered, and his memory was scorned as that of a
felon.


It will serve a certain purpose if we now note several negative
characteristics of the Aton religion.

In the first place, all myth, magic, and sorcery are
excluded from it. (*)

(*) Arthur Weigall (The Life and Times of Akhnaton, 1923,
says that Ikhnaton would not recognize a hell against the
terrors   of which one had to guard by innumerable magic spells.
"Akhnaton flung all these formulas into the fire.  Djins,
bogies, spirits, monsters, demigods and Osiris himself with all
his court. were swept into the blaze and reduced to ashes.'

Then there is the way in which the sun-god is represented:  no
longer as in earlier times by a small pyramid and a falcon, 
but - and this is almost rational- by a round disk from which
emanate rays terminating in human hands.  In spite of all the
love for art in the Amarna period, not one personal
representation of the sun-god Aton has been found, or, we may say
with confidence, ever will be found. (*)

(*) "Weigall, op. cit., p. 103: "Akhnaton did not permit any
graven image to be made of the Aton.  The true God, said the
King, had no form; and he held to this opinion throughout his
life."

Finally, there is a complete silence about the death-god Osiris
and the realm of the dead.  Neither hymns nor inscriptions on
graves know anything of what was perhaps nearest to the
Egyptian's heart.  The contrast with the popular religion cannot
be expressed more vividly. (*)

(*) "Erman, op. cit., p. go: "of Osiris and his realm no more was
to be heard." Breasted: Dawn of Conscience, p. 291.  "Osiris is
completely ignored.  He is never mentioned in any record of
Ikhnaton or in any of the tombs at Amarna."

I venture now to draw the following conclusion: if Moses was an
Egyptian, and if he transmitted to the Jews his own religion,
then it was that of Ikhnaton, the Aton religion.

I compared earlier the Jewish religion with the religion of the
Egyptian people and noted how different they were from each
other.  Now we shall compare the Jewish with the Aton religion
and should expect to find that they were originally identical. 
We know that this is no easy task.  Of the Aton religion we do
not perhaps know enough, thanks to the revengeful spirit of the
Amon priests.  The Mosaic religion we know only in its final form
as it was fixed by Jewish priests in the time after the Exile,
about eight hundred years later.  If, in spite of this
unpromising material, we should find some indications fitting in
with our supposition, then we may indeed value them highly.

There would be a short way of proving our thesis that the Mosaic
religion is nothing else but that of Aton: namely, by a
confession of faith, a proclamation.  But I am afraid I should be
told that such a road is impracticable.  The Jewish creed, as is
well known, says: "Schema jisroel Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echod."

If the similarity of the name of the Egyptian Aton (or Atum) to
the Hebrew word Adonai and the Syrian divine name Adonis is not a
mere accident but is the result of a primeval unity in language
and meaning, then one could translate the Jewish formula: "Hear,
O Israel, our God Aton (Adonai) is the only God." I am, alas,
entirely unqualified to answer this question and have been able
to find very little about it in the literature concerned (*), but
probably we had better not make things so simple.  Moreover, we
shall have to come back to the problems of the divine name.

(*) Only a few passages in Weigall, op. cit., pp. 12: "The
god Atum, who described Re as the setting sun, was perhaps of the
same origin as Aton, generally venerated in Northern Syria. A
foreign Queen, as well as her suite, might therefore have been
attracted to Heliopolis rather than to Thebes."


The points of similarity as well as those of difference in the
two religions are easily discerned, but they do not enlighten us
much. 

Both are forms of a strict monotheism, and we shall be inclined
to reduce to this basic character what is similar in both of
them.  Jewish monotheism is in some points even more
uncompromising than the Egyptian - for example, when it forbids
all visual representation of its God.  The most essential
difference - apart from the name of its God - is that the Jewish
religion entirely relinquishes the worship of the sun, to which
the Egyptian one still adhered.  When comparing the Jewish with
the Egyptian folk religion we received the impression that,
besides the contrast in principle, there was in the difference
between the two religions an element of purposive contradiction. 
This impression appears justified when in our comparison we
replace the Jewish religion by that of Aton, which Ikhnaton, as
we know, developed in deliberate antagonism to the popular
religion.  We were astonished - and rightly so - that the Jewish
religion did not speak of anything beyond the grave, for such a
doctrine is reconcilable with the strictest monotheism.  This
astonishment disappears if we go back from the Jewish religion to
the Aton religion and surmise that this feature was taken over
from the latter, since for Ikhnaton it was a necessity in
fighting the popular religion, where the death-god Osiris played
perhaps a greater part than any god of the upper regions.  The
agreement of the Jewish religion with that of Aton in this
important point is the first strong argument in favor of our
thesis.  We shall see that it is not the only one.
   
Moses gave the Jews not only a new religion; it is equally
certain that he introduced the custom of circumcision.  This has
a decisive importance for our problem and it has hardly ever been
weighed.  The Biblical account, it is true, often contradicts it.

On the one hand, it dates the custom back to the time of the
patriarchs as a sign of the covenant concluded between God and
Abraham.  On the other hand, the text mentions in an especially
obscure passage that God was wroth with Moses because he had
neglected this holy usage, and proposed to slay him as a
punishment.  Moses' wife, a Midianite, saved her husband from the
wrath
of God by speedily performing the operation.  These are
distortions, however, which should not lead us astray; we shall
explore their motives presently.  The fact remains that the
question concerning the origin of circumcision has only one
answer: it comes from Egypt.  Herodotus, "the Father of History,"
tells us that the custom of circumcision had long been practiced
in Egypt, and his statement has been confirmed by the examination
of mummies and even by drawings on the walls of graves.  No other
people of the eastern Mediterranean, as far as we know, has
followed this custom; we can assume with certainty that the
Semites, Babylonians, and Sumerians were not circumcised. 
Biblical history itself says as much of the inhabitants of
Canaan; it is presupposed in the story of the adventure between
Jacob's daughter and the Prince of Shechem. (*)

(*) When I use Biblical tradition here in such an autocratic and
arbitrary way, draw on it for confirmation whenever it is
convenient, and dismiss its evidence without scruple when it
contradicts my conclusions, I know full well that I am exposing
myself to severe criticism concerning my method and that I weaken
the force of my proofs.  But this is the only way in which to
treat material whose trustworthiness - as we know for certain -
was seriously damaged by the influence of distorting tendencies. 
Some justification will be forthcoming later, it is hoped, when
we have unearthed those secret motives.  Certainty is not to be
gained in any case, and, moreover, we may say that all other
authors have acted likewise.

The possibility that the Jews in Egypt adopted the usage of
circumcision in any other way than in connection with the
religion Moses gave them may be rejected as quite untenable.  Now
let us bear in mind that circumcision was practiced in Egypt by
the people as a general custom, and let us adopt for the moment
the usual assumption that Moses was a Jew who wanted to free his
compatriots from the service of an Egyptian overlord and lead
them out of the country to develop an independent and
self-confident existence - a feat he actually achieved.  What
sense could there be in his forcing upon them at the same time a
burdensome custom which, so to speak, made them into Egyptians
and was bound to keep awake their memory of Egypt, whereas his
intention could only have had the opposite aim: namely, that his
people should become strangers to the country of bondage and
overcome the longing for the "fleshpots of Egypt"?  No, the fact
we started from and the suggestion I added to it are so
incompatible with each other that I venture to draw the following
conclusion: If Moses gave the Jews not only a new religion, but
also the law of circumcision, he was no Jew, but an Egyptian, and
then the Mosaic religion was probably an Egyptian one: namely
because of its contrast to the popular religion - that of Aton,
with which the Jewish one shows agreement in some remarkable
points.

As I remarked earlier, my hypothesis that Moses was not a
Jew, but an Egyptian, creates a new enigma.  What he did -- 
easily understandable if he were a Jew -- becomes unintelligible
in an Egyptian.  But if we place Moses in Ikhnaton's period and
associate him with that Pharaoh, then the enigma is resolved and
a possible motive presents itself, answering all our questions. 
Let us assume that Moses was a noble and distinguished man,
perhaps indeed a member of the royal house, as the myth has it. 
He must have been conscious of his great abilities, ambitious,
and energetic; perhaps he saw himself in a dim future as the
leader of his people, the governor of the Empire.  In close
contact with Pharaoh, he was a convinced adherent of the new
religion, whose basic principles he fully understood and had made
his own.  With the king's death and the subsequent reaction he
saw all his hopes and prospects destroyed.  If he was not to
recant the convictions so dear to him, then Egypt had no more to
give him; he had lost his native country.
                               

In this hour of need he found an unusual solution.  The dreamer
Ikhnaton had estranged himself from his people, he had let his
world empire crumble.  Moses' active nature conceived the plan of
founding a new empire, of finding a new people, to whom he could
give the religion that Egypt disdained.  It was, as we perceive,
a heroic attempt to struggle against his fate, to find
compensation in two directions for the losses he had suffered
through Ikhnaton's catastrophe.  Perhaps he was at the time
governor of that border province (Gosen) in which - perhaps
already in "the Hyksos period" - certain Semitic tribes had
settled.  These he chose to be his new people.  A historic
decision!  (*)

(*) "If Moses were a high official, we can understand his being
fitted for the role of leader he assumed with the Jews.  If he
were a priest, the thought of giving his people a new religion
must have been near to his heart.  In both cases he would have
continued his former profession.  A prince of royal lineage might
easily have been both: governor and priest.  In the report of
Flavius Josephus (Jewish Antiquities), who accepts the exposure
myth, but seems to know other traditions than the Biblical one,
Moses appears as an Egyptian field-marshal in a victorious
campaign in Ethiopia.

He established relations with them, placed himself at their head,
and directed the Exodus "by strength of hand." In full
contra-distinction to the Biblical tradition, we may suppose this
Exodus to have passed off peacefully and without pursuit.  The
authority of Moses made it possible, and there was then no
central power that could have prevented it.

According to our construction, the Exodus from Egypt would
have taken place between 1358 and 1350 BC - that is to say, after
the death of Ikhnaton and before the restitution of the authority
of the state by Haremhab. (*)

(*) This would be about a century earlier than most historians
assume, who place it in the Nineteenth Dynasty under Merneptah;
or perhaps a little less, for official records seem to include
the interregnum in Haremhab's reign.

The goal of the wandering could only be Canaan.  After the
supremacy of Egypt had collapsed, hordes of warlike Aramaeans
had flooded the country, conquering and pillaging, and thus had
shown where a capable people could seize new land. We know these
warriors from the letters which were found in 1887 in the
archives of the ruined city of Amarna.  There they are called
Habiru, and the name was passed on - one knows how - to the
Jewish invaders, Hebrews, who came later and could not have been
referred to in the letters of Amarna.  The tribes who were the
most nearly-related to the Jews now leaving Egypt also lived
south of Palestine - in Canaan.

The motivation that we have surmised for the Exodus as a
whole covers also the institution of circumcision.  We know in
what manner human beings -- both peoples and individuals -- react
to this ancient custom, scarcely any longer understood.  Those
who do not practice it regard it as very odd and find it rather
abhorrent; but those who have adopted circumcision are proud of
the custom.  They feel superior, ennobled, and look down with
contempt on the others, who appear to them unclean.  Even today
the Turk hurls abuse at the Christian by calling him "an
uncircumcised dog." It is credible that Moses, who as an Egyptian
was himself circumcised, shared this attitude.  The Jews with
whom he left his native country were to be a better substitute
for the Egyptians he left behind.  In no circumstances must they
be inferior to them.  He wished to make of them a "holy nation" -
-  it is explicitly stated in the Biblicaal text --  and as a sign
of their dedication he introduced the custom that made them at
least the equals of the Egyptians.  It would, further, be welcome
to him if such a custom isolated them and prevented them from
mingling with the other foreign peoples they would meet during
their wanderings, just as the Egyptians had kept apart
all foreigners (*)

(*) Herodotus, who visited Egypt about 450 B.c., gives in the
account of his travels a characteristic of the Egyptians which
shows an astounding similarity with well-known features of the
later Jewish people.  "They are in all respects much more pious
than other peoples.  They are also distinguished from them by
many of their customs, such as circumcision, which for reasons of
cleanliness they introduced before others; further, by their
horror of swine, doubtless connected with the fact that Set
wounded Horns when in the guise of a black hog; and, lastly, most
of all by their reverence for cows, which they would never eat or
sacrifice because they would thereby offend the cow-horned Isis. 
Therefore no Egyptian man or woman would ever kiss a Greek or use
his knife, his spit, or his cooking vessel, or eat of the meat of
an (otherwise) clean ox that had been cut with a Greek knife...
In haughty narrowness they looked down on the other peoples who
were unclean and not so near to the gods as they were." (After
Erman: Die Egyptische Religion, pp. 181 ff.)
  Naturally, we do not forget here the parallels from the life
of India.  Whatever gave, by the way, the Jewish poet Heine in
the nineteenth century the idea of complaining about his religion
as "the plague trailing along from the valley of the Nile, the
sickly beliefs of the ancient Egyptians"?

Jewish tradition, however, behaved later on as if it were
oppressed by the sequence of ideas we have just developed.  To
admit that circumcision was an Egyptian custom introduced by
Moses would be almost to recognize that the religion handed down
to them from Moses was also Egyptian.  But the Jews had good
reasons to deny this fact; therefore the truth about
circumcision had also to be contradicted.



At this point I expect to hear the reproach that I have built
up my construction - which places Moses the Egyptian in
Ikhnaton's era, derives from the political state the country was
in at that time, his decision to protect the Jewish people, and
recognizes as the Aton religion the religion he gave to his
people or with which he burdened them, which had just been
abolished in Egypt itself - that I have built up this edifice of
conjectures with too great a certainty, for which no adequate
grounds are to be found in the material itself.  I think this
reproach would be unjustified.  I have already stressed the
element of doubt in the introduction, put a query in front of the
brackets, so to speak, and can therefore save myself the trouble
of repeating it at each point inside the brackets.

Some of my own critical observations may continue the
discussion.  The kernel of our thesis, the dependence of Jewish
monotheism on the monotheistic episode in Egyptian history, has
been guessed and hinted at by several workers.  I need not cite
them here, since none of them has been able to say by what means
this influence was exerted.  Even if, as I suggest, it is bound
up with the individuality of Moses, we shall have to weigh other
possibilities than the one here preferred.  It is not to be
supposed that the over-spiritualized religion, to find in what it
offered satisfaction for their needs, as were the Egyptians of
the Eighteenth Dynasty.  In both cases the same thing happened:
those who felt themselves kept in tutelage, or who felt
dispossessed, revolted and threw off the burden of a religion
that had been forced on them. But while the tame Egyptians waited
until fate had removed the sacred person of their Pharaoh, the
savage Semites took their destiny into their own hands and did
away with their tyrant. (*)

(*) It is truly remarkable how seldom during the millennia of
Egyptian history we hear of violent depositions or assassinations
of a Pharaoh.  A comparison with Assyrian history, for example,
must increase this astonishment.  The reason may, of course, be
that with the Egyptians historical recording served exclusively
official purposes.

  Nor can we maintain that the Biblical text preserved to us does
not prepare us for such an end to Moses.  The account of the
"wandering in the wilderness" - which might stand for the time of
Moses' rule - describes a series of grave revolts against his
authority which, by Jahve's command, were suppressed with savage
chastisement.  It is easy to imagine that one of those revolts
came to another end than the text admits.  The people's falling
away from the new religion is also mentioned in the text, though
as a mere episode.  It is the story of the golden calf, where by
an adroit turn the breaking of the tables of the law - which has
to be understood symbolically (= "he has broken the law") - is
ascribed to Moses himself and imputed to his angry indignation.

There came a time when the people regretted the murder of Moses
and tried to forget it.  This was certainly so at the time of the
coming together at Qades.  If, however, the Exodus were
brought nearer in time to the founding of their religion in the
oasis, and one allowed Moses, instead of the other founder, to
help in it, then not only were the claims of Moses' people
satisfied, but the painful fact of his violent removal was also
successfully denied.  In reality it is most unlikely that Moses
could have participated in the events at Qades, even if his life
had not been shortened.


Here we must try to elucidate the sequence of these events. 
I have placed the Exodus from Egypt in the time after the
extinction of the Eighteenth Dynasty (1350 BC).  It might have
happened then or a little later, for the Egyptian chroniclers
included the subsequent years of anarchy in the reign of
Haremhab, the king who brought it to an end and who reigned until
1315 B.C. The next aid in fixing the chronology - and it is the
only one - is given by the stele of Merneptah (1225-1215 B.C.),
which extols the victory over Isiraal (Israel) and the
destruction of their seeds (sic).  Unfortunately the value of
this stele is doubtful; it is taken to be evidence that Israelite
tribes were at that date already settled in Canaan.  Meyer
rightly concludes from this stele that Merneptah could not have
been the Pharaoh of the Exodus, as had previously been assumed. 
The Exodus must belong to an earlier period.  The question of who
was Pharaoh at the time of the Exodus appears to me an idle one. 
There was no Pharaoh at that time, because the Exodus happened
during the interregnum...




...a convinced adherent of the Aton religion, but in 
contra-distinction to the brooding king, he was forceful and
passionate.  For this man the death of Ikhnaton and the 
abolishing of his religion meant the end of all his hopes.  Only
proscribed or recanting could he remain in Egypt.  If he were
governor of a border province he might well have come into
touch with a certain Semitic tribe which had immigrated several
generations before.  In his disappointment and loneliness he
turned to those strangers and sought in them for a compensation
of what he had lost.  He chose them for his people and tried
to realize his own ideals through them.  After he had left Egypt
with them, accompanied by his immediate followers, he hallowed
them by the custom of circumcision, gave them laws, and
introduced them to the Aton religion, which the Egyptians had
just discarded.  Perhaps the rules the man Moses imposed on his
Jews were even harder than those of his master and teacher
Ikhnaton; perhaps he also relinquished the connection with the
sun-god of On, to whom the latter had still adhered.

For the Exodus from Egypt we must fix the time of the interregnum
after 1350 B.C. The subsequent periods of time until
possession was taken of the land of Canaan are especially
obscure.  Out of the darkness which the Biblical text has here
left - or rather created - the historical research of our days
can distinguish two facts.  The first, discovered by Ernst
Sellin, is that the Jews, who even according to the Bible were
stubborn and unruly towards their lawgiver and leader, rebelled
at last, killed him, and threw off the imposed Aton religion as
the Egyptians had done before them. The second fact, proved by
Eduard Meyer, is that these Jews on their return from Egypt
united with tribes nearly related to them, in the country
bordering on Palestine, the Sinai peninsula, and Arabia, and that
there, in a fertile spot called Qades, they accepted under the
influence of the Arabian Midianites a new religion, the worship
of the volcano-god Jahve.  Soon after this they were ready to
conquer Canaan.


The relationship in time of these two events to each other
and to the Exodus is very uncertain.  The next historical
allusion is given in a stele of the Pharaoh Merneptah, who
reigned until 1215 B.C., which numbers "Israel" among the
vanquished in his conquests in Syria and Palestine.  If we take
the date of this stele as a terminus ad quem, there remains for
the whole course of events, starting from the Exodus, about a
century after 1350 until before 1215.  It is possible, however,
that the name Israel does not yet refer to the tribes whose fate
we are here following and that in reality we have a longer period
at our disposal.  The settling of the later Jewish people in
Canaan was certainly not a swiftly-achieved conquest; it was
rather a series of successive struggles and must have stretched
over a longish period.  If we discard the restriction imposed by
the Merneptah stele, we may more readily assume thirty years, a
generation, as the time of Moses, and two generations at
least... (*).

(*) This would accord with the forty years' wandering in
the desert of which the Bible tells us.