According to Freud, Moses was assassinated by the Hebrews because he wanted to impose on them a too spiritual religion (1). According to this thread, the Hebrews were not yet ready to accept such a sophisticated religion as cosmic Monotheism. The Jews, before the First Exile, were indeed no less polytheist than the Canaanites they came to supplant. As is richly described in the Books of Judges and Kings, the worship of Baal, Astarte and Asherah was the rule and not the exception.
Only after the Exile, after a latency period of more than seven centuries since Moses had tried to impose on them Monotheism, they fully accepted and implemented it (2).
Freud attributed the acceptance of Moses legacy to the reemergence of the murder from the repression, due to a renewed sense of guilt: “It appears as though a growing sense of guilt had taken hold of the Jewish people...” (3). The sense of guilt had been apparently triggered by the loss of independence, and by the hardship of the new situation in which the Jews had found themselves with the Exile.
In a previous work , based on a psychoanalytical analysis of the Biblical text, we corrected and developed Freud's thinking, and we sustained that the most compelling reason for Moses’ murder had not been only his imposition of monotheism on the Hebrews, but because he wanted to prevent the Israelites from invading the Promised Land, which in Jewish psyche is unconsciously perceived as the body of the Mother.
The association between land and earth, and the maternal body, had been made by Freud himself, back in the days of Totem and Taboo (5), as he called her “Mother Earth”, and explained the meaning. Reik returned on this association: Promised Land = maternal body (6). As Freud has explained in his work, the primal reason for the drive of killing the Father is the lust for the body of the mother.
Henceforth, if he interpreted Moses' assassination as a patricide, it is much more articulate to attribute it to the lust for the Land than just only to the imposition of too a spiritual religion. Indeed, the connection is there: imposing monotheism meant imposing the discipline of the Father, which means imposing an instinct inhibition. The all argument is strongly interconnected, and it is impossible to separate between the two elements.
It might be that Freud himself felt inhibited from making the connection. In my opinion, the only way of fully explaining Moses murder as a patricide is implying that he was erecting himself as a barrier between the Hebrews and the Land, i.e. between them and their incestuous drives.
If we take for granted this assumption, all the subsequent historical and psychological unfolding becomes much clearer, too. We must remember that Freud wrote Moses and Monotheism at the end of his life, after that, by his own admission, the Moses’ problem had been hunting him during all his life (7). He left many threads disconnected, even if he had laid the founding stone, and he had put in place the basis for a much more articulate exposition. He had in his hands all the elements. He just could not complete his own work, probably due to his own ambivalence towards the issue.
As not only Freud, but also Wellhausen and Robertson Smith before him had concluded, the Jews retrenched into an intolerant iconoclastic monotheism only after the First Exile.

The Mother goddess in the First Temple

Why the exile transfigured an idol - worshipping people, addicted to the cultivators' cult of the land, the fertility cults related to her and sacred prostitution which was consummated at the very inner Holy of Holies of the Temple, into a monotheistic iconoclastic intolerant people?
Indeed, in the Hellenist period, there had been a renewed trial to reactivate pagan cults in the midst of Judah but, with the Maccabbean wars, orthodoxy resumed its predominance, and this time for good. The second exile cemented even more the rule of an absolute sole God, and since then paganism and images' worship had become the antithesis of Judaism.
We have good reason to believe that as time elapsed, the Jews became more and more entrenched in their iconoclastic peculiarity. In a synagogue, discovered at Dura Europos in northern Syria, belonging to the third century A.D., still there are images of Patriarchs painted on the walls, and on a mosaic at Hefzi Ba (Beith Alfa), in the Jordan Valley, which belongs to the 6th century A.D., the images of Abraham, Isaac, and the two servants are composed on the floor. Not to mention the anthropomorphic representations of the months and of the sun. At the synagogue of Korazin, in Galilee, belonging to the third century A.D., the architect carved on a architrave an image of Medusa. Today, such a thing would be inconceivable in a modern synagogue.
The process of instinct inhibition, activated during the First Exile, has continued to work its way in Jewish psyche into our very days. We can say that the Jews, even non – religious ones, are more “Mosaic” today than they had been two thousands years ago.
The exile, the first and even more the second, activated the Mosaic monotheistic idea of the sole rule of the Father and his demands of instinct renunciation, of which the inhibition from making images is part (8). The original drive, inhibited by iconoclasm, is the voyeuristic urge to look at the female genital, which is displaced into the inhibition to stare at the Father's genital, as part of the regression from the heterosexual drive into the homosexual urge. Staring at the face of God is a displacement of the drive of staring at his genital.
The second element, at which Freud only hinted in his work, but did not explain, is the destruction of the Temple. He mentioned the loss of the Second Temple as the catalyst for the process of intellectualization and instinct renunciation of the Jewish people, but he did not explain why, and how the process unfolded.
With the first exile, and again after the second, the Jews lost two cherished assets at the same time: the Land and the Temple.
As for the Land, losing the Promised Land, we have seen that it means losing the maternal body. The Temple is her repetition. In Hebrew, the Temple is called simply Habait, which means: The House, i.e. the Temple is the house par excellence.
And, as Freud himself has shown in Symbolism in Dreams (1915-1917), a house is the symbol of the maternal body.
In Hebrew Bait (house) and Bat (daughter but also wife) are written with the same letters, even leading sometimes to confusion in interpretation whether the text means daughter, or wife, or house. When “Yosef spoke to the house of Par'o” (Gen. 50:4), the text did not intend to say that Josef spoke to a house but to Paro's wife (9).
Moreover, until the First Exile, the Temple of Jerusalem had been the center of the cult of the Mother and not of the Father, as instead the Second Temple became afterwards. The kings of Judah had been also the priests of the cult of Astarte and Asherah, the Great Mothers of all the Semitic peoples, as the Bible witnesses of king Salomon himself (1 Kings 1:1-9). The Biblical text has been edited by priestly censorship, and presents to us Salomon's deeds as a prevarication, but it could not have been such, if 350 years later, at the time of the first reforms by king Josiah, the altars to Astarte and to Asherah that Salomon had built in Jerusalem were still there (2 Kings 23: 4-28). As is written, “The king [Josiah] commanded [...] to bring out of the temple of the Lord all the vessels that were made for the Baal and for Ashera [...] ”. in the Semitic East, Asherah was the goddess of the sacred prostitutes (qaddeshot) , and also in the temple of Jerusalem.
We can conclude that, prior to the First Exile, the cult of the Mother, i.e. heterosexual libido, had the predominance in Jewish psyche, and only with the loss of the two most important symbols of the maternal body, the Land and the House, there was, at the national collective psychic level (10), a renunciation to the heterosexual drive, due to the sense of guilt induced by every loss, which caused a retrenchment into the cult of the Father. As we have sustained in a previous work (11), the conquest of the Land and the building of the Temple itself had been a prevarication in defiance of Moses' will, who had wanted to hold the Hebrews in the wilderness, and to prevent them from becoming cultivators and building houses. Now, we can explain the struggle between Moses' will, and the Hebrews craving to invade the land and building houses, also as the struggle between homosexual and heterosexual libido energies.
As Freud has exposited in his work, a retrenchment from the heterosexual channel automatically produces a strengthening of homosexual libido. The catastrophe, which befell on the feminine object of lust strengthened, at the collective level, the homosexual libido of the Jewish people, as a child who loses his mother redirects his libido towards the father.
At this level, Jewish Monotheism may be interpreted as the strengthening of homosexual libido after the loss of the heterosexual object.
As evidence of how Freud had the all elements in his hands, and only failed of completing the addition, I quote from Totem and Taboo:

After they had got rid of him [of the father], had satisfied their hatred and had put into effect their wish to identify themselves with him, the affection which had all this time been pushed under was bound  to make itself felt. It did so in the form of remorse. A sense of guilt made its appearance, which in this instance coincided with the remorse  felt by the whole group. The dead father became stronger than the living one had been –for events took the course we so often see them follow in human affairs to this day. What had up to then been prevented by his actual existence was thenceforward prohibited by the sons themselves, in accordance with the psychological procedure so familiar to us in psycho-analysis under the name of deferred obedience[...] Thus the brothers had no alternative [...] to institute the law against incest, by which they all alike renounced the women whom they desired and who had been their chief motive for despaching their father. In this way they rescued the organization  which had made them strong – and which may have been based on homosexual feelings and acts, originating perhaps during the period of their expulsion from the horde (12).

Second Part

Links :

The Image of God in Judaism: Father or Mother?
Exodus and Intrauterine Regression. The Genealogy of Jewish Monotheism
The Chariot of the Sun and the Messiah
Pinocchio. The Puberty Rite of a Puppet

* I want to express my gratitude to Prof. Nicola Peluffo and Dr. Quirino Zangrilli for having kindly discussed with me the significance of the Temple and the Exile, and rendered possible the completetion of the essay.
 

(1) Sigmund Freud, “Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays” (1939), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, (The Hogart Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, translated by James Strachey ) London 1964, Vol. XXIII, pp.36-53
(2) Ibidem, pp.66 -86
(3) Ibidem p. 86.
(4) “Uccidere Dio: il Destino del Popolo Ebraico. Dall’Assassinio di Mose’ all’Omicidio di Rabin”, in Agor�,  Vol. IV, (Liceo Scientifico Statale “G.Ferraris”), Varese, 2000. English tr. Killing God, in www.geocities.com/psychohistory2001/KillingGod.html
(5)”Totem and Taboo”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, The Hogart Press, London 1955, 1957 and 1962, vol. XIII, p.152
(6) Theodor Reik, "The Puberty Rites of Savages", in Ritual-Psychoanalytic Studies (Farrar, Strauss & Co.)  New York, 1946,  p.157.
(7) Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Edited and Abridged in one Volume by Lionel Trilling  and Steven Marcus, Basic Books, New York 1961, p. 502. Freud writes: “The theoretical basis of the Moses story is not solid enough to serve as a basis for my invaluable piece of insight. So I remain silent. It is enough that I myself can believe in the solution of the problem. It has pursued me through my whole life”
In one of his letters to Lou Salome Freud calls his Moses: “a ghost not laid” (The Complete Corrispondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones 1908-1939, Edited by R. Andrew Paskauskas, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, 1993, p. 62.)
(8) For the connection between Mosaic Monotheism and instinct renunciation Cf. S.Freud, "Moses and Monotheism", in op.cit., vol. XXIII, pp.116-122. Refraining from making images is a form of  instinct renunciation.
(9) For other examples were Bait has been mistakenly translated as “house” instead of “wife” see: Ahmed Osman, Out of Egypt, Arrow Book, London 1998, pp. 88-9.
Regarding the unconscious equivalence between "house" and "woman", we are enlightened by Shakespeare in the Merry Wives of Winsdor:

Falstaff: Of what quality was your love, then?
Ford: Like a fair house built upon another man's ground; so that I have lost my edifice by mistaking the place where I erected it.
(Act II - Scene II)

(10) Freud explains: "I have taken as the basis of my whole position the existence of a collective mind, in which mental processes occur just as they do in the mind of an individual" in "Totem and Taboo", op.cit., vol. XIII, p.157.
(11) The Jews and their Temple
(12) “Totem and Taboo”, op.cit., pp.143-4
 
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