January 16, 2004

For it is the lot of every myth gradually to creep into the crevice of an
assumed historical reality and to become analyzed as a unique fact in
answer to the historical demands of some later time or other
(F.Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 10)

The article is a free translation of the paper presented at the Convention "Esodo, traumi e memorie", organized by Scienza e psicoanalisi , which took place at Fiuggi (Italy) on the 4 October 2002. Original title: Trauma della nascita, esilio e monoteismo.
 

The Background

The idea for this paper came to me reading the Second Prefatory Note of the Third Essay of Freud's Moses and Monotheism. Freud concludes the Prefatory Note with the sentence : "let us now take the plunge". The first association which came to my mind was: "To take the plunge" = Birth. Freud himself, in "Symbolism in Dreams" (1915 - 1917), had written:

Birth is almost invariably represented by something which has a connection with water: one either falls into the water or climbs out of it, one rescues someone from the water or is rescued by someone - that is to say, the relation is one of mother to child ( in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Ed. and Trans. J. Strachey, Hogarth Press, London 1964, Vol.XV, p.153)

Water and Moses' rod are the protagonists of the first stages of Exodus' events.

Therefore, it is comprehensible that, dealing with an essay on Moses, the first association is "birth"
His story begins indeed with the hero's birth, which speaks in a very explicit way of birth and being drawn from water.
However, Freud's association is not only with birth, but also with fatal decision (to take the plunge).

As stated by Freud, the word Mos, in Egyptian means "child". In Egyptian names it is a suffix, such as Tut - mosis, which means "Tut's child", Ptah - mosis, Amun - mosis, and so on.

As Ahmed Osman has shown in his book Out of Egypt (London 1998), when the name Mos appears alone, and not as a suffix of a name, it indicates someone very well known, but whom they don't want to mention. Namely, Moses would mean that one, whom we know but we are not allowed to mention.
Ahmed Osman's interpretation is that Moses was the heretic and monotheistic Pharaoh,  Akhnaton himself, who was assassinated by the Egyptians because of his monotheistic faith. After his dispatching, his traces were deleted (Damnatio Memoriae) and was prohibited even mentioning his name, punishable by death.
Henceforth, Akhnaton name does not appear in the lists of Egypt's rulers, and we know of his existence and of his religious reforms only because in the 19th century the archaeologists found the site of his capital Amarna.
Akhnaton's followers, being prevented from mentioning his name, called him Mos, "the child of..."

According to this interpretation, the Biblical Moses represents the mnemonic trace of Akhnaton, the heretic and Monotheistic Pharaoh. Akhnaton is the historical figure, Moses is the legendary personification. The silence imposed on Egypt emerged in an over - loquacious story in the Biblical text. As Ian Assman writes in his Moses the Egyptian: "Moses is a figure of memory but not of history while Akhnaten is a figure of history but not of memory" (Harvard College 1997, p.2)

Moses, who was drawn from the water, himself drew Israel from the water of Egypt, and he became their midwife. The Bible, too, speaks of midwives dealing with the beginning of Moses' story (Ex.1:16-19). Namely, his personal myth is the anthropomorphic representation of the birth of the people of Israel.
The collective unconscious association condensed the hero's birth with that of the people by him represented, and his being drawn from the water with the drawing of the entire people from it.
In the collective memory, the Exodus represents the moment in which the Hebrews melted into a nation and acquired an identity.

In reality, the events unfolded in quite a different way.
What has been remembered as the central event in the story of the nation, the Exodus, was very far from being such.
The majority of the Hebrew tribes had never been in Egypt, and had been pasturing their flocks at the fringes of the seeded land, between Canaan, inhabited by the cultivators, and the Sinai peninsula, sparsely inhabited by Bedouin tribes.
Henceforth, the refugees from Egypt would be the ones who joined the tribes pasturing at the fringes of the seeded land in the Negev and the Jordanian highlands. The Sinai peninsula is unable to contain large amounts of people, because of its desert nature and the lack of waters: at most a hundred people with their flocks at one time, and even that only in the best furnished oasis.
We must imagine a situation in which the Southerner clans of the Negev and the Sinai, which later became the tribe of Judah, and that had been wandering sparsely with their flocks, received the refugees from Egypt, who could not possibly be more than a very few hundreds.
The biblical version of an Exodus which included  600.000 man "on foot besides women and children" (Es. 12:37),  is to be considered a wild fantasy.

The material truth is that of some Hebrew clans which were pasturing at the fringe of the seeded land, called since the XV century B.C. "Canaan", and after that Eretz Israel. Some of them might have had an experience of temporary settlement in the Egyptian Delta, the Biblical Goshen.
It is possible that the Egyptian influence that permeated many Hebrew customs and legislation is the by product of that temporary settlement, but my tendency is to think that it depends on the fact that during the XVIII dynasty Sinai and Canaan were part of Egypt. Egyptian presence was very strongly felt through mining activities in Sarbit 'l Chadem in Sinai, and in Timna in the Negev. In both places, several layers of temples dedicated to Hathor have been excavated. Moreover, the Egyptians held garrisons in the main valleys of Canaan, and along the international roads.

250 years after the Exodus, the Hebrew tribes were very far from having melted into one people.
The Book of Judges narrates of struggles between the tribes. They made temporary alliances against each other, which disintegrated immediately after they had achieved their goal.
According to The Book of Judges, the Abimelech clan slaughtered the inhabitants of Schem (Jud. 9), the men of Gil'ad almost committed a genocide of the sons of Efraim (Jud. 12), and the tribe of Gad migrated from the cost into the Galilee, looting on the road Efraim' s territory (Jud.18).
All the tribes of Israel united against Benjamin with the purpose of destroying him (Jud. 20). Since then, it became the smallest tribe, and as such is narrated by Biblical tradition, as the youngest son of Israel. It could survive only under the protection of Judah.

As a matter of fact, it was not the Exodus, that transformed the Hebrews into one nation, but the Exodus became, in the collective memory, the point of reference for their beginning, even if it had not been so.
Looking backwards they will say later: "we were born then"
The psychic event of birth and of national identity was the result of a condensation, worked out many centuries afterwards.
Passover, the celebration memorizing the Exodus, was instituted only six hundreds years after  the times of the alleged event, during the kingdom of Josiah, king of Judah, as is written explicitly:

[21]  The king commanded all the people, saying, Keep the Passover to Yahweh your God, as it is written in this book of the covenant. [22]  Surely there was not kept such a Passover from the days of the judges who judged Israel, nor in all the days of the kings of Israel, nor of the kings of Judah; [23]  but in the eighteenth year of king Josiah was this Passover kept to Yahweh in Jerusalem (2 Kings 23:21-23)*

My thesis is that Jewish Monotheism, which was instituted after the First Exile, was a mechanism of defense against the anxiety enacted by the regressive drive of returning into the maternal womb, triggered by the loss of the Temple and the Land, which is Mother Land par excellence, and that both are unconsciously perceived as maternal imagines.
The libido, forced to detach from the Mother, was redirected towards the Father, who became the only god, as may happen to a child who has lost his mother.
This only god became the one who would have saved them from death and destruction associated with the regressive drive into the maternal womb. As Ruth Stein has written in Evil as Love and as Liberation : "the father is usually represented as the one who prevents the child from returning to the mother's womb". The Father imago, as apotropaic mean (defense) against the regressive urge, condensed with and resulted in a strengthening of the homosexual libido.
The images associated to that regressive drive appear everywhere in the Biblical text, which was composed under the impression of the traumatic events which befell on Israel and Judah.

Through a psychoanalytic analysis, I shall try to decode the psychic contents of the Exodus, namely, how the event has been interpreted by the collective unconscious a posteriori. As Freud has shown, it is not the event which produces the trauma, but its interpretation. The event may well be only a fantasy created by need; Ananke as producer of imagines.

I sustain that it is not casual if the text used a sentence rather than another, because no association is casual and void of a latent meaning, but there are repressed psychic contents which strive to emerge circumventing the censorship of the Editor.
As Freud has shown, men cannot retain secrets. These emerge to the surface through apparent trivial signs, lack of attention by the Editor or simple literary virtuosities.

The Torah was edited after the return from the First Exile. The ancient legends of the Hebrews which were orally transmitted, were adapted to the new situation of a monotheistic people, but the traces of the historical truth remained in the text, circumventing the official censorship.

Myth and Dream

Karl Abraham, in Dreams and Myths : A Study in Race Psychology  (1909), 12, draws a parallel between dreams and myths. Myth, according to Abraham, is a collective dream. It engenders not in an ethical background but in a sexual fantasy. The ethical - religious elements are later overlays, consequence of the repression.

Many Biblical stories are myths, namely, according to Karl Abraham, collective dreams.
The story of the Exodus, as is narrated by the Torah, represents the collective dream of the Jewish people concerning its origins, and, as I shall try to prove, it is a dream (= fantasy) of birth.
Being a dream, we have to deal with the emerging representations with the same tools with which we approach a dream, keeping in mind the main mechanisms present in dreams as censorship's tools of the Ego: condensation, inversion, displacement, and isolation.
 

The Exodus as Birth

The one who reads the first chapters of the Book of Exodus, senses the impression of having already lived the narrated drama: an oppressive bondage, a slavery in chains, a claustrophobic oppression escalating with the unfolding of the events and, eventually, an exhilarating explosion of liberation.
Indeed, the last days preceding birth are terrible to the fetus. It begins suffocating, and the placenta, which until then had been protective and nutrient, becomes more and more oppressing and poisonous. The baby needs exiting, but he is in chains. The umbilical cordon which until then had brought him oxygen ant nutrients becomes the chain preventing from it the exit (= Exodus), and as an enormous serpent threatens it of strangulation.
The womb becomes a prison. Only the Messiah will be able to save it "drawing it from the water" of the maternal womb (= Egypt).
The images of serpents and other phallic monsters crowding the fantasy of ancient peoples and of our children, in the regressive context of intrauterine fantasies, represent a projection of the image of the placenta. In more progressive stages of evolution, as the genital, the serpent represents the female missing penis, or, in the context of oral sadistic fantasies it represents the drive to bite and to devour the female. The serpent always represents the Mother: as placenta, as drive of devouring, as genital object.

In Hebrew there is an expression: "Chavalei Ha Mashiah" (the labor pains of the Messiah), meaning, the coming of the Messiah will be preceded by labor pains. The word Chevel means both "labor pain" and "rope", condensing the concept of birth with umbilical cord.
In the context of the Exodus, the Messiah is Moses, who, through the labor pains, will save Israel from from the chains of Egypt, namely, from the unbearable habitat of a suffocating placenta, and he becomes, in this way, his midwife.
As we shall see, the text speaks in a very concrete way of Moses as midwife.
 

Exodus' Labor Pains

The expressions used by the text are enlightening. The fetus begins suffocating, but it is not yet able to get out. It craves for space. The third chapter of the Book of Exodus describes the situation:

[7]  Yahweh said, "I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters, for I know their sorrows. [8]  I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and large land, to a land flowing with milk and honey; to the place of the Canaanite, the Hittite, the Amorite, the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite. [9]  Now, behold, the cry of the children of Israel has come to me. Moreover I have seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them.  (Ex. 3:7-9)

Therefore, the people cry because of their taskmasters, that do not let them go, they are keeping them in prison. "I have come down to deliver them out".  The Lord, through Moses,  came down to liberate the fetus from the chains of the maternal womb.
The phrases and the idioms used by the Biblical text are telling the all story:

 "to a good and large land, to a land flowing with milk and honey;" (3:8)

From the withholding placenta, to the flowing breasts. The placenta, represented by Pharaoh, responds: :

 [2]  Pharaoh said, "Who is Yahweh, that I should listen to his voice to let Israel go? I don't know Yahweh, and moreover I will not let Israel go"(5:2)

More and more the oppressive habitat of the placenta denies to the fetus its needs:

 [7]  "You shall no longer give the people straw to make brick, as before. Let them go and gather straw for themselves. [8]  The number of the bricks, which they made before, you require from them. You shall not diminish anything of it, for they are idle; therefore they cry, saying, 'Let us go and sacrifice to our God.' " (5:6).

With no oxygen and nutrition, the fetus has no choice, but exiting.

At this point, the waters broke:

[20]  Moses and Aaron did so, as Yahweh commanded; and he lifted up the rod, and struck the waters that were in the river, in the sight of Pharaoh, and in the sight of his servants; and all the waters that were in the river were turned to blood.  (7:20)

The pathos of the narrative escalates and the rhythm becomes more and more close, through the plagues, and until the last night, in which the Israelites are retrenched in their homes, waiting for the great moment of the delivery; as the rhythm gets closer and closer in the last hours preceding birth.
Birth is represented by the separation of the Red Sea's waters, which the Israelites pass with no harm, while the Egyptians, namely, all the poisonous remains, are left behind.

Also the explosion of relief, represented by Miriam's and the women's dance at the sound of the timbrels, is peculiar of the sensation of relief felt by new born. The women are the ones dancing. There is a condensation between the relief of the new born and the relief of the mother.
Therefore, the Exodus, as narrated by the Bible, is a collective fantasy of birth.
 

The First Contacts with the External World (Numbers Chapters 11 -21)

The Oral Sadistic Stage

The association between Exodus from Egypt, birth and conditions in the wilderness, death and new born returns as a chain in the chapters 11 to 14, and 21 in the Book of Numbers.

[4]  The mixed multitude that was among them lusted exceedingly: and the children of Israel also wept again, and said, Who shall give us flesh to eat? [5]  We remember the fish, which we ate in Egypt for nothing; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic: [6] but now our soul is dried away; there is nothing at all save this manna to look on (Numbers 11:4)

At this point, the unconscious role of Moses as midwife and delivering - Mother of Israel emerges in the text:

[11] Moses said to Yahweh, Why have you dealt ill with your servant? and why haven't I found favor in your sight, that you lay the burden of all this people on me? [12]  Have I conceived all this people? have I brought them forth, that you should tell me, Carry them in your bosom, as a nursing-father carries the sucking child, to the land which you swore to their fathers? [13]  Whence should I have flesh to give to all this people? for they weep to me, saying, Give us flesh, that we may eat. [14]  I am not able to bear all this people alone, because it is too heavy for me.   (Numbers 11:11-14).

In the 11th chapter of Numbers we read on the first weaning experiences of the child:

[31]  There went forth a wind from Yahweh, and brought quails from the sea, and let them fall by the camp, about a day's journey on this side, and a day's journey on the other side, round about the camp, and about two cubits above the surface of the earth. [32]  The people rose up all that day, and all the night, and all the next day, and gathered the quails: he who gathered least gathered ten homers: and they spread them all abroad for themselves round about the camp. [33]  While the flesh was yet between their teeth, before it was chewed, the anger of Yahweh was kindled against the people, and Yahweh struck the people with a very great plague. [34]  The name of that place was called Kibrot Tehavah, because there they buried the people who lusted.    (Nm.11,31-33). (Tehavah means lust in every sense, and it has a very strong sexual connotation)

It seems that I was always destined to be so deeply concerned with vultures; for I recall as one of my very earliest memories that while I was in my cradle a vulture came down to me, and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me many times with its tail against my lips
(S.Freud, "Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood" (1910), in The Standard Edition of the complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Tran. by James Strachey, The Hogart Press, London 1957, vol. XI, p.82.

Why The anger of Yahweh was kindled against the people? Because we are dealing with an oral sadistic drive. The sense of guilt is always activated by a regressive erotic drive. The Lord is indeed always angered along the all Exodus' saga.

In the 12th chapter of Numbers, Miriam and Aaron slandered ("spoke against", according to the text) Moses. Speaking is acted out through the mouth, which, immediately after birth, becomes the mucous where oral eroticism is located, and

Aaron said to Moses, Oh, my lord, please don't lay sin on us, for that we have done foolishly, and for that we have sinned. [12]  Let her not, I pray, be as one dead, of whom the flesh is half consumed when he comes out of his mother's womb (Numbers 12:11)

The placenta, which in the last days of pregnancy had become oppressive and suffocating, a land of bondage, at the first post -  birth difficulties, is idealizeddd and is remembered as protective.
To the new born, the first contact with the outside world, in contrast with the moist environment of the placenta and its amniotic liquid, it seems as that of a desert, a very dry place, as it must have seemed to the first living creatures which for the first time abandoned the sea, in order to climb into the dry land.
At this point, the new born experiences a strong drive to return to the previous environment, namely, a drive to regress to the level preceding birth and life, which in the text is expressed as follows:

[2]  All the children of Israel murmured against Moses and against Aaron: and the whole congregation said to them, Would that we had died in the land of Egypt! or would that we had died in this wilderness! [3]  Why does Yahweh bring us to this land, to fall by the sword? Our wives and our little ones will be a prey: wouldn't it be better for us to return into Egypt? [4]  They said one to another, Let us make a captain, and let us return into Egypt.     (Nm. 14:2-4; cfr. Es. 16:3).

As Melanie Klein has shown, the new born, while exiting the womb, experiences two contrasting but concomitant drives: the drive to be born (Freudian Eros) and the drive to break into the placenta again, which is a regressive and a very aggressive drive. It is what Freud has called Death -urge (Todestrieb). The tension and the consequent ambivalence will never leave the human being, until, at the end of his life, the death- urge will gain the upper hand.

Melanie Klein confirms Freud's theory on the existence of a regressive Trieb of Eros and Death - urge pasted together, preceding even oral sadism, whose topic instance (topos ) is in the stage between the uterus and the external world, and which only in the days subsequent birth is canalized into oral sadism.

Here we have the Israelites of the Biblical story that, immediately after birth, are eager to die.
Thinking death is equivalent to thinking returning to the condition preceding life, namely, the intrauterine condition, because only before birth we have experienced it. After all, as Nietzsche correctly pointed: "The non - being is unthinkable".
Henceforth, the text expresses itself in that way. It does not say:" We would prefer to live in Egypt than to die in the desert", that it would have at least made a sense, but: "Would that we had died in the land of Egypt! or would that we had died in this wilderness!"
Namely, "we prefer to die in Egypt than dying here". What sense it may possible have?!
Egypt, as we have seen, represents the maternal womb. Therefore, the Israelites fantasized returning there.

The struggle and the ambivalent feeling towards the maternal breast which nurtures the new born are expressed again in the 21th chapter of Numbers

 [5]  The people spoke against God, and against Moses, Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? for there is no bread, and there is no water; and our soul loathes this light bread. [6]  Yahweh sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and much people of Israel died. [7]  The people came to Moses, and said, We have sinned, because we have spoken against Yahweh, and against you; ...pray to Yahweh, that he take away the serpents from us... (Nm. 21:5 - 7).

Bread is synonymous of meat (flesh). In archaic Hebrew and in Arabic the word lehem, that today means "bread", meant "meat". Therefore, craving for lehem, bread, it indicates a cannibalistic drive.

Therefore, the sin because of which the serpents attacked the Israelites it had been an oral sadistic drive. Speaking is acted out through the mouth and the tongue. Of whom slanders, we are used to say that he has a serpent tongue, and the cause was hunger: a need strictly associated to the oral sadistic drives of infancy.
The serpents attacking the Israelites bit them, because that had been the sin: biting. Every punishment must be associated to the sin itself, because that is the Law of the Talion, the only law understood by the archaic psyche and by our unconscious.

The myth of Orpheus, too, who the first time loses Euridices to a serpent bite, represents an oral sadistic drive and its punishment. The story of the serpents attacking the Israelites in the wilderness is equivalent to the serpent biting Euridices and causing her death. Both are dream - myth - representations of the oral sadistic drive.

As we have seen, many stories associated to the Exodus are dream - representations, in our case intrauterine and sadistic oral fantasies.
 

From the Initiation of the Law to the Conquest of the Promised Land

In 1919 Theodor Reik published an essay: "The Moses of Michelangelo and the Events on Sinai" (Supplement of "The Shofar", in Ritual - Psychoanalitic Studies, Farrar & Straus, New York 1946), in which he interprets the the story of the promulgation of the Ten Commandments and the sin of the golden calf as a totemic rite.
According to Reik, the two tablets of the Law, which were made of stone, are to be interpreted not as commandments but as the body of the god. Reik shows that for the ancients the stone was the god himself. The tablets of the Law were two and not one: the stone - god Jahveh and the stone - god Moses. A Father - god and a Son - god, like in Christian myth.
Moses destroying the tablets means that he kills Father - god and takes his place. The destruction of the golden calf is a repetition of the destruction of the tablets, when he also self - destroys as an acting out of atonement.
When the children of Israel are forced to drink the ashes of the golden calf that they had made, and that Moses had destroyed, they repeat the cannibalistic act towards the assassinated Father, as part of the totemic rite, in condensation with the devouring of the body of the Son, as atonement and identification. In the Christian rite of Eucharisty, the condensation of the different stages is even more explicit.
In my opinion, the evidence presented by Reik is compelling, and it is the only interpretation of the events on Sinai which makes any sense.

Therefore, a tribal totemic rite was consumed at the foot of Mount Sinai, not very different from the one described by St. Nilus in the V century A.D., which has been described by Robertson Smith, and quoted by Freud in Totem and Taboo.
St. Nilus had assisted how Bedouin tribes in the Sinai had bonded a camel to an altar of stone, and had devoured it still alive.

After forty years, Reik writes Mystery on the Mountain (Harper & Brothers, Publishers, New York 1959), where he broadens the scope, and he interprets the events on Sinai as a collective puberty rite. Those rites condense also the symbolic repetition of the patricide as perpetrated through the Totemic meal, and the death and re - birth of the novices as atonement and reconciliation.

This interpretation does not, in my opinion, invalid Ahmed Osman insight that the Dacalogue is strongly influenced by the Egyptian Book of the Dead (Out of Egypt , London 1998, pp.130-1).
However, it proves that the Decalogue is detached from the events on Sinai, and the two condensed together in a much later stage.

After the First Exile, the mnemonic traces of the archaic puberty rites as had been consummated by the Hebrews in the desert condensed with the Mosaic moral message, which could not possibly be part of those rites, and became a unique event.
Monotheism itself is a post - exile affair.

This can explain why Birth (the Exodus) and the acquisition of an identity, which is part of the puberty rite, in the collective memory of the Jewish people became one.
During the puberty rites, the novices definitely acquire the Father's identity and the impositions of the Law of the clan, through the traumatic events which are part of the rite, as they are indeed the terrifying events described by the Book of Exodus and Deuteronomy.

The events on Sinai are connected to the wandering of the Hebrew tribes at the fringe of the seeded land, but they are dissociated from the ten commandments and the "Mosaic" law, and they were repressed after the Israelites penetrated into the Promised Land and became a people of cultivators, keeping only foggy mnemonic traces. As the Greeks repressed their tribal memories, after they became settled down city - dwellers.
The puberty rites on the sacred mountain were a periodical event, but were repressed for seven centuries. The mnemonic traces emerged again, in a displaced and condensed form, only when they could be condensed with the Decalogue and the memory of Egypt, after the First Exile.
The rites were repressed because they were very real.

The Book of Joshua
The Conquest of the Promised Land

What was not repressed, because it never happened, were the deeds of Joshua and his epic of conquest of the Promised Land by storm.
Instead of the long and painful penetration into the Land, which was the material truth of the Conquest, and which took almost three centuries of trials and errors as described in the Book of Judges, and has been confirmed by archaeological excavations, the collective memory created an initiation saga of heroism, at the orgiastic rhythm of drums, directed by Jahveh, the God of Hosts.

The most enlightening instance is that of Ai.
In the first half of the the third millennium, the city had been the most prosperous city of Palestine, but at the times of the Israelite conquest, in the last half of the 13th century, it already had been a mound of rubble for one thousand three hundred years. As Jericho, Ai is not mentioned in the Book of Judges, that, at difference from the Book of Joshua, correctly describes the material truth of the slow process of penetration and conquest of the Land.

The detailed description of Ai's conquest, perpetrated through an astute trick, in order to break into the city without the need of overcoming by assault the cyclopic walls encircling it, is the mirror image of the frightening impression that the rubbles of this majestic city had done on the semi - nomads invading from the desert. Ai, in Hebrew, means "rubble".
The purpose of the Biblical narrative (Jos. 8:1-29) is to explain how Joshuah could take a city so massively fortified.

In the case of Jericho, too, archaeological excavations have proved that in the Late Bronze, in which the invasion of the Israelites is supposed to have occurred, the city was non more encircled by a wall, although it had been in the preceding millennium.

The Book of Judges, which narrates its version of the conquest, and which is much more reliable as an historical source, does not mention Jericho nor Ai, the first conquered through a magic exorcism, the second conquered through an astute trick.

What the Book of Joshuah does narrate is the ideal od the conquest, as it was perceived in the deepest layers of the collective psyche. Namely, it is a myth, which, according to Abraham, represents a sexual fantasy.

The book of Joshuah may be compared to the Iliad, even if it does not mach its broader scope, as song of a people initiation saga, in which the Brotherhood Horde put a siege on the city, symbol of the maternal body.
The Achean horde has as its task Troy and her Queen
The Israelite horde has as its task all the fortified cities of the Promised Land.
As Rashi, the most important Biblical commentator (lived in France in the 11th century), explains: "a city is a woman", bright intuition confirmed by psychoanalysis. Therefore, conquering a city is psychically equivalent to conquering a woman.
The Mother's body materializes in the image of a Promised Land, whose numerous cities are to be taken by storm. The war's hymn expresses the the craving and the violence of the desire of the thirsty tribes coming from the desert. This is the song of the consummated incest. The text sounds the excitement of possess.
What will slowly become a loving intercourse of the people with the Land, in later psychic elaboration began as a violent  rape. Exactly as children fantasize their parents' coitus.
The excitement escalates with the unfolding of the narrative. It begins with the collective initiation rite of circumcision on the threshold of the Promised Land (Jos. 5: 2-9).
As in primitive tribes, the circumcision of the initiation rite is followed by heterosexual license, in the same way the circumcision of the children of Israel was followed by the conquest of Jericho:

Now Jericho was tightly shut up because of the children of Israel: none went out, and none came in. [2]  Yahweh said to Joshua, Behold, I have given into your hand Jericho, and the king of it, and the mighty men of valor. [3]  You shall compass the city, all the men of war, going about the city once. Thus shall you do six days. [4] Seven priests shall bear seven trumpets of rams' horns before the ark: and the seventh day you shall compass the city seven times, and the priests shall blow the trumpets. [5]  It shall be that when they make a long blast with the ram's horn, and when you hear the sound of the trumpet, all the people shall shout with a great shout; and the wall of the city shall fall down flat, and the people shall go up every man straight before him" (Jos.6:1-5).

The armed men went before the priests who blew the trumpets, and the rearward went after the ark, [the priests] blowing the trumpets as they went. [10]  Joshua commanded the people, saying, You shall not shout, nor let your voice be heard, neither shall any word proceed out of your mouth, until the day I bid you shout; then shall you shout. (6:9-10).

The drums' roll scans also the rest: all the Palestinian cities are stricken by Joshuah terror and his horde. The King of Jerusalem, the king of Hebron, the king of Jarmuth, the king of Lachish, the king of Eglon, "all the kings of the Amorits, dwelling the hills" make a last desperate attempt of coalition in the strive to contain the Israelites. The span of daylight hours is not enough for Joshuah to destroy his enemies, being they so numerous. Then, by his magic power, he stops the astral corpses in their march through the sky:

"Sun, stand you still on Gibeon; You, Moon, in the valley of Aijalon." The sun stood still, and the moon stayed, Until the nation had avenged themselves of their enemies. Isn't this written in the book of Jashar? The sun stayed in the midst of the sky, and didn't hurry to go down about a whole day. (Jos.10,13).

The story of the conquest is seeded with connotations associated to the coitus, as it is perceived by childish fantasy: cities hermetically sealed, that only a magic formula is able of opening, astute tricks, massive fortifications, going in and going out, setting up fires. Fire is, indeed, the associative image closest to sexual excitement.

Julius Wellhausen, the Father of modern Biblical criticism, did not think in psychoanalytic terms. However, it is not casual that he included the Book of Joshuah together with the first five books of the Bible, and called them all "Exateuch". He had unconsciously perceived that the Pentateuch and the Book of Joshuah are part of the same context: the psycho sexual evolution from birth until the Oedipal stage.

The Exodus as birth. The adventures in the desert as the oral sadistic stage. The events on the sacred mountains as the acquisition of an inhibiting Super - Ego, and the conquest by storm of the Promised Land as the stage of the Oedipal fantasies.

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                                                 SECOND PART
 
 

Adulthood: The Kingdoms of Israel and Judah.

Real history of the people begins being narrated in  "the book of the history of the kings of Judah" mentioned in 2 Chronicles (25:26)  and in " the book of the history of the kings of Israel" mentioned in 2 Kings (14:28), which, at difference from the the Pharaonic annals, were lost, or were intentionally lost, because they would have contradicted the official post - exile version of the history of Israel.
The true story of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel had been written, but never reached us. The final Biblical editor had them, he mentions their existence and used them for his edition, adapting the stories to the new monotheistic vision.
If we write a book on Jewish history, and not of prehistory, we should begin at earliest with the history of the wars of the first kings of Judah and of Israel with their neighbors and between themselves.
David still was a tribal chieftain. Salomon probably has never existed
If we distill the text from the later layers overlaid by the post - exile editor, we obtain a picture of a people of cultivators, worshipping the cultivators' deities, immersed in the sacred prostitution cults, as their Canaanite neighbors, and of Baal and Asherah.
The Jerusalem temple did not differ in anything from one of the many temples dedicated to those deities and cults.
Still at the times of Ezekiel, at the eve of the first Exile (VI century B.C.), those cults are mentioned as the main religion of the Hebrews:

      [14]  Then he brought me to the door of the gate of Yahweh's house which was toward the north; and see, there sat the women weeping for Tammuz  (Ez.8:14),

Tammuz was the young Syrian - Canaanite god, lover of Ishtar and protagonist of fertility cults, who dies in Springtime, like Adonis and Attis, to be born again in the Autumn, when the first rains regenerates the vegetation after the long dry Middle East Summer.
When he died, the women bitterly cried and mourned him.
 

The Catastrophe

While in Judah they were weeping for Tammuz, the Assyrians put the siege on Samaria, the capital of the kingdom of Israel, and in 721 they destroyed it, deporting the ten Northern tribes. Two third of the Hebrew people disappeared as snow with the first Spring sun. They evaporated without leaving any trace.
As Jeremiah laments:

[20]  Is Ephraim my dear son? is he a darling child? for as often as I speak against him, I do earnestly remember him still: therefore my heart yearns for him; I will surely have mercy on him, says Yahweh (Jeremiah  31:20).

Hezekiah the son of Ahaz king of Judah began to reign...He removed the high places, and broke the pillars, and cut down the Asherah: and he broke in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses had made; for to those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it; and he called it Nehushtan.  (2 Kings 18: 1-4)

Where those the first monotheistic reforms?
In my opinion, not yet.
They were the first monolatric reforms, which, after the Babylonian Exile unfolded into Monotheism.
The difference between Monolatry (Henotheism) and Monotheism is that the latter means believing that there is only one god, while the former means worshipping only one god, without excluding the existence of other gods to other peoples.
The difference between Monolatry and polytheism is that the former is the cult of the god of the tribe, while the second means worshipping many gods at the same time.
In Monolatry, the female divinities and Son - gods are repressed. Monolatry is indeed the projection of the patriarchal social structure of the Semi - nomadic peoples.
The cultivators, on the other hand, after having evolved from the strict patriarchal structure of patriarchal society, and re - activating daily the heterosexual libido through the work of the earth (Mother Earth), they let the repressed Mother image to emerge from the repression. Mother deities are mated with Son - gods, and the cultivators become polytheist.
As confirmed by the studies of Father Wilhelm Schmidt, and as reiterated by Reik in Mystery on the Mountain, in the history of mankind, Monolatry has preceded polytheism
As sustained by Reik, the Israelites wandering at the fringes of the seeded land, before the conquest, were monolatric and not monotheist; polytheist neither. They became polytheist only when they became cultivators. Jahveh was their only god, and he had no pretensions of being the only god of the world. He defines himself  "the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob", and not the god of the all mankind. In the Bible, he is named 226 times "Jahveh  Sebaot", Jahveh of the Hosts. Jeremiah and Ezkiel say  fourteen times “Jahveh Sebaot is his name”.
Therefore, he had a specific name, and he represented the phallic symbol of the Judean tribes when they went to battle.
After the Hebrews entered the Land and became cultivators, they adopted other gods, side by side with Jahveh. He became a secondary god, almost relinquished to oblivion behind Astarte, the Canaanite fertility goddess, Asherah, sacred prostitute and sacred pole, and Tammuz, the dying and resurrecting god.
The Prophets, who had remained faithful to Jahveh, the shepherds' god, were very angry at that change in style of life by the Hebrews, and cast their curses against the gods of the cultivators.
The evidence that after the conquest of the Land, Jahveh had been worshipped together with other gods is very transparent, even if censored, in the Biblical stories.
For instance, Gedeon had in his yard the sacred pole of Asherah and the statue of Ball, and at the same time he sacrificed to Jahveh (Jud. 6:25), and he saw no contradiction of terms in doing so.
And not only in Biblical stories.
As proved by the excavations, at Elephantine, in Egypt, near Asswan and the first cataract, in the 5th century B.C. was stationed a garrison of Jewish mercenaries at the service of the Persian governor of Egypt. In the site, were found papyrus documents explicitly saying that, in the local Jewish temple, Jahveh and Asherah were worshipped together as a divine couple.
The Jewish mercenaries at Elephantine had not yet been acknowledged on the religious reforms implemented in the meantime Judah, and continued worshipping  Jahveh and Asherah together.
 

Hezekiah (705 –701)

As we have seen, at the times of Hezekiah, one century before the First Exile and immediately after the holocaust of the kingdom of Israel, there had been a first trial to return to Jahveh's monolatry. That first trial did not have any following, because, as we shall see, three generation afterwards the sacred poles of Asherah and the statues of Baal still were in the temple of Jerusalem, brought back there by Hezekiah's son, Menashe, who ruled on Jerusalem for 55 years, and sacrificed his own son to the Moloch.

When the Babylonian empire annexed Assyria, and at its turn began making the preparations for invading Egypt, in Jerusalem they understood that, on their way, the Babylonians would have trodden on Judah, too, and no one would save them from the fate of Israel.
At this point, emerged the anxiety of losing the Land, as had occurred to Israel, of losing the Temple (the House), where the cults of the Mother were carried out at the rage of Jahveh' Prophets, and of disappearing.
In those conditions of panic and of sense of guilt the process of regression from the genital heterosexual level was triggered, and since the threat was of total annihilation, the regression did not stop at the intermediate stages of psycho sexual evolution, but reached that regressive drive that Melanie Klein has called: "the urge of the new born to break again into the maternal body"; the regression to "Who shall give us flesh to eat? [5]  We remember the fish, which we ate in Egypt for nothing; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic:" that we have mentioned above (Numbers 11:4).
The memory of the protective and nurturing aspect of the placenta emerged in the group fantasies, and triggered the regressive drive.
The repressed memory of Egypt, of the beginning, is associated with that regressive drive, and in Jerusalem the panicked people are eager of  returning there.
The Prophet Jeremiah put himself between the people and their regressive urge:

Don't be afraid of the king of Babylon, of whom you are afraid; don't be afraid of him, says Yahweh: for I am with you to save you, and to deliver you from his hand. [12]  I will grant you mercy, that he may have mercy on you, and cause you to return to your own land. [13]  But if you say, We will not dwell in this land; so that you don't obey the voice of Yahweh your God, [14]  saying, No; but we will go into the land of Egypt, where we shall see no war, nor hear the sound of the trumpet, nor have hunger of bread; and there will we dwell: (Jer. 42:12-14)...
[12]  I will take the remnant of Judah, that have set their faces to go into the land of Egypt to sojourn there, and they shall all be consumed; in the land of Egypt shall they fall; they shall be consumed by the sword and by the famine; they shall die, from the least even to the greatest, by the sword and by the famine; and they shall be an object of horror, ? an astonishment, and a curse, and a reproach. [13]  For I will punish those who dwell in the land of Egypt, as I have punished Jerusalem, by the sword, by the famine, and by the pestilence; [14] so that none of the remnant of Judah, who have gone into the land of Egypt to sojourn there, shall escape or be left, to return into the land of Judah, to which they have a desire to return to dwell there: for none shall return save such as shall escape   (Jeremiah 44:12).

Passover

Only then, with the Babylonians at the gate, as an apotropaic mean, as a defense against the regressive urge of re - entering the placenta of Egypt, equivalent to Freudian Death urge, which had been triggered by the present conditions, emerged from the repression the Paraoh of Egypt, Horus son of Osiris, the living god, who represented the Son - god on Earth, and Vicar of Osiris, the god of Heaven and Last Judge. This Son - god, with the name of Moses, became the midwife of Israel. He became Moses, Vicar of the Father, for Israel, as Akhnaton had been the Vicar of the Father for Egypt. As in Christianity, a Son - god condensed with the Father, so Moses, the Son - god, condensed with the Father - god. In later elaboration, after the implementation of Monotheism, he lost his divine nature, and became only "Vicar" of the Father, the "greatest of Prophets".
Only at this stage, they found "Moses' Law" in the Temple of Jerusalem, as is written in the Book of Kings:

 [8]  Hilkiah the high priest said to Shaphan the scribe, I have found the book of the law in the house of Yahweh. Hilkiah delivered the book to Shaphan, and he read it. [9] Shaphan the scribe came to the king, and brought the king word again, and said, Your servants have emptied out the money that was found in the house, and have delivered it into the hand of the workmen who have the oversight of the house of Yahweh. [10]  Shaphan the scribe told the king, saying, Hilkiah the priest has delivered me a book. Shaphan read it before the king. [11]  It happened, when the king had heard the words of the book of the law, that he tore his clothes. [12]  The king commanded Hilkiah the priest, and Ahikam the son of Shaphan, and Achbor the son of Micaiah, and Shaphan the scribe, and Asaiah the king's servant, saying, [13]  Go you, inquire of Yahweh for me, and for the people, and for all Judah, concerning the words of this book that is found; for great is the wrath of Yahweh that is kindled against us, because our fathers have not listened to the words of this book, to do according to all that which is written concerning us. (2 Kings 22:8-13)

In Judah, at the eve of the Exile, the god who got the preeminence was not Aton, but Jahveh, the monolatric god of the Semi nomadic shepherds, warrior god and phallic symbol of battle.
It was reactivated the Monolatry of Jahveh, not the Monotheism of Aton, as sustained by Freud in Moses and Monotheism. For Monotheism to get hold, it will take another three generations and even more traumatic events.

Once that Jahveh and the Egypt fantasy were activated again, Josiah (628 - 609 B.C.) king of Judah and descendant of Hezekiah, completed the monolatric reforms of his ancestor, which had not been implemented, because the sacred symbols of Baal and Asherah were to be found again in the Temple. As we are told:

The king sent, and they gathered to him all the elders of Judah and of Jerusalem. [2]  The king went up to the house of Yahweh, and all the men of Judah and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem with him, and the priests, and the prophets, and all the people, both small and great: and he read in their ears all the words of the book of the covenant which was found in the house of Yahweh. [3]  The king stood by the pillar, and made a covenant before Yahweh, to walk after Yahweh, and to keep his commandments, and his testimonies, and his statutes, with all [his] heart, and all [his] soul, to confirm the words of this covenant that were written in this book: and all the people stood to the covenant. [4]  The king commanded Hilkiah the high priest, and the priests of the second order, and the keepers of the threshold, to bring forth out of the temple of Yahweh all the vessels that were made for Baal, and for the Asherah, and for all the host of the sky, and he burned them outside of Jerusalem in the fields of the Kidron, and carried the ashes of them to Bethel. [5]  He put down the idolatrous priests, whom the kings of Judah had ordained to burn incense in the high places in the cities of Judah, and in the places round about Jerusalem; those also who burned incense to Baal, to the sun, and to the moon, and to the planets, and to all the host of the sky. [6]  He brought out the Asherah from the house of Yahweh, outside of Jerusalem, to the brook Kidron, and burned it at the brook Kidron, and beat it to dust, and cast the dust of it on the graves of the common people. [7]  He broke down the houses of the sodomites, that were in the house of Yahweh, where the women wove hangings for the Asherah. [8] He brought all the priests out of the cities of Judah, and defiled the high places where the priests had burned incense, from Geba to Beersheba; and he broke down the high places of the gates that were at the entrance of the gate of Joshua the governor of the city, which were on a man's left hand at the gate of the city. [9]  Nevertheless the priests of the high places didn't come up to the altar of Yahweh in Jerusalem, but they ate unleavened bread among their brothers. [10] He defiled Topheth, which is in the valley of the children of Hinnom, that no man might make his son or his daughter to pass through the fire to Molech. [11]  He took away the horses that the kings of Judah had given to the sun, at the entrance of the house of Yahweh, by the chamber of Nathan-melech the chamberlain, which was in the precincts; and he burned the chariots of the sun with fire. [12]  The altars that were on the roof of the upper chamber of Ahaz, which the kings of Judah had made, and the altars which Manasseh had made in the two courts of the house of Yahweh, did the king break down, and beat [them] down from there, and cast the dust of them into the brook Kidron. [13]  The high places that were before Jerusalem, which were on the right hand of the mountain of corruption, which Solomon the king of Israel had built for Ashtoreth the abomination of the Sidonians, and for Chemosh the abomination of Moab, and for Milcom the abomination of the children of Ammon, did the king defile. [14]  He broke in pieces the pillars, and cut down the Asherim, and filled their places with the bones of men. [15]  Moreover the altar that was at Bethel, and the high place which Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin, had made, even that altar and the high place he broke down; and he burned the high place and beat it to dust, and burned the Asherah. [16]  As Josiah turned himself, he spied the tombs that were there in the mountain; and he sent, and took the bones out of the tombs, and burned them on the altar, and defiled it, according to the word of Yahweh which the man of God proclaimed, who proclaimed these things   (2 Re 23/1-16)

From Monolatry to Monotheism.

Twenty years after Josiah's religious reform, in 587, the Temple was destroyed, and the Exile came.
When, seventy years later, the Persians incorporated Babylon, Judah, and Egypt, it became the most extensive empire ever. Cyrus the Great, in an inscription found in Galilee, names himself as follows: "I, Cirus king of the world, the great king, the strongest king".
The monolatric god Jahveh could not possibly be enough, as god who will bring Salvation from such strong enemies, and from all the encircling peoples. In order to challenge adversaries which now included the entire world, and not only the neighboring tribes, he had to assume peculiarities of a cosmic god. The Father of the tribe could not promise Salvation to his children without transforming into the Father of the whole world.
From tribal god he became a cosmic god. In prayers he is called as Cyrus: "Oh Jahveh, king of the world, the great king, the strongest king", but his real nature is betrayed by the most peculiar attribute of the god of the clan, that of being elected by his own people. The peculiarity of the monolatric god is betrayed in the concept of "chosen people" (by God), which is an inversion of "chosen god" (by the people).
As Nietzsche writes:

The entire history of ethnic fighting, victory, reconciliation, mergers—everything which comes before the final rank ordering of all the elements of a people in that great racial synthesis—is mirrored in the tangled genealogies of its gods, in the sagas of their fights, victories, and reconciliations. The progress towards universal kingdoms is at the same time always also the progress toward universal divinities. In addition, despotism, with its overthrow of the independent nobles always builds the way to some variety of monotheism ("Second Essay: Guilt, Bad Conscience and Related Matters", in On the Genealogy of Morals, 20).

*The Biblical quotes are from World English Bible (ed. Rainbow Missions, Inc.), as reported on the Perseus Project

Links:

Killing God. From the Assassination of Moses to the Murder of Rabin
Exile and Monotheism (Part I)
Exile and Monotheism (Part II): Zionism and Psychoanalysis
Freud and Reik: Was Moses an Egyptian?