CHAPTER EIGHT
A famous figure of the French Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century, Voltaire, reduced the miracles of the Bible to a laughing stock of the French salons. Voltaire nevertheless believed in a god. In a world then bemused by the technology of clocks, with clock-makers and clock-philosophers everywhere, he examined the astronomical system of the Earth and the heavens and pronounced it a clock. With all of this clockwork, said he, there must be a clock-maker somewhere. So Moses and his men will be readily understood when, in an environment that exhibited electrical effects in many places, they found, behind the grand son et lumière show, a great electric god, Yahweh.
It may be that Moses, in ways unsuspected by the psychohistory of science, has infiltrated the lives and work of Newton, Darwin, Edison, Einstein, and others; by his tenacious insistence on the single god, he made all things dependent on a single system incorporating a key machine assembly, and therefore made an integrated philosophy of nature imperative. In one legend, Moses cannot get the great natural bodies Sun, Moon, Earth, Heaven, Stars, Planets, Sea, Rivers that is, all the gods of the Greeks, to intercede on his behalf with Yahweh because, they said, they were but Yahweh's helpless creatures [1] . Possibly Yahweh's invisibility was a model of the ordinary invisibility (immateriality) and omnipresence of electricity, and of its appearing as incorporeal "fire" when it was visible. I think it no coincidence that among the enthusiasts and practitioners of early electrical science were numerous mosaist clergyman, both Catholic and Protestant. G. Beccaria, pioneer of electrical field theory, was a Piarist; John Wesley, founder of Methodism, wrote copiously on electricity.
By one cause or another, being mortal, Moses died. But Yahweh did not die. Even in the technical sense of "the name of the Lord," he did not die, because the Ark and Altar remained in the Yahwist repertory for some centuries. He was no longer, thereafter, much of an hallucination; he joined the ranks of the gods as a pure collective delusion. With the ups and downs typical of divine careers, he has come into the present.
Moses' greatest triumph was to bequeath a portion of his mind to posterity by means of Yahweh. Unfortunately, it was the wrong part, the conscience-loaded superego, but so it must go with the birth of religious cults. Since it was the hallucinatory and delusionary operations of his mind that were handed down, these would in some ways not be truly Moses. They would be idiosyncratically Moses, but not completely him.
Moses stopped far short of placing all his religious impulses into the hallucination of Yahweh; he seems to have been previously what might be called a liberal Hermist, a devotee of Thoth-Hermes-Mercury. His invention-conversion to Yahweh did not eradicate the Hermetic qualities that took deep root during his Egyptian years. His great and versatile skills gave him a reputation throughout the ancient world for being a veritable Hermes.
Julian Jaynes has developed a theory that the human race, for a period of time extending up to the classical period, was of two minds, one rational and pragmatic (corresponding to the traits of the left hemisphere of the brain) and the other mind hallucinatory and occupied by gods who talked to men and appeared before them (corresponding to the traits of the right side of the brain) [2] . Moses, he said, was an archetype of this type of mind. The hallucinations are of a type well-known in psychiatry, often if not always associated with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. This is true, I think, and also Moses was much more than Yahweh, and maintained a pragmatic balance that brought him great and justified fame as a scientist and leader,
There is much to be said for Jaynes' theory. Its analytic side is in line with what is advanced in these pages, and I have elsewhere pointed out that the complex membrane dividing the two lobes of the cerebrum, the corpus callosum, may well be the site of schizoid behavior; in fact, I have hypothesized that behavior which is specifically human has occurred because of a possible physiological-psychosomatic microsecond block in transfers of information and impulses through the corpus callosum; this delay would constitute an instinct block and therefore would promote human self-awareness, reflection, and the feeling of talking to oneself, whence one hallucinates others as well [3] .
Jaynes was not able to cope with the historical materials, largely because he relied upon conventional ancient history and chronology. As a result, he was put into a position where he had to perceive just the opposite of the actual process. He says that the "bicameral mind" as he terms it, finally broke down because world-conditions became unsettled and the gods that had satisfied the needs of the hallucinators such as Moses lost face. In reality it was the catastrophes of the world whose terrible stresses made hallucinatory leaders out of borderline cases and staunch believers out of normal people. (And elsewhere Jaynes makes this very point.) There is every reason to believe that long cycles of history occurred before the time of Exodus and Moses when there were "golden ages" of Saturn and Elohim, whose central and celebrated significance was the reduced role permitted to mosaic characters, that is, reduced schizotypical behavior.
Yet, as one studies Moses as a person, it is plain that his peculiarities as a human being are remarkably well reflected in Yahweh as a god. If Yahweh were given a worldly childhood and experience, like some gods and god-heroes, instead of being presented full-blown, they could be like the childhood and experience of Moses. If Yahweh were extinguished from Biblical history as a god and become a kind of sequestered ruler speaking only through Moses, he might appear inexplicably incoherent, stupid, non-revealing of his motives and reasons and of his knowledge of the world. Moses would be continually besought by his people to seize the name and authority of the hidden power.
One is placed in a tight logical-psychological corner here. Speaking now for persons bred in cultures colored by mosaism, one's conception of a father is Moses' conception and is also, in fact, Moses. So when one says Moses is like a father, and is also like Yahweh, who is the father, one is measuring a standard by the standard itself.
One has to make a very simple statement, which sets up a very different anthropological perspective, namely: "I would not want Moses, hence Yahweh, for my father." When asked "Why?" one responds in the pragmatic manner: "Because I do not like the consequences." Then one lists those experiences that emanate from fathers like Moses-Yahweh. Those that evolve from other kinds of fathers are possibly better; in any event, one rejects the mosaic consequences.
Recently circles of biblical scholarship were agitated by some newly uncovered tablets of the ancient city of Ebla in Northern Syria that were reported to contain the name "Ya." If this were a contraction of "Yahweh," it might be Moses' Yahweh, and place the god several centuries earlier than we have him here. One of Moses' inventions would be struck from our list. More lately, it appears that the syllable might have had several usages in the Semitic languages, and that no single tie with Moses' Yahweh has appeared [4] .
There is some likelihood, however, that Moses derived the name from the Midianites or another tribe thereabouts when he was in exile. Buber, for instance, says that Yahweh may be related to "Ya-hu," that is "O He!" of the Dervishes and that this cry occurs once in Genesis during the blessings of Jacob [5] . The name is not foreign to Genesis; Abraham uses it, but more commonly used is Elohim, and most likely, Yahweh was implanted in the Book of Genesis by Moses or Yahwist editors [6] .
A suggestion can be made that would lend integrity to such an assertion. In the years of the grandson of Adam, "men began to call upon the name of Yahweh." I make the identification, as have others elsewhere, of Yahweh with gods of lightning and fire, such as Zeus and Jove, and I place the beginnings of the great electrical gods around the time of Adam and Eve, replacing Elohim and Saturn. Yahweh may have been inserted into Genesis to claim his own from times long past.
Ziegler maintains that "the original god of the Hebrews at the Exodus was Zeus." The Greeks change H to E and final H to S. (Jeremiah is Jeremias). The "Y" was originally a "Z". Thus YHWH becomes ZEWS or ZEUS, and with the erroneous transliteration of Y for J, "Jews." The Etruscan-Roman case, "Jove," pronounced "Yowe" is so close to Yahweh that the Roman Jupiter may be considered as basically the same entity [7] .
Another theory holds that Moses framed the word from Egyptian roots, meaning "I am." Egyptian was familiar to all Hebrews and was Moses' native tongue. A Jewish legend says that Yahweh's first word when he announced the Decalogue was Egyptian: "Anoki!" (" It is I") [8] . The Bible has Yahweh announcing the well-known "I am that I am" from the Burning Bush. The phrase has been played upon endlessly, which is what a religious phrase should be and do for people. Moses is given to understand this when he asks Yahweh for more concrete identification, and it is denied him.
Let me now assemble the name of Yahweh in the context of this book. Moses, learned as he was, had known the syllable "Ya"; he heard it, and also other compound words including it, in Egypt and then in Midian among the Kenites and the nearby tribes. It was a godword, part of various sacred epithets. He heard a sound very much like "Yahweh" streaming with light from the Burning Bush. This is the essence of god, he thought; it is the name of god and is hinted at in all the "ya" syllables that I have heard.
Now he asks what it is, and "Yahweh ehweh" is heard. This makes sense. "I am that I am." "I am the great I am." I am It!" "I am the essential principle." Not the principle of light alone. It is already sound and light. It is the activity of the skies and earthly nature. It is the main and primary manifestation. It is connected with the old gods as well. Yahweh tells Moses: "Say this to the people of Israel, I am has sent me to you… Yahweh, the God of your fathers… has sent me to you: this is my name forever and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations. " [9]
Then Yahweh tells Moses that his plea before the Pharaoh is to lead the Israelites thither to worship him. Unless Moses convinces the Hebrews that they should worship Yahweh [10] and that this will be the way that they will be able to break through to freedom, and unless he is ready to give the Pharaoh a good reason for their leaving Egypt, after so many years of sacrificing within Egypt, his plan will not work. He must therefore tie in Elohim, whom both Hebrews and Egyptians acknowledge, with Yahweh. So Yahweh is a very new god of special manifestations and a concrete task to perform: getting Moses through the specific obstacles on both sides to an Exodus.
Hence, Moses was the inventor of Yahweh in every meaningful sense of an invention, no invention ever being unprecedented and quite new. Merely to imagine that it would be possible to propose a new god to the world was audacious and brilliant. Yahweh is explicitly new, yet another name, as Yahweh says, for the old god of the Hebrews. His name dwells most precisely on the mercy seat of the Ark, and then in the place in the temple chosen by him. With negligible exceptions he speaks only to and through Moses.
Moses invents Israel as well, in the sense that he takes a nickname given to Jacob after Jacob has wrestled with God or the Angel of God, and attaches it to the descendents of Jacob and the initiates into the new Yahwist Israelite group led by Moses himself. The term is translated variously as "the god-fighter " "God fights," [11] "the god who battles," or "god rules." [12] Israelites were then "the people of the fighting god." Yahweh is of course a bellicose god, so the name is apt, and both "Israel" and "Yahweh" become battle cries of the newly founded nation.
The idea that the Jews never spoke the name YHWH seems to me preposterous. The name was inutterable simply because its authentic voice came only from the Ark of the Covenant. When the time came that the Ark was rarely functional, the name became secret. The name of "Amen" had the same history; presumably the Egyptian pyramids, too, were no longer displaying or sounding the god's name; whereupon it was said that Amon hid himself - not of course from all prayers and enunciations to which the response is "Amen."
Does not the idea that YHWH has the electric name of god when he spoke through the noise of the ark contradict the very Third Commandment that says: "You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain?" Of this, Ziegler says, "with the idea of YHWH as an electrical discharge, there are at least three possible reasons for the commandment. First, there might have been a danger of injury to those using the power indiscriminately. Second, its use might have allowed the enemies of Israel to obtain this secret, Third, a frequent use of the power might discourage the worship of it." [13] Or at least, so Moses thought at the time. Actually the ark ceased to speak as YHWH when the electric age ended - around 600 B. C. - and the substitute notion arose that the commandment referred to the human voice not uttering the word YHWH, because it was the name of God [14] .
Moses was concerned with law and order, and therefore with blasphemy. The Douay (R. C.) Bible adds abruptly to the Third Commandment: "For the Lord will not leave unpunished him who takes his name in vain." [15] The Jerusalem Bible (also R. C.) renders the verse as banning utterance of the name of Yahweh to misuse it (that is, maliciously or for unholy purposes).
Ziegler argues that "we are warned against effecting the sign or signature of the powerful YHWH. More specifically here, the Third Commandment forbids us without good reason to discharge an electric arc with its accompanying flash of light and noise. It is believed here that this discharge is the name of God, YHWH." [16] Later on the sound becomes a word and then a secret word, for the sound has gone.
Cassuto gives this version of the Commandment: "You shall not take up the name of the Lord your God for unreality, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes His name for unreality." [17] I think that Cassuto's version gives us the clue for expatiating fully the commandment.
The word is the thing. We face here the crux of the ancient philosophical debate between the "realists" and "nominalists," Platonists and Aristotelians. (Primitive, untrained thinkers, and religious devotees are generally realists; the word is a sacred entity and not to be used as a mere tool nor certainly for deliberate blasphemy.) The thing, by reverse (and incorrect) logic, is the word, and especially the sounded name, for the most ancient sacred associations of things and sounds came before the written word.
The electrical discharge is the voice (as well as the vision) of Yahweh, and, in the Ark, the name of Yahweh. Blasphemy is any assertion that the sound of Yahweh is unreal and does not exist, and by inference that the name is an inconsequential incident; and by extension blasphemy is also any assertion that the name can be used for purposes other than harkening to the emanations from the sole source of the authentic God on the Ark. For common people, the sin of blasphemy is ordinarily a denial of the reality of the word, or ridicule of it.
Bearing in mind this anthropological and psychological process, one can understand how the cult of the secret name of god developed and how the common sin and crime of blasphemy evolved.
Does not the design of the Ark contradict the second commandment: it says "You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them.." This is altogether strange since the Lord also commands that Moses make the Tabernacle and the Ark "after the pattern for them, which is being shown you on the mountain." And the Ark even carries two cherubim. The Ark itself was duplicated at a later time by a private person and carried off by the tribe of Dan. The answer is, of course, "I am a jealous god," who reserves the right to spot and destroy possible competitors, such as the Golden Calf
The cherubim were almost surely recognizable likenesses of living things, although Cassuto apologized that since they were composites of more than one being, they were not to be banned. He surmises that "on the kapporeth [the lid or mercy seat] there was not sufficient room for two images of quadrupeds, and it appears that the cherubim on it were erect figures, like the cherubim of Ezekiel's visions and those of Solomon's Temple [18] . R. W. Moss also believed them to be winged human figures [19] . The mention of quadruped is logical, inasmuch as many winged bulls and other animals are to be found of the same general period throughout the Near East, The word "cherubim" itself seems related to an Assyrian word for the winged bull.
Yahweh was a ground force sometimes exhibiting himself, but ruled the heavens invisibly. By keeping Yahweh as a heavenly god, under a new name, and invisible, Moses could avoid choosing among the specific historical heavenly gods. Moreover, Yahweh must not be identified with a heavenly body, for a good reason; the heavenly body could not be controlled or possessed uniquely by the Jews, that is, by Moses,
As time passed and the name of YHWH disappeared along with his image in electrical form and his burning of the altar-offerings, the Jews might have been expected to bring back images, especially of YHWH. But here we may call into play Freud's concept of instinctual renunciation which he applies to the self-denial of holy image-making [20] . This refusal of the strong urge to reproduce the forms of the deity was probably built up in the mosaic period and later on maintained by the compulsive repetition of the highly ritualistic religion, with discipline maintained by the priesthood. Referring to Max Weber's analysis of rabbinical Judaism, we may speculate that any image of Yahweh would have to represent some other culture's image and therefore violate the "pariah" tendencies of the Jews.
Yahweh and Moses made the Jews a lonely people, isolated, not sharing other gods, as other nations did whenever they so desired for purposes of international amity and communication of sentiments. This was a source of pain to many Jews, as it was a source of pride to others. Many more Jews chose other gods than other people chose Yahweh. No wonder, then, that the Jews as a group never could fulfill the promises of Yahweh that they would multiply in vast numbers. Moses' deep aversiveness to humanity determined in the beginning of Israel that this should be so.
Yahweh says and Yahweh does. What he says consists of describing himself, expressing his emotions, relating what he has done, instructing as to what must be done, and foretelling what he will do. In describing the hallucinatory voices of schizophrenic patients, Jaynes stresses that they speak "often in short sentences." [21] They command, yell, curse, and consult. They are sometimes rythmical. The abrupt commands of Yahweh, his great noises, curses, and marvelously clear consultative advice enrich the verses of the Books of Moses. The lack of explanation is typical of both hallucinatory voices and of Yahweh's words. One must wonder whether the hallucinatory patients have learned through mosaism to speak like Yahweh or Moses is the prototype of hallucinators.
All that Yahweh says is in an absolutely authoritative mood. This includes those expressions which comment upon behavior that is against his will or interests; one learns of the crime when Yahweh refers to it and considers what punishment to meet out, without trial, of course. This last kind of behavior is presumably an exercise of "free will" on the part of Israelite believers or non-believers or on the part of gentile non-believers. They have the uniquely human ability to obey or disobey him. It is a totalitarian system in that no human act is done outside of his jurisdiction or without religious meaning. A secular sphere does not exist for him.
What Yahweh does, supplementing what he says, is to cause all things to happen, even expressions of disobedience coming out of "free will", in the sense that if he wished to do so, he could make people will what he wanted them to will. He is thus all-powerful, even against free will. Sometimes, as with Pharaoh, Yahweh plays a mean game with people, forcing them to be bad so that he can punish them more. "I will harden Pharaoh's heart, and though I multiply my signs and wonders..., he will not listen to you." [22]
He even asserts a power to be bad, to do evil. He is not bound by notions of good or evil. "Who makes peace and creates evil, I Yahweh do all this." [23] Speaking through the prophet, Ezekiel, Yahweh proclaims of Israel: "I defiled them through their very gifts in making them offer by fire all their first-born, that I might horrify them: I did it that they might know that I am Yahweh." [24] Nor is he bound by promises and laws or a principle of consistency. Thus he is unlike Zeus, as Eliade Points out. [25] He is in this sense, like Moses, charismatic, above the rules.
Although he causes all things to happen, only selective actions of Yahweh are described. Yahweh acts in categories set up almost always by his worshippers, rarely by non-believers or opportunists outside of Israel. He rules the heavenly host, destroys nations, feeds Israel, punishes friend and foe, and so on; he wills all natural forces and especially great or unusual natural forces.
Particular actions are of the same kind, but deal with special cases that come to his attention, such as punishing a named person or giving a sign at a certain time and place or appearing on the mercy seat of the Ark, or sending down manna or causing all East wind to blow. As with his speech, all that he does is likewise in an authoritative mood. Can one then slip in a substitute word for Yahweh such as "nature" and read the Exodus and wanderings as natural history? If one uses the word "nature" or "a natural force," can one then also eliminate all anthropomorphic or metaphorical references? Such would be, for example, reading only the first three words from "Smoke went up from his nostrils…" etc [26] Perhaps, yet one must not dismiss metaphor. In a certain broad sense all language originated metaphorically, and further, one can often find a fact through the metaphor used to describe it. If Yahweh (Nature) melts mountains like wax, it may be that sudden eruptive thermal melting is occurring, producing the viscous appearance and softness of wax. Or, whenever Yahweh "appears," is it to be taken as metaphor? A god who is everywhere, omnipresent, cannot "appear" in one place; he was already there; or, logically, since nothing is beyond him, he can appear, even in seeming contradiction to himself.
No, Yahweh is not Nature animated. And he is not metaphor (unless hallucination is metaphor, which in a way it is but in a way that is irrelevant here). The activities of nature - especially the powerful, disastrous and brutal forces - are contained within the sum total of activities - moral, social, political, and military - of a hallucinated, all-powerful man.
But then, in the end, all words and deeds are but weak tools to describe one to whom the absolutes of presence, knowledge, power, and activity are assigned. One either makes of blind faith a virtue or brings to bear the tools of psychiatry. A logical exposition of Yahweh's mental labyrinth is impossible. It is the ghost of Moses' mentation.
A religion cannot come to be without voices sacredly and definitively authorized to speak accurately on behalf of the god; therefore, it has to be presumed that Moses, who claims and is accorded such credentials, is speaking the truth about Yahweh. Yet Moses himself is but a delegate of limited instructions, and often repairs to Yahweh for further orders or clarification. But Yahweh, the absolute one, knows that, at best, Moses is only a superior human; that is, Moses is still a weak reed to lean upon for establishing godly rule among a portion of the human race. And, as for the Jews as a body of people, Yahweh has little confidence or trust in them, and the grounds on which he has chosen them as his "peculiar treasure" are indefinite, to say the least. The choice seems to have been practically a random act of grace on his part.
An outside observer can scarcely be faulted, then, if he feels himself racing giddily in a circular trap, with his every attempt to question a fact or a cause being referred back to an absolute quality which respects neither fact nor cause. He can only cease his anxious circlings, he is assured, if he accepts to believe, or if he is coerced into non-believing acceptance. Accepts what? Authority, of course, and please do not begin circling around again in search of the justification of authority. That is merely another circle around Yahweh.
Are the words and actions of Yahweh such and only such as would emerge front the delusionary projections of Moses? Generally, yes, and nothing important comes other than through the screen of Moses or through the operations of nature. Are all the events that occupy the perceiving apparatuses of the speaker( s) of the Pentateuch - Moses and all the preceding rememberers and all those who have worked upon the materials after Moses - possible or probable when appraised by the rules for testing the occurrence of events that are laid down by social and natural scientists? Again the answer is yes. The "unscientific miracles" that are left to explain are few and casual, not worth explaining, one might say. I am not here denying the great mysteries of existence, I merely assert that these are in no wise explained by the Pentateuch-Torah: Moses and mosaists are not theologians, much less philosophers.
Those who accept such scientific answers do not generally find themselves less in control of themselves and of the world about them, and less happy, than those who have accepted the authoritative complex of Yahwism or have resigned themselves to the coercion to accept the same. That this should be generally believed, even among psychologists after the manner of William James, does not make it so. It is ordinary to feel, when anxious, that "the grass grows greener on the other side of my fence." I would not deny, however, that one day a religion might be invented that would deliver a delusional system that would make humankind happier than even a dependence upon truth and consequences.
If Moses is a scientist, a great inventor, why does he not hallucinate a god who is recognizably a scientist? Yahweh writes; he organizes lists or rules; he keeps books; and little else that is technical; he is the product, not the fountainhead of the science of Moses. Yahweh, though, is an unlimited, ungoverned power. Being a great scientist is certainly sometimes a strong fantasy and even can be hallucinated, but the urge to know is subordinate to the urge of power. The urge to power was exceedingly strong in Moses, for reasons and in ways already put forward. Further, hallucinations generally fulfill a role that is absent in the person, not one that is satisfied.
Everybody had always said that Moses was a supremely intelligent person. But that was not enough. They also withheld from him, partly because his demands were so excessive, the power that he wanted. Only god could give him that, so Moses, the archetypical mad scientist, invented a god.
This invented god is full of instructions but is a perfectly bad model for a teacher. He rarely connects things causally. He rarely explains. He simply asserts and commands. That is quite satisfactory for Moses who has no love for his pupils, and, more and more, wishes them simply to memorize and obey.
Moses' Yahweh begins as a set of creative miracles coming out of Moses' science and his cooperation with and exploitation of nature. Then, owing to the rush of catastrophe, what begins as a fairytale ends in a monstrous takeover by wild natural forces. Yahweh becomes catastrophic. Yahweh symbolizes the most terrible memories.
Moses is changing his own character, though in directions pointed out by his earlier character. Yahweh is accompanying this change with changes in his character. Every attempt is made by Moses, the Bible, the people, to assemble and reorder their minds in the process and aftermath of the natural catastrophe of Exodus. Moses' mind and to a quintessential degree that of Yahweh moves towards severity, punishment, and order. As much as must be forgotten and reassembled, that much is to be converted into sin, blame, and chastisement.
The invention of a punishing god is to help people to remember lessons of unity and ethnicity. "Early Israel was the dominion of Yahweh, consisting of all those diverse lineages, clans, individuals, and other social segments that, under the covenant, had accepted the rule of Yahweh and simultaneously had rejected the domination of the various local kings and their tutelary deities - the baalem." [27]
To recall the slogan: "Yahweh brought you up from Egypt," is to recall slavery and catastrophe. And it is also to recall simultaneously Moses. So the edifice of history and religion is the private property and power of Moses. In the famous formula of Harold Lasswell: the power-driven man displaces his private motives upon public objects, and rationalizes the displacement in terms of the public interest [28] .
Moses needs a god of power - nothing very much else. Once Moses has his god, and that god has become identified with a catastrophe, then the god has to be the center of a cult of power centered around the expiation of disaster. For Moses, and therefore Yahweh, there is no other route, and for the people who became Israel there was no escape, no turning back to the call of Egypt, no popular vote on what type of character Yahweh should be, no fairytale religion except in the underground of their popular legends, no evasion of his rule. The continuous disastrous circumstances of nature and society, beginning in Egypt and ending generations later, reinforced the authority of the god that the people had taken, for better or for worse, as their spouse (as the prophet Hosea would call the relationship). Not even by turning whore (again using Hosea's image) could Israel escape the claims of its husband, and indeed suffered the mosaic penalty for adultery, death.
It is not hard to prove the primary obsessions of the Books of Moses. One can examine, even if summarily, the amount of declaiming about sin, guilt and compulsion that occurs in their pages. Should the reader at this point complain that everybody knows this to be true, I would grant that most may know it but few have the nerve and stomach to bear it in mind. As their part of the general trend of scholars and ministers to make the Bible unthreatening, by erasing the natural catastrophes, and by "humanizing" Moses, they also downgrade or dismiss its obvious impact and look in it for sweet and rare words like love. Buber's elaborate Index to his life of Moses contains no references to sin, guilt, blame, or punishment. Nor does the equally detailed Index of Daiches.
The major concordances of the Bible list references and passages to all except minor words. If we look into a concordance to see how often certain significant words are used in the Books of Moses, we shall find them in context. Should we count the references to sin, guilt, punishment, coercion and enemies, and then their contraries of love and friendship, we might test our impression that aggression in its various forms overbalances affection in the Books of Moses. And, as Table 11 shows, so it does. Overwhelmingly. In the two concordances, based upon two different translations, differences occur. But both versions agree emphatically at all important points.
The five books of Moses carry from eight to twenty times as many accusatory, demanding, punitive and hostile references as they do affectionate and friendly ones. If Genesis is removed from the calculation on grounds that it was mostly inherited by Moses from the earlier Hebrew religion and incorporated partly to bolster his claim to base Yahwism upon the "god of the fathers," then the extreme misanthropism of mosaism becomes all the more evident [29] . Love and friendship are absolutely wanting in Moses himself, if this statistical indicator possesses any validity.
To search out additional evidence, we can fashion another kind of sample, this time the first verse that appears on every upper left hand corner of every page of the Oxford Bible. Of the Pentateuch, there are 262 pages and therefore a sample of 262 verses. Statistically the sample approaches randomness and adequacy, so that what is represented in the 262 verses is probably close to what is contained in the whole. We judge in each case whether the statement does or does not directly involve sin, blame, or compulsion. Table III reveals the findings.
Sin is guiltiness and is defined as an ascribed quality of deserving punishment, implicitly or explicitly stated, and attached to an action. Blame is the assignment of guilt or sin or evil to a person or object involved in an action. Compulsion is a holy penalty established in the verse or referred explicitly to its being provided elsewhere for this described action.
Affection and Aggression in the Books of Moses
Explicit wortds of Books of Moses
| Explicit wortds of Books of Moses | Strong's 5 Books of Moses | Concordance Genesis only | Presbyterian 5 Books of Moses | Concordance Genesis only |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Love, Loved, Loves Lovest, Loving | 41 | 15 | 52 | 14 |
| Guilt, Guilty | 16 | 1 | 66 | 2 |
| Must | 17 | 4 | 24 | 11 |
| Lest | CA | 17 | 22 | 1 |
| Anger, Angry | 43 | 7 | 66 | 12 |
| Obey, Obedient, Obedience | 21 | 3 | 12 | 5 |
| Sin, Sinned, Sins, Sinning, Sinners, Sinful, Sinneth | 204 | 8 | 179 | 6 |
| Enemy, Enemies | 58 | 3 | 64 | 6 |
| Friend, Friends | 5 | 3 | 12 | 5 |
Sources: James Strong, Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (Nashville: Abingdon, 1963) based on the Authorized Version; and the Living Bible Concordance, J. A. Speer, ed., Poolesville, Md.: Presbyterian Church, 1973, based on K. N. Taylor's (Paraphrased) Bible, 1972. Half of the Books of Moses, we would conclude, is devoted to alleging sin, casting blame, or inflicting and threatening punishment. Very few of the balance of actions are concerned with love, neighborliness, mutual help, sowing and reaping, or the like. The rest is mainly comings and goings. The catastrophes of Genesis such as the Deluge and others less definitely treated are long gone into thousands of years of tradition. Moses copied Genesis; he lived and wrote the essentials of Exodus, and the other books are in a way commentaries upon Exodus or extensions of it. Hence they reflect his character.
We can observe that little place is left in mosaism for an honest mistake or an error in judgement, There are no means of discriminating between pragmatic and sacred action. This is truly primitive or, better, traumatized; practically everything is within the grasp of religion. It reveals, too, how profoundly Moses had changed from a scientific genius; to all intents and purposes, apart from his bag of techniques, Moses had become a wholly obsessed, hallucinatory, punitive theocrat.
| Book | Actions involving Sin, Blame, or Compulsion | All other verses |
|---|---|---|
| Genesis | 18 = 27% | 48 |
| Exodus | 32 = 58% | 23 |
| Leviticus | 30 = 79% | 8 |
| Numbers | 19 = 35% | 35 |
| Deuteronomy | 26 = 53% | 23 |
| Total | 125 = 48% | 137 |
Those who profess a Christian, Moslem or Judaic mosaism, or who are subjected to mosaic education in the contemporary world number some 1.3 billions, a third of the world's people. The history of Europe and the Near East has been deeply affected by mosaic conduct and ideas for 1900 years - since the Christians let them out of the bag, so to say.
There should not be so many mosaists in history if the momentum of mosaism came only from Moses. That is, people have had within themselves, as a product of their genesis and ancient history, a capacity for grasping and becoming Mosaists and Yahwists. They can become something else - and obviously most people who have ever lived were something else - but not something so different that they are freed in utero or in culture from the possibility of lending themselves, as leaders or followers, to mosaism. The human is catastrophically constructed and prone to a kind of schizotypical behavior.
What universally appealing features can make mosaists of normal humans? First there is the world out of control: the heavy anxiety in the face of disturbed nature and nations creates the need for psychological, if not actual, control and security. In ancient history, and still today, nations imitate nature. There is a constant interplay of metaphor between the two: rulers and winds are strong; saviors and suns bring illumination; and so on into hundreds of parallels. When we have "Gott mit uns" we feel a control over both our human problems and our natural problems.
Mosaism very clearly places gods on earth among us. It establishes a worldly god who is interested in the smallest details of our existence, so as to control us; but we are controlling him (little does he know) by occupying him with our problems. A jealous god, like a jealous lover, is a prisoner of his chosen one. This limitation of, or demand upon, the divinity is most useful for the organization of primitive political power and of political power primitively. If people look elsewhere than within the fabric of their conscience for their god, the rulers cannot so neatly use him.
Further, the insistence upon a single god, monotheism, pyramids the possibilities of employing the one god for the purpose of absolute social control. There has been a great god in most cultures and the erosion of his powers is fought in order that power may be more concentrated in the hands of rulers. Monotheism simplifies the monopoly of authority and totalitarian rule.
Inasmuch as societies have not discovered how to exploit the mines of human energy without coercion and oppression, they may find in mosaism an ample and simple ideology of sin, blame, and coercion. Unconsciously, sincerely, and manipulatively, the power to speak in the name of a single, absolute, demanding and unbound god is a very great power; it leaks into politics, family relations, work groups, and every other sphere of life, with plenty of power to spare: it is theoretically unlimited.
When, to this power, is attached the logic of sin, blame, compulsion, and punishment, the power is greater and more effective. Thus occurs the formula: Yahweh has an interest in all your actions; all your actions are good or bad; that is, either demanded by or prohibited by him. If you fail to be good, you can expect punishment now or later, and punishment then is never a surprise, for the storing up of evil is great in you. If you do good and suffer, this is for a past misdeed, even as Moses was kept from the Promised Land by an obscure fault.
Even the most heinous deeds are in the name of Yahweh or are committed as a punishment by him. Sacrifice to Yahweh of the first-born of children and cattle was originally proclaimed as the price of his guiding the Israelites out of Egypt. It is avoided or discontinued by Moses by the expedient of dedicating the Levites as substitutes for the sacrifice, the cost being obedience to the Levites. The duty of such sacrifices remains as a holy theoretical obligation. Exceptional killings of offspring occur in the royal families of Judah and Israel, and elsewhere.
The gruesome passages on infanticide and cannibalism in Deuteronomy (28: 53-75) are put into the future tense. However, it is not reasonable to believe that the prophets, in accord with what scholars say often, told history in foretelling events, whereas the Deuteronomist had no historical sense when foretelling events. Both recited history. The terrible memories of sieges and famines erupt in the present tense. We stress here that the people are assured that they were condemned to commit these acts because of their disobedience to Yahweh.
Again, as we said earlier, the concept of absolute, peak obedience to Yahweh makes all other crimes pale into insignificance, and all evil actions are capable of losing their criminal quality. Moses could commit his frightful actions because they were in the name of Yahweh. When any and all crime can be justified if attributed to a god, then secular authority will not lag far behind. Rarely is an action mentioned that is good, either pragmatically and socially or religiously; much less is it praised. A dreadful negativism pervades the Pentateuch or Torah.
All of this is helpful in controlling a population without their consent. At any instant, the criminal or charitable or pragmatic (useful) nature of an action may be altered; the psychological bind in which a person finds himself is obvious, as is the inherent connection with schizophrenic training, where Moses is the trainer.
The connection with ritual becomes manifest here as well. One reaction to contradictory and inexplicable behavior of authorities is catatonism. The person dares not move in any direction. To reestablish control over this numbed mind, highly explicit and numerous behaviors are prescribed; life processes become ritualized.
Moses inaugurated an obsessive ritualism, that was to be perpetuated over the generations by the succession of priests. The signal quality of obsession, which can begin with the obsession of sin, is that it provides a compulsiveness to behavior. That is, once put on the treadmill of obsessive-compulsive conduct, the person cannot get off of it. If a population behaves so, the rulers know at any given moment where the people are and what they are doing. They will not become friendly with foreign people, as at Beth-Peor; they will not be running up to the high places and behaving licentiously, as the Yahwist prophets later complain. They will be working painstakingly, guiltily, and reserving the Sabbath for Yahweh.
There is this to be said on the positive side of mosaism, but only from a psychological and not from an ethical or religious viewpoint. By keeping people eternally in pain and guilt, with a sense of being continually observed by the kind of mean father that Moses conjured, there would be produced not only many mad-persons but also some unusual number of geniuses. For creative, driving genius is a kind of malady of deviance that can win freedom from mosaism but cannot win freedom from the watchfulness, self-consciousness, restless movement, and obsessiveness that had been inculcated by mosaic training.
Unfortunately for mankind, more humanistic and pragmatic forms of pedagogy, as in classical China and Greece, Augustan Rome, Medieval Islam, Renaissance Italy, and the centers of nineteenth-twentieth century science - including always the formidable humanistic Judaic contribution - have had only small constituencies, and are always in danger, whether from some extended form of mosaism or another religiously founded authority-formula.
In Yahwism, life after death is a matter for legends and rabbinical speculation. Moses is given a guided tour of all the wonders of heaven says one story, while he is supposed to be on Mt. Sinai elaborating designs for the Israelite camp and carving the tablets of the Decalogue. But the Bible, more correct as to Moses' mentality, has Yahweh visiting face-to-face, "mouth-to-mouth," with Moses on solid ground.
Yahweh does not grant immortality nor even comment upon it. Death is everywhere in the Books of Moses, and death is final. There is no intimation that Moses believes in heaven as an abode for the souls of the departed or as a place for terrestrial visitors, nor for that matter does Moses believe in a hell or a sheol, where the dead may receive punishment or purgation. This lapsus on Moses' part is strange. First, one might think that so ambitious a man would find a place where he might continue his mission after death. Whether he would have received the inspiration from Egyptian, Hebrew, or Mesopotamian sources, he might have felt the need to project himself into a prolonged relationship to Yahweh. Further, it might have consoled his people "in the land… of the shadow of death" [30] to provide a place for at least the better among them in heaven, and it might have helped him to control the people were he able to assure them, as did later Christian mosaists, of burning in hell-fires for their wrong-doing to Yahweh-Moses while they were alive.
Various explanations occur to us. Moses was in need of immediate obedience, not in allowing a lifetime of choices to qualify for heaven or hell. "Obey, or be burnt now!" is rather obviously his theme, whether addressed to individuals or to all of Israel. On the annual Day of Atonement, one goat is burnt before Yahweh and another, the scape-goat, is heaped with the sins of all the people and loosed into the wilderness to find his way to Azazel, the evil demon. Atonement is earthly, too. Moses would have felt threatened with the loss of control of the people, if each had come to think of himself according to Plato's vision as destined to occupy one of the myriad of stars.
Moses is intent upon conquering an earthly Promised Land where Israel may dwell in material comfort and seek to please Yahweh. "The God he discovered was eventually a protecting lawgiver who enunciated comments to the people in their own interests, not in the interests of their eternal salvation, for such a concept was quite foreign to Moses' way of thinking, but in the interests of their earthly welfare [31] .
This nationalistic goal would be rendered vague and even unessential, if a heavenly goal and immortality were projected as well. Perhaps he believed in an eternal nation, with endless religious and blood descent, whose people would fulfill their need for immortality in the transmission of Yahweh along the lines of their descent as the Chosen People, "the Peculiar Treasure" of Yahweh.
There is another side to this matter of the Chosen People. Yahweh commands the destruction of all peoples who stand in the way of his "children." The limits of their territory, it may be argued, are those of the Jordan Valley and Canaan; but the directive is without limits, according to another argument. Since even related tribes come under the annihilating directive, thanks to the monopoly the Israelites allow themselves in the use of the Ineffable Name, one would have to conceive of a special heaven for Israelites only. This invites theological problems, and we know that, as Neher points out, Moses was adverse to such. Later on, Christian and Muslim sects would produce the theologians to invent exclusive heavens for their true believers.
Moses himself would probably not care for such a heaven, no matter how thinly populated by select yahwists such as Aaron, Joshua and himself, some of the people of Israel, of whom he has little good to say, might by some independent judgement of Yahweh, find their way there. He would not like his decision-making powers to lapse, and, if they were tendered to him ad infinitem, heaven would soon be cleared, and hell full.
These musings may not be in vain, because ultimately they lead us to a hard theory. Moses, we have stressed, possesses a catastrophist mentality and an earthly mission; he has no interest in preserving the souls of the people of Israel. If one were to judge by the many times that he prophesies for them, and threatens them with, total destruction for their failures in respect to himself and Yahweh, one might guess that he fully expected the world, or at least the world of the Jews, to go up in flames and destruction at any time. And certainly, he would believe that, upon his own demise, and deprived of his leadership, the chances of their prompt destruction would be greatly increased.
Can we go one step farther and say that Moses harbored the wish, not very deep below the surface of his consciousness, that the Chosen People be destroyed? Yahweh occasionally toys with the idea. In the Revolt of the Golden Calf, Yahweh says of Israel: "Let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; but of you I will make a great nation." [32] But when Moses remarked that he would lose face with the Egyptians, and that he should remember his promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Israel [Jacob], Yahweh repented and forebore to kill them all.
Again, quoted by Ezekiel [33] , because they profaned the sabbaths and walked not in his laws, Yahweh says: "I promise to pour out my fury upon them in the wilderness, in order to exterminate them." He withholds his hand: "But I acted for the sake of my own name that [it] might not be profaned before the eyes of the nations, before whose eyes I had brought them forth." Again, too, a vulgar regard for public opinion.
This catastrophic wish and its related belief disposes of the problem of immortality. Like many a sick and dying person, and like many otherwise normal persons, Moses wanted to take the world with him. Or, if he refused to entertain such a notion, he would expect and prophesy such an event. Then there would be no problem of immorality; the solution would be total. Neither Moses nor Yahweh, when they argue the question of extirpating the Israelites, wonders how to go about judging their merits and assigning them a place in the afterlife.
I would conclude, until otherwise instructed, that Moses carried like a great lump with him an obsessive idea: when Moses dies, Israel must die with him. Reinforcing his obsession was the unconscious appreciation that Yahweh also must die with Moses.
Moses did not grow kinder with age; the obsession would have become more and more difficult to suppress and conceal; it might ultimately have contributed to the cause of his death - by a flying stone, by shock, by accident, by abandonment, by physical removal from office, by execution. Then, despite his unconscious wishes, Yahweh, mosaism, and Israel did survive. As the psychological imprints of Moses, they survived.
The brand of Moses and Yahweh upon the character and history of the Jews carries this sadism into a corresponding masochism of self-destruction. No matter how successful in mundane terms, no matter how let to live in peace, they were haunted by the fear that they would be destroyed as a people. It is of course part of the tragic game that they should be encouraged by their religion and leaders to believe that this destruction is the desire and intent of the outside world, for they could not permit themselves to recognize that it was Moses and Yahweh who wanted them to die as a people. Yet, with unerring technique, they set themselves up time after time for destruction, expecting, in the end, to tell themselves: "You see now it is as it is written in the Law. We shall be destroyed for our sins." And they permitted their destroyers to say: "By your own profession, it would not happen, if it were not that you are wicked."
One after another national disaster is attributed to Yahweh - whether the instrument is some now-dead nation, whether the Egyptians, or the Neo-Babylonians; it happens because they have misbehaved towards Yahweh; the score of millennia amounts to an impressive collective masochism. Hardly is one disaster ended, than the prophets of new disaster arise, recalling to them all the previous disasters back to Exodus. Although it cannot be said that people behave as they say or believe, nevertheless, in the absence of a competing ideology - and the Jews have never permitted one in their midst - it cannot be argued that the dominating ideology has been without effect.
Myth presents us with a cluster of ideas about Judaic-Christian-Islamic religion which are in significant respects untrue and harmful. The function of the myth (as is typical) is to make its believers feel well and superior to others. So it is with the myth that Yahwism is monotheism; further, that Yahweh is invisible; further, that monotheism is good for people and naturally reasonable.
Yahweh is very much anthropomorphized, in fact. He is portrayed as a magnificent man. He is, like Moses, exclusive and will not show himself to anyone in his true figure. Once he promised Moses to exhibit himself to the Elders on Mount Sinai, but they were treated only to a smooth rock and bright light. "No prophet had anything to tell of a figure resembling the human until Ezekiel…" [34] He does reveal his presence by the light of the Ark and the column of smoke. He sits on the "mercy seat." He directs campaigns, promulgates laws, decrees punishment and in every way, save sexuality, which he treats almost entirely by restrictions, he is human. I have found it difficult to distinguish between Moses and Yahweh once Yahweh is assumed to be Moses' other self and his presence is otherwise manifested in forces of nature and in the good and evil fortunes of people. Then, too, he has the normal emotions of hate, love, anger, boastfulness, jealousy, mercy, but not fear, because fear is the reciprocal of power, and power is the essence of Yahweh.
Yahweh does not claim that he is the only god. Nor does Moses claim that Yahweh is the only god. He is content to quote Yahweh to the effect that Yahweh is the same god as the god of the Hebrews. At the Burning Bush we hear "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." [35] And again, after Moses' first meeting with Pharaoh, "I am Yahweh. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty (El Shaddai), and by my name of Yahweh I did not make myself known to them." [36] Buber says that Moses saw the god of his wife's tribe but recognized him as the god of the fathers [37] . This is interesting but goes unexplained: how do you recognize a god as your own?
It is perplexing. Surely the Hebrews of Egypt knew their god, Elohim El Shaddai, God-Most-High, well enough to tell whether he would permit himself another name. Gressmann, among others, declares Elohim and Yahweh to be two distinct gods. "Yahwism, in mosaic times, suppressed the older religion of El." [38] "The legends treat the patriarchs as thoroughgoing pacifists. Their god is a god of peace-loving men," writes Max Weber [39] . Moshe Greenberg tells us so:
The God of the patriarchs shows nothing of YHWH's 'jealousy'; no religious tension or contrast with their neighbours appears, and idolatry is scarcely an issue. The patriarchal covenant differed from the Mosaic Sinaitic Covenant in that it was modeled upon a royal grant to favourites and contained no obligations, the fulfillment of which was to be the condition of their happiness [40] .
Perhaps the Hebrews had become Egyptianized and religiously indifferent, as legends indicate. Messianism is not specifically conceptualized in Exodus; but sociologically Moses would have to be understood by the Hebrews and related populations as a messiah coming with a representation of the old god on a specific mission of deliverance.
And always there were the looming catastrophe, the perceived comet and the plagues to validate a return to religion and messianism. With Moses there came another kind of god. With Jesus there came still another, closer to Saturn-Elohim than to Yahweh. The disciples and crowd of Jesus formed one more of the several splinter movements that took their devotees from Judaism. The Israelites had no sooner struck the deserts when they began building variant gods: idols of Egypt came out of the luggage; a new cometary Baal emerged in the Golden Calf.
Following the proclamation of the Covenant, Yahweh claims the whole earth; Israel is but his "peculiar treasure." [41] In Amos' prophecies, Yahweh asserts that he led other nations to safety at the same time as he retrieved the Hebrews from Egypt. He says that he punishes them all alike, including the people of Israel [42] .
These seem but minor claims when contrasted with the striking verses that, along with much other evidence, put Yahweh in his place. They are the words of Moses, in a farewell address to Israel, as recomposed by a writer during monarchic times, six or seven centuries later:
When the Most High [Eyon] gave to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of men, according to the number of the sons of God. For the Lord's [Yahweh's] portion is his people, Jacob [43] his allotted heritage.
The Lord [Yahweh] alone did lead him and there was no foreign god with him [44] .
Clearly Yahweh here is one of the sons of god, to each of whom a nation of the Earth's people was distinguished and allotted. Yahweh receives Israel, and is free of interference from any foreign god.
"The sons of god" are "the divine beings who belong to the heavenly court," and when god speaks of them he uses the term "us" and "our." [45] It is a very old relationship, encountered in the first chapter of Genesis, The resemblance here to the Olympian family of gods under Zeus the Father is notable; the Greek gods take up the sides of different nations as in the Iliad; have favorite countries as Athene with Athens; and so onto other conformities.
A god is usually an idea of a people about a being that controls their destiny. The people establish a religion to control their god by being in step with him. The more out of control their destiny, the more they look for and seek to control a god. The god takes on traits that are appropriate to their problems: if fire is threatening to their world, a fire-god occurs; if sheep are critically important, god will tend their flocks. The worse the problem, the greater the status of the god attending to it.
Stabilizing the universe is a most common trait of the most powerful gods. Therefore we reason that the unstable universe has been the most important problem when the greatest of gods came upon the scene. The moral dogmas of humans are avocational pronunciamentos of the great gods; try as may the philosophers and theologians of another, later age, they cannot get rid of the essence of divinity, the bringing and removing of catastrophe. Yahweh saved the Hebrews from catastrophe: specifically, he brought them out of Egypt and through the years of wandering; but these events are formal history, the idiosyncratic chronology moving on top of the informal history of the catastrophe.
Elohim (God-in-Heaven) would appear to have preceded Yahweh in the Hebrew theogony. He is frequently mentioned. He is securely identified by a number of writers as the Osiris of the Egyptians, the Saturn of the Romans, and the Kronos of the Greeks. Other god-names in Genesis are El Shaddai, El Eyon (God Most High), El Olam (Eternal-God), El Bethel (God of Bethel), and El Ro'i (God of Vision) [46] . The word "Elohim" denotes a plural entity in Hebrew. Isaac Asimov, in his commentaries on the Bible, discussing this point, concludes that an original polytheism existed; we would agree.
Cyrus Gordon in all analysis of Psalm 82 shows that Elohim is regarded as the "President of the gods." [47] The gods let rulers be wicked. Whereupon "all the foundations of the earth totter." Elohim then says:
Ye are gods And all of you are deities.
But ye shall die like mankind,
And fall like any of the princes
Arise, 0 God [Elohim], rule the earth;
For Thou shalt take over all the nations!
Gordon finds a parallel to the Psalm in the Ugaritic epic of Krt. We would again see in Elohim the great god Saturn whose recall of the world's people to his Golden Age is longed for. The character of Yahweh, like Indra, as well as Zeus, is bound up with catastrophe and war. Max Weber writes [48] :
Yahweh, like Indra, is fit to be god of war because, like Indra, he was originally a god of the great catastrophes of nature. His appearance is accompanied by phenomena such as earthquakes [49] , volcanic phenomena [50] , subterraneous [51] , and heavenly fire, the desert wind from the South and South East [52] , and thunderstorms. As in the case of Indra, flashes of lightning are his arrows [53] as late as the prophets.
Yahweh includes insect and snake plagues, and epidemics in his repertoire.
The connection of the qualities of Yahweh as a god of frightful natural catastrophes, not of the external order of nature, preserved down to the time after the Exile, [that is, for a thousand years] was, beside the general relationship of those processes with war, based historically on the fact that God had made use of his power first in battle…
We have seen in this book that what Weber says of Yahweh as god of catastrophe and battle is exactly correct. But we have also seen that Weber is quite deceived by a Biblical reductionism of the Exodus environment so that he reverses the order. Yahweh, in fact, historically, made use of his power first to create catastrophes, then to bring wars. His pugnacity, Moses' pugnacity, and the bellicosity of the Israelites, Hyksos and many other nations followed, both in time and as effect, the natural disasters whose turbulence destroyed the social order.
Gressmann, like Weber, committed "the four sins of modern biblicism": confused chronology; reductionism; primitivism; and uniformitarianisin. He too observed that catastrophe was connected with Yahweh. "The catastrophe of the Sea of Reeds," he declares, "laid the basis for the Yahwist religion." [54] He treats this event as a local disaster caused by a volcano and tidal wave at the gulf of Aqaba, far from Egypt; the plagues are to him relatively meaningless. Therefore he is in no position to make the correct statement, which is that cometary Yahweh brought the ecological catastrophes of Yahweh, which incited Yahwist aggressiveness among people, and all of this laid the basis for Yahwism.
But, if Yahweh is just coming upon the scene, and Elohim is Saturn, how could Yahweh not be known to the Hebrews before Moses, since Yahweh is like Zeus and Jove, and Horus-Amon? And these gods have been heavily worshipped for perhaps 2500 years. There is a gap. A god of the Hebrews is missing.
Perhaps, unlike other peoples, they clung to Elohim from the first creation of the world in Genesis and through the flood and thereafter, disregarding candidates for a Jove-type god until Yahweh was introduced. Then Elohim would be given an additional name and, with this new name, certain new qualities,
The early Hebrews moved long distances, had many skills, were not bellicose, and lived among many nations. Their religion shared many legends and features with other peoples. Perhaps their monotheism had its origins in an innocuous name that was not objected to by their neighbors, not a source of contention. That is, Monotheism may be a pantheistic device. We tend to think of it as we see it in Moses, as a parochial, exclusive, anti-polytheistic device. It may not be so.
But if Moses were the Messiah, coming upon a people in distress with a new version of god, there would seem to be good reason why a universalistic uncompetitive god should suddenly acquire the traits of a nationalistic jealous god - keeping monotheism constant.
Still this would presume that Elohim, and also El Shaddai, were plugging the gap. However Elohim-Osiris-Saturn, while still a great god in Egypt, had long given way there to Horus-Amon and Thoth. "From the sixth dynasty on, Horus alone appears as the true patron of monarchy" until the end of the Middle Kingdom. [55] Then Seth, who can be identified as the perennial antagonist of Osiris, Horus, and Isis (Venus), becomes the principal divine monarch of the Hyksos until their overthrow by a combined Israelite-Egyptian army.
But Thoth is not to be neglected. He is the Egyptian Hermes or Mercury, who bear a caduceus like Moses' Brazen Serpent. Just as Hermes served under Zeus in Greece, Thoth might have served under Horus in Egypt. His cult in Egypt was huge. His character is singular. In Egypt, Rome, Greece, Phoenicia, India and Mexico, he is powerful and gives judgement on the law; clever; rebellious; electrical; inventor of writing, expert scribe and linguist; magical; a wizard; a healer; mundane; instructor; guide of wanderers and roads; equivocal; he hides himself; but never so great as the greatest on high, never El Shaddai (God Almighty), never Jupiter. But when Horus resigned his earthly power, Thoth succeeded to his throne [56] . The cult of the ram followed the cult of the bull in Egypt [57] that is, Thoth followed Horus.
It is conceivable that Abram when he changed his name to Abraham, was adding the Egyptian god Ra to the name of his Hebrew capital city of Ramah. Ram is Thoth and its totem animal is the ram. In this case, one might investigate whether the god of the fathers may not always have been a Saturn or a Jove, but a Mercury.
Moses would have been familiar with Thoth - the sophisticated man's god - in Egypt. Perhaps when he began to hallucinate Yahweh, the traits of Yahweh became a combination of those of Jove and Mercury, Horus-Amon and Thoth. The mundane Thoth is perhaps the strongest model. What he found the Hebrews enjoying was a composite of Elohim and Amon-Thoth, perhaps so indefinite as to be the source of legendary complaints that the Hebrews had lost their religion in Egypt.
Thoth, believed the Egyptians, created the world by the force of his word [58] . And the Gospel according to John says, "In the beginning was the Word." Whose word, Thoth's? We have noted how strong for the word were Yahweh, and Moses: "Write it down in your Book!" And how Moses has been inextricably identified with Thoth-Hermes by scientists of the occult over the ages. Biblical exegetes insist that "Logos," the original word in John, means more than Word; it means Life, Intelligence, Light, and metaphorically, Christ the Savior, present in the Word and in God from the beginning of creation. So did Thoth represent his Word, too, as life, intelligence and light striking upon mankind.
We must observe closely and speculate cautiously: Moses as a "rational" cultist was Thoth-Hermes; Yahweh was Zeus-Horus-Amon. That is, when it came to projecting a god, Moses' personal need was for a stern, heavy father-figure, connected with lightning and meteors [59] , admittedly more powerful than Thoth. Moses does not introject Zeus as well as he does Hermes, Horus as well as he does Thoth. This may explain why Yahweh is such a crude and simple power-directed god, so unidimensional. He provides the strength and will, the compulsion, and the brute force. Thoth-Moses provides the brain.
The reasons why Moses chose monotheism are fairly plain. Not only was there this syncretistic monotheism to work with among the Hebrews, but Moses had only the technology for one god. If the god were to be wandering with, talking to, and working with a tribe, he should better be unaccompanied by potential competitors.
Moses did not have the ability to talk to more than one god at a time. He was a rigid person, and changed roles only with great difficulty. He could not be the executive secretary of a council of gods. He had in mind the concentration of power in his own hands: as on earth, so in heaven. A single god seemed logical, and could manage everything alone, with occasional messengers or angels. By the same line of reasoning, we may understand why there is no devil in Yahwism; Yahweh is his own devil-demon when necessary. Moses did not need to split his ambivalence into personalities. The destructive behavior of Yahweh gave Moses all the satanism that he needed.
To be possessed by two or more gods at the same time is not at all impossible; indeed, such is the case with most people and most of history: monotheism is claimed only for some few religions. The human mind compartmentalizes readily. Saturn, Mars, Jupiter and other gods occupied the Roman mind, and no one will say that the Romans were confused or impractical, at least not by historical standards.
Nor does personal development - although many imagine such - shunt all that is god's onto one's superego or conscience. Just as a boy will take several men as his models, believing, whether true or not, that these men possess abilities and traits that he must emulate, so he may take on several hypothesized gods as his inspiration for learning different skills and achieving different goals in life.
So it was that Thoth-Hermes could fill the developing Moses with desires, techniques, and traits, and then bow down within Moses to let pass the new god of the conscience, the aggressive and absolute Yahweh, who is exclusively to occupy the grand ballroom of world dominion in Moses' mind.
In this basic sense, Moses was a double religious personality, and thus, quite specifically, polytheistic. He was Thoth-Hermes in his ego and unconsciously, while he was Yahweh-Zeus in his superego and consciously. This, if nothing else, can explain why monotheism may never have existed in mosaism except as a formal, scholastic, linguistic construction, ex post facto.
This construction of monotheism, once it burst its priestly bonds, encouraged everyone from philosophers to mechanics to shave off strips of reality from the religious sphere. They might invest their conscience in Yahweh while inventing a realistic, objective, scientific world, as did Isaac Newton and a host of other workers. Or they might reinvest their conscience in Jesus, while dealing pragmatically with the scientific world. Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), one of the founders of electrical science and experimental method, was an early Unitarian leader. John Wesley (1701-1791), founder of Methodism, wrote on "Electricity made Plain and Useful, by a Lover of Mankind and Common-sense."
Such is the "monotheism" that the present world inherits and passes on. It is descended from the monotheism of Moses. It consists of concurrent and successive images of a single god, who is usually accompanied by a host of celestial figures. It is certainly not the logically sharp and eternally consistent monotheism, such as the human mind has conceived and maintained.
Monotheism belongs actually in the category of legal fictions, together with concepts such as "sovereignty." All the world may be persuaded of one god, with no single person agreeing within himself on the matter, and with no two persons agreeing between them. Nevertheless, the persuasion of monotheism will have substantial effects upon mind and conduct.
Notes (Chapter 8: The Electrical God)
19. III Ency. Relig. and Ethics, 510.
20. Moses and Monotheism, 144.
25. M. Eliade, Traité d'Histoire des Religions (1964, 1974), 88.
28. Psychopathology and Politics (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1930.
33. Ez. 20: 13-14 (New World transl.)
34. Buber, p. 117; Ezek. 1: 26.
38. Mose and seine Zeit. p. 433.
39. Max Weber, 49, citing Gen. 13: 8f.
45. Cf. Gen. 1: 26; Ps. 29: 1; 1 Kg. 22: 19; Job. 1: 6; Is. 6: 8.
46. Andrew Jukes, The Names of God, London: Kregel, 1888.
49. Ibid. I Sam. 14: 15; Is. 2: 21f, 46: 6.
50. Ibid. Gen. 19: 24; Ex. 19: 11f; Psalm 46: 6.
55. J. Van Seters, The Hyksos (1966), 99 quoted by Bimson, I SISR 4 (1977) 9.
56. Larousse Encycl. of Mythology, "Thoth."
58. Mircea Eliade, Myth of the Eternal Return, 22.