Moses and Monotheism
Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion, first edition, 1939
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| Author | Sigmund Freud |
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| Original title | Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion |
| Translator | Katerine Jones |
| Language | German |
| Subject | Moses |
| Publisher | Knopf |
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Publication date
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1939 |
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Published in English
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1939 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 186 |
Moses and Monotheism (German: Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion) is a 1939 book about monotheism by Sigmund Freud, published in English translation in 1939.
The book consists of three essays and is an extension of Freud’s work on psychoanalytic theory as a means of generating hypotheses about historical events. Freud hypothesizes that Moses was not Hebrew, but actually born into Ancient Egyptian nobility and was probably a follower of Akhenaten, an ancient Egyptian monotheist. Freud contradicts the biblical story of Moses with his own retelling of events, claiming that Moses only led his close followers into freedom during an unstable period in Egyptian history after Akhenaten (ca. 1350 BCE) and that they subsequently killed Moses in rebellion and later combined with another monotheistic tribe in Midian based on a volcanic God, Jahweh. Freud explains that years after the murder of Moses, the rebels regretted their action, thus forming the concept of the Messiah as a hope for the return of Moses as the Saviour of the Israelites. Freud said that the guilt from the murder of Moses is inherited through the generations; this guilt then drives the Jews to religion to make them feel better.
Theologian Rowan Williams concluded that Freud's accounts of the origin of Judaism in Moses and Monotheism are "painfully absurd", and that Freud's explanations are not scientific but rather "imaginative frameworks". Philosopher Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and psychologist Sonu Shamdasani write that in Moses and Monotheism Freud applied to history "the same method of interpretation that he used in the privacy of his office to 'reconstruct' his patients' forgotten and repressed memories."
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