Moses and Freud(ian) Analysis

While digging through the archives to research my Literature of Ancient Israel term paper I stumbled on some interesting conjecture regarding Moses. This material loosely ties into the subject we currently are studying in class: the emergence of Jews from Egypt.

Near the end of his life, Sigmund Freud in 1939 published a book titled Moses and Monotheism in which he hypothesized Moses was an Egyptian who learned monotheism from then Pharaoh Akhenaten. The controversial book advances a theory that is roughly synchronistic with the Gradual Infiltration theory of Levant settlement.

Although not a great deal is known about his reign, there is evidence Akhenaten attempted to shift Egypt’s polytheism to focus on Aten. In truth, worship of Aten included other gods, thereby creating a henotheism rather than a monotheism.

Freud’s theory is that Moses, an Atenist priest, only led a small tribe out of Egypt and into Canaan after Akhenaten’s death. The story holds that Moses was killed by his own tribe, which later came to regret their decision and introduced the concept of a messiah as a foreshadowing of Moses’s return. The Moses tribe then merged with a volcano-worshiping monotheistic tribe in Midian, Freud says.

Akhenaten was Pharaoh for a relatively long 17 years and died in roughly 1336 B.C.E. As part of his embrace of Aten, Akhenaten is said to have changed his name from Amenhotep IV. It is said traditional polytheism returned to Egypt after Akhenaten’s death. Interestingly, King Tutankhamun is thought to have been one of his sons, although not born to his wife, Nefertiti.

In 1987 Egyptologist Ahmed Osman published Stranger in the Valley of the Kings, in which he claims Joseph of Genesis fame was a man named Yuya, the father-in-law of Amenhotep III, who in turn was the father of Akhenaten. To complicate things, some biblical scholars project that both Akhenaten and Joseph were transgender.