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Moses and Monotheism Paperback – January 12, 1955

4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 307 ratings

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This volume contains Freud’s speculations on various aspects of religion, on the basis of which he explains certain characteristics of Jewish people in their relations with Christians.  From an intensive study of the Moses legend, Freud comes to the startling conclusion that Moses himself was an Egyptian who brought from his native country the religion he gave to the Jews. He accepts the hypothesis that Moses was murdered in the wilderness, but that his memory was cherished by the people and that his religious doctrine ultimately triumphed. Freud develops his general theory of monotheism, which enabled him to throw light on the development of Judaism and Christianity.

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Editorial Reviews

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"To deny a people the man whom it praises as the greatest of its sons is not a deed to be undertaken lightheartedly--especially by one belonging to that people," writes Sigmund Freud, as he prepares to pull the carpet out from under The Great Lawgiver in Moses and Monotheism. In this, his last book, Freud argues that Moses was an Egyptian nobleman and that the Jewish religion was in fact an Egyptian import to Palestine. Freud also writes that Moses was murdered in the wilderness, in a reenactment of the primal crime against the father. Lingering guilt for this crime, Freud says, is the reason Christians understand Jesus' death as sacrificial. "The 'redeemer' could be none other than the one chief culprit, the leader of the brother-band who had overpowered the father." Hence the basic difference between Judaism and Christianity: "Judaism had been a religion of the father, Christianity became a religion of the son." Freud's arguments are extremely imaginative, and his distinction between reality and fantasy, as always, is very loose. If only as a study of wrong-headedness, however, it's fascinating reading for those who want to explore the psychological impulses governing the historical relationship between Christians and Jews. --Michael Joseph Gross

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Freud's speculations on various aspects of religion where he explains various characteristics of the Jews in their relations with the Christians.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; Later Printing edition (January 12, 1955)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 192 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0394700147
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0394700144
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 5.3 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.23 x 0.5 x 7.21 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 307 ratings

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4.5 out of 5 stars
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Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on September 24, 2013
After reading this most serious book by one of the most profound thinkers of the 20th century, and being myself a Urantia Book reader I can't help but sharing the following taken from UB:

The Sage of Salem

It was 1,973 years before the birth of Jesus that Machiventa was bestowed upon the human races of Urantia. His coming was unspectacular; his materialization was not witnessed by human eyes. He was first observed by mortal man on that eventful day when he entered the tent of Amdon, a Chaldean herder of Sumerian extraction. And the proclamation of his mission was embodied in the simple statement which he made to this shepherd, -I am Melchizedek, priest of El Elyon, the Most High, the one and only God.-...

Although it may be an error to speak of -chosen people,- it is not a mistake to refer to Abraham as a chosen individual. Melchizedek did lay upon Abraham the responsibility of keeping alive the truth of one God as distinguished from the prevailing belief in plural deities...

Not long after they had established themselves near Salem, Abraham and Lot journeyed to the valley of the Nile to obtain food supplies as there was then a drought in Palestine. During his brief sojourn in Egypt Abraham found a distant relative on the Egyptian throne, and he served as the commander of two very successful military expeditions for this king. During the latter part of his sojourn on the Nile he and his wife, Sarah, lived at court, and when leaving Egypt, he was given a share of the spoils of his military campaigns.

It required great determination for Abraham to forgo the honors of the Egyptian court and return to the more spiritual work sponsored by Machiventa. But Melchizedek was revered even in Egypt, and when the full story was laid before Pharaoh, he strongly urged Abraham to return to the execution of his vows to the cause of Salem.

The Remarkable Ikhnaton

The teachings of Amenemope were slowly losing their hold on the Egyptian mind when, through the influence of an Egyptian Salemite physician, a woman of the royal family espoused the Melchizedek teachings. This woman prevailed upon her son, Ikhnaton, Pharaoh of Egypt, to accept these doctrines of One God.

Since the disappearance of Melchizedek in the flesh, no human being up to that time had possessed such an amazingly clear concept of the revealed religion of Salem as Ikhnaton. In some respects this young Egyptian king is one of the most remarkable persons in human history. During this time of increasing spiritual depression in Mesopotamia, he kept alive the doctrine of El Elyon, the One God, in Egypt, thus maintaining the philosophic monotheistic channel which was vital to the religious background of the then future bestowal of Michael. And it was in recognition of this exploit, among other reasons, that the child Jesus was taken to Egypt, where some of the spiritual successors of Ikhnaton saw him and to some extent understood certain phases of his divine mission to Urantia.

Never in all history did any king so methodically proceed to swing a whole nation from polytheism to monotheism as did this extraordinary Ikhnaton. With the most amazing determination this young ruler broke with the past, changed his name, abandoned his capital, built an entirely new city, and created a new art and literature for a whole people. But he went too fast; he built too much, more than could stand when he had gone. Again, he failed to provide for the material stability and prosperity of his people, all of which reacted unfavorably against his religious teachings when the subsequent floods of adversity and oppression swept over the Egyptians.

The Matchless Moses

The beginning of the evolution of the Hebraic concepts and ideals of a Supreme Creator dates from the departure of the Semites from Egypt under that great leader, teacher, and organizer, Moses. His mother was of the royal family of Egypt; his father was a Semitic liaison officer between the government and the Bedouin captives. Moses thus possessed qualities derived from superior racial sources; his ancestry was so highly blended that it is impossible to classify him in any one racial group. Had he not been of this mixed type, he would never have displayed that unusual versatility and adaptability which enabled him to manage the diversified horde which eventually became associated with those Bedouin Semites who fled from Egypt to the Arabian Desert under his leadership

Moses endeavored to negotiate diplomatically for the freedom of his fellow Semites. He and his brother entered into a compact with the king of Egypt whereby they were granted permission peaceably to leave the valley of the Nile for the Arabian Desert. They were to receive a modest payment of money and goods in token of their long service in Egypt. The Hebrews for their part entered into an agreement to maintain friendly relations with the Pharaohs and not to join in any alliance against Egypt. But the king later saw fit to repudiate this treaty, giving as his reason the excuse that his spies had discovered disloyalty among the Bedouin slaves. He claimed they sought freedom for the purpose of going into the desert to organize the nomads against Egypt.

But Moses was not discouraged; he bided his time, and in less than a year, when the Egyptian military forces were fully occupied in resisting the simultaneous onslaughts of a strong Libyan thrust from the south and a Greek naval invasion from the north, this intrepid organizer led his compatriots out of Egypt in a spectacular night flight. This dash for liberty was carefully planned and skillfully executed. And they were successful, notwithstanding that they were hotly pursued by Pharaoh and a small body of Egyptians, who all fell before the fugitives- defense, yielding much booty, all of which was augmented by the loot of the advancing host of escaping slaves as they marched on toward their ancestral desert home.

Moses, the greatest character between Melchizedek and Jesus, was the joint gift to the world of the Hebrew race and the Egyptian royal family; and had Ikhnaton possessed the versatility and ability of Moses, had he manifested a political genius to match his surprising religious leadership, then would Egypt have become the great monotheistic nation of that age; and if this had happened, it is barely possible that Jesus might have lived the greater portion of his mortal life in Egypt.
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Reviewed in the United States on December 27, 2011
The writer, Sigmund Freud, is a household word. This author is never trivial and, although sometimes controversial in his thinking, it is because he is so original and outside the box that most of us feel so comfortable being locked in.

His hypothesis about the origins of Moses, whose teachings go without being fully tapped to this very day, are well supported by as much evidence as was humanly possible to dig up at the time of Freud's writing, in the late 1930's, the first copyright being 1939.

The Torah, or Pentateuch as it is often referred to, has been authored by Moses, although many modern academics claim it was written by multiple authors, because of the several styles of writing one might identify in the work -- this gets a bit lost in translations, the most commonly found at this time being in the King James version of the Bible. It is not uncommon to look for multiple authorship when it comes to works so profound that it makes even the most erudite among us pale with the discomfort of inadequacy -- consider, for example, similar allegations regarding the works of Shakespeare, again vastly above the highest ambitions of most mere mortals.

Given this unique standing of the work (the five books known as Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy), the origin of its purported or fictional author is of great interest, since it bears directly on the development of human thought and human civilization.

To make a long story short, the Torah writing states that Moses was a Jew, son of slaves fated for execution as a newborn, who was circumstantially brought up as a prince of Egypt, educated as a prince of Egypt, who then left his princedom when he discovered the suffering of the Hebrew slaves and became their leader who, with the help of the Almighty, led them to freedom and responsibility into the promised land three and a half thousand years ago, of which today's State of Israel is but a small fraction.

In antithesis to the preceding paragraph, Freud's thesis is that, in fact Moses was an Egyptian who became a monotheist in the midst of and in spite of the powerful Egyptian polytheism and emphasis on the hereafter, in which cult the afterlife took on a central role and major preoccupation in this life. The Egyptian Moses, in Freud's hypothesis, then found himself a people, the Hebrews, who could follow his monotheistic teachings, a teaching totally devoid of any mention of afterlife, a teaching totally focused on this life -- this teaching attributed to Moses is not to be confused with common practices of Judaism, even though the Torah remains the major rallying point of Judaism.

While surprisingly few people are conversant with the five books of Moses, even fewer people are familiar with the Egyptian culture that has given human civilization so much. It is this culture that is revealed in modern terms by Freud, in a way that is unique to Freud in its clarity and cogency. Whether Moses was born a Hebrew or an Egyptian is not really the relevant issue; the relevant issue is to see how the father of modern psychology, Sigmund Freud, delves into the available evidence for monotheism and the departure from Osiris, the god of the after-world, in the history of Egyptian civilization.

True to Freud, the educational, thought providing and informational value of this book is second to none.
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Reviewed in the United States on December 1, 2014
Great read and suggesting that Moses was an Egyptian makes sense.
Reviewed in the United States on September 29, 2015
This book was, in the words of Jimmy Walker: "Dyn-o-mite!" Seriously, the conclusion that all religious sentiments/impulses are basically a form of neurosis relating to metaphysical-Oedipal daddy issues? -- holy $hite! Freud never disappoints when discussing social psychology. I understand and agree with the feminist antagonism towards him but it is undeniable that Freud was a titan in the world of ideas and thought. It's a shame, though not surprising, that little of his work outside the individual-psychological is remembered or discussed today. His historical tracing/hypothetical "recreating" of the world's first monotheistic religion and its evolution into Judaism and then Christianity is very worth a read, much consideration, reflection, and ultimately action. This book is packed with ideas and implications that need to be brought back to the attention of the intelligentsia.
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Reviewed in the United States on February 26, 2015
Sigmund Freud no less! Fascinating study. I had 2 of the earlier version of this book each time my friends (?) borrowed it I never got it back. I don't know what that tells me about the book or those that borrowed it. Needless to say, the story of the child floating down the river is a nice story, but Freud's analysis is a more plausible. Moses it turns out is an Egyptian and not a Jew. the book goes on to describe the historical reasons why Moses was compelled to leave Egypt and take a Jewish tribe with him. Fascinating book, worth reading.
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Top reviews from other countries

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Joseph Myren
5.0 out of 5 stars AWESOME
Reviewed in Canada on June 21, 2023
AWESOME
Gaurrika
5.0 out of 5 stars great print, good delivery conditions, and a definite must read
Reviewed in India on January 18, 2022
a must read for those interested in psychology or theology
Antonio de Pádua M S Brandão
5.0 out of 5 stars O Monoteísmo de Moisés
Reviewed in Brazil on June 3, 2017
Freud avalia com grande objetividade as questões históricas relacionadas à formação, no tempo e no espaço, da religião de Israel.
erics kid
5.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating read I had come to the same conclusion ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 22, 2017
A fascinating read I had come to the same conclusion many years ago myself it makes a lot of sense
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Evelyn D'souza
4.0 out of 5 stars Moses and monotheism
Reviewed in India on September 9, 2018
It's a different perspective which was very interesting to read.
One person found this helpful
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