Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism

Conclusion: The Mosaic Distinction

127 Conclusion The Mosaic Distinction The Mosaic Distinction, as I defined it over a decade ago,1 is the distinction between true and false in religion. This proposal has met with many objections from biblical scholars,2 who insist that this distinction was certainly not one of Moses’ crucial concerns when he led his people out of Egypt. He was concerned with freedom and slavery, justice and injustice , good and evil rather than with questions of religious truth, let alone orthodoxy. This view is correct and remains so even when one replaces the “historical” Moses with the “symbolic” Moses, that is, with Moses as a figure not of history but of memory. What biblical tradition ascribes to Moses has little to do with theology but rather more with ethics, politics, law, behavior, dietary rules, social organization, ritual observances, and abstention from worshiping other gods or God in the wrong way. All of these things concern questions not of “truth” but of loyalty and correctness . Moses did not leave Egypt because of its wrong or false religion. The terms “true” and “false,” my critics insist, refer to philosophy rather than religion. This latter distinction has been considered only by Greek philosophers, but not by Moses. It should consequently be dubbed the “Parmenidean” distinction. This is again correct, and it explains why Moses has been hailed by many Greek writers as a philosopher, a forerunner of Plato, who in turn came to be recognized as a Greek Moses.3 Strabo wrote that Moses was an Egyptian priest who left Egypt with a group of followers out of dissatisfaction with Egyptian polytheism.4 Three hundred years earlier, Hecataeus of Abdera praised Moses for the purity of his concept of God.5 To impute to Moses the distinction between true and false in religion is to perpetuate this misunderstanding and to turn the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob into the god of the philosophers. Still, there is much that Moses—always to be understood in the sense of “what the name ‘Moses’ stands for” and not “what the (historical ) ‘man Moses’ did and believed”—rejected with regard to Egypt, and even more so with regard to “Canaan.” These often violent rejections were based on a single underlying, decisive distinction that called for commitment and conversion. It is this underlying distinction that generated not only rejections, “abominations,” and exclusions of all sorts but also social distinctions that led to the formation of segregative communities , or “enclave cultures,” to use Mary Douglas’s terminology. Although I do not insist on the determination of this distinction in terms of “true” and “false,” I emphasize the distinction as such, which I hold to be an innovative cultural event of the highest importance. Perhaps the best way to deal with the distinction I have in mind is not to determine it at all but rather to take it as a kind of deep-structure concept that, on the surface of articulate speech, may be realized in terms of good and evil, just and unjust, pure and impure, freedom and slavery, loyalty and disloyalty, religion and idolatry, orthodoxy and heresy. Eventually it may even be realized in terms of truth and untruth, god and world, spirit and matter, as well as other more philosophical categories. Many of these “surface” distinctions (with the exception of religion and idolatry, orthodoxy and heresy) are to be found in other religions and cultural contexts as well, but they are not related to the same deep-structure distinction that calls for commitment and conversion. The new form of religion based on this distinction creates a frame of communal and individual life that is clearly set off from other forms of life—so clearly and distinctly, in fact, that entering it amounts to a complete transformation or “conversion;” while leaving it amounts to “apostasy ,” defection, or desertion, and defending it may involve either killing or dying for it. The Biblical Theory of Paganism If one looks carefully at some of the biblical texts in which the distinction between the true God and the other gods, or true belief and idolatry , is stressed, one sees that idolatry is not only associated with such evils as injustice, lawlessness, oppression, violence, murder, and fornication but above all with a lack of insight, a failure to recognize the truth. 128 Conclusion Selecting Psalm 82 as an example, here the distinction between true and false appears in the...