Rand Flem-Ath - The Murder of Moses: How an Egyptian Magician Assassinated Moses, Stole His Identity, and Hijacked the Exodus

For August, Cole, Hayley, Heidi, and Zo. For all the wonderful memories of miles wandered together.

The Murder of Moses

Talk about a cold-case murder getting hot new attention! Rand and Rose Flem-Ath bring some first-class detective work to bear on one of the most important, albeit lost, stories of Western civilization, and they come to some shattering conclusions. Long ignored by mainstream academic scholarship, the extraordinary views of the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, on the identity and fate of the Hebrew lawgiver Moses finally get some richly deserved attention. In a dramatic tale of wartime danger and personal hardship suffered by Freud and his family, the Flem-Aths offer a rare glimpse into his little-known quest to track down the details of a sensational and controversial hypothesis that he knew might get him cast out of his own community, if not killed. The result is riveting and the book is a true page-turner.

J. DOUGLAS KENYON, EDITOR AND PUBLISHER OF ATLANTIS RISING MAGAZINE AND EDITOR OF FORBIDDEN HISTORY, FORBIDDEN RELIGION, AND FORBIDDEN SCIENCE

Scouring the highways and byways of our ancient past, seeking clues to the true story of the biblical Moses, Rand and Rose Flem-Ath have come to some radical conclusions that are bound to cause controversy. If their conclusions are right, then a significant piece of what we thought we knew of our religious heritage will almost certainly have to be revisited. A tour de force of original thinking.

SCOTT CREIGHTON, AUTHOR OF THE GREAT PYRAMID HOAX AND THE SECRET CHAMBER OF OSIRIS AND COAUTHOR OF THE GIZA PROPHECY

This culmination of many years of exhaustive, in-depth research reaches fascinating conclusions that are far more than mere speculation. The Flem-Aths survey perennial Jewish folklore as well as a myriad of previous investigators findings in order to demonstrate how Old Testament scribes altered those biblical texts to favor the biases of the priesthood. I learned much more sensible history from this intriguing work than any Sunday school class would ever be permitted to teach.

ALAN GLASSMAN, AUTHOR AND BOOK REVIEWER FOR NEW DAWN MAGAZINE

Acknowledgments

A heartfelt thank you to Jon Graham for championing our book so that we can bring our fascination with this ancient mystery to a wide audience. The stellar cast at Bear & Company: Jeanie Levitan, Manzanita Carpenter, Kelly Bowen, Patricia Rydle, and Jennie Marx, with her eagle-eyed editing, have made it a pleasure to move the manuscript through its many stages to publication.

This book would not have been possible without the forty years of research (undertaken in secret) by Sigmund Freud (18561939). Freud, in turn, relied upon the insight of the German Egyptologist Ernst Sellin (18671946) that there were two men who took the name Moses: one legitimately by birth, the other by impersonation. In unraveling the various sources of the documentary hypothesis, we relied upon the works by Richard Elliott Friedman (1946), Martin Noth (19021968), Joseph Estlin Carpenter (18441927), and Robert Henry Pfeiffer (18921958).

For the great enemy of truth is very often not the liedeliberate, contrived, and dishonestbut the mythpersistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichs of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

JOHN F. KENNEDY

Authors Note

T his book is the result of a decade-long investigation into the mystifying life and death of Moses. His story contains many puzzling contradictions that defy the usual widespread myths about his character. These inconsistencies offer clues pointing to a history-changing crime and its cover-up. This subterranean story is buried within the pages of the first five books of the Bible.

We have adopted a strictly secular point of view. No religious agenda guided the research. Like hard-nosed detectives we made every attempt to separate the dogma from the facts as far as they could be deciphered. (See appendix 2 for our research methodology.) As we unpeeled layer after layer of mystery and secrecy surrounding our prime suspect, we found evidence of an ancient crime compelled by motives as old as humanity itself.

An Unlaid Ghost

I have occupied my whole life with standing up for what I considered to be the scientific truth, even when it was uncomfortable and disagreeable to my fellow men. I cannot close it with an act of disavowal.

SIGMUND FREUD

I t was the worst day of his life. All the loving fathers prestige could not help his daughter now. The entry in his diary was typically curt: 22 March 1938: Anna at Gestapo.

In view of the desperate circumstances, the family doctor had slipped Anna a supply of the barbiturate Veronal. If there was no rescue from the Nazis, the drug would provide the girl with the ultimate escape of suicide. Puffing constantly at a cigar, the father waited, pacing the floor like a caged animal. But Anna Freud had inherited a cool intelligence and a stoic self-discipline that would save her life. Inside a cold corridor at Gestapo Headquarters she gambled everything by pushing forward to the head of the line of detainees waiting to be interrogated. The method behind her madness was driven by the terrifying certainty that if she hesitated until the days end the Nazi bureaucrats would sweep up those remaining in the queue like litter and dispatch them to a concentration camp. There would be no returning the next day to take care of unfinished business.

Annas bold strategy worked and to the relief of her anguished father she found her way back through the streets of Vienna to the home where her family had lived for forty-seven years.

The reality that the bullying, terrorizing, and murdering of Jews had become a psychopathic sport had hit home. During the spring, some five hundred Austrian Jews choose to kill themselves to elude humiliation, unbearable anxiety, or deportation to concentration camps.

SS Reichsfhrer Heinrich Himmler had been constantly braying for Sigmund Freuds imprisonment. The American consul general, John Cooper Wiley, intervened to buy the famous analyst some time but Freud feared he was too old and weak to make the transition to a new life and he doubted that he would be granted the precious permit needed to settle in another country. But his daughters chilling experience accomplished what the burning of his books in Berlin and even the brutal German occupation of Austria could not; it changed Freuds mind about the wisdom of remaining in his homeland.

During these dangerous times, his intellectual pursuits had demanded a self-censorship that was alien to him. The father of psychoanalysis had been fascinated by the dominating figure of Moses for decades and began writing his version of the prophets story in 1934. But hed soon recognized that his controversial pursuit of this historical mystery might cause serious trouble, not only for himself but for the Jewish people. He wrote to his friend Lou Andrea-Salome about the lure of the Moses enigma and the blasphemous theory hed formulated: And now you see, Lou, this formula, which holds so great a fascination for me, cannot be publicly expressed in Austria today, without bringing down upon us a state prohibition of analysis on the part of the ruling Catholic authority. And it is only this Catholicism that protects us from the Nazi.