Jan Assmann - The Invention of Religion: Faith and Covenant in the Book of Exodus

THE INVENTION of RELIGION

The
INVENTION
of
RELIGION

FAITH AND COVENANT IN THE BOOK OF EXODUS

JAN ASSMANN

TRANSLATED BY ROBERT SAVAGE

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON & OXFORD

Copyright 2018 by Princeton University Press

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ISBN 978-0-691-15708-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017963671

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Incipit exire qui incipit amare.

St. Augustine

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

FOREWORD

A NUMBER OF YEARS AGO, Fred Appel gave me the idea for a book on Exodus. My first thanks go to him; without his initiative, this book would never have been written. I declined his initial invitation by pleading the many Old Testament scholars who, it seemed to me, would be far better suited to the task. By the time Fred renewed the invitation some years later, I had come to the realization that the Exodus theme had actually preoccupied me all my life.

What became clear to me was that the Book of Exodus is not just about the departure of the people of Israel from Egypt but also about the establishment of a completely new type of religion, or even religion as such. In the ancient world, this complex of election, covenant, and loyalty was something completely new; it by no means emerged from what came before it, despite incorporating many preexisting elements. From the internal viewpoint of the biblical texts, this innovation is experienced and presented as revelation; from the external perspective of historical analysis, it can be understood as invention, albeit invention of a kind that has nothing to do with fiction. It is not the case that a lone genius called Moses was suddenly struck by inspiration. Rather, over many decades, perhaps even over many centuries, a collective experience attained a form of binding, ultimate truth that appears in Exodus as an act of otherworldly foundation. That is what we mean by the word revelation, an idea that has no equivalent in the ancient languages. Yet no single word could do justice to this unprecedented new idea. It needed instead to be developed in a Grand Narrative. Faith based on revelation, this complex of election and promise, covenant and loyaltythat is what we, the inheritors of this extraordinary invention, understand today by religion. In the idea of incarnation, of (the word of) God entering the world in human form, and of a book sent into the world from heaven, Christianity and Islam adopted the motif of otherworldly foundation. Entering into this new religion required turning ones back on Egypt. That is the theme of the Book of Exodus, which does notlike the myth of oldend with the peoples arrival in the Promised Land, but with the entry of God and his people into a joint foundation.

The world that the Israelites had to leave behind them in order to enter into the new kingdom of holiness was Egypt and not Assyria, Babylonia, the Kingdom of the Hittites, or some other ancient realm. Ancient Egypt therefore represents that world in exemplary, ideal-typical fashion. For this reason it is legitimate to view this new religion from an Egyptian (i.e., Egyptological) point of view. From this vantage point, there are two quite different ways of looking at the Hebrew Bible. One sees Israel embedded in the cultures of the ancient world and primarily detects continuities and parallels: between Egyptian hymns and biblical psalms, between Egyptian love songs and the Song of Solomon, between Egyptian and biblical sacrificial rites, taboos, and ideas of purity, between Egyptian and biblical representations of (sacral) kingship, and much else besides. The other foregrounds the discontinuities, antitheses, and ruptures in the relationship. It sees in Israel a new force that pits itself against the old world order as something radically heterogeneous and, in so doing, lays the foundations of the world we know today. Whereas I used to read the Bible, during my first quarter century as an Egyptologist, entirely under the spell of the first approach, I have since become far more attuned to the other, discontinuous, antagonistic, revolutionary aspect of ancient Israelite and above all early Jewish religion, and hence also to the symbolic meaning of the departure from Egypt.

This book aims at neither a retelling nor a commentary, although it naturally cannot avoid traveling some way down these two well-trodden paths to the biblical Exodus tradition. Above all, what I am aiming at here is a resonant reading, a necessarily subjective interpretation of the biblical texts that reflectsto as great an extent as possiblemy own Egyptological and general cultural interests and historical experiences. More than twenty-five years ago, as a visiting Egyptologist, I was invited by the Stroumsa family to a Seder in Jerusalem. My friends thought it would be meaningful, from a professional point of view, to commemorate the suffering endured by the children of Israel in their Egyptian house of bondage. That unforgettable evening of endless storytelling and song gave me heart as I embarked on this project.

I frequently walk past a sign that reads: Use only under supervision and with expert guidance. The sign stands in front of a high ropes course at the local sports center. I was often reminded of such a high ropes course when coming to grips with the Old Testament. Fortunately, supervision and expert guidance were never wanting. Michaela Bauks, Ronald Hendel, Bernd Janowski, Othmar Keel, Daniel Krochmalnik, Bernhard Lang, and Konrad Schmid all read the first draft of the manuscript and offered numerous corrections, changes, and references; where their suggestions have been taken on board, they have been individually acknowledged in the notes. I extend my thanks, too, to the Berlin theologian, Rolf Schieder, as well as Thierry Chervel, editor of the online magazine Der Perlentaucher, and his assistant, David Assmann. In his book Are Religions Dangerous? (2008), Rolf Schieder produced what is probably the most searching critique to which Moses the Egyptian has so far been subjected. He was kind enough to join me and a panel of invited speakers in an extremely productive debate that subsequently found a forum in Der Perlentaucher. In the course of the debate I learned a great deal that allowed me to refine and hone my arguments.1 In this context, I am particularly grateful to the Viennese theologian Jan-Heiner Tck, who twice invited me to Vienna to discuss my ideas with a wider audience.

My heartfelt thanks likewise go to Ulrich Nolte, who edited the original German version with care and imagination and also selected the illustrations, along with Maximilian Eberhard and Matthias Golbeck. The manuscript was completed in Weimar during a four-month fellowship at the International Collegium for Research in Cultural Technology and Media Philosophy, a disciplinary focus that might at first glance appear far-removed from the topic of Exodus. However, the specific theme that brought together ten Fellows in Weimar in Winter 201314 could not have been more apposite: Memorization: The Construction of Pasts. In remembering the departure from Egypt, we are indeed dealing with the construction of a past that a community appropriates for itself in order that they may, on that basis, embark on a new beginning and forge a new identity. My project benefited greatly from the discussions about memory, history, media, and constructivism conducted in Weimar. I thank both directors, Bernhard Siegert and Lorenz Engell, for inviting me to join the Collegium and their coworkers for their energetic support. Last but by no means least, I want to thank Robert Savage for the diligence and ingenuity of his rendering my sometimes convoluted German into readable English.