Ernst Sellin and the death of Moses (3 of 3): Is Sellin’s theory of the murder of Moses plausible?

This is the third of three posts on the book, Geschichte des israelitische-jüdischen Volkes (1924) by Ernst Sellin. Part 1 is Freud's use of Sellin's material. Part 2 is The Sellin mystery.

Ernst Sellin was an important Biblical scholar and archaeologist. Ernest Jones describes him as “one of the most distinguished Hebrew and Arabic scholars.” He is perhaps most famous for his archaeological work including the excavation of Jericho, which he described in Jericho, die ergebnisse der ausgrabungen dargestellt von Ernst Sellin und Carl Watzinger (1913).

Michaelangelo's Moses

The seventh annual Ernst Sellin-Carl Watzinger-Kolloquium was held in May 2009 at the University of Rostock. The 2006 version was held by the University of Vienna. Sellin taught in both universities.

I don’t read Hebrew and I have no credentials as a Biblical scholar. So I can only offer a lay person’s view as to the plausibility of Sellin’s argument on the murder of Moses.

Contemporary historical scholarship on the period is marked by a dispute between archaeological minimalists who contend that absent any supporting archaeological evidence, the Hebrew Scriptures have no secular historical value and events known only through that and other literary sources cannot be accepted as historically valid.

Most Biblical scholars aren’t ready to go that far in dismissing the literary sources as completely useless for the writing of history. But most would also not have put the confidence that Sellin and Freud apparently did in the literary sources, either. But Sellin was also a leading Biblical archaeologist and did not assume that Biblical traditions should override the physical evidence. His extensive use of information derived from archaeological discoveries in Geschichte des israelitische-jüdischen Volkes is evidence of his familiarity with the field.

There is no clear archaeological evidence for the existence of Moses or of the Exodus. There is archaeological evidence showing that a major part of the people who later became Israelites were not descended from Hebrews coming out of Egypt but rather developed locally and expanded their presence through some combination of peaceful and military expansion. A reasonably conservative use of the available evidence would argue that there probably was an Exodus and that some leader like the one remembered as Moses existed, and that Hebrew immigrants into Palestine combined with local groups over a period of time to form the tribes of Israel. There is evidence of the presence of large numbers of Semitic people in Egypt that is consistent with the movement of people there describes in Genesis in the story of Joseph.

Based on the Biblical passages he cites, I would say that Sellin has a good argument for a tradition that believed Moses had been killed by his own people. Given the lack of evidence outside the Scriptures for the existence of Moses, it doesn’t strike me as a tradition that should be completely discarded as history.

The fact that Freud found such a reading historically plausible is in itself a reason not to dismiss it carelessly. Ernest Jones wrote, “It was Sellin's suggestion [on the murder of Moses] that made Freud decide to write his book; it fitted so well with his views on the importance of parricide.” Jones’ description argues for the view that Freud may have been particularly disposed to accept such an interpretation, and that’s very likely true. But Freud’s own studies on religion and his views on the role of guilt in Judaism and Christianity provide a basis for that inclination that is neither arbitrary nor irrational in itself.

The possibility of the existence of such a tradition that Moses was murdered is important in itself because it could have shaped the understanding of the authors of the Hebrew Bible in ways such as those on which Freud speculated in Moses and Monotheism. I find Sellin’s idea that [Deutero-] Isaiah 53, the Suffering Servant chapter, could be read as coming out of this tradition that viewed Moses as having been murdered and then taken retrospectively as a substitute sacrifice for his people, to be particularly intriguing in that regard.

Christians, of course, see Deutero-Isaiah 53 as a prophecy of Jesus and generally don’t give it much more thought. A great deal of the lyrics in Handel’s orotorio The Messiah are taken from the Suffering Servant description. The Jewish theologian and philosopher Abraham Heschel wrote in The Prophets (1962) about the servant of the Lord, who is the subject of Chapter 53 and other passages in Second Isaiah:

Perhaps no other problem in the Hebrew Bible has occupied the minds of scholars more than the identification and interpretation of the servant. For a survey of the vast literature, see C. R. North, The Suffering Servant in Deutero-Isaiah (Oxford, 1956). In the main, four theories have been proposed. The servant is (1) an anonymous contemporary of Second Isaiah; (2) Second Isaiah himself; (3) Israel; (4) a purely ideal or imaginary figure. To quote J. Muilenburg, in The Interpreter's Bible, V, 408, 411, "The servant is certainly Israel. . . . Israel, and Israel alone, is able to bear all that is said about the servant of the Lord. For the fundamental fact outweighing all others is the repeated equation of the two in the poems." ... According to H. H. Rowley, The Faith of Israel (London, 1956), p. 122, "The servant is at once Israel and an individual, who both represents the whole community and carries to its supreme point the mission of the nation, while calling the whole people to enter into that mission, so that it shall be its mission and not merely his. ... The servant is Israel today and tomorrow; but Israel may be all or a few or one of its members."

A tradition like that Sellin and Freud describe around the murder of Moses could very plausibly have contributed to Jewish and later Christian concepts of the Messiah, the anointed one. And specifically to Deutero-Isaiah’s image of the Servant of the Lord.

Sellin’s following comments about the significant of Moses in the Jewish religion could apply just as well to an historically false tradition that nevertheless could have contributed to the development of ancient Jewish theology (S. 94):

Zum Schlusse sei schon hier daran erinnert, daß Mose auch durch sein persönliches Schicksal bedeutungsvoll für die Religion seines Volkes geworden ist. Sein Verkehr mit der Gottheit galt je länger je mehr als ein Unikum, nur er hatte Gott von Angesicht zu Angesicht gesehn, nur mit ihm hatte Gott von Mund zu Mund gesprochen vgl. Ex. 33.11; Num. 12.7 f.; Deut. 34.10. Er war von seinen eigenen Volksgenossen als Märtyrer seines Glaubens hingemordet, auch das ist im Kreise seiner Anhänger unvergessen geblieben. Während Hosea noch einfach konstatiert, daß dies ungesühnte Verbrechen der Gipfel aller Sünden Israels sei, daß es unweigerlich jetzt das Gericht im Gefolge haben werde 9.7,11f.; 12.15, bildete sich allmählich die Vorstellung heraus, daß Mose, der sanft-mütigste aller Menschen Num. 12.3, sich freiwillig selbst als Sühnopfer dargebracht habe, und daraus erwuchs beim Deuterojesaja der Gedanke einer Erlösung des Volkes durch ihn, die Hoffnung auf seine Wiederkehr als eines Torahlehrers für die Volker der Erde 42.1ff.; 49.1 ff. usw. Und das bleibt bestehn [sic]: mit ihm ist ein Großer durch die Geschichte hindurchgegangen, der nicht nur eine Bedeutung für sein Volk, sondern für die ganze Menschheit gewonnen hat, eine weit großere, als die meisten Menschen sich träumen lassen.

[In conclusion, it should also be remembered that Moses also became important for the religion of his people through his personal fate. [Sellin means his murder at the hands of the Israelites.] His interaction with God was seen increasingly as unique; only he had seen God face to face, only with him did God speak mouth to mouth. … He was massacred by those from his own people as a martyr to his faith, [and] that also remained unforgotten in the circles of his followers. While Hosea still simply took the view that this unexpiated crime was the pinnacle of all Israel’s sins, that it would now inevitably bring judgment …, a concept was developing that Moses, the mildest of all people, … freely offered himself as a sin-offering, and from that arose the idea with Deutero-Isaiah of the salvation of the people through him, the hope of his return as a teacher of the Torah for the peoples of the earth … And it remains true: with him, a great one passed through history who won not only a significance for his people, but for all of humanity, one far wider than most people could even dream.]

Tags: ernst sellin, ernest jones, freud, moses

Ernst Sellin and the death of Moses (2 of 3): The Sellin mystery

This is the second of three posts on the book, Geschichte des israelitische-jüdischen Volkes (1924) by Ernst Sellin. Part 1 is Freud's use of Sellin's material.

Freud’s and Sellin’s view that Moses was murdered by the Hebrews he led never gained broad acceptance among Biblical scholars, an issue which is discussed further in Part 3 tomorrow.

Freud’s close collaborator and biographer Ernest Jones added a more recent mystery in The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 2: The Last Phase, 1919-1939 (1957). Sellin’s argument was “immediately rejected by all Jewish scholars”, Jones writes. As Freud’s version of Moses in Moses and Monotheism was also, for the most part. One of the arguments Jewish scholars made is that Sellin himself later repudiated his argument, “some say ten years later and some seven”, according to Jones. That would presumably be seven or ten years after Sellin’s 1922 book on Moses. Jones relates:

Yahuda [presumably Abraham Shalom Yahuda], another great scholar, told Freud this when he visited him in 1938, and Freud could only shrug his shoulders and say "It might be true all the same." It was Sellin's suggestion that made Freud decide to write his book; it fitted so well with his views on the importance of parricide.

There is a curious postscript to this story. I have made all possible endeavors to find out the truth about Sellin's supposed withdrawal, and have been given a number of different references to it, in his writings, in his addresses before Congresses and so on. All of them proved to be false. On the contrary, in a book Sellin published thirteen years later he not only adhered to his opinion, but stated that he had found "further confirmation" of it in a number of allusions to the murder, which he listed, in the writings of other prophets. In spite of all that, however, there appears to be a certain basis for the rumor. A friend of Sellin's, Professor Rust of Berlin, has been good enough to answer my inquiries, and he informs me that on one occasion Sellin, when hard pressed in private talk, was willing to admit that he might have been mistaken in his interpretation of the passage in Hosea which had been the starting point of his theory.

The book to which he refers as having been published 13 years later than 1922 is Geschichte des israelitische-jüdischen Volkes, which was originally published in 1924; Jones’ endnote cites a 1935 date. Additional mystery, because the original publication puts it two years after the 1922 book, so a repudiation seven or ten years after the 1922 book wouldn’t be contradicted by the first publication of Geschichte des israelitische-jüdischen Volkes in 1924.

And Jones adds cryptically:

Sellin's hypothesis could be supported by numerous suggestive passages in the Torah and other apocryphal literature hinting mysteriously at various legends concerning the death of Moses, but it would be impertinent to discuss them here.

“Impertinent” is an odd choice of words in the context, it seems to me. Here he cites three sources: Meyer Abraham, “La Mort de Moïse,” Legendes juives aprocryphes sur la vie de Moïse (1925); Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews (1947); and, M. Rosenfeld, Der Midrasch über den Tod des Moses (1899).

Ernest Jones (1879-1958)

It does seem that Jones’ account of this aspect of Freud’s work on Moses is too dismissive. Sellin had identified a number of passages in the Hebrew Bible which he read as a tradition that said Moses had been killed. Jones himself then cites material from the Jewish midrash that also, by his own account, lend credence to Sellin’s argument and also demonstrate the existence of Jewish traditions about the death of Moses at variance with the main view presented in the Hebrew Bible. Yet his account, quoted above, leaves the impression that Freud picked up the idea based on Sellin’s 1922 book and that he picked it up because “it fitted so well with his views on the importance of parricide,“ even lightly dismissing the news from a leading scholar that Sellin himself had rejected his own theory.

But, as I noted before, it seems odd that Freud would not have been familiar with Sellin’s later work on Moses. He was not a specialist in Biblical scholarship as such. But he was no dilettante, either. He was familiar with some of the cutting-edge work on Near East archaeology and Biblical criticism. It makes more sense to me that Freud was familiar with Sellin’s case he made two years after the original book, but cited the 1922 book in Moses and Monotheism because, as he wrote in it, “In 1922 Ernst Sellin made a discovery of decisive importance.” Moses and Monotheism cites only a limited number of sources; it’s entirely plausible that Freud cited only the one that originally contained Sellin’s “discovery”.

Unfortunately, Jones also does not give a date for Professor Rust’s reported conversation with Sellin, a fact which has obvious relevance to the question of whether Sellin later rejected his own argument on the death of Moses. And what Jones relates of Rust’s account of his private conversation with Sellin doesn’t have Sellin rejecting the whole notion; instead it has Sellin “willing to admit that he might have been mistaken in his interpretation of the passage in Hosea which had been the starting point of his theory.”

But as we’ve seen, Sellin cited at least five passages in Hosea in support of his view of the murder of Moses, and well as numerous others from other books of the Hebrew Bible. The fact that Sellin in a long conversation with a friend and fellow scholar may have mused out loud that his interpretation of one of those passages may have been mistaken in some way isn’t exactly the same as retracting an elaborate argument made in print on more than one occasion. (Not even close, actually.) And, again, in the context it’s puzzling that Jones didn’t give any indication of when that conversation took place.

Part 3 tomorrow: Is Sellin’s theory of the murder of Moses plausible?

Tags: ernst sellin, ernest jones, freud, moses

Ernst Sellin and the death of Moses (1of 3): Freud's use of Sellin's material

Ernst Sellin (1867-1946)

I recently found a copy of a book, Geschichte des israelitische-jüdischen Volkes (1924) by Ernst Sellin (1867-1946) which gave me new insight into a literary/historical question that has puzzled me for a long time.

One of Sigmund Freud’s very last publications, which came out during his exile in England, is Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion. Drei Abhandlungen, published in English as Moses and Monotheism (1939).

There is a tradition of considering Moses as an Egyptian rather than a Hebrew, which Freud also did in Moses and Monotheism. Not as implausible as it might sound to those familiar only with the traditional story. The familiar Biblical story itself describes Moses growing up as an Egyptian prince, and Moses is an Egyptian name. Jan Assmann discusses this tradition, including Freud’s part in it, in Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (1997; Harvard Press edition).

Assmann points out that the selection of the phrase “der Mann Moses” (the man Moses) for the title of Freud’s book in German refers to Exodus 11:3, the only place in the Scriptures in which Moses is referred to that way, in what Assmann calls “such a distancing manner”. That description includes a reference to Moses being “exceedingly important in the land of Egypt”, making the use of “der Mann Moses” a particular reference to his Egyptian background.

Freud cites the references in Sellin’s earlier Mose[sic] und seine Bedeutung fur die israelitisch-jüdischenReligionsgeschichte (1922) and describes Sellin’s references there to the murder of Moses as follows:

In 1922 Ernst Sellin made a discovery of decisive importance. He found in the book of the Prophet Hosea (second half of the eighth century [BCE]) unmistakable traces of a tradition to the effect that the founder of their religion, Moses, met a violent end in a rebellion of his stubborn and refractory people. The religion he had instituted was at that time abandoned. This tradition is not restricted to Hosea: it recurs in the writings of most of the later Prophets; indeed, according to Sellin, it was the basis of all the later expectations of the Messiah. [Katherine Jones translation]

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) in London, 1938, with the manuscript of An Outline of Psychoanalysis

Sellin saw the northern prophets Hosea and Amos as part of a religious tendency that preserved the “desert religion” of Moses and the period of the Exodus. This trend placed a strong emphasis on an ethical monotheism. So they were particularly critical of the assimilation of what they saw as Canaanite practices, especially including the incorporation of Canaanite deities. The Hebrew Bible repeatedly refers to the cult of the goddess Asheroth. Sellin argues that Asheroth was of honored in some form as part of the Yahwist religion and later archaeological work has confirmed that view. She was sometimes considered to be Yahweh’s consort. But as the invective against Asheroth in the Hebrew Bible shows, this was never a generally accepted practice and apparently always had its opponents, not just among the supposed “desert religion” tendency of Hosea and Amos.

Sellin detects two distinct traditions in the Hebrew Bible over the wandering of the Israelites in the desert: a Sinai tradition and a Kadesh tradition, which were merged at the time of Saul and David. He’s careful to note that solutions have to be inferred from the evidence and cannot be taken as certain.

Sellin argued that part of this desert religion/Sinai tradition included a version of the Exodus in which the Israelite rose up against Moses and actually killed him. This tradition was also known to others, he argues, that were not Northern prophets like Deutero-Isaiah and Deutero-Zechariah. He lists the following as “Seher un freien Propheten” working in the direct Mosaic tradition: “Debora, Samuel, Nathan, Elia, Amos, Hosea, Jesaja, Micha, Jeremia, Deuterojesaja”. He argued that those in this group who followed the ethical religion of Moses “the most truly have the image of the historical Moses,” i.e., the more likely correct image.

The passages of the Bible in which he perceives this tendency include the following, based on his exposition in Geschichte des israelitisch-jüdischen Volkes (pp. 77-78) are:

Hosea 9:7-13; 12:14-13:4; 5:2; 4:4-5; 11:3. According to his summary in this work, the first three references are those he cited in the earlier book Der Mann Mose that Freud cites in Moses and Monotheism.

Exodus 32:32 vergleich mit Hosea 9:7ff

Numbers 11:12; 25:6ff; vergleich mit 12:1; he notes that Num. 25:1-5 “reißen ganz abrupt ab”.

Deuteronomy 34:1ff “mit einem Schleier zugedeckt”.

II Kings 9:31

Amos 5:13

Deutero-Isaiah Ch. 53, the Suffering Servant chapter, using the figure of the Servant of the Lord.

Jeremiah 2:30

Deutero-Zachariah 10:12; 11:4-14; 13:7

Since Geschichte des israelitisch-jüdischen Volkes appeared two years after Der Mann Mose and apparently includes more complete references to the texts on which Sellin based his theory of the death of Moses, I wonder why Freud didn’t cite the later text, as well.

Part 2 tomorrow: The Sellin mystery

Tags: ernst sellin, ernest jones, freud, moses