A Volcano-God? Freud’s View

Sigmund Freud in his last published work characterized the Jewish god Yahweh as being a volcano-god:

Jahve was certainly a volcano-god…One of these [volcanic] mountains must have been the Sinai-Horeb which was believed to be Jahve’s abode. In spite of all the transformations the Biblical text has suffered, we are able to reconstruct – according to E Meyer – the original character of the god: he is an uncanny, bloodthirsty demon who walks by night and shuns the light of day.’[1] 

Yahweh surely did appear as being a god of everlasting rage, always blowing his top. You would hardly expect to come across Him in a mellow mood. He keeps being credited with fiery powers whereby a lot of people got killed. (See the video ‘Was god a volcano?’) 

Here is a rather volcanic appearance -

On the morning of the third day, a thick cloud came down onto the mountain. There was thunder and lightning and a very loud sound from a trumpet. All the people in the camp were frightened. Mount Sinai was covered with smoke. Smoke rose off the mountain like smoke from a furnace. This happened because the Lord came down to the mountain in fire. Also the whole mountain began to shake (Exodus, 19:16-18)

Or again,

 The mountains quake before him
    and the hills melt away.
The earth trembles at his presence,
    the world and all who live in it.
 Who can withstand his indignation?
    Who can endure his fierce anger?
His wrath is poured out like fire;
    the rocks are shattered before him.(Book of Nahum, 1,4-6

But, was there not originally a very different side to the Hebrew god? Freud recognised that the original monotheistic vision had come from the Pharaoh Akhenaten in Egypt:

It is the first case in the history of mankind, and perhaps the purest, of a monotheistic religion. (p.96)

Freud accepted that Moses was an Egyptian, and maybe he was the first to realise that. The grand conception by Akhenaten of one single Creator-god, was soon rejected by the Egyptians, who wanted their own religion back again -  and then it came to be taken over by the Hebrews, a nomadic, bedouin tribe. How on Earth did that happen? Freud well posed this question:

Whence then did this tiny and impotent nation derive the audacity to pass themselves off for the favourite child of the Sovereign Lord? (p.105)

He was probably the first to realize that:

The great religious idea for which the man Moses stood was, as we have stated, not his own; he had taken it over from his King Akhenaten. (p.175)

Although an atheist, Freud seems to have admired that vision:

Egyptian Moses had given another and more spiritual conception of God, a single God who embraces the whole world, one as all-loving as he was all-powerful, who, averse to all ceremonial and magic, set humanity as its highest aim a life of truth and justice. For, incomplete as our information about the ethical side of the Aton religion may be, it is surely significant that Ikhnaton regularly described himself in his inscriptions as "living in Maat" (truth, justice).

His hymns lay stress on not only the universality and oneness of God, but also His loving kindness for all creatures; they invite believers to enjoy nature and its beauties. Gp. Breasted, The Dawn of Conscience. (Moses and Monotheism, p. 81)

Thus, the glorious Psalm 104 to this One God appears as very much a transcription of the great Hymn to Aten (found in the tomb of Ay, cut into the cliffs overlooking the ruined city Akhetaten, the city built to honour the one God.)[2] Akhenaten himself surely composed that hymn, Psalm 104 - but as an outcast and an exile and no longer the mighty Pharaoh. Before these events, the Hebrew tribes did not have monotheism.

The idea of one god had developed, Freud suggested, as the huge expanse of the Egyptian empire came to stretch from the Nile across to the Euphrates, during the 18^th dynasty. That was the largest empire, ever known. The Aten-god of Egypt was not bloodthirsty, did not want sacrifice:

We may surely say that Jahve was quite unlike the Mosaic God. Aton had been a pacifist, like his deputy on earth or rather his model the Pharaoh Ikhnaton, who looked on with folded arms as the Empire his ancestors had won fell to pieces. For a people that was preparing to conquer new lands by violence Jahve was certainly better suited. Moreover, what was worthy of honour in the Mosaic God was beyond the comprehension of a primitive people.

Aton had begun his reign in Egypt in a happy period of security, and even when the Empire began to shake in its foundations his followers had been able to turn away from worldly matters and to continue praising and enjoying his creations. To the Jewish people fate dealt a series of severe trials and painful experiences, so their God became hard, relentless and, as it were, wrapped in gloom. (p.103)

Freud viewed these two incompatible aspects of the Jewish deity:

The god Jahve, to whom the Midianite Moses led a new people, was probably in no way a remarkable being. A rude, narrow-minded local god, violent and blood-thirsty, he had promised his adherents to give them " a land flowing with milk and honey " and he encouraged them to rid the country of its present inhabitants " with the edge of the sword. "

During the centuries since then the Levites had become one with the people or with the priesthood and it had become the main task of the priests to develop and supervise the ritual, besides caring for the holy texts and revising them in accordance with their purposes. But was not all this sacrifice and ceremonial at bottom only magic and black art, such as the old doctrine of Moses had unconditionally condemned ? (p.80, 82)

The Egyptian origin of their monotheism came to be, as Freud said, ‘something which the Jewish priesthood had certainly forgotten.’ p107.

In Verse 22 of Genesis we first encounter the nightmare-horror logic of Judaism:

And your people will live in cities that they will take from their enemies. Every nation on the earth will be blessed through your descendants.(22:17-18)

At least the first part of that prediction has come to pass.

This nightmare-god had moods when He wished to undo Creation. “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.” (Genesis, 6:7)

Freud was spot-on with the timing of the Exodus – ‘We have placed the Exodus from Egypt in the time after the extinction of the Eighteenth Dynasty’ (p.78). He mistakenly believed that Akhenaten had died when he abdicated, after 17 years of rule - but, no tomb or mummy of his remains has ever been found. Freud was surely correct in his view about the Levites:

He (the Egyptian Moses) must have brought his retinue with him, his nearest adherents, his scribes, his servant. These were the original Levites. Tradition maintains that Moses was a Levite. This seems a transparent distortion of the actual state of affairs: the Levites were Moses’ people. (p.62)

Freud found Egyptian names ‘only among the Levites’ in the Hebrew texts, whereby he derived this conclusion. He never apprehended that Moses was Akhenaten himself, which would have further vindicated this view. Freud understood that the Hebrew name for God  ‘Adonai’ derived from Aten:

We have already mentioned that Jewish ritual ordains a certain economy in the use of the name of God. Instead of Jahve they had to say Adonai. 

 - and he surmised that this change was a result of the Egyptian Moses’ arrival on the scene.
     Freud died shortly after this book was published in English.

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[1] Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 1951, p.56

[2] For these two as the same hymn, see Moses and Akhenaten, Brothers in Alms, by Ted Loukes, 2015, pp.260-266.