Abstract
The religious imagination behind the book of Exodus represents a revolutionary innovation in the history of religious ideas. Nowhere else, Assmann writes, did a people imagine a deity of “pure being,” who interrupted history in order to build a relationship with them, and whose highest worship entailed unswerving fidelity and rigorous application of the deity’s will to all aspects of life. In previous conceptions, gods and people came into being together at the beginning of time, and cooperated through cult and magic to maintain cosmic integrity. These systems had no analog to the burning bush, because the gods had always been known. They likewise had no equivalent Sinai covenant, because divine will made itself felt in narrow and piecemeal ways. Knowledge of the gods and the fulfillment of their will were so embedded in wider cultural activities that no word for “religion” even exists in many ancient languages. The book of Exodus represents the “invention of religion” insofar as it imagines a deity intervening in history to forge a personal relationship with a specific people through liberating signs and the terms of a covenant. This relationship is liberating, insofar as service to the deity is vastly preferable to service to a human overlord, it is personal insofar as the service is binding on every member of the community, and it is enduring insofar as every new generation can reappropriate the original narrative according to their circumstances. These features of the Exodus narrative have established it in the West as the primary pattern not just for religious thought, but also for political liberation and nation building.
A. is honorary professor of cultural studies at the University of Konstanz and professor emeritus of Egyptology at the University of Heidelberg. His training was in Egyptology, and early research focused on cultural studies, specifically the religion and piety of early Egypt. One of his primary research goals has been the study of “cultural memory,” that is the ways that cultural systems preserve and hand on the narratives that generate identity within a people. As his research continued, A. developed an enduring interest in the encounter of ancient Egypt and biblical Israel. That two neighboring people should have such vastly different cultural memories required explanation. That both people preserved traditions of an encounter with and rejection of the other offered, A. believed, a fertile ground for the study of intercultural contact. The Invention of Religion is thus the fruit of a life’s work of research, criticism, and evaluation. It is a richly sourced study that draws on scholarship from a wide variety of fields.
This ambitious work endeavors to trace the effects of the Exodus narrative as it developed in pre-exilic Israel, through its establishment as canon, and then beyond, as interpretations of it developed in the medieval and modern periods. A.’s erudition is vast. His analysis can move smoothly from Assyrian historiography to Handel’s Israel in Egypt without losing its depth or focus. One of the strengths of this book is A.’s ease in demonstrating the way that the ideas implicit in the Exodus account have functioned religiously and politically throughout three millennia. The book’s weaknesses are those inherent in such a broad study. A number of A.’s claims are speculative. For example, he claims that the Exodus first became a powerful cultural memory during the secession of the ten northern tribes from Judahite hegemony, as related in 1 Kings 12 (49‒52, 64, 334). Many biblicists would hesitate to give such a naïve reading to 1 Kings 12, especially given the later historically attested superiority of the northern kingdom vis-à-vis Judah and the enthusiastic pro-Judahite editorial stance of the Deuteronomists who transmitted that particular narrative. A. also presents Amos and Hosea as writers of the late eighth century BCE, placing their work during and after the fall of Samaria (64). Although this supports his thesis that the Exodus narrative generated national identity during times of crisis, many biblicists would date these works significantly earlier in the eighth century BCE, well before the Assyrian conquest.
These are not fatal flaws. A.’s thesis, that the religious imagination behind the Exodus narrative is both innovative and enduring, is well crafted and skillfully followed. This book will be equally useful to anyone seeking the theological elements implicit in the Exodus narrative or to those tracing the impact of these elements on subsequent developments. A. represents the best tradition of a German public intellectual, able to support his thesis with a wide diversity of insights and to do so with authority and creativity.