You must know where I am headed after discussions of death and Dante and Egyptian mummies that my next topic has to be the clash of cultures between Egypt and the Children of Israel especially at this time of year. The story of Passover is billed as a deliverance of the Children of Israel from Slavery to Freedom. That is certainly true superficially but many have observed how the Hebrews seem to have merely traded one form of obedience for another, which was every bit or even more demanding and if you read the pentateuch with at least as great or even much more dire consequence and to the end of time.

Funerary rites in ancient Egypt were involved mostly with the preservation of bodily tissues since they were thought to be necessary in the afterworld. Egyptians had evolved an elaborate 70 day mummification ritual. Presence of relatively intact human forms from those days such that moderns are capable of examining and x-raying and even diagnosing testify to the success of the mummification process. From our point of view now the ancients may have made slight errors in throwing away the brain for example and with the notion that thoughts and memories occur in the heart, which is merely a muscle. Earthly possessions of great value went with the deceased into the tombs and pyramids and I mentioned that people of the time must have seen, contrary to expectations of the deceased and possessions being physically transported into the western sky of the setting sun, that all physical presence remained exactly where the deceased had been placed implying that all these efforts came to nought.

Under these circumstances one might have thought the Egyptians might cease and desist from practices that were empirically unsuccessful, well perhaps not in an unscientific world. You might say perhaps the deceased were entombed never to be disturbed again, no one ever looked in other words but we know this was not the case because family members were often added to tombs upon their later demise. Of course the obvious explanation for such behavior is that priests, religionists and mummifiers had their own livelihoods to protect even if their craft was demonstrably useless. As I had pointed out, the Egyptian’s view of the dead emphasized the body and belongings, physicality, but the recitation from the Book of the Dead and other sources testifies that they seem to have had some concept of the soul.

The biblical story of the Passover in the pentateuch describes the sojourn of the Children of Israel (I will denote them as CI)  in ancient Egypt perhaps some 3300 years ago for over 200 years. Looking at this story through a modern lens, it is straightforward to see how the CI ended up in Egypt. Joseph was an able and handsome man having angered his older brothers, was imprisoned and ended up some type of prime minister in Egypt. The brothers reconciled in a heart rending scene and due to a famine in the region which Joseph had helped prepare the Egyptians for, the pharaoh’s dreams were prophetic and Joseph interpreted dreams, the pharaoh was most appreciative, the Ci clan moved into Egypt. There were perhaps 70 or so  male CI who moved in but after about 10 or more generations, closer to 600,000 men who escaped in the story of the Exodus. By the way there are explicit records of exploits of great pharaohs particularly Ramesses II during this approximate period describing conquests of other Canaanite peoples, Moabites and Edomites, both very close relatives of the CI (Moab thru Lot, Edom thru Esau) but no one has found any explicit mention of CI or Hebrews in writings of ancient Egypt.

We all know that the Ci were eventually enslaved and suffered greatly according to legend under the Egyptians and that they suffered under the lash.  Later pharaohs did not know Joseph, were alarmed at the reproductive rate of the CI and merely seemed to have decided to enslave them in order to build cities which were monuments to the pharaoh, the Egyptian religion and pyramids and huge monuments to the dead from which we know the Egyptians today. One of the CI clan, a Levite who barely escaped death, through the intercession of his mother and older sister, as all CI males were supposed to be killed at the time he was born, but as a baby seems to have been appealing, laying in a little basket, was drawn up out of the Nile by a daughter for the Egyptian royal family, and grew up as an Egyptian. Later this character, Moses, of course,  with his Egyptian name, discovers his CI heritage or it is revealed to him. Striking down an Egyptian taskmaster, he breaks with his Egyptian past.  Much more is revealed to Moses thru contact with a bush that is not consumed by fire, including a new Name of the Eternal heretofore unknown to co-religionists having to do with past, present and future tense of the verb “to be”.  For me this says that history is controlled by the CI Deity and is about to be made. In any event, Moses leads CI out of the Egyptian house of bondage into freedom.

My purpose in this discussion, is to contrast views of life after death. I had written about two thus far, that of Dante which i took as a classical rendering of afterlife that seems most popular in our time for the largest number of followers who believe in an afterlife (I do not have a scientific survey) and that of ancient Egypt. As we have seen the ancient Egyptians with their vibrant civilization dominant in the region for over 4000 years, seemed largely obsessed  by preparation for the Afterlife.  I say this observing the size of their pyramids,  quantity of written records and abundance of mummified remains.

I was in high school when I read Sigmund Freud, as at the time, I planned to become a psychiatrist and Freud was still well respected by some people when I grew up.  I came upon his books, Religion and Its Discontents and especially Moses and Monotheism written late in his life. I had him on a pedestal at the time in my life but even so was i was much troubled by what he said. Today most of Freud’s  psychoanalytic theories have been debunked which is not to say they might still contain certain elements of truth. Freud was certainly knowledgable about Ancient Egypt, was fascinated by that topic as well as all ancient thought and a collector of Egyptian art. He wrote, if I might paraphrase him, that the Mosaic religion (Judaism) was just about entirely drawn from Egypt.  While we cannot place precisely in time the CI’s sojourn in Egypt, and the jealous one god cult of Aten seems to have held sway only very briefly in Egyptian history,  namely over part of the reign of Akhenaten, Freud maintained this concept was plagiarized from the Egyptians. Of course monotheism is not so complex a concept that it might not have been developed more than once in history. This is controversial too as to whether it was performed but circumcision by which it was possible to mark a co-religionist, was held by Freud to come from Egypt as well. Freud was very into the idea of founders of a faith being murdered as a sort of salute to Oedipus so that he believed Moses to have been murdered as well.

Most striking for me is the contrast between the Ci and the Egyptian concept of death and afterlife. For Egypt the afterlife is a major compulsion, huge amounts of labor, wealth, and intellectual capital obviously having been devoted to the Afterlife throughout their long multi-millennnial history. For the CI death and the afterlife are barely worth mentioning. You find no elaborate theory of the Afterlife anywhere in the Hebrew Bible.  This has been noted by many writers. For the CI the emphasis was in this known life, not at all upon the conjectures about what is to come.  And while in Egypt so much elaborate effort was taken to preserve the remnants of the physical incarnation, for the CI no such effort of preservation seems to have been made at all. This attitude extends to modern members of this clan even today as the rush to get the deceased without any embalming process or any protections at all, into the ground, in order that the body decay directly into the earth from whence it came. The contrast between these two cultures could not be stated too strongly, one focussed on the next world the other on this one.

Ancient Egypt’s view of the Afterlife developed over time but was rather explicit. The CI view is unknown or some would say, agnostic. The CI emphasis on behavior is in the here and now. Just as striking is the focus in ancient Egypt on the physical form of the human body, physicality, matter, form. Egyptian gods were embodiments of both men and beasts and were multiple. The CI by contrast wrote of a single, formless, matterless, entirely incorporeal spiritual entity.  As the CI leaving Egypt learned, they were certainly not free in the sense of being given leave to behave anyway they pleased.   They obeyed  a different Master, not the Pharaoh. One wonders if the story of the Exudus is better characterized  not as deliverance from slavery to freedom but from matter to spirit.