Jan Assmann is an immensely distinguished Egyptologist, who has developed the rich idea of ‘cultural memory’ to explain the transmission of ideas across the centuries, and has also shown a marked interest in the figure of Moses (see Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism, Cambridge, MA, 1997). These two themes are recapitulated here in a study of the reception history of the book of Exodus.

Assmann is not directly concerned with the possible historical roots of what he calls the ‘myth’ of the exodus, though he allows that it may recall some actual events and trends that go back well before our extant texts, and which were preserved in cultural memory. Thus there is a treatment of the Hyksos, the apiru, the Sea People, and other well-known peoples that might underlie the exodus traditions. Cultural memory could have preserved these features beneath the surface of the biblical narratives. But essentially the exodus stories are the product of late monarchic and early exilic Israel, from the seventh or sixth centuries, and the present form of the book of Exodus is the work of the even later Priestly compiler, who integrated it into a work beginning with Genesis. Exodus and Genesis are however very different: Genesis is universalistic, cosmic in its concerns, and unaggressive, while Exodus on the contrary focuses on the people of Israel alone as distinctive among the nations, is concerned with the covenant rather than with the creation and introduces the theme of religiously inspired violence into the Bible for the first time.

Again and again Assmann argues for the uniqueness and distinctiveness of Exodus’ vision. Law ceases to be the enactments of kings working under divine authority and becomes the work of God himself. Israel's relationship with its god (YHWH rather than simply ‘God’ (elohim)) becomes contractual, as the form of the Assyrian vassal-treaty is adapted to describe the partnership which God and his people freely enter into – whereas in Genesis it is simply a subset of the relationship between God and the created order. Monotheism in Exodus is a ‘monotheism of loyalty’, whereas in Genesis (and in other places in the Hebrew Bible) it is a ‘monotheism of truth’, that is, a metaphysical claim that there is only one God. This is the contrast other scholars sometimes define as monotheism proper versus monolatry or ‘henotheism’. But the latter terms capture a tendency occasionally found in many nations to worship only one god in practice, as against a ‘full’ monotheism which asserts that only one God exists; whereas the ‘monotheism of loyalty’ we find in Exodus goes much further than a practical preference for one god over others to an insistence that only one God ought to be worshipped, because that God is in a covenant-relationship with a unique people, Israel.

The contrast is striking, and certainly captures the Israel-centred character of the theological approach of Exodus, as also of Deuteronomy, where arguably the treaty parallel is even more obvious. The overall effect of Assmann's argument is to restore something like the old Biblical Theology Movement's contrast, defended so often in the 1940s and 1950s, between the ‘natural’ religion of both Canaan and ‘the Greek thought-world’, on the one hand, and the election-based theology of the highly distinctive covenant-people of Israel, on the other. However weak some of the arguments deployed in the interests of that contrast were (they were often based in a kind of pseudo-linguistics), the contrast itself was not imaginary. Assmann even argues that it has its later avatars in the contrast between Catholicism and Protestantism, or between Lutheranism and Calvinism, or between different branches of Anglicanism. He draws fruitfully on the work of Mary Douglas to characterize the difference in the Pentateuch between ‘P’ and the Deuteronomist's work, encompassing some of Exodus:

There is much more than this controlling contrast in Assmann's work. He discusses selected examples of later reception, including some visual representations of scenes from Exodus, and also, at more length, musical settings, especially Handel's oratorio Israel in Egypt and Schoenberg's Moses und Aron. On the literary side, Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers is noted several times, and – of course – Freud's Moses and Monotheism. Assmann does not believe that Moses was really an Egyptian, as Freud did, but he can evaluate the Egyptian elements in the story on the basis of detailed knowledge of the relevant sources, as most biblical scholars cannot. He succeeds in explicating the hold Egypt has exercised over the western imagination as the ‘house of bondage’ through the exodus stories. Indeed, if Rome owed its foundations to Aeneas the Trojan, Scotland could trace its origins to Egypt: ‘The name Scotland comes from Scota, supposedly a daughter of the very pharaoh who reigned during the Exodus and came to grief in the Sea of Reeds’ (p. 335).

Assmann does not ignore more traditional biblical-critical studies of Exodus. He is sceptical of the classic Wellhausen model of four sources in the Pentateuch, inclining to the more recent and simpler P/non-P distinction, and moreover with P as a later framework for non-P, rather than as a source that ever had a separate existence. He regards the growth of the book as the result not of the interweaving of sources but as a piece of Fortschreibung, as it is now called – successive incremental additions to a basic text.

This is a work that should interest all serious students of the Bible, and especially those concerned with the burgeoning approach that is reception history. It is a masterly example of how to treat, from this point of view, a book of major importance in the Bible.