The Mosaic Distinction: Israel, Egypt, and the Invention of Paganism

Abstract

Call it the first distinction.Call the space in which it is drawn the space severed or cloven by the distinction. ' IT SEEMS AS IF GEORGE Spencer Brown's "first Law of Construction" does not apply solely to the logical and mathematical construction for which it is meant. It also applies strangely well to the space of cultural constructions and distinctions and to the spaces that are severed or cloven by such distinctions.The distinction with which this essay is concerned is the one between true and false in religion: a distinction that underlies the more specific ones between Jews and Gentiles, Christians and pagans, Muslims and unbelievers. Once this distinc tion is drawn, there is no end of reentries or subdistinctions. We start with Chris tians and pagans and end up with Catholics and Protestants, Calvinists and Lu therans, Socinians and Latitudinarians, and a thousand similar denominations and subdenominations. These cultural or intellectual distinctions construct a uni verse that is full not only of meaning, identity, and orientation but also of conflict, intolerance, and violence. Therefore, there have always been attempts to over come the conflict by reexamining the truefalse distinction, albeit at the risk of losing cultural meaning.Let us call the distinction between true and false in religion the "Mosaic dis tinction" because tradition ascribes it to Moses. While we cannot be sure that Moses ever lived, since there are no other traces of his earthly existence outside the legendary tradition, we can be sure, on the other hand, that he was not the first to draw the distinction. There was a precursor in the person of the Egyptian king Amenophis IV, who called himself Akhenaten and instituted a monotheistic re ligion in the fourteenth century B.C.' His religion, however, created no lasting tradition and was forgotten immediately after his death. Moses is a figure of mem ory, but not of history, whereas Akhenaten is a figure of history, but not of mem ory. Since memory is all that counts in the sphere of cultural distinctions and constructions, we are justified in speaking not of "Akhenaten's distinction" but of the Mosaic distinction. The space severed or cloven by this distinction is the space of Western monotheism. It is the mental and cultural space constructed by this distinction that Europeans have inhabited for nearly two millennia.

Black to The future

“…Proponents of Afrocentricity will of course be quite interested in scholarship that looks for the origins of Christian and Islamic monotheism in the heresy of Akhenaten in ancient Egypt's Middle Kingdom (see Allen, 1989;Assman, 1989Assman, , 1995Assman, , 1996Assman, , 1998. But Afrocentrists will also be sympathetic to Christians and Muslims who would also call themselves Afrocentrists.…”

Religionens teknik og teknikkens religion

“…I sin indflydelsesrige og omdiskuterede artikel "The Mosaic Distinction" og senere bøger haevdede den tyske aegyptolog og religionshistoriker Jan Assmann, at en ny og radikalt anderledes type religion var trådt ind i religionshistorien, da jødedommen i løbet af det første årtusind f.v.t. konstituerede sig som en monoteistisk religion (Assmann 1996, Assmann 1997, Assmann 2018):…”

“…It is the mental and cultural space constructed by this distinction that Europeans have inhabited for nearly two millennia. Let us call the distinction between true and false in religion the "Mosaic distinction" because tradition ascribes it to Moses (Assmann 1996).…”

“…These cultural or intellectual distinctions construct a universe that is full not only of meaning, identity, and orientation but also of conflict, intolerance, and violence (Assmann 1996).…”

Afterword: Writing Religion and the Genealogy of the Literary Aesthetic

“…In his lengthy digressions on hieroglyphical writing and Egyptian religion Warburton addressed the deistical association of parable, fable and allegory with the 'secret writing' of an exploitative, self-perpetuating priestly caste. 15 But it was left to John Brown and Richard Hurd to engage most explicitly with what might be described as the 'literary' component of anticlerical mythography and the historiography of religion.…”