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Ever since the biblical character of Moses entered upon the stage of human history there has been an unending series of echoes about him and his influence on Western religion and civilization. Sigmund Freud's (1939) penultimate work, Moses and Monotheism, seems to have stirred the pot of intellectual and historical curiosity to the point where the subject seems to be in a constant boil. In the past decade alone, several books on the subject have been published (Rice, 1990; Yerushalmi, 1991; Paul, 1996, among others).
Freud's interest in the subject of Moses began with the publication of The Moses of Michelangelo (Freud, 1914). It lay dormant until the late 1920s, when he appears to have had his interest in his own religious origins awakened when he chose Moses as the focal point of his hypothetical endeavor. It did not culminate in publication until he fled to London in 1939, where he felt that the religious and cultural climates were free enough to allow its publication without his fearing reprisal from the Catholic hierarchy of his