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Friedrich Schiller, who was not only a poet and playwright but also professor of history at the university of Jena, in 1790 published an essay entitled “The Mission of Moses.”*1 This essay is based on two lectures about “The Oldest Hebrew Mysteries”2 given by Karl Leonard Reinhold.
Schiller accepted the biblical story of Moses' upbringing. He assumed that Moses was a Jewish boy raised at the court of the Pharaoh. He continued his account of Moses' education as follows:
Thus he (Moses) was turned from a slave child and sacrificial offering of death into the son of a royal princess and as such was to participate in all privileges enjoyed by the children of the kings. The priests to whose order he belonged in the very moment of his incorporation into the royal family now took over his education and instructed him in all the Egyptian wisdom which was the exclusive property of their class. It is certainly probable that they withheld none of their secrets from him, since a passage of the Egyptian historian Manetho, in which he makes Moses into an apostate of the Egyptian religion and a priest who escaped from Heliopolis, allows us to surmise that he was destined to become a member of the priest class.
Schiller then analyzed the Egyptian mysteries with which Moses became familiar, according to Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 B.C.—c. A.D. 50) and other early historians. He showed how with the development of society, economics and science, polytheism must have given place in the minds of some intelligent and educated priests to monotheism, to the idea of “the Highest Being.” This idea was probably first passed on from one priest to another until it became the knowledge of a small élite.