Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: Israel and Revelation

Titel: Israel and Revelation

Stichwort: Israel: Rückblick auf Ägypten u. Mesopotamien u. Ausblick: Moses - Exodus (Ramses); Wüste

Kurzinhalt: the attraction of the divine magnet was not strong enough to orient the soul toward transcendent being

Textausschnitt: 1/4 The compact experience of cosmological order proved to be tenacious. Neither the rise and fall of Mesopotamian empires nor the repeated crises of imperial Egypt could break the faith in a divine-cosmic order of which society was a part. To be sure, the contrast between the lasting of cosmic and the passing of social order did not remain unobserved, but the observation did not penetrate the soul decisively and, consequently, did not lead to new insights concerning the true order of being and existence. ...
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... Man, in his desire for a new freedom, seemed on the verge of opening his soul toward a transcendent God; and the new religiousness, indeed, achieved a surprising feat of monotheistic speculation. Nevertheless, even in the Amon Hymns, the attraction of the divine magnet was not strong enough to orient the soul toward transcendent being. The Egyptian poets could not break the bond of Pharaonic order and become the founders of a new community under God.
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And yet, it was their age in which the bond was broken. The Amon Hymns were created under Dynasty XIX, ca. 1320-1205 B.C. And this was the dynasty under which, according to recent trends of conjecture, occurred the Exodus of Israel from Egypt. Ramses II is supposed to be the Pharaoh of the oppression, his successor Merneptah 1225-1215) the Pharaoh of the Exodus. While such precise suppositions may be doubtful, the thirteenth century B.C. in general was probably the age of Moses. At the time when the Egyptians themselves strained their cosmological symbolism to the limits without being able to break the bonds of its compactness, Moses led his people from bondage under Pharaoh to freedom under God.
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... the desert was only a station on the way, not the goal; for in the desert the tribes found their God. They entered into a covenant with him, and thereby became his people. As a new type of people, formed by God, Israel conquered the promised land. The memory of Israel preserved the otherwise unimportant story, because the irruption of the spirit transfigured the pragmatic event into a drama of the soul and the acts of the drama into symbols of divine liberation.
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When the spirit bloweth, society in cosmological form becomes Sheol, the realm of death; but when we undertake the Exodus and wander into the world, in order to found a new society elsewhere, we discover the world as the Desert. The flight leads nowhere, until we stop in order to find our bearings beyond the world. When the world has become Desert, man is at last in the solitude in which he can hear thunderingly the voice of the spirit that with its urgent whispering has already driven and rescued him from Sheol. In the Desert God spoke to the leader and his tribes; in the Desert, by listening to the voice, by accepting its offer, and by submitting to its command, they at last reached life and became the people chosen by God.
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When the spirit bloweth, society in cosmological form becomes Sheol, the realm of death; but when we undertake the Exodus and wander into the world, in order to found a new society elsewhere, we discover the world as the Desert. The flight leads nowhere, until we stop in order to find our bearings beyond the world. When the world has become Desert, man is at last in the solitude in which he can hear thunderingly the voice of the spirit that with its urgent whispering has already driven and rescued him from Sheol. In the Desert God spoke to the leader and his tribes; in the Desert, by listening to the voice, by accepting its offer, and by submitting to its command, they at last reached life and became the people chosen by God.