Freud and the exegesis of Exodus ii, 3.

Freud’s 1939 interpretation of the basket (Kästchen) as a symbol of the womb and of the woman, in the parallel accounts of Moses’ infancy and in the Babylonian legend of Sargon of Akkad is here reviewed. Some of the background is given. The lexical association of the Hebrew tēbāh (used both for Moses’ basket and Noah’s ark) is also discussed, and the lack of an equivalent parallel in the Sargon legend with the Akkadian flood story. The salvific motif of the biblical account of the flood and its parallels, including the Epic of Gilgamesh is outlined. Various patristic (allegorical) interpretations of it are presented to demonstrate the way exegesis responded to the changing circumstances of the early Church, particularly during the Decian persecution. The symbolism adopted by Rank, Karl Abraham and Stekel and on which Freud drew (1909 and 1914) is also discussed, and Freud’s earlier philological analysis of the English word ‘box’ from 1900. It is argued that while the biblical text signifies salvation (being ‘rescued from’ something), Freud’s interpretation discloses an autobiographical focus on a desire not for flight but for safety, for a refuge (the ‘containment’ of the womb); one that between writing the first part and 1939 he was destined to find in England. His declared foundation for the interpretation reveals a concern not with the basket but with the false biblical etymology of the name Moses taken up by Josephus and Philo which he had already correctly dismissed with the help of Herlitz and Kirchner’s Jüdisches Lexicon IV (1), 303. In contrast to ‘the meaning of the father’ which Lacan rightly identified as the overall focus of Moses and Monotheism, the premise of the first, earliest part of the book, drawn from the shared story of the infancy of Moses and Sargon, is shown to be the meaning of the woman.