Freedom From Bondage

By George Elder, 3/28/25

In my previous Post (“Amalek”), I said in passing that the biblical report of the Israelites’ freedom from bondage in Egypt—what is usually called, the “Exodus”—is not likely to be historically accurate. The journalist Teresa Watanabe summarized the matter in the Los Angeles Times in 2001:

After a century of excavations trying to prove the ancient accounts true, archaeologists say there is no conclusive evidence that the Israelites were ever in Egypt, were ever enslaved, ever wandered in the Sinai wilderness for 40 years or ever conquered the land of Canaan under Joshua’s leadership. (“Doubting the Story of Exodus,” 4/13/01)

Instead, the Twelve Tribes of Israel probably emerged slowly from among the Canaanite population—perceiving themselves as having a common patriarchal ancestry.

They may have been joined by a small group of nomads who had—in fact—been oppressed in Egypt and who had wandered toward what the Bible calls the “Promised Land.” That this group would have been small seems attested by the lack of any mention of an enslaved but rebellious people in ancient Egyptian records.

Nonetheless, the biblical version of the Exodus (including plagues against the oppressors, the miraculous crossing of a sea on dry land, etc.) became the origin story of all Israel—celebrated at Passover as historically true for thousands of years.

When Rabbi David Wolpe told these modern findings to his congregation, many were not pleased. As Watanabe reported, some said they did not want to hear it, others said it could not possibly be true, while one congregant asked rhetorically—”If it were not true, how could we follow it for 3,300 years?”

Indeed, many Americans might be displeased at what scholars have long known but has only recently drifted into public awareness. For the Exodus is something of the origin story of the United States of America. The Puritans, our first settlers, saw themselves as repeating the Bible’s salvation history: they were latter-day “Israelites” oppressed by the “Egyptians” of England for their religious beliefs, “wandering” across a dangerous ocean to a New World they would have to conquer as their “Promised Land.” New Canaan (Connecticut) is evidence of this self-understanding—embedded, actually, in the American psyche. 

It is a tragic contradiction that Americans who were freed from their bondage in Europe would eventually own slaves. And yet oppressed African-Americans themselves adopted the biblical story of Egyptian slavery as evidence that they, too, would someday be free. They sang a hopeful spiritual: 

Go down, Moses

Way down in Egypt’s land

Tell old Pharaoh

Let my people go

We all sang it during the civil rights marches in the 1960’s.

Let me note that Wolpe says his “faith in God” remains intact, that God has saved the Jews many times in their history and will continue to do so. “It is not an historical claim that God created us and cares for us.” (“Did the Exodus Really Happen?” beliefnet.com)

I am reminded again of an important statement by C. G. Jung that I have quoted in my “Christmas” Posts. Jung observes that many still believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus while just as many say it is a physical impossibility. He goes on:

Both are right and both are wrong. Yet they could easily reach agreement if only they dropped the word, “physical.” “Physical” is not the only criterion of truth; there are also psychic truths which can neither be explained nor proved nor contested in any physical way. . . . Religious statements are of this type. They refer without exception to things that cannot be established as physical fact. (CW 11, pars. 553-554)

We have only to change the word “physical” to “historical” in this quotation to see its relevance to recent doubts about the Exodus.

Jung is saying, with Wolpe, that the archaeology of the ancient Near East is culturally important yet does not impinge upon the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. Unlike the rabbi, however, he is claiming that the story of “Freedom from Bondage” remains true—a “psychic truth”—and is in fact the founding myth of the Jewish people.

The Twelve Tribes of Jacob or Israel—i.e., the Israelites, eventually called the Jews—were gripped by a symbolic story or image of “Freedom” that resides as an archetype in the collective unconscious of all of us in one form or another. It had been stirred into life by circumstances about which we know little, then projected onto a slim set of historical facts—that thereby became numinous, i.e., an “act of God.” It would inspire the Children of Israel to become a distinctive and exceptionally creative people.

Jews stir it back to life every spring at a Passover feast. The Wikipedia website describes this event:

Seder customs include telling the story, discussing the story, drinking four cups of wine, eating matzah, partaking of symbolic foods, and reclining in celebration of freedom. The Seder is among the most commonly celebrated Jewish rituals, performed by Jews all over the world. . . . It is stated in the Haggadah that “In every generation everyone is obligated to see themselves as if they themselves came out of Egypt”—i.e., out of slavery. (“Passover Seder”)

Here we witness the function of ritual, namely, to constellate archetypal forces deep within the psyche and make that creative energy available. We witness, too, the power of religious imagination. For the Seder participants are not actually slaves in Egypt yet imagine that they are—feeling one with the original Chosen—shifting past historical reality into present psychic reality.

The early American Puritans and the African-American slaves did the same thing—imagining they were ancient Israelites, making that salvation history psychologically available in their own difficult circumstances. 

There are, of course, many kinds of bondage from which freedom is sought. The physical kind—when one person owns another as property—is profoundly immoral, although that has become less acceptable as humanity evolves ethically. Political oppression, however, seems as prevalent as ever as is economic or social class enslavement—less obvious perhaps and, therefore, tougher to uproot.  

Even when these more external forms of slavery are abated, there often remains mental slavery—sapping the human spirit. Compulsions of all sorts and complexes that “get one’s goat” are forms of private bondage from which it is often difficult to become liberated. They block one’s “free will,” a measure of psychological health, and may require analysis for release.

Much of this “enslavement” is rooted in ignorance or unconsciousness, the worst human sin that persists in everyone to a greater or lesser degree. As we learned, a person may not even want to hear the latest archaeological news and prefer to remain ignorant. For the news may oblige one to re-think one’s assumptions, to realize with some dismay one’s naivete—and even require an answer to the question, “How could we believe in something that isn’t true?” That takes integrity but also some psychological work. Maybe laziness is the greatest sin.

Indeed, it takes some effort (along with grace) to discover that not only the biblical “Exodus” but also the biblical “God” is a psychological image. Thus, Jung favors the term, “God-image,” since he cannot believe in religion’s traditional unknowable, transcendental deity. The more accessible psychic image of God is real enough, however, lying in our depths—from which it functions as the instigator of all “freedom movements.” (See my Posts on “The God Within”)

Edinger writes in The Bible and the Psyche: “The sacred history of the Jews is an expression of individuation symbolism, and its vicissitudes are an expression of analogous events in the psychic development of the individual.” (44)  This is an important statement since a case can be made that the “Jews” have been carrying the symbolism of “individuation” for Western culture—but unconsciously and collectively. When enough individuals carry that symbolism, this ethnic group that has been both “blessed and cursed” will no longer be burdened by that task.

Let us consider “analogous events in the psychic development of the individual” as stages in freedom. 1) First, there is the natural freeing of the ego from the bonds of infantile unconscious beginnings that is experienced by everyone. 2) Second, there is the freeing of consciousness from identification with the family psyche experienced by most people—when “home” feels like a prison—and it is time to make one’s mark in the world.

3) At a third stage of development, the myth of “Exodus” becomes especially meaningful—for a “creative minority,” to use Toynbee’s felicitous phrase. For the temptation of mere worldliness has long been expressed in our culture as preferring the “fleshpots of Egypt” to the “wilderness” experience of having to find one’s own authentic path, one that no one else has tread—to express one’s unique individuality. It is a major feature of what Jung calls “individuation.”

This exceptional development of consciousness is never easy. By definition, it is unacceptable to society since it is a break with its priorities—even a break with the instinct to “belong” to the group. Jung writes:

The words, “many are called, but few are chosen” are singularly appropriate here, for the development of personality from the germ-state to full consciousness is at once a charisma and a curse, because its first fruit is the conscious and unavoidable segregation of the single individual from the undifferentiated and unconscious herd. This means isolation and there is no more comforting word for it. . . . The development of personality is a favor that must be paid for dearly. (CW 17, par. 294)

4) And should this isolated individual approach his or her symbolic “Promised Land,” there is the shock of finding—if not already along the way—that “we are not absolute master in our own house.” (CW 9.i, par. 235) That “master” is the “God-image” within the unconscious to which the individuating ego owes allegiance, listening for its guidance and trying to meet its exacting standards.

The Bible puts this strongly. The Israelites who had been slaves became “servants” of Yahweh—“obeying his voice” and ”keeping his commandments.” Scholars tell us, however, that the Hebrew for “servant” (ebed) can mean either servant or slave, depending on context. Even the Messiah, according to the prophet Isaiah, is a “Suffering Servant” (ebed)—or a slave who suffers the ignominy of being “a thing despised and rejected by men.”

The Jewish-Christian Paul put it unambiguously in Greek. Freed from the “yoke” of sin and fear of death, he said he became, instead, the “slave (doulos) of Christ.”

It follows that if we hear the call to live authentically, answer it, and become increasingly more conscious, the more external forms of bondage give way to a profounder inward bondage—from which there is no escape. What if Wolpe told his congregation that?