On Jan Assmann’s Of God and gods: Egypt, Israel, and the rise of monotheism (Madison: U. of Wisconsin Press, 2008). Assmann keeps talking about Moses as a symbolic, not historical character, which is fine, but I find more exact to speak of the story about Moses, of the authors of that story… About violence: Assmann tackles the passage about Phinehas in Numbers 25, and wants to show that one alluring aspect of polytheistic culture was the participation in feasting, i.e. sacrifices, to the gods of Moab (p. 116). But more than that was involved in the story of violence attributed to Phinehas. The background to the telling of the story is that the sharing of other gods in the ancient world was by the same token the sharing of women, the contracting with other families who had their own privileged access to gods and goddesses (clear for instance from their proximity to temples), and therefore the “sharing” of access to land and labor. Exilic Israel authors of the sixth and fifth c. BC, in this kind of stories, made virtue out of necessity, i.e., turned the impossibility of the conquest of lands and therefore the uselessness of adopting other gods, into a virtue or blessing, and finally a mark, as well defended as the normal conquest (by war, alliance, translation or translatability of gods). But this type of thinking, and reinforcement stories, could only follow other starker needs: to explain how and why their ethnic god still protected them and had a role to play.