This paper analyses and synthesises Jan Assmann’s Exodus: Die Revolution der Alten Welt (2015; transl. The Invention of Religion: Faith and Covenant in the Book of Exodus (2018)), which is considered to be one of the momentous contemporary studies on the impact of Exodus on modernity. He does not approach the Exodus from a historical perspective, but rather from the perspective of its semantic potential and the history of its impact on our tradition. His thesis is that the Exodus represents ,a big bang of modernization‘ and that modern culture, on the threshold of the digital age, still stands on ,Mosaic foundations‘. In the Exodus a new form of religion was established, a religion of revelation based on the covenant. This results in a new relationship between God and man, represented by the travelling Tabernacle: in it God takes up residence in the midst of his travelling people. The second major innovation of the Exodus is the theologisation of law, which resulted in the dissolution of the old Middle Eastern sacral state and paved the way for modernisation, the fundamental value of which is freedom.
|
