ABSTRACT
A significant link between psychoanalytic literary theory and biblical scholarship lies in the privilege both accord the language of images and symbols.1 One image that seems to connect the two disciplines is God’s rod, mentioned first in Exodus 4:1-5 and later in 7:8-12 as an object that changes its form into a serpent and then back again into a rod. Since the language of images and symbols is equally important in mythology,2 a discipline that bridges psychoanalytic literary theory and biblical scholarship, I would like to return to Egypt, instead of leaving it as Moses did, and read the Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris as a lens through which I view the symbolism, and hence significance, of Moses and God’s rod.3 First, however, I would like to clarify some presuppositions, primarily in terms of “who” or “what” I mean by Moses and in what sense the text is “historical.”
