The Development of Biblical Prayer - Jewish Bible Quarterly

purely business encounters and not happy ones. During his maturer Weimar
years, he did meet a few Jews but never developed a significant relationship with
them. Hence, his indifference toward the contemporary Jewish scene was
undisturbed and his childhood prejudices remained unchallenged.
Schiller was not only poet and dramatist; he was also philosopher and
historian. As philosopher, his most lasting contribution was to aesthetic theory;
as historian, his most notable contributions were his studies on the Thirty Years'
War and on the revolt of the Dutch against the Spanish Crown. But Schiller also
made use of Biblical material for historical studies. In his lectures, published in
I 790, under the long title, Etwas iiber die erste Menschengesellschaft nach dem
Leiifaden der Mosaischen Urkunde, he let his fertile imagination fill in gaps in the
Biblical narrative and his dramatic talent vivify myths about Biblical characters.
His portrait of Moses anticipated the insights and aberrations of Sigmund Freud's
work, Moses and Monotheism (I937-1939), and may, indeed, have influenced
the father of psychoanalysis. This study, contained in Die Sendung Moses, 1790,
illumines Schiller's attitude toward historical Judaism, for it was the historical
role of the ancient people from whom Christianity sprang that interested him far
more than did Jewish contemporaries with whom he had little to do and for
whom he had even less sympathy.
Die Sendung Moses, originally delivered as a lecture at the University of Jena,
emphasized the founding of the Jewish religious and national entity by Moses as
one of the supreme achievements of mankind, one which had a lasting influence
throughout the following generations. Schiller held that neither Christianity nor
Islam would have come into existence if not for the innovations of Moses,
primarily his popularization of monotheism. While the belief in one God had
penetrated into the minds of individual wise men among the heathens, it had not
seeped down to the masses who continued everywhere to worship a multiplicity
of gods. It was Moses who, by the power of his charismatic personality,
persuaded an entire people, the Hebrews, to be the first nation to accept
monotheism. In Schiller's opinion, the Hebrews were not especially worthy to
play such a role in world history. He regarded them as a depraved national group,
both in ancient times and in his own days. Yet, so strange are the ways of God:
this impure vessel contained precious ingredients of truth, which it dispensed to
others before it was deservedly scattered and dispersed. Schiller believed that he
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