God's Underground?

MOSES, PRINCE OF EGYPT (303 pp.)--Howard Fast--Crown ($3.95).

JEPHTA AND HIS DAUGHTER (255 pp.) --Lion Feuchtwanger--Putnam ($3.95).

St. Paul told the Corinthians that "the children of Israel could not steadfastly behold the face of Moses for the glory of his countenance." In latter days Moses has been psychoanalyzed by Freud (Moses and Monotheism) and has taken his turn at the treaDeMille (The Ten Commandments). Now. ex-Communist Howard Fast, veteran of 14 mostly ideological novels (Citizen Tom Paine, Freedom Road), has turned out what looks like Volume I of a Mosaic saga with overtones of both Freud and DeMille.

From Egypt to Sinai. Fast agrees with Freud and others that Moses' monotheism is traceable to the great Egyptian monarch, AkhenAton (also known as Ikhnaton), who forswore all gods save the Sun-God Aton. But where Freud guessed that Moses was an Egyptian by birth. Novelist Fast makes him an Egyptian merely by adoption and education. As Fast tells it, fear of the old gods and their priests caused AkhenAton's successors to denounce Aton worship, but not before the idea of monotheism had taken root in some Egyptian minds. In Fast's account, every priest and prince in the great Nile palace of King Ramses II is sworn to polytheism, but an Aton underground passes the teachings of monotheism from one generation to another. Enekhas-Amon. sister (and bedmate) of Ramses, is herself an Atonist, and she spots Baby Moses in the bulrushes, where his captive Levite mother has left him as a sacrifice to the water-snake god. Enekhas-Amon takes the infant, reappears at court months later pretending that the child is hers. One day, she dreams. Moses will ascend the throne and restore Aton to his sole supremacy.

As Moses grows up amid the hundred-odd bastard princelings who throng the palace, the Aton underground works on him steadily, guiding and teaching him. Ramses, kept informed by his spies, visits a lot more than ten plagues on Moses, until he finally escapes from Egypt, crosses the Red Sea and sets out "into the Wilderness of Sinai." Author Fast handles his subject matter skillfully, is at his best in descriptions of palace life, battle scenes, landscape studies. His Moses is reasonably convincing as a potential lawgiver who comes to believe that the god Aton is really justice. But Howard Fast cannot get within miles of the God-inspired, prophetic Moses who stirred the soul and genius of the Chosen People and marked out the whole history of civilized man. From Sinai to Gilead. Jephta and His Daughter fits neatly beside Fast's Moses. Seven generations have passed since Moses covenanted with Yahweh to worship Him alone. In that time the wheel has turned full circle: the people of Gilead. "grown fat on the oil and milk of the land," are not only a fragment of a disunited Israel but have become easygoing polytheists. Yahweh is no longer the fire-god of Sinai; he is merely one of many gods that dwell in the hills. When Gilead's warriors capture maidens in battle, they no longer sacrifice them to Yahweh; they marry them instead and adopt their alien gods. Even Gilead, the great judge, takes a heathen concubine to his bed and loves their son Jephta* more than his legitimate children. So, when Gilead dies, his other sons deny Jephta his inheritance and drive him into the wilderness. There Jephta grows tough and strong, and raises around his standard so doughty an army of outcasts and freebooters that, when enemies attack the tribe of Gilead, it is to Jephta that the tribesmen turn for help.

How Jephta saves the tribe that cast him out is one of the most famous tales in the Book of Judges. Jephta's sacrifice of his beloved daughter fascinated poets and artists as much as its Greek equivalent--Agamemnon's sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia at Aulis. Like Author Fast's Moses, Author Feuchtwanger's book falls far short of the story's greatest possibilities, but it is told competently and plausibly in the simple, direct language of a veteran historical novelist (Jew Suss, Josephus). Both books reflect the intelligent spirit of the text that Author Feuchtwanger takes from Spinoza: "I have honestly endeavored not to laugh at the actions of men, nor to bemoan them, nor to abhor them, but to understand them."

* Spelled Jephthah in the King James version of the Bible.

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