“Let us adopt from Sellin the surmise that the Egyptian Moses was killed by the Jews, and the religion he instituted abandoned. It allows us to spin our thread further without contradicting the trust-worthy results of historical research. If Moses was an Egyptian and if he transmitted to the Jews his own religion then it was that of Ikhnaton, the Aton religion [Atenism].”

“Therefore we have to picture the true religion of Moses, the belief he proclaimed in one, ethical god, as being from now on, as a matter of course, the possession of a small circle within the people. We cannot expect to find it from the start in the official cult, the priests religion, in the general belief of the people. All we can expect is that here and there a spark flies up from the spiritual fire [see: spirit terminology upgrades] he had kindled, that his ideas have not died out, but have quietly influenced beliefs and customs until, sooner or later, under the influence of special events, or through some personality particularly immersed in this belief, they broke forth again more strongly and gained dominance with the broad mass of the people. It is from this point of view that we have to regard the early religious history of the old Israelites. Were we to reconstruct the Mosaic religion after the pattern laid down in the historical documents that describe the religion of the first five centuries in Canaan we should fall into the worst methodical error.”

— Ernst Sellin (1922), Moses and its Significance for the Israeli-Jewish religious History [3]