“And you shall raise high your staff, stretch out your hand over the sea and cleave it in two, so that the Children of Israel can pass through the sea on dry ground,” says Yahweh to Moses pursued by the Egyptians.³⁹⁵ “Then the cloud that covered the camp was seen, / the dry land rising up out of what had been water, / out of the Red Sea an unhindered highway / and a grassy plain out of the tempestuous waves / by which they passed, as one people, they who were protected by your hand,” sings the Wisdom of Solomon.³⁹⁶ Passing through the Red Sea on dry land—a salvific event, a glint of the elect—is also a repetition of the Creation: the Red Sea dries up just as in the beginning the earth, the soil on which those feet protected by the Lord walked, was separated from the waters under the firmament: “Elohim called the dry land Earth, and the gathering of the waters he called Seas.”³⁹⁷ Now the “grassy plain” that substitutes the “tempestuous waves” is a momentary excess of divine love. If this meant a gradual drying up of nature, it would turn into dire punishment. But that image, promising a total draining of nature, would continue to guide many generations: the dry priests of Judaism, those who prefer to keep their feet on the cultivated plain rather than venture into the sea, those who regard the sea as no more than the tomb of the Enemy. Later, when Yahweh’s presence is obscured, the divine gift will become the dream of a vast reclaimed land, no longer a miracle come down from the sky, but a laborious conquest of the subject.

Freud’s heraldic motto—Wo Es war, soll Ich werden (“Where Id was, there shall I be”)—presupposes the drying up of the Zuider Zee, and once again in relation to a “salvation,” though secularized, anguished, and uncertain: “It may safely be doubted […] whether this road will lead us to the ultimate truths from which salvation is to be expected.³⁹⁸ Nevertheless it may be admitted that the therapeutic efforts of psychoanalysis have chosen a similar line of approach. Its intention, indeed, to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the superego, to widen its field of perception and enlarge its organization, so that it can appropriate fresh portions of the id. Where the id was, there the ego shall be. It is work of culture—not unlike the draining of the Zuider Zee.”