The Influence of Atenism in Egypt and the Bible? | Akhenaten and the Origins of Monotheism (2024)

James K. Hoffmeier

the final years of Akhenaten’s reign and the years following his death in 1336 b.c. remain full of uncertainty and intrigue.1 It remains a matter of debate whether Queen Nefertiti served as co-regent toward the end of Akhenaten’s reign or served independently as ruler for a brief period. Mention was made earlier of our discovery in north Sinai of a wine jar seal with the name Nfr-nfrw-ἰtn ȝḫ.t n hy.s “Nefer-neferu-aten who is beneficial to her husband” (see Chapter 6 and Figure 6.15).2 Coupled with Nefertiti’s later name, this epithet suggests that she reigned along with her husband, Akhenaten.3 Akhenaten’s immediate successor appears to have been Smenkhkare, also known as Ankhkheperure, whose identity remains uncertain. He or she (Nefertiti?) may have been co-regent and/or successor,4 a reign that seems not to have lasted more than a few years.

In the Amarna tomb of an official named Mery-re II (Tomb 2), King Ankhkheperure Smenkhkare is shown beside his queen, Meritaten (Akhenaten and Nefertiti’s eldest daughter),5 which might indicate a brief rule at Akhet-Aten. At Thebes a hieratic graffito in the Tomb of Pa-Re contains a prayer directed to Amun and is dated to regnal year 3 of Ankhkheperure-Neferneferuaten.6 Whether or not this ruler is the aforementioned Smenkhkare-Ankhkheperure is not the concern of the present study, but rather to show that shortly after Akhenaten’s reign the Thebans were directing petitions to Amun, and beyond the ruler’s name and epithets, Aten is conspicuously absent from this text. When Akhenaten passed away, his remains were sealed in his pink granite sarcophagus. It was decorated with the Aten and its descending rays, along with the didactic name and he was buried (initially?) in the royal tomb at Amarna. This tomb was desecrated: scenes and inscriptions were smashed, while the sarcophagus was savagely bashed to pieces.7 Thanks to the restoration work of Geoffrey Martin, the sarcophagus was pieced together and now is on display outside the Cairo Museum (west side) (Figure 9.1).

Within a few years, the mysterious Tutankhamun ruled from Memphis, so reports the “Restoration Stela,”8 indicating that Akhet-Aten had been abandoned as the capital. He altered his name from Tut-ankh-aten, his birth name, as did his wife; Ankhesenpaaten became Ankhesenamun.9 While some objects from Tutankhamun’s tomb have the earlier name on them, the magnificent golden throne chair contains both forms of his name, and Aten hovers over the figures of the king and queen with its iconic extended rays (Figure 9.2). This throne apparently was reworked several times for different rulers, Tutankhamun being the last.10 This leads some to believe that there was a brief period of détente between Aten and Amun early in Tutankhamun’s reign before the complete rejection of the former.11 Donald Redford also sees no immediate turn against the new status quo when Akhenaten died, noting that “no temple of the Sun-disc was closed, their reliefs hacked out, or their priesthoods disbanded and slaughtered. There was no sudden damnatio memoriae of Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and those associated with them.”12 The reason for the name “Restoration Stela,” is because of Tutankhamun’s claim that he restored and refurbished dilapidated temples throughout Egypt (for translation of this passage, see Chapter 7). And Tutankhamun was active building in Thebes and Karnak specifically. One temple he built was made of reused Akhenaten talatat, suggesting that the dismantling of Aten temples began with him (late in his reign?), continued under Ay (his successor), but that Horemheb appears to have done the yeoman’s share of the work of destroying the Aten temples across Egypt.13

While it is evident that Tutankhamun was responsible for re-establishing the old polytheistic orthodoxy, with Amun-Re reinstated as “king of the gods” once again, his connection to Akhenaten and the Amarna heresy meant that he had to go the extra mile in his efforts to mollify the old order and show his bona fides as a reformer. New images of Amun and his consort Amunet were executed at his command, in which the likenesses of Tutankhamun and Ankhesenamun served as the models; they were placed at the heart of Karnak Temple (Figure 9.3a–b).14 His restoration stela was subsequently usurped by Horemheb,15 who himself had been a general of Akhenaten, so as to deprive Tutankhamun of the credit he deserved for the restoration and obviously to distance himself from the previous royal family.16 In Horemheb’s reign, hostility toward Akhenaten and the Amarna heresy was no longer restrained. Aten’s temples were systematical demolished and the talatat blocks were reused in building projects (thereby completely obscuring them) of Horemheb and his successors, especially Ramessses II (see Chapter 4).

Seti I (1294–1279 b.c.) actively restored many damaged monuments. Where Amun’s name had been erased, Seti I’s scribes recarved the texts (e.g. Figure 2.10 in Chapter 2). Moreover, when he had a list of his predecessors inscribed on the walls of his temple at Abydos, there was a hiatus between Amenhotep III and Horemheb, intentionally omitting the names of Akhenaten, Smenkhkare, Tutankhamun, and Ay, as if they had never ruled.17

In the Ramesside story known as the “Quarrel between Apophis and Seqenenre,” the former ruler being the Hyksos king and the latter being his Theban counterpart, a curious criticism of Apophis is made.18 The derogatory accusation is that the Hyksos king “adopted Seth for himself as lord, and he refused to serve any god that was in the entire land ex[cept] Seth.”19 Seth, of course, was an Egyptian deity who corresponds to Baal of the Semitic world.20 Orly Goldwasser recently explained that the offense of the Hyksos is not that they worshiped Seth, “but the fact that the Hyksos ruler did not worship any other god in the entire land except Seth.”21 The use of the word “except” (wpwt) is the same exclusionary word used by Akhenaten to describe Aten (see Chapter 8). Jan Assmann has suggested that behind the charge of heterodoxy against the Hyksos were “dislocated Amarna reminiscences.”22 The idea is that the bitter and recent memories of the Atenist heresy were unfairly equated with the Hyksos. Goldwasser, on the contrary, argues that the memory of the Hyksos religious practice “was an authentic—not superimposed or artificially projected—ideological affinity . . . The Amarna king and the Hyksos king may have shared a genuine religious otherness.”23

Goldwasser’s observations are quite intriguing. It is difficult, even after four decades of excavations at Tell el-Dab‘a, to know if Apophis worshiped only one deity; however, the main temple of Avaris was the precinct of Baal/Seth, which thrived throughout the Hyksos period and was even restored in Tutankhamun’s and Horemheb’s reign.24 The negative attitude towards the worship of one deity is on display in the “Quarrel between Apophis and Seqenenre,” and Egypt after Akhenaten viewed monotheism as a heresy. The short duration of the Amarna sacrilege, coupled with a quick return to polytheistic orthodoxy, and the iconoclasm directed at Akhenaten, his successors, and the Aten temples and tombs at Amarna are testimony to the attempt to eradicate every memory of this embarrassing interlude of Egyptian history.

It was impossible to completely rewrite history, however, and there were instances when individuals needed to refer back to events that occurred in the Amarna period. For example, the tomb of Mes, or Mose, contains the record of a legal dispute dated to the end of Horemheb’s reign in which the plaintiff seeks to gain control of property inherited “in the time of the enemy (ḫrw) of Akhet-Aten.”25 Though around 40 years after the death of Akhenaten, this court proceeding could not avoid referring to an event during Akhenaten’s reign, but the witnesses could not bring themselves to utter Akhenaten’s name. He is simply dubbed, “the enemy of Akhet-Aten.”

A second case where an event from this fateful period is recalled comes from a tax record of the Ramesside period. The death date of one [ . . . ] nakht is requested. The answer was that “he died in regnal year nine of the rebellion (sby).”26 The word sby could be translated “rebellion” or “rebel.”27 In either case, the attitude toward Akhenaten more than 50 years later was visceral. The antipathy toward Akhenaten precluded uttering his name.

Since Akhenaten’s religion died with him and members of his immediate family were quick to drop the name “Aten” from their personal names, it is fair to say that the officials and people had no interest in perpetuating the cause. The idea of monotheism, however, may have left its imprint on the priests and theologians of Egypt. The Leiden Hymn from the Ramesside period contains a virtual Trinitarian description of the three most prominent deities, Amun, Re, and Ptah:

God is three of all gods:

The presence of such theological supposition by some Amun priests may be Akhenaten’s greatest legacy within Egypt. Even if this reflects a genuine triune conception of deity within a century of Akhenaten’s death, it was limited to certain priestly elites, and it did not mean the end of the multitude of cults and the overshadowing of any gods and goddesses of Egypt. This consideration may be why John Wilson regarded the Leiden Hymn as “syncretistic” rather than monotheistic.29

Given the realities of the aftermath of the Amarna heresy in Egypt, it seems inconceivable that the Hebrews and the development of Yahwism were influenced directly by Atenism. The issue that must be considered is whether the Hebrews were in Egypt, and if so, when.

Chronological And Historical Issues

When Sigmund Freud’s book Moses and Monotheism was published (1939), the assumption of most Western scholars was that the Hebrews had been an enslaved population that was liberated by Moses and Yahweh, the God who had revealed himself to Moses, who then became the recipient of the laws given at Sinai. Freud theorized that Moses was actually the vizier or priest of Akhenaten, which would explain the connection between the monotheism of Atenism and Yahwism. He speculated, “I venture now to draw the following conclusion: if Moses was an Egyptian and if he transmitted to the Jews his own religion, then it was that of Ikhnaton, the Aton religion.”30 Most biblical scholars and Egyptologists have dismissed this suggestion as fanciful; after all, if there was a historical Moses among the Hebrews, how would he end up in such a prestigious office? Then, too, the pharaohs with whom Moses dealt in the book of Exodus give no indication of any affinity for Moses. He fled for fear of his life from the first pharaoh to the land of Midian (Exod. 2:11–15). While living as a refugee in Midian, the narrative reports that he had a theophany in which Yahweh revealed himself and his name (Exod. 3:1–15). Moses then returned to Egypt, where he approached the new king with the demand of Yahweh, “let my people go,” to which pharaoh responds, “Who is the Lord (YHWH) that I should obey his voice” (Exod. 5:2). This memorable encounter hardly sounds like a pharaoh who is a devotee of God, be he called Aten or Yahweh.

One reason for others to reject any Egyptian connection between Atenism and Israelite religions is a chronological gap between the supposed date of the exodus. The dates for Akhenaten’s reign are established, although a slight range exists among historians. The low chronology of Kenneth Kitchen dates his reign to 1353–1336 b.c.,31 while Donald Redford, a proponent of the high chronology, opts for 1377–1360 b.c.32 It is true that during the last 30 years, Israel’s origins in Egypt have been increasingly dismissed by Old Testament scholars and Syro-Palestinian and biblical archaeologists. The author has dealt at length with these issues in two monographs and maintains that while there is no direct evidence to prove the exodus, the Egyptian linguistic and cultural background details in the Exodus narratives suggest a historical origin for Israel in Egypt that is most plausible.33 Those who maintain a historical exodus date the Exodus to ca. 1447 b.c. (the early date) or ca. 1270 b.c.,34 and a few scholars would push the exodus to as late as the 12th century b.c.35

The 15th century date would place Moses and the exodus nearly a century before Akhenaten’s reign. The 13th century date, favored by the author, falls a generation or two after Akhenaten, while the early 12th century b.c. date is nearly a century and a half after the Amarna period. Since the dating of the era of Moses and the exodus remains unfixed, some scholars maintain that one cannot a priori dismiss a connection between two traditions. William Propp, for example, has recently revived the debate, proposing “that Atenism influenced Israel, remains viable. While I do not claim that it is correct, I insist that it is sufficiently plausible to be entertained by critical scholars, alongside or in conjunction with other possibilities.”36 He may have a point that the reasons for the knee-jerk negative response to Freud is that he was an amateur, not an academic trained in biblical and Near Eastern languages, and that his theory was overly specific in trying to identify Moses as a high priest or vizier who had a direct connection to Akhenaten.37 Propp is not dismissive of the possibility of some sort of influence of Atenism, suggesting that it “is not ludicrous and is yet to be disproved.”38

More recently, Edwin Yamauchi has also returned to the question of the possible relationship between “Akhenaten, Moses, and Monotheism,” which is the title of his essay.39 He, too, sees the chronological overlap between the two figures as a problem for establishing a direct connection between Atenism and Moses. He concludes, as did W. F. Albright 40 years earlier, that if there was any influence, it was indirect. They found it noteworthy that both “monotheistic” religions originate within less than a century of each other within Egypt, leading Albright to affirm that “it is very likely that Moses was familiar with vestigial remains of the Aten cult.”40 As was noted above, the Leiden Hymn to Amun-Re does contain hints of monotheism that may have lingered from Atenism in the Ramesside era. Some have seen the traces of the Great Hymn to Aten in Psalm 104 as a testimony to the Hebrew poet drawing from Akhenaten’s theology.

The Great Hymn To Aten And Psalm 104

As early as 1905, the Egyptologist James Henry Breasted drew attention to similarities between these Egyptian hymns and Psalm 104.41 As time went on, he became more convinced of a dependence of the Hebrew poem upon the Aten hymn. In the second edition of his History of Egypt he declared, “The one hundred and fourth Psalm of the Hebrews shows a notable similarity to our hymn both in the thought and sequence . . .”42

In the early 1930s he went so far as to claim that the Aten hymn “reveals to us the source of the Hebrew Psalmist’s recognition of the gracious and goodness of God in the maintenance of his creatures.”43 In that volume he offered his translation of the hymn in one column and what he deemed to be the similar sections of the Hebrew Psalm in the second column. He saw the points of overlap being Psalm 104:20–26 and parts of lines 4–7 in the Hymn to Aten. The point is that the areas of similarity between the two works represent relatively small portions of the respective paeans. In John Wilson’s translation of the Aten hymn, he saw additional similarities between Psalm 104:11–14 and the end of line 5 and beginning of 6 in the hymn.44 Adding these verses to the picture would mean that 15 verses out of 35 find similarities in the Hymn to Aten. At best this means only portions or snippets of the Aten hymn made their way into the Hebrew Psalm, and not in the order in which they occur in the Egyptian original. Here the verses are laid out for comparative purposes, using Wilson’s translation:45

Many biblical scholars from the 1930s through early 1960s concurred with Breasted’s position. Problems on the connection between the two pieces of literature abound. First, it is apparent that if the Aten hymn was the source, the verses were randomly extracted and were used in a very different order. Second, in recent decades, scholars have been more cautious about seeing a direct connection because of the time gap between the two pieces of literature and the geographical distance between Israel and Amarna in Egypt. Those scholars who are inclined to see some sort of dependency of the Hebrew psalm on the Aten hymn(s) seem to overlook the fact that Akhet-Aten, the decade-long capital of Akhenaten where the texts were recorded, was abandoned shortly after the king’s death. Furthermore, the tombs in which the hymns were recorded apparently were not actually used by Akhenaten’s officials because of the abandonment of the city around 1335 b.c. Then too, there are no surviving papyrus or ostraca copies of the Amarna hymns to suggest that they were copied and studied by later generations of scribes, which would have been the case if it had attained some sort of canonical status. These factors notwithstanding, there are those who maintain a dependence between the two because the similarities are in their minds too striking to ignore or unlikely to be purely coincidental.

Thus a bridge linking the two sources was proposed, namely a Canaanite, Ugaritic, or Phoenician intermediary source. Mitchell Dahood, for instance, followed the lead of George Nagel46 in believing that “it would be more prudent to envisage an indirect Egyptian influence through Canaanite mediation, more specifically through Phoenician intervention.”47 Moreover, he detected what he believed to be the presence of Canaanite and Egyptian elements that had been thoroughly Hebraized.48 Storm-god imagery (Canaanite) and Egyptian literary motifs were detected in Psalm 104 by Peter Craigie.49 Leslie Allen concurred, suggesting that the combination of Egyptian and Ugaritic elements were “a clue as to the means whereby a knowledge of Egyptian cosmological motifs became known to Israel.”50 What Allen meant by that is that there must have been some sort of Levantine intermediary between Egypt of the 14th century b.c. and the period of Israel’s divided monarchy (i.e., prior to 586 b.c.) when the Hebrew psalm was composed. To those who hold this view, this is the only way to address the problem of the geographical and chronological propinquity.

Building on the ideas of the dual emphasis of solar and storm-god language, Paul Dion offered an expanded investigation of these themes in Psalm 104.51 He maintains that it “derived from the traditions of Egypt and of Syria, in reclaiming for the God of Israel an important part of the “common theology of the Ancient Near East.”52 Dion’s reference to “the common theology of the ancient Near East,” borrows from the classic expression from the title of Morton Smith’s seminal article from 1952.53 Smith was responding to what might be called a pan-Ugaritization of Old Testament studies, in which biblical scholars were trying to explain too much in the Hebrew Bible as being influenced by Canaanite religious literature. He, rather, saw certain commonalities in worldview, ideas of kingship and how nature functions that give rise to a common theology.54 Most relevant to the issue at hand, namely the dependency of Psalm 104 on the Aten hymn(s), Smith concludes that “parallels between theological material in the OT and in ‘Ancient Near Eastern Texts’ cannot be taken off hand as indicating any literary dependence, common sources, or cultural borrowing.”55 It is curious, then, that Dion appeals to Smith’s idea of common theology because he confidently asserts that “the religious and literary phenomenon represented in a privileged fashion by the great Aten hymn somehow did come to the attention of the biblical writer. There is simply no alternative explanation for the concentration of contacts between these two poems heaped up in vv. 19–30.”56 Furthermore, he asserts that the Hebrew poet had a “source of inspiration, and used it,” and speaks of “his Amarnian source.”57

J. Glen Taylor made a thorough investigation of solar imagery that is applied to Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible.58 Perhaps the most memorable example is in the priestly prayer of Numbers 6:

Naturally, Taylor treats Psalm 104, and he contends that there was no direct borrowing by the Psalmist, but that some sort of borrowing did occur, declaring “there can be no doubt that the poetic imagery of storm and sun which the psalmist borrowed has been brought into conformity with the distinctive theological outlook of ancient Israel.”59 He rightly recognizes that the Hebrew Psalmist does not equate Yahweh with the sun. Indeed the sun and moon, and all God’s creation, are celebrated as “his works” (וישֽׂ ָ ﬠֲמַ) in Psalm 104:31, thus clearly distinguishing the creator from creation. This is no small matter.

While biblical scholars have tended to look for similarities between the two hymns, A. A. Anderson cogently observes “we must not neglect the striking differences.”60 The most “striking” difference between the Hebrew Psalm and the Hymn to Aten lies in their different understanding of the sun. For Akhenaten, the Aten or sun-disc was the vehicle through which direct revelation occurs, whereas in Hebrew thought, the sun was created by God; the sun, moon, and stars are “his works” and are never equated with God. In Hebrew thought, the sun and heavenly host can be vehicles of proclaiming the glory of God in some general way (see Chapter 8), whereas for Akhenaten, the sun-disc was the mode of direct or special revelation. These are the most fundamental differences that are hard to reconcile if there was some direct borrowing of the “Amarnian” theology by the Hebrew poet.

A Levantine Intermediary Solar Hymn?

One explanation for the parallels between the Egyptian and Hebrew hymns is that there must have been some sort of West Semitic copy or version of the Aten hymn that was preserved and accessible to the Psalmist centuries later. This scenario is certainly plausible, but we lack an Ugaritic or Phoenician text that would approximate the hypothetical mediating document. Hence the position of Nagel, Dahood, Craigie, Allen, Taylor, and others rests on the argumentum ex silentio; they must conjure up a literary “missing link.” Ronald Williams, who translated the Aten hymn for Documents from the Old Testament Times and was a respected Hebrew Bible scholar, addressed the chronological and geographical problems, saying:

In the present study, we have already investigated what Williams called the “earlier models” (Chapter 8), but need to examine some “later religious works.” In the succeeding Ramesside era (ca. 1294–1100 b.c.), solar hymns continue to use this type of language. A Leiden Papyrus from around the time of Ramesses II states62

The theme of the response of nature to the sun, well known in the Aten hymns, was noted in the Coffin Texts (Chapter 8). The so-called monotheistic hymns on the recto of Pap. Chester Beatty No. IV, which date to the end of the 19th Dynasty, also paint a similar word picture. “Flocks and herds (ʽwt mnmnt) turn to you, flying things leap (tbhn) for you. All vegetation turns to your beauty.”64

The expression ἰȝwt/ʽwt nbt tbhn is first attested in the Aten hymns, and the word tbhn is not known in Egyptian literature until the Amarna hymns.65 This suggests a possible influence of the Aten hymns on this 19th Dynasty hymn. If so, this is the only uniquely Amarna expression one can detect in later literature, whereas it has been shown that most of the solar imagery in the “Aten hymns” have antecedents from the Middle and Old Kingdoms (Chapter 8).

Hymns to the sun-god outlive the New Kingdom, and they continue to use the traditional solar language and motifs of earlier periods. First, the Book of the Dead, Chapter 15, contains paeans to Re and Osiris, and these span from the 18th Dynasty down to the Greco-Roman period with little appreciable change.66 The title of this chapter is “Worshiping Re when he rises (wbn) in the eastern horizon of the sky” . . . Hail to you when you come (ἰἰ) as Khepri, Khepri being the one who creates (ḳmȝ) the gods. When you appear (ḫʽἰ) you rise (wbn), shining (psd) (for) your mother.” . . . “They have seen Re in his appearing (ḫʽʽ), his rays (stwt) flooding the lands . . . illuminating (ḥd) the land at his birth daily.”67 Another hymn is to Re in Book of the Dead 15 is adored as the Aten: “Hail to you, O Re when you rise . . . O Sun-disc (ἰtn), Lord of the sunbeams (stwt), who shines forth (psd) from the horizon everyday: may you shine (psd) in the face of N (the deceased) . . .”68

The solar terminology in these hymns is identical with what is present in the Aten hymns, solar hymns from the earlier 18th Dynasty, and all the way back to the Old Kingdom Pyramid Texts. And ἰἰ, it was noted (see Chapter 8), was the term introduced in the final form of Aten’s didactic name. What is missing from BD 15 is the list of animals created by the deity, or their response to the rising sun, that is found at Amarna. From the Greco-Roman period, however, the temple of Khnum at Esna provides a litany to Khnum-Re that includes:

Another hymn from the same temple reads:

These lines share motifs and language with the Aten hymns, but also the Coffin Texts. The fact that earlier solar images have survived into the Greco-Roman period is well known. Louis Zabkar pointed out that not only were Ptolemaic period temples patterned after New Kingdom architectural plans, but the liturgical texts follow earlier ones with only minimal change.71 At Philae Temple there are texts dating to Ptolemy II Philadelphus (284–246 b.c.), and yet some of the liturgies are from the New Kingdom. Part of the hymn to Atum-Khepri in Room X in the Temple of Philae, Zabkar observed, comes from the opening of Pyramid Text Spell 600 (§§1652–1653).72 He argues that these texts were available to the scribes in the temple library and were written on papyri.

This continuity into the late period is not surprising since during the Kush*te and Saite periods (715–525 b.c.) these rulers looked back on the Middle and Old Kingdoms for inspiration in art and literature.73 There are examples of the entire artistic and textual repertoires of Old Kingdom tombs being lifted and copied in 26th Dynasty tombs.74 The Saite period, late 7th and 6th century b.c., has been called the “Saite Renaissance” in which ancient texts were copied and utilized. Nicolas Grimal states that Psammetichus I continued, like the Kush*te kings, to emphasize more “nationalistic” art by returning to Old Kingdom and Middle Kingdom artistic sources.”75 With this Kush*te-Saite renaissance period, Pyramid Texts reappear on coffins and in tombs of this period and occasionally in tombs down to Dynasty 30 (4th century b.c.).76 The Pyramid Texts spells were copied directly from the Old Kingdom pyramids themselves. The Pyramid of Unas as Saqqara seems to have been the inspiration for the texts used in the Memphite region. In his 2009 Brown University dissertation, Ramadan Hussein observed: “the Lower Egyptian cemeteries exhibit different levels of interest in the Pyramid Texts. The largest portion of Saite copies is attested in the shaft-tombs clustered around the pyramid of Unas.”77

It is true that Akhenaten’s successors attempted to stamp out his memory and his heretical theology. But solar religion and the traditional language associated with it, and Aten or sun-disc itself, were not censored or rejected. It was the particular theology of exclusiveness that Akhenaten attached to old solar religion and his brand of monotheism and his persecution of Amun and other deities that made him the heretic and the enemy of the polytheistic orthodoxy.

When the foregoing post-Amarna hymns are considered, several conclusions regarding the hymns to Aten and their influence in Egypt and Israel are in order:

The fact that there is no chronological gap between Egyptian sun-hymns and the Hebrew Psalm, and in the absence of any evidence for a Canaanite-Phoenician intermediary, the theory of a Semitic link between the Aten hymns and Psalm 104 can safely be abandoned.

Conclusions On Psalm 104 And The Aten Hymns

There is no philosophical reason to reject some influence from Egypt on Psalm 104. The chronological gap between the 14th century b.c. when the Aten hymns were composed (for which there are no later extant copies) and the presumed 9th–7th century date for the composition of the Hebrew Psalm has posed a problem. The notion that the principal ideas and motifs were passed on in a Semitic version via Phoenicia (Byblos is especially known for having direct contact with Egypt for centuries) has been shown to be unnecessary in view of the fact that the same solar imagery and language lived on in the Book of the Dead and various liturgical texts in Egypt down to the Ptolemaic period, and thus theoretically there could have been some direct connection, although how that would have happened remains a mystery.

Nearly 30 years ago, the author participated in a conference at the University of Toronto in which a question was raised by a member of the audience asking about the relationship between the Aten hymn and Psalm 104.78 One of the speakers, the late Klaus Baer, professor of Egyptology at the University of Chicago, offered a rather humorous but insightful answer. He memorably explained that most investigators who do comparative studies of the two pieces of literature have the King James Version in one hand, and in the other, John Wilson’s somewhat King James–like translation of the Great Hymn to Aten from the Ancient Near Eastern Texts volume (see above in this chapter). Due to the archaic English used in both translations, he suggested, a false impression is given of a direct connection between the two poems. Baer then suggested that when the Aten hymn is read in Egyptian and Psalm 104 in Hebrew, the similarities fade. He has a point, for most biblical scholars who have compared the two pieces of literature have not been experts on Egyptian language and literature.

The literary or thematic parallels between the two hymns strike one as being rather banal. When the sun rises, life on earth springs into action and humans do their work. When the sun sets, humans rest, while certain nocturnal animals prowl looking for food. The sun and moon serve to mark the passing of time and seasons. Not surprisingly, some version of a sun-god is attested across the Near East. In Sumer, he was known as Utu, while the standard Semitic word for sun, šmš, is the name of the sun-god (Shamash) in Babylon as well as in the Levant,79 and this same word for sun in the Hebrew Bible (שֶׁמֶ֗שׁ), including Psalm 104. Indeed, there is no culture in the ancient Near East for which the phenomena of nature were not common, and for whom the sun did not play a central religious role; thus these “similarities” likely reflect “the common theology” of the eastern Mediterranean world, to return to Morton Smith’s axiom. These common cosmological themes fit under what Smith called a “general pattern.”

In the absence of convincing evidence for some sort of direct connection between the Amarna hymns or later solar literature and the Hebrew Psalmist, or some Semitic intermediary document by which this material reached Israel, it seems best to conclude for the present that the “parallels” between Amarna hymns to Aten and Psalm 104 should be attributed to “the common theology” and the “general pattern.” Should some new text be discovered that offers a mechanism for explaining a connection between the two literary traditions, scholars would certainly welcome that, and where needed, one would happily revise the position taken here.

Monotheism In Israel

The origin of Israel’s religion has been the subject of hot debate for nearly two centuries. Here is not the place to review thoroughly the history of that debate, but to merely sketch some of the contours so as to allow a basis for studying the Hebrew Bible tradition alongside Atenism.

There are several problems that have led to the protracted academic deliberations. One, of course, is a matter of definition (for our working definition, see Chapter 7), especially where to draw the line between monotheism and henotheism (or monolatry), a challenge also for Egyptologists in understanding Atenism. The second major complication lies in the conflict between theoretical reconstructions of the composition of the Pentateuch or Torah by critical biblical scholars and what the biblical tradition actually claims. Since the 19th century, under the influence of evolutionary theory applied to the religion of Israel, sophisticated ideas like monotheism and covenant were believed to be developments from the end of Old Testament history. The Babylonian exile of Judah and its attendant trauma and dislocation are thought to serve as the crucible out of which monotheism finally emerged in the 6th century b.c.80 Wellhausen asserted: “Monotheism was unknown to ancient Israel. . . . It would only be from the time of the Babylonian exile that the concept was alive. Around that time, it suddenly emerges that he [Yahweh] not only controls but also created the lands and seas, with all their abundance, the heavens and their host.”81

With regard to “covenant” (Heb. b^erît), it is now known that this word was universally used in the making of treaties across the Near East in the 2nd millennium b.c.82 In fact, the word b^erît is even used as a Semitic loan-word in 13th-century Egyptian texts.83 So the use of this term in Genesis, Exodus, and Deuteronomy simply cannot be viewed as a late development.

Critical biblical scholars today by and large, while claiming that they no longer adhere precisely to Wellhausen’s four source hypothesis and his dating of those sources (Yahwist of the 9th century, the Elohist of the 8th century, Deuteronomist of the 7th century, and Priestly of the 6th century), still in fact hold to some sort of evolutionary understanding of Israelite origin.84 A new factor that has contributed to perpetuating the evolutionary model is the rejection by historical minimalists of the Bible story of Israel’s national origin, namely that a group of Hebrew pastoralists migrated to Egypt, lived there for some centuries, followed by the exodus, the Sinai wilderness period, and the Sinaitic Covenant, culminating with military conquest in the land of Canaan two generations later.85 Consequently, many biblical scholars and archaeologists now maintain that because there was no sojourn in Egypt, there was no exodus. As a result, Israel’s origin as a people and their religious traditions require a new explanation. The current theory, which has captured the imagination of many scholars, is that “Israel” was originally an indigenous people group in Canaan.86 There was a process of a long struggle with its Canaanite identity and its deities, El, Baal, Ashereh, and Astarte. Then, in some inexplicable way, this group attached itself to the god Yahweh87 (although he is not attested in the Canaanite pantheon or in any Canaanite/Ugaritic literature!). According to this view, the struggle between this god and the other Canaanite deities was not as the Bible presents it, apostasy against “the LORD your God from the land of Egypt; you know no God but me, and besides me there is no savior. It was I who knew you in the wilderness, in a land of drought,” to quote the 8th century prophet Hosea (Hos. 13:4–5). Rather, as Mark Smith frames it, “it is precisely this conflict that produced the differentiation of Israelite religion from its Canaanite heritage during the second half of the monarchy.”88

The major obstacle with the claim that Israel originated within Canaan is that there is no convincing explanation for the origin of Yahweh. The Pentateuch, the prophets, and the Psalms, when speaking of Israel’s origins, focus invariably on Egypt, Sinai, and the wilderness.89 So, according to this revisionist view, the god Yahweh evolved out of Canaanite culture and religion, and then Yahweh became the national deity and only in the end of biblical history did the Jews become authentically monotheistic. Some biblicists believe that the movement toward a Yahweh-only theology may have begun as early as the 8th century prophets, with Hezekiah’s reforms playing a decisive role in centralizing the cult (2 Kings 18; 2 Chron. 29–30), followed by Josiah’s reforms in the late 7th century (2 Kings 22–23), which is consistent with the preaching of 8th-century prophets like Hosea, Micah, and Amos,90 who likely represented “a prophetic minority.”91

Another reason that this evolutionary model continues is that it comports with the Axial Movement theory of religious development. The Zoroastrian 18th-century scholar A. H. Anquetil-Duperron had advanced the theory that in the centuries leading up to 500 b.c. there was a convergence of charismatic leaders, Zoroaster, Buddha, the Hebrew prophets, and Greek philosophers, across Asia to Europe, that led to “a great revolution for humankind.”92 The Achsenzeit (Axial Age) theory was further advanced by Karl Jaspers (who actually coined the term Achsenzeit)93 and others who saw a breakthrough occurring in this era, from which monotheism emerged. Because this theory, too, is evolutionary, it has been criticized along with other more recent developmental schemes. In his recent study, The Social Roots of Biblical Yahwism, Stephen Cook offers a fitting critique of the old evolutionary model to explain the rise of monotheism in Israel: “one can defend nineteenth-century scholars’ embrace of the developmental thesis as appropriate to their times, because of the contemporary dominance of Hegel’s and Darwin’s ideas of progress, evolution, and becoming. It is harder to view the current espousal of this thesis charitably, given the atrocities of the twentieth century and late-modern critiques of the idea of humanity’s general religious ascent.”94

The state of Pentateuchal studies is currently in flux,95 and regarding the old consensus that consolidated around Wellhausen’s views, John Van Seters has recently described that state of the art as being in “chaos rendered by the demise of the older consensus.”96 And this has had its impact on how the origins of Israel’s religion is interpreted.

No one would argue that both the biblical text itself and archaeological data from Iron Age Israel show (bull cults, Asherah figures, etc.)97 that Yahweh was the only deity worshiped in Israel and that other gods and goddess were not worshiped at different times and places. Indeed, the Hebrew Bible repeatedly speaks of Israel’s recidivism and worshiping “other gods.” Even in the “era” of Moses in the Sinai Wilderness, immediately after the grand theophany of Yahweh at Mt. Sinai (Exodus 19), a golden calf was molded and celebrated with offerings (Exod. 32). Moses reportedly demolished it (Exod. 32:20), in keeping with the first two commandments:

Moreover, even Joshua, Moses’s successor, is reported to have spoken to the Israelites soon after entry into the land of Canaan in a covenant renewal ceremony at Shechem and indicated that the ancestors of Israel worshiped other deities.

Joshua complained that they continued to be entangled in pagan practices:

Ever since Martin Noth’s seminal work in 1943, scholars have viewed Joshua as a part of the work of the Deuternomistic History, compiled in the 7th century b.c. in Jerusalem.98 Thus the narratives are largely a retrospective viewed through the lens of the reforms of Josiah. Robert Boling and G. E. Wright, however, regarded this Shechem pericope to be “pre-Deuteronomic,”99 while in his recent monograph on the origins of monotheism in Israel, André Lemaire suggests that the Shechem episode “is probably also historical,” but, in his view, the account portrays monolatry (i.e., henotheism), not strictly monotheism.100

The point argued here is that there was an official or orthodox view of Yahweh the God of the Exodus and Sinai that the prophets promoted, but that there was persistent tension between “biblical Yahwism,” to use Cook’s term, and popular religion’s syncretistic tendency to intermingle Yahwism with local Canaanite cults.101 Fifty years ago, Norman Snaith commented on this fusion: “It is the fact of the existence of the one and only High God from the beginning which leads scholars to see monotheism, or traces of monotheism at all stages of Israelite history . . . but this does not preclude low-god cults at that particular time.”102 “Popular religion” and state or official religion are not always the same, but typically coexist. It has been shown in New Kingdom Egypt that popular religion in the village of Deir el-Medineh (Western Thebes) included the major deities of state religion, who were worshiped among the people of this community, but that the cults of other local deities not attached to the major state-sponsored temples were also venerated by the villagers.103 The picture with Israel is surely the same, namely, that the official religion of Israel—with its first cult center in Shiloh104 but later in Jerusalem—was Yahwism. After all, the temple was called “the house of Yahweh” (הָ֥והְי חיִֵ֥בּ). Indeed, there are more than 230 references to this expression in the Old Testament. Popular religion, with its local “high places” (הָֽמָבּ/תוֹ֑מָבּ), was a perennial problem for orthodoxy in Israel and Judah during the monarchy, but Yahweh’s dominance was clear, as evidenced by the choice of personal names used in the Hebrew Bible. One study has shown that of the 466 theophoric names, 89 percent are Yahwistic while only 11 percent are pagan.105 Lest one think that the biblical data are slanted to reflect positively on devotion to Yahweh, an analysis of theophoric names from available epigraphic (extra-biblical) sources by Jeffrey Tigay revealed that 557 cases use some form of divine name Yahweh, whereas only 35 employ clearly identifiable “pagan” names, which is 6.3 percent.106 Personal names are a good indicator of the deities venerated by the parents giving the names.

Although not the current prevailing view among biblical scholars, there is a stream of thought following scholars like Yehezkel Kaufmann,107 Helmer Ringren,108 William F. Albright,109 Georg Fohrer,110 and recently Lemaire,111 that trace the origins of Israel’s religion to the southern desert (Midian or Sinai) and the theophany of Yahweh to Moses.

The reason for looking for Israel and Yahweh’s origin in Sinai or Midian is that among the geographical lists at the Temple of Amenhotep III at Soleb in Nubia are references to names of various Bedouin or desert tribes (Egyptian Shasu), including the Shasu land of 𓇌 𓉔 𓍯𓅂, which reads yhwȝ.112 These names were also recopied at the nearby ‘Amrah temple of Ramesses II in the 13th century b.c.113 Egyptian yhwȝ linguistically corresponds to Hebrew YHWH. This toponym led some scholars to think that it points to a geographical territory where a cult for Yahwa existed in the 14th century b.c.114

This interpretation is strengthened by the proximity of Seir in the same list. Genesis 32:3 indicates that Seir is one and the same as Edom, or is some part of it or adjacent to it: “Jacob sent messengers before him to his brother Esau in the land of Seir, the country of Edom.” Other passages in Genesis associate the two names: “So Esau settled in the hill country of Seir; Esau is Edom. These are the descendants of Esau, ancestor of the Edomites, in the hill country of Seir” (Exod 36:8–9).

The proximity of Seir and yhwȝ in the Soleb and ‘Amrah geographical lists support the theory that Yahweh may have had his origin in the area of northeastern Sinai or the southern Arabah. This area, in turn, is associated with the home of the Kenites,115 who are associated with the in-laws of Moses (Judg. 1:16).

Thus this Egyptian evidence seems to support the view that this is the very region where the Bible suggests Moses encountered Yahweh and where the Israelite encamped in the wilderness during the period 1350–1250 b.c.

From the perspective of the historian of religion, especially the phenomenologist, theophany is always foundational to a religion. The Sinai theophany is no exception. Memorable is the 9th-century story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal on Mt. Carmel in northern Israel. Yahweh’s prophet challenges the followers of Baal to “call upon the name of your god, and I will call upon the name of the Lord, and the God who answers by fire, he is God” (1 Kings 18:24). At the end of the competing calls for a divine manifestation by the Baal prophets, Elijah called on Yahweh and “then the fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt offering and the wood and the stones and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench. And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces and said, ‘The Lord, he is God; the Lord, he is God’” (vss. 38–39). “The fire of the LORD” here surely evokes memories of the Sinai kratophany with its “thunders and lightnings” (Exod. 19:16). Noteworthy is the juxtaposition of this Mt. Carmel theophany (1 Kings 18) and Elijah’s pilgrimage to Horeb (i.e., Sinai), where he experienced a numinous encounter at “the mount of God” (1 Kings 19:8).

The Mt. Carmel episode well illustrates the tug-of-war between Yahweh and local (Canaanite) deities, but also suggests that despite the invitation for Baal to reveal himself, there was none. Commenting on the contest between Elijah and the prophets of Baal, Simon DeVries proposes that Elijah’s statement “the god who answers by fire, he is God” (1 Kings 18:24) indicates that “early Israel believed not in a theoretical but a practical monotheism, i.e. that the only god who counts as real is the one who acts, who has power to help his people.”116

Concluding Thoughts

In this study it has been suggested that in the middle of the 14th century b.c. Akhenaten advocated a monotheistic expression of solar religion, namely Atenism. In Chapter 5, based on the language and terminology used on the boundary stela at Amarna, the idea was advanced that Akhenaten was the recipient of some sort of theophany, a revelation of the sun god (Aten) that was repeated in connection with the discovery of the site in middle Egypt to build his holy city, Akhet-Aten (Chapter 5). Then, after the move to that new capital, a third and unequivocally monotheistic form of Aten’s didactic name was introduced, Living Re, Ruler of the Horizon, Rejoicing in the Horizon in His Name of “Re, the Father, who has come as the Sun-disc” which involved the removal of the names of Shu (meaning light or the deity by that name) and Horus (from Harakhty) so as to convey one and only one God (Chapter 7). The names of Amun and other gods, and the plural writing for “gods,” were erased in many tombs, stelae, obelisks, and temples. The early appearance of Aten as a man with the head of the falcon with the sun-disc on its head soon disappears, with only the sun-disc and its rays surviving as the official icon. The Aten hymns seem to serve as the official dogma of this “sole god.”

Akhenaten must be considered the founder of Atenism. However, his monotheistic religion lacked a committed group of disciples or followers who carried on the tradition, copied, compiled, and canonized his teaching (sbȝyt) for future generations. Egypt was clearly not prepared to give up its gods for the One, and officials like the priests Meryre and Panehsy, and high officials like Ay and Horemheb, must have realized that they were swimming against the current, and so abandoned Aten, opting for Amun-Re and traditional religion.

With regard to Axial Movement theory and Atenism, Assmann has observed that “ancient Egyptian evidence invites us to modify the Axial Age theory in two respects that are of some importance to our general search for the roots of monotheism.”117 He suggests that one needs to consider “smaller-scaled transformations” as influential on a culture, rather than major movements and the role that “breakdown and breakthrough” play in cultural and religious transformation to monotheism. When it comes to Israel, however, Assmann falls in step with the prevailing view among biblical scholars that even though Israel’s founding “story is set in Egypt at a time strangely proximate to that of Akhenaten and his monotheistic revolution, that is, in the fourteenth century or thirteenth century b.c.e. However, it was told at a much later time, in the seventh through fifth centuries, and in Judaea and Babylon at the time of the Babylonian exile and Persian domination.”118

What Atenism demonstrates is that even though it was only a blip on the radar of religious history, the “breakthrough” had occurred, to borrow Assmann’s term. This means that there is no reason a priori to dismiss the idea of Mosaic monotheism or Yahwistic monotheism as originating in the century following Akhenaten. Here, too, an individual, Moses, reportedly experienced a theophany which the ancient Hebrews who had been in Egypt witnessed at Mt. Sinai/Horeb (Exod. 19–20), and which led to the establishment of a cult (with a movable shrine at first) and a body of teachings (the Book of the Covenant, Exod. 24:7).119 While it appears that some or even many in early Israel were not prepared to follow Yahweh alone and his cult that had no images, some followed a more syncretistic form of Yahwism. Nevertheless, Mosaic monotheism had followers who perpetuated the religion, such as Joshua, Samuel, Elijah, Isaiah, and other prophets and priests like Jehoida and Hilkiah (2 Kings 11 & 22), and transmitted the tradition and added to it over time. It may be that beginning with reformer kings like Hezekiah (late 8th century) and Josiah (7th century), and through the preaching of prophets and priests and scribes, during and after the exile, a monotheist faith in Yahweh was no longer debated or challenged in the Jewish community. Standing behind these later reforms is the God Yahweh, who was believed to have delivered the Hebrews from Egypt, and the Sinai revelation. The latter is recalled in the Song of Deborah, thought to be among the oldest poetic works in the Old Testament,120 “The mountains quaked before the Lord, even Sinai before the Lord, the God of Israel” (Judg. 5:5).

The fact that Atenism was a monotheistic religion does not prove that Mosaic Yahwism, possibly originating in the following century, was also monotheistic, but from the perspective of the historian of religion, there is no reason to deny that possibility. This is not to say that there was any direct or indirect influence of one upon the other, but Atenism does demonstrate that a long evolution from animism to monotheism, as early anthropologists of religion of the 19th century maintained and some biblical scholars still advocate, is not a viable model to explain the origins of monotheism. True monotheism normally requires a theophany (or the belief in one), a charismatic leader, and followers to sustain and transmit the traditions and doctrines. This seems to be the pattern behind monotheistic faiths that survived: Moses and ancient Israel’s religion and later Judaism; Zarathushtra and Zoroasterism; Jesus and Christianity; and Mohammed and Islam. Why Atenism ultimately did not survive beyond the lifetime of its founder is that it lacked the adherents to perpetuate the belief. So the sun set on Akhenaten’s monotheistic religious experiment so that it is a footnote in history, but indeed an important one—the first one to advocate one God, the universal creator and sustainer of all life.

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