Moses and Akhenaten (27 page)

It was only on the death of Aye himself that Horemheb, another powerful military figure, emerged to take power on behalf of the dissident Establishment and to start the campaign of destruction designed to remove all trace of Amarna rule from Egyptian history.

17

THE FIRST MONOTHEIST

S
INCE
Freud first showed the similarity between the religions of Moses and Akhenaten fifty years ago in his book
Moses and Monotheism,
there has been endless argument about the identity of the first monotheist. As we saw in the introduction to this book, attempts have been made to place the Jewish Exodus long before the Amarna period, thus ensuring the honour for Moses. Then, when this approach failed and all the evidence pointed to the Exodus having taken place
after
the Amarna reigns, the focal points of attack became the discrediting of Akhenaten himself and efforts to demonstrate that the beliefs he introduced into Egypt were not monotheistic at all.

The holy books establish Moses as the first monotheist although, while the Hebrew patriarchs believed in one God, they accepted that other peoples had other gods to worship, as in the case of Laban (Genesis, 31:43–55). Yet, from historical sources, Akhenaten is the first person we know of to introduce worship of one God. An examination of their respective religious beliefs makes it clear that Moses and Akhenaten should not be looked upon, as has been largely the case, as rivals but as the same person.

Akhenaten's God

The early representations of Akhenaten's God showed the deity as of human shape with the head of a falcon, surmounted by a solar disc. Towards the end of his Year 2 or early in his Year 3 an important development took place in this representation. The human figure disappeared and in its place a golden disc was shown at the top of the scene with extended rays that came down over the members of the royal family as well as the temple, altar and palace. These rays ended in hands that held the symbols of ‘life' and ‘power'. To indicate the kingly status of Akhenaten's God, an uraeus (cobra) hung from the disc in the same way as an uraeus adorned the brow of the king. At the same time the name and epithet of the God was placed inside two cartouches, matching the manner in which the ruling king's name was written.

The God introduced by Moses to Israel is often spoken of and addressed as a ‘king' (Isaiah, 41:21; 44:6; 52:7) and the so-called
Enthronement Psalms of Jehovah
(Psalms 47:93; 96–9) emphasize this kingly idea of the Lord. Yet the attribution of kingship to Jehovah was certainly foreign to Israelite thought at the time of the Exodus.

Akhenaten seems to have drawn on the traditional worship of the solar god of Heliopolis in many ways. The early name for Akhenaten's God was the same as the name of the Heliopolitan god Re-Harakhti (Horus of the horizon). Furthermore, the name given by the king to his early Karnak temple,
ben-ben
(obelisk), was the same as that of the Heliopolitan temples where the
ben-ben
(a small pyramid on a square base) was a characteristic of the solar temples. Meryre II, the high priest of Akhenaten's God, the Aten, was also given the same title – ‘greatest of seers' – as the high priest of Heliopolis.

From the inscriptions both at the Karnak temple and at the rock tombs of Amarna, especially that of Aye, we can see how Akhenaten regarded his God:

‘The living Aten, there is none other than He';

‘Who Himself gave birth to Himself';

‘He who decrees life, the Lord of sunbeams';

‘The world came forth from Thy (Aten) hand';

‘Thou createst the earth when Thou were afar, namely men, cattle, all flocks, and everything on earth which moves with legs, or which is up above flying with wings. The foreign countries of Syria (north) and Kush (south), and the land of Egypt, Thou placest every man in his place, and makest their food. Everyone has his food, and his lifetime is reckoned; and similarly their languages are wholly separate in form. For their colours are different, for Thou hast made foreign peoples different';

‘Thou … creator of months and maker of days, and reckoner of hours'.

We find echoes of these attributes in the God of Moses. He was:

a sole God

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord. (Deuteronomy, 6:4)

Thou shalt have no other gods before me. (Exodus, 20:3)

without a cult image

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. (Exodus, 20:4)

the creator of the world

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. (Genesis, 1:1)

the king of the world

The Lord shall reign for ever and ever. (Exodus, 15:18)

the father

And thou shalt say unto Pharaoh, Thus saith the Lord, Israel is my son, even my firstborn. (Exodus, 4:22)

Temple and Worship

The way the patriarchs who preceded Moses worshipped their God was by building an altar of stone at the spot where the Lord had spoken to them:

And the Lord appeared unto Abram, and said, Unto thy seed will I give this land; and there builded he an altar unto the Lord, who appeared unto him. (Genesis, 12:7)

And he erected there an altar, and called it El-elohe-Israel. (Genesis, 33:20)

They made offerings of drink and oil:

And Jacob set up a pillar in the place where he talked with him, even a pillar of stone: and he poured a drink offering thereon, and oil thereon. (Genesis, 35:14)

And they also offered sacrifices:

Then Jacob offered sacrifice upon the mount, and called his brethren to eat bread: and they did eat bread, and tarried all night in the mount. (Genesis, 31:54)

And Israel took his journey with all that he had, and came to Beer-sheba, and offered sacrifices unto the God of his father Isaac. (Genesis, 46:1)

Moses was the first person to introduce a temple into Israelite worship when he created the tabernacle in Sinai. It is true that the Canaanites did build their own kind of stone temples in Palestine, and even in some locations in the Eastern Delta during the Hyksos period, but we have no evidence that the Israelites had, or made use of, any such construction before the time of Moses. For his part, Akhenaten adapted the Heliopolitan solar form of the Egyptian temple – the same form used by Moses in the desert – to be used as the place of worship for his new religion.

Accordingly, there was no Israelite priesthood before the time of Moses. It was he who arranged the priesthood in two main levels, the high priest and the ordinary priests, and instructed them on what garments to wear, how to be purified and anointed and how to go about fulfilling the duties of their office. Ritual and worship at the newly-established Israelite tabernacle were similar to those introduced by Akhenaten, who instructed his followers to sacrifice the sacred Egyptian animals for his new God, again echoing an incident that we find in the story of Moses:

And Moses said, It is not meet so to do; for we shall sacrifice the abomination of the Egyptians to the Lord our God: lo, shall we sacrifice the abomination of the Egyptians before their eyes, and will they not stone us? (Exodus, 8:26)

Moses also introduced the ark, the receptacle in the temple in which the Pentateuch scrolls were to be kept (Exodus, 25:10). The ark is regarded as being the holiest part of the Jewish temple after the Pentateuch itself. This again was an Egyptian practice, as Akhenaten adopted the Egyptian holy boat, usually kept in the temple where it was used to carry the deity during processions.

Jehovah, Adonai and Aten

Before the time of Moses, the patriarchs identified their God in a variety of terms, all of which were names of ancient Canaanite deities, such as:

El: (Genesis, 33:20);

El ‘Elyon (The Most High): (Psalms, 73:11);

El ‘Olam (The Everlasting God): (Genesis, 21:33);

El Shaddai (God Almighty): (Genesis, 17:1);

El Ro-i (The God Who Sees Me, or The God Of Vision): (Exodus, 6:3);

Elohim: Elohim, the plural of Eloho, meaning ‘a god' and thought to be a lengthened form of ‘El', is used in the Bible more than two thousand times and is usually replaced in English by the word ‘God', but it is also used for pagan gods and goddesses (Exodus, 12:12 and I Kings, 11:5).

Jehovah: This, the personal name of the God of Israel, is written in Hebrew with four consonants, YHWH, which is understood to mean ‘I am' and is referred to as the ‘Tetragrammaton'. Like Elohim, this name occurs frequently in the Bible and is usually replaced in English by the word ‘Lord'.

Adonai (My Lord): The Hebrew word ‘Adonai' is also usually rendered in English as ‘Lord'. It is used in the Bible to refer to human beings (‘The man, who is the lord of the land …', Genesis, 42:30') as well as God. We also find the combined form ‘Adonai Jehovah' (My Lord Jehovah):

And Abram said, Lord God, what wilt thou give me…? (Genesis, 15:2)

And he said, Lord God, whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it? (Genesis, 15:8)

O Lord God, thou hast begun to shew thy servant thy greatness, and thy mighty hand … (Deuteronomy, 3:24)

The ‘ai' can be removed from the word ‘Adonai' as it is a Hebrew pronoun meaning ‘my' or ‘mine' and signifying possession. We are then left with ‘Adon' (Lord) which, as correctly noted by Freud, is the Hebrew word for the Egyptian ‘Aten' as the Egyptian ‘t' becomes ‘d' in Hebrew and the vowel ‘e' becomes an ‘o'. The name of the God of Moses, Adon, is therefore in the above references the same as the name of the God of Akhenaten, Aten.

What of Jehovah? The Book of Exodus account of the argument that took place in Sinai between Moses and his God over the question of his return to Egypt to rescue the Israelites does not make any real sense unless Moses and Akhenaten were one and the same person. When his new religion was rejected, Akhenaten fled to Sinai, leaving the throne to his son, Tutankhamun, who was followed by Aye, then Horemheb. When Horemheb died, there was no Tuthmosside heir to the Eighteenth Dynasty apart from Akhenaten himself in desert exile. Pa-Ramses, Horemheb's vizier, commander of the army and mayor of Zarw in the Eastern Delta – where he resided and where the Israelites and Egyptian followers of Akhenaten had been imprisoned – prepared to proclaim himself the new King of Egypt as Ramses I.

Having been rejected by the majority of Egyptians, Akhenaten now decided to choose the Israelites as his own people. However, when the Lord urges him in the Book of Exodus story to challenge the new Pharaoh, it becomes clear that his main concern is not confrontation with Ramses I but how he is to succeed in obtaining the support of the Israelites. His first problem is that he does not speak their language sufficiently well:

And Moses said unto the Lord, O my Lord, I am not eloquent … I am slow of speech and of a slow tongue. (Exodus, 4:10)

For this reason, Aaron, the Israelite feeding brother of his early childhood (see page 182), had to be enlisted as his spokesman:

And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Moses, and he said, Is not Aaron the Levite thy brother? I know that he can speak well … (Exodus, 4:14)

The second problem facing Akhenaten in enlisting the support of the Israelites was to establish a relationship between his God and the God of the Israelites' ancestors. Both Gods were the same in the sense that, unlike the ancient gods of Egypt, they had no image. The question of God's name, however, seems to have been a matter of compromise, giving rise to two strange passages in the Book of Exodus. The first arises when Moses asks which name he should use:

And Moses said unto God, Behold when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say unto them?

And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM (i.e. Jehovah) hath sent me unto you. (Exodus, 3:13–14)

The second passage, in which God informs Moses that he never appeared to the patriarchs under the name Jehovah, is even stranger in the light of the fact that we encounter this name in several chapters of the preceding Book of Genesis:

And I appeared unto Abraham, and unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name of God Almighty, but by my name JE-HO-VAH was I not known to them. (Exodus, 6:3)

It seems that Akhenaten would not reject the name of his God, the Aten, simply to secure the support of the Israelites. Therefore a compromise had to be reached. Its nature was that, while the Hebrew word ‘YHWH' could be written, it could not be read aloud but had to be pronounced as ‘Adonai'. Nobody knows when this Jewish practice started although I believe it dates from the time of Moses. Nor has any convincing explanation ever been put forward for the interdict. To say that a ban on uttering God's personal name was intended as a sign of respect is contradicted by the fact that all the other names given to the Israelite God before the time of Moses, as well as Adonai, are spoken aloud by the Jews. In fact, as Freud has noted, the God of Akhenaten is the same as the God of Moses, as can be clearly seen from the way the verse from Deuteronomy cited at the beginning of this chapter is written in Hebrew:

Shema Yisrael YaHWaH Elohina YaHWaH Ekhod.

That is:

Hear, O Israel, Jehovah our God is the only God.

However, according to this ancient tradition, when read aloud by Jewish believers, it becomes:

Shema Yisrael: Adonai Elohina Adonai Ekhod

This confirms that a compromise was reached in Sinai under which the old personal name of God, Jehovah, before the time of Moses would never be pronounced again and should in every case be replaced by Adonai, the name of the God of Akhenaten.

The Evidence of Sinai

We know from the biblical story that Moses fled to Sinai after killing the Egyptian – after falling from power according to the Talmud – and lived there until his return after the Pharaoh of the Oppression had died. What about Akhenaten? Although we do not have conclusive evidence that Akhenaten followed a similar course, there are many indications that point to this being the case.