17
SINCE 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.
In the early years of this century, Flinders Petrie led an expedition into Sinai where he recorded what he was able to find of ancient inscriptions. The resulting evidence showed that the Egyptians had sent expeditions to the mountains of Sinai since early dynastic times, mainly for the purpose of mining turquoise.
Sinai is in the form of a triangle with its apex to the south between the two arms of the Red Sea, the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba. At its northern base runs the road from Egypt to Asia, from Kantarah to Gaza along the Mediterranean coastline. To the south of this low northern land is a lofty limestone plateau, crossed by only a few narrow passes. The southern triangle, between the two arms of the Red Sea, is a mountain mass including Mount Sinai or Mount Horeb (modern name, Gebel Musa, which means the Mount of Moses). En route from the Eastern Delta through the valleys, before arriving at Mount Sinai we come to another important site, Sarabit el-Khadim, a mountain area with many turquoise mines.
On the high peak of Sarabit, 2600 feet above sea level, a shrine was constructed, originally in a cave, although by the time of the New Kingdom it had been extended outside and reached a total length of 230 feet. This temple was dedicated to Hathor, the local deity. Petrie found fragments of a limestone stela at Sarabit, made by Ramses I. Although the stela is not actually dated, this poses no problem as Ramses I ruled for little more than a year. What is surprising about the stela is that in its inscription Ramses I describes himself as ‘the ruler of all that the Aten embraces’.1 Of this unexpected reappearance of the fallen Aten, Petrie commented: ‘To find the Aten mentioned thus after the ruthless Amunism of Horemheb is remarkable. Hitherto the latest mention of it was under King Aye.’2
The name of the Aten had been missing for thirteen years during the reign of Horemheb: now in the time of his successor, Ramses I, the hated God has reappeared, not in Egypt proper but in Sinai. The stela made more than a quarter of a century after Akhenaten’s fall from power, also features the Amarna realistic style: ‘The portion which is preserved of the figure [Ramses I’s figure at the top of the stela] is carefully wrought, and in the dress resembles the work of Akhenaten.’3
This was not the only surprising discovery. At the temple Petrie found the dark green head, executed in the Amarna style, of a statuette of Queen Tiye, Akhenaten’s mother. The complete statuette must have been about a foot high. Why should it be at Sarabit? ‘It is strange that this remotest settlement of Egypt has preserved her portrait for us, unmistakably named by her cartouche in the midst of the crown,’ Petrie remarked. ‘The haughty dignity of the face is blended with a fascinating directness and personal appeal. The delicacy of the surfaces round the eye and over the cheek shows the greatest delicacy in handling. The curiously drawn-down lips with their fullness and yet delicacy, their disdain without malice, are evidently modelled in all truth from the life.’4
Petrie was also able to find evidence indicating that the rituals performed in the temple at Sarabit were of Semitic nature:
• The Offering of Burnt Sacrifices: He found a bed of clean white ash under a considerable portion of the temple, amounting to more than fifty tons, which he took to represent the remains of burnt sacrifices over a long period.5 This practice is known from the Bible to have been Israelite.
• The Dedication of Conical Stones: Two cones of sandstone, alike in shape and size, were found in the temple. Stones of this type were used in certain forms of Syrian ritual and are not to be found in Egypt.
• An Elaborate Ceremony of Ablutions: At Sarabit there were three rectangular tanks and a circular basin, placed to be used at four different stages of entering the temple. This makes it clear that ablutions played a great role in the form of worship at Sarabit as they do in both Judaism and Islam.6
• The Practice of Visiting Sacred Places for the Purpose of Obtaining Oracular Dreams and the Setting Up of Memorial Stones at the Spot Where the Dream Occurred: Scattered over the area around the temple Petrie came across many slabs of sandstone, set upright. The slabs ranged in height from a few inches to a couple of feet, propped up by other stones if necessary to make them stand on end. Similar piled stones were found around Mount Sinai, indicating that both areas were regarded as sacred places. This archaeological find agrees with what we find in the Bible:
And he (the Lord) said, Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground. (Exodus, 3:5)
Petrie noted that this piling of stones is part of a well-known system of sacred stones, set upright in adoration, that is not Egyptian, and for him the only explanation for this ritual would be the custom of sleeping at or near a sacred place in order to obtain some vision from the deity, which he compared with what the patriarch Jacob is said to have done:7
And Jacob went out from Beersheba, and went toward Haran.
And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows, and lay down in that place to sleep.
And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. (Genesis, 28:10–12)
If Akhenaten lived at the Sarabit temple for twenty-five years, although he would not have changed any of his original beliefs it is easy to envisage his adopting some of the local Semitic rituals that did not conflict with them. But why Sinai – why would he choose Sinai for his place of refuge in exile?
Although Sinai was regarded as part of Egypt from the early days of Egyptian history, no army garrison was stationed there. Nor did it have a resident governor. Instead, during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties the area was placed under the control of two officials, the Royal Messenger in All Foreign Lands and the Royal Chancellor.
Neby, the Troop Commander and Mayor of Zarw, was also the Royal Messenger in All Foreign Lands. Zarw was Tiye’s city, where the Israelites lived until their Exodus, and there are also indications that Zarw remained faithful to the Aten during the reigns of Tutankhamun and Aye. It was only when Horemheb appointed Pa-Ramses (later Ramses I) to the posts previously held by Neby that the climate changed. At least until that time, therefore, Akhenaten could count on being able to live in peace in his chosen refuge.
Nor was he under any threat from the Royal Chancellor, who was responsible for the mining expeditions sent to Sarabit. We know from inscriptions found in Sinai and other sources that, up to the time of Amenhotep III, the treasury was placed in the hands of one family, that of Pa-Nehas, for three generations. Akhenaten himself also appointed Panahesy, a descendant of Pa-Nehas, as his chancellor and Chief Servitor of the Aten in his temple at Amarna as well as the Servitor of the King in the temple. Thus the family of Pa-Nehas was not only involved in Akhenaten’s government, but in his worship. It would therefore have been normal for them to suggest Sarabit as a place of exile where they would have been able to give him support.
Although there is as yet no complete proof, it is easy to see that, in the prevailing circumstances, Sarabit offered the best, if not the only, location for Akhenaten’s exile – a holy place, close to another holy place, Mount Sinai, away from Egyptian control, where he could meditate and develop his religious ideas until, when Horemheb’s death brought the Eighteenth Dynasty to an end, he came back to try to reclaim his throne.
The Ten Commandments
The Ten Commandments given by the Lord God of Moses to the Israelites in Sinai are clearly in an Egyptian tradition and would seem to have common roots with the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
Egyptians believed that, after their death, they faced a trial in the underworld before Osiris and his forty-two judges in the Hall of Judgement. Spell 125 of the Book of the Dead contains a Negative Confession that the dead person has to recite on this occasion, containing such assurances as:
I have done no falsehood,
I have not robbed,
I have not stolen,
I have not killed men,
I have not told lies.
The Ten Commandments are a kind of positive form of this Egyptian Negative Confession:
Thou shalt not kill,
Thou shalt not steal,
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
It therefore seems likely that Akhenaten, who did not believe in Osiris or his underworld, turned the moral code according to which the Egyptians believed their dead would be judged into an imperative code of behaviour for his followers in this life.