6
IF we assume for the moment what is as yet far from proved – that Moses and Akhenaten were the same person – it is possible to assemble a brief outline of the historical facts behind the varied, and at times extravagant, accounts of the life of the greatest Jewish hero that we find in the Old Testament and other holy books, and to offer an explanation of why the world should have remembered him by the name of Moses.
Moses, the second son of Amenhotep III and Queen Tiye, was born, I believe, at the frontier fortified city of Zarw, probably in 1394 BC (see also Chapter Eleven). His elder brother, Tuthmosis, had already disappeared mysteriously, and, in view of the threats that were about to be made to the life of Moses, it seems more than likely that the disappearance of Tuthmosis was not the result of natural causes. The reason for the king’s hostility to the young princes was the fact that Tiye, their mother, was not the legitimate heiress. She could therefore not be accepted as the consort of the State god Amun.
Furthermore, as she herself was of mixed Egyptian-Israelite blood, her children would not, by Egyptian custom, be regarded as heirs to the throne. If her son acceded to the throne, this would be regarded as forming a new dynasty of non-Egyptian, non-Amunite, part-Israelite kings over Egypt. This is exactly the light in which the Amunite priests and nobles of Egypt, the watchdogs of old traditions, regarded Akhenaten. It was not he who first rejected the position of son of Amun: it was they, the Amunists, who refused to accept him as the legitimate heir to the throne.
Consequently, the king, motivated by the possible threat to the dynasty and confrontation with the priesthood, instructed the midwives to kill Tiye’s child in secrecy if it proved to be a boy. The Talmud story confirms that it was the survival of Moses that Pharaoh wanted to prevent, because, once he knew that Moses had been born and survived, his attempt to kill all the male Israelite children at birth was abandoned: ‘After Moses was placed in the Nile, they [Pharaoh’s astrologers] told Pharaoh that the redeemer had already been cast into the water, whereupon Pharaoh rescinded his decree that the male children should be put to death. Not only were all the future children saved, but even the … children [who had already been] cast into the Nile with Moses.’1
Zarw was largely surrounded by lakes and a branch of the Nile. On learning – perhaps from the midwives – that her son’s life was in danger, Tiye sent Moses by water to the safe-keeping of her Israelite relations at nearby Goshen. Yet the biblical story makes it clear that the king was still afraid of Moses. Why should the mighty Pharaoh fear Moses if he was simply a child of the despised Asiatic shepherds? In those circumstances, how could he have posed a threat to the Dynasty?
Moses spent most of his youth in the Eastern Delta where he absorbed the traditional Israelite beliefs in a God without an image. It was not until he was a grown boy that he was finally allowed to take up residence at Thebes, the capital city in Upper Egypt and the principal centre of worship of the State god, Amun. By this time the health of his father had begun to deteriorate and Tiye’s power had increased correspondingly. In order to ensure her son’s ultimate inheritance of the throne, she therefore arranged for him to marry his half-sister Nefertiti – the daughter of Amenhotep III by his sister, Sitamun, the legitimate heiress – and to be appointed his father’s coregent, with special emphasis on Nefertiti’s role in order to placate the priests and nobles.
Moses, whose religious ideas were already well developed, offended the Amunite priesthood from the start of the coregency by building temples to his monotheistic God, the Aten, at Karnak and Luxor. In a climate becoming increasingly hostile, Tiye eventually persuaded him to leave Thebes and found a new capital for himself at Tell el-Amarna, some 200 miles to the north, roughly halfway between Thebes and the Eastern Delta. Moses named his new city Akhetaten – the city of the horizon of the Aten – in honour of his new God.
It was during this period that the old king became concerned about the growing power of the Israelites and sought advice about how to deal with them. But this cannot be simply because they had grown in number and might side with his enemies: the growth in their numbers would simply have provided him with more slaves to work for him and made him stronger in the face of foreign aggressors. What we are dealing with is a religious revolution. The vast increase in the numbers of the Israelites by this time was not simply a matter of their birth rate: the declaration by Moses that the Aten, his God, was the only true God, had attracted many Egyptian adherents who, as a result of their conversion to the new religion, became regarded as Israelites. Other evidence suggests that the Israelites had also achieved political importance and high position in the land, with, according to Manetho, priests and learned people in their ranks. At the same time, those of Moses’ followers who did not follow him to Amarna were, according to Manetho, set to harsh work in the stone quarries.
At Amarna the monotheistic ideas of Moses underwent further development and, when he became sole ruler on the death of his father, Amenhotep III, after the end of his Year 38 – Year 12 of Moses – he shut down the temples of the ancient gods of Egypt, cut off all financial support for them and sent the priests home. These actions caused so much bitter resentment that, in his Year 15, Moses was forced to install his brother, Semenkhkare, as his coregent at Thebes. This action served only to delay the eventual showdown. In his Year 17 Moses was warned by his uncle, Aye, the second son of the Patriarch Joseph (Yuya), of a plot against his life, and he abdicated and fled to Sinai, taking with him his pharaonic symbol of authority, the staff topped by a bronze serpent. Semenkhkare did not long survive the departure of Moses – perhaps only a few days – and was replaced on the throne by Moses’ son, the boy king Tutankhamun, who restored the old gods, but attempted a compromise by allowing the Aten to be worshipped alongside them. Tutankhamun ruled for at least nine, and perhaps ten, years and was succeeded by Aye, his great-uncle, who ruled for four years before the army leader, Horemheb, brought the era of Amarna rule to an end.
The bitterness which divided the country at the time is indicated by the actions of Horemheb and the Ramesside kings who followed him. The names of the Amarna kings were excised from king lists and monuments in a studied campaign to try to remove all trace of them from Egypt’s memory, and it was forbidden even to mention in conversation the name of Akhenaten. In addition, the Israelites were put to the harsh work of building the treasure cities of Pithom and Raamses.
On the death of Horemheb, there was no legitimate Eighteenth Dynasty heir. Ramses, Horemheb’s elderly vizier, took power as Ramses I, the first ruler of the Nineteenth Dynasty. On hearing of Horemheb’s death, Moses returned from Sinai to challenge Ramses’ right to the throne. With him he brought his sceptre of authority, the bronze serpent. The wise men of Egypt were assembled to decide between the rival claimants to the throne, but, while they chose Moses as the rightful heir, Ramses controlled the army, which was to prove the decisive factor in the power struggle. For a short time, however, Moses did succeed in establishing his followers as a community in Zarw, which for the Israelites may be likened to the Paris Commune briefly established in the French capital in 1871. Then, having failed in his attempt to restore his former position as ruler, Moses eventually persuaded Ramses I to allow him and the Israelites to leave the country.
How long was the Oppression? If the chronology in the Book of Exodus was correct, it would have begun before Moses was born, lasted during the eighteen or twenty years he was growing up, and continued during the years of his exile before his eventual return to lead the Exodus – a period of several decades, which seems an unduly long time to build the two store cities. The Oppression story in the Book of Exodus, in fact, links three separate events that happened at different periods – the first the plan to murder the Israelite male children; the second related to the religious upheaval caused by Akhenaten that was already in full flow at the time he was forced to build his new capital at Amarna to avoid further confrontation with the Theban priests; the third the rigorous Oppression of the Israelites by Horemheb after the final overthrow of Amarna rule.
It seems therefore that it was the scribes, working from what Cassuto has called ‘an epic poem describing the enslavement of the Israelites in Egypt and their liberation’ – whether it was oral or written, or partly oral and partly written, in Egyptian – who rearranged the chronology, especially in the opening chapter of the Book of Exodus, which was regarded as an introduction to that book as well as a link with the preceding Book of Genesis.
It is worth drawing attention at this stage to a few points in which this suggested outline of the historical events that lie behind the story in the Book of Exodus agree with what we know of the life of Akhenaten. As in the case of Moses, the childhood of Akhenaten is largely uncharted territory. Yet as soon as he appears on the scene at Thebes he is already bubbling with different ideas about art and rebellious ones about religion, suggesting that he must have been brought up in a manner that differed from the traditional upbringing of a future king. He had evidently not had the normal sport and warfare training common to his ancestors, nor does he seem to have known the sons of the Egyptian nobility, who were customarily educated at Memphis with the royal princes. It is more likely, as his new religion and rituals had many similarities with the solar worship which had developed in the lower end of the Eastern Delta, that it was there that he lived and was educated. The threats to the life of Moses in his early years also find an echo in Akhenaten’s later life. The strange epithet ‘Great in his Duration’ (‘He who Lived Long’) that he applied to himself constantly has been interpreted by Gardiner as an indication that, as a child, he was not expected to live long. In addition, it is curious on two grounds that he allowed himself to be represented as an Osiris (god of the dead) in a large number of colossal statues placed in the massive Aten temple he built at Karnak early in his reign. Firstly, it was normally a dead king who was shown in this Osiride form, and, secondly, Akhenaten did not believe in Osiris or his underworld. The only possible explanation is that he saw himself as having escaped from death, supporting the idea that during his childhood his life, too, had been threatened.
Yet if, in outlining the story of Moses we are also outlining the story of Akhenaten, why is it that the world has remembered him as Moses rather than by the name under which he ruled Egypt, as coregent and alone, for seventeen turbulent years?
The Name Moses
It seems that neither the Bible nor the Koran gives us the proper name of the leader of the Jewish Exodus, but what on the evidence appears rather to be a codename.
In his last book, Moses and Monotheism, Sigmund Freud argued that Moses was an Egyptian, a follower of Akhenaten, who later led the Jews out of Egypt. Freud was first persuaded to take this view by the fact that Moses was itself an Egyptian name: ‘What first attracts our interest in the person of Moses is his name, which is written Moshe in Hebrew. One may well ask: “Where does it come from? What does it mean?”’
The answer to Freud’s question is found in Exodus, 2:10 when we are told how the mother-nurse returns the child to his royal mother who adopted him and called him Moses because, she said, ‘I drew him out of the water.’ For a Hebrew name, Moshe is a rare, even unique, formation. In fact, the Hebrew word m sh a does not mean what the biblical editor would like us to believe. As a verb it can mean either ‘to draw’ or ‘one who draws out’. In order to agree with the explanation given by the biblical editor, the name should have been Moshui, ‘one who has been drawn out’.
There are other questions to be raised about this explanation of why the name was chosen. How, for instance, can we expect the Egyptian royal mother to have sufficient knowledge of the Hebrew language to be able to choose a special Hebrew name for the child? Then again, as we can see from the case of the Patriarch Joseph, when Pharaoh appointed him as his vizier he bestowed on him an Egyptian name to go with his new Egyptian identity. How could we expect that the royal mother of Moses could still give her royal Egyptian son a Hebrew name at a time when the Israelites, in the lingering aftermath of the invasion by the Hyksos shepherds, were still regarded as ‘an abomination’ by the majority of Egyptians?
In Ancient Egyptian, the word meaning a child or son consists of two consonants, m and s. If we take away the two vowels o and e from Moshe we are left with only two consonants, m and sh. As the Hebrew letter sh is the equivalent of the Egyptian s, it is easy to see that the Hebrew word came from the Egyptian word. Short vowels, although always pronounced, were never written either in Hebrew or Egyptian, and using long consonants for long vowels, as we saw earlier in examining the identity of the royal mother of Moses, was a later development in both languages. A final point is that the s at the end of the name Moses is drawn from the Greek translation of the biblical name.
As a large number of scholars have noted, mos was part of many compound Egyptian names such as Ptah-mos and Tuth-mos, yet we also find some examples of the word mos used on its own as a personal pronoun belonging to the New Kingdom, which started with the Eighteenth Dynasty.2
After Akhenaten fell from power, the Egyptian authorities forbade any mention of his name. Consequently, it seems to me that an alternative had to be found in order that his followers could refer to him. Apart from that, Akhenaten’s name was part of his royal power while he was king, but once he was no longer on the throne use of his royal names was forbidden to him, and he was referred to officially in latter days as ‘The Fallen One of Akhetaten (Amarna)’ and ‘The Rebel of Akhetaten’. Faced with the accusation that Akhenaten was not the real heir to the throne, I believe the Israelites called him mos, the son, to indicate that he was the legitimate son of Amenhotep III and the rightful heir to his father’s throne. We shall see how mos was used in a legal sense in a subsequent chapter where a protracted land dispute has added to the confusion and debate about the length of the reign of Horemheb, the Pharaoh of the Oppression.
Later, the biblical editor, who may not have had any knowledge of the original name of the greatest Jewish leader, attempted to put forward a Hebrew explanation of the Egyptian word Moses in order to sever any possible link between Moses and Egypt.