Hi Raha,
Sorry for the delay in responding but I have been busy here, I just seem to be finding it difficult to get on top of all the new courses this year, but I am almost there now, and I was also waiting for a book that I needed answer your post to be returned to the library.
I read through your story again and I can see no problem with it in a fictional context, the problems would start if it was ever to be suggested that it was historically plausible.
I think your story is one that is not that difficult to construct, it was fairly obvious where it was going very early on in the text, but it was still very interesting all the same. As you know, we take a different approach to the topic, you from a novelist approach and I come from the archaeological/theological approach.
The crux of your theory is that the monotheism that arose in Canaan was somehow related to that of the monotheism exhibited by the Pharaoh Akhenaten, so therefore there must have been a point of contact that caused the transmission of the concept of monotheism from Egypt to Canaan. I think it is fair to say that the suggestion is that the Israelites who were enslaved in Egypt were the ones who took monotheism from Egypt to Canaan after being ejected by the Egyptians.
I looked through a few journals and books and it appears that the Akhenaten-Moses connection is a bit of a non-starter, and the similarities between Ahkenaten’s religion and the religion of Moses is not that similar upon closer inspection.
On a superficial level there does appear to be certain similarities and quite a few writers have made a connection between the pair, however these writers were not specialists, one of the people who suggested a connection was none other than Sigmund Freud (
Sigmund Freud,
Moses and monotheism; translated from the German by Katherine Jones. London : Hogarth Press, 1932).
Some authors who were more interested in selling books that actual finding accurate history made Akhenaten a teacher of Moses and a forerunner of Christ, however, these writers display a lack of familiarity with the primary sources (
Donald B. Redford, Akhenaten : the heretic king. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1984, p 226).
These writers declare that it is self-evident that the monotheism preached at Mount Sinai is to be traced back eventually to the teachings of Akhenaten, the heretic king. Even those who reject direct contact nonetheless allow themselves to compare the two systems and to marvel at the points of similarity (
Donald B. Redford. Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in ancient times. Princeton, N.J. ; Oxford : Princeton University Press, 1992, p 377)
If the researcher had dug a little deeper into the primary sources he would have discovered some severe difficulties that would have curbed his enthusiasm. For example, he would have learned that the Exodus is most unlikely to have occurred when and under the conditions and involving the people the Hebrew Bible says it did. In fact probably no part of the Israelites was even in Egypt during the New Kingdom in a capacity that later gave rise to the Sojourn and Bondage narratives. I have quoted James Weinstein before on this site but I feel it is necessary to do so again. Weinstein is a reputable archaeologist who is very familiar with the debate surrounding Ancient Israel’s origins, and he categorically states that
‘'were it not for the Bible, anyone looking at the Palestinian archaeological data today would conclude that whatever the origin of the Israelites, it was not Egypt.' Archaeological Reality p.98, in
Exodus the Egyptian Evidence. Eisenbrauns, Indiana 1997).
With the impossibility of Moses and Akhenaten ever having met, then that should really be an end to the investigation, but historical facts never seem to deter some people, but further comparisons serve to undermine the connection between Akhenaten and Moses.
One thing that always seems to be part of research of this kind is there is a tendency to assume a greater significance for an alleged point of contact than is actually the case. ‘It is easy to point to aspects of activity, universality, divine sonship, justice, and messianism in both Israelite and Amarna belief, but these are so widespread in all ancient religions (including the normative religion of Egypt) that to posit specific contact is quite misleading’ (
Redford 1992, p 378)
Anyone that sees a similarity between what Akhenaten was promoting and ‘Mosaic Monotheism’ really needs to compare the two a bit more closely. The Amarna religion seems clear, in terms of textual sources, chronological limits, and content. Mosaic monotheism, is very sketchy, it hadn’t really crystallised into monotheism during the time Moses was said to have lived. Most scholars would deny that, in the thirteenth century BCE, the generally accepted date for Moses, the Hebrew were nowhere near the exalted plane of monotheism, the prophetic movement of the Iron Age is really the point when Hebrew religion resembled anything that could with any certainty be called monotheism.
What appears to be compared with Akhenaton’s religion is not the religion followed by the Hebrews in the 13th century BCE, rather it is the religion that only emerged in the advanced concepts of the Deutero-Isaiah material of the sixth and fifth centuries, a religion removed by almost a thousand years from Akhenaten.
Also, was what Akhentaten and Moses taught actually a religion? What Moses preached was love for a creator God who interacted with his people in history, Moses religion included a code of conduct, rituals, and the worship of God by the whole community and Hebrew religion, at least in the formative stage in which we see it in the later Iron Age, is creedal (
G. Von Rad, The problem of the Hexateuch, and other essays / translated from the German by Rev. E.W. Trueman Dicken, introduction by Norman W. Porteous. New York, Oliver & Boyd, 1966. pp 1-33) involving a confession of faith in Yahweh.
This doesn’t really resemble Akhenaten’s faith at all, what Akhenaten endorsed in no way involves a creed; it is more a royal statement regarding the king's relationship with his father the Sun Disk, it was not really a religion of the people. ‘As such it thrusts a teaching role upon the monarch in which he, as the sole individual privy to god's will, is obliged to make plain to the people the nature of god and the king's place in creation. There is nothing comparable in early Hebrew religion with the "teaching" of Akhenaten no one fills an essential didactic role, and, when later the prophets emerge, they prove to be outside the system (
Redford 1984, p 53).
Hebrew religion is to all intents and purposes indigenous to a particular ethnic group, and underwent a natural evolution over centuries of prehistory. But Akhenaten's program is a self-conscious modification of an existing system, it was sudden and in opposition to the beliefs of a whole range of high officials.
If we now examine the natures of the gods of Akhenaten's program and the early Hebrew religion, there is a remarkable difference between the two.
Akhenaten's god is celestial and solar, identified as "light" and the "sun disk"; he creates brightness and therefore his own essence. By contrast the Hebrew god Yahweh displays atmospheric and earthly traits, being associated with the wind, earthquake, fire, and thunder. Light by no means summarises Yahweh, it may be associated with him as a symbol of purity and truth and another difference is that his followers accepted him is a new deity.
Yet another difference is that the Sun Disk inspires very little response in the worshiper but Yahweh is a wrathful, vengeful god prone to violent outbreaks of temper, he has childish tantrums, but also capable of compassion and forgiveness, which is entirely in line with all the other Canaanite gods.
The Sun Disk is a timeless royal deity without any record of past deeds, but Yahweh is a hero-god whose victories have to praised and preached forever. The Sun Disk never demanded any particular code of ethical behaviour different from what had dominated Egyptian society from time immemorial. By contrast, Yahweh was very much a god of his people and contained from the outset all the ingredients of a personal deity. A rigid code of ethics is strongly stressed, and becomes an integral part of Hebrew religion (
Redford 1994, p380) Also, there existed between him and Israel a bond unknown between an Egyptian god and his people, and that was the covenant. Yahweh had chosen Israel and entered into a contractual agreement with it. Upon closer inspection, the gulf between Akhenaten’s faith and Mosaic monotheism really is quite large.
Now we arrive at what is an insurmountable problem, and that is the question of plurality of deity, there is no doubt that Akhenaten was a monotheist but in the earliest stages in the development of the Hebrew religion, Yahweh is seen as just one god amongst the many in the Canaanite pantheon. Yahweh was a stereotypical Canaanite hero-creator god. His creation of man from clay and woman from a rib is as inane as most foreign contemporary accounts, and the Flood story, even though it has been heavily edited, remains within the range of a well-known type of myth. In contrast, the Sun Disk has no mythological past, there is no creation story or accounts of anything else for that matter, the Sun Disk was never a fully developed system of belief in the same sense as Yahwism was.
There are other differences, Yahwism was strongly patriarchal, favouring the males and belittling the females, but for generations the Egyptian court had been strongly influenced if not dominated by royal females, and its customs, life-style, and art are influenced by a sort of feminine energy (
Redford, 1992 p 382)
I suppose we could say that Akhenaten was the first monotheist, but he had no influence on the religion that emerged in Canaan that finally became monotheism. There may be certain similarities on a basic level, but it appears that these similarities have been over exaggerated. There is no way to link the Israelites who emerged from within Canaan in the late bronze/early Iron Age with Egypt at all, far less a link it with an individual pharaoh.
So, although your story is enjoyable and perhaps a little predictable, it does belong in a fictional setting, however I would say that if you wanted to have a more realistic feel to it, then you have to forget the implicit suggestion that Israel took monotheism from Egypt to Canaan.
Brian.
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