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  • From: JimStinehart AT aol.com
  • To: leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il, b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Redford's 1970 answer to Kitchen's 1998 point
  • Date: Tue, 16 Feb 2010 08:45:40 EST



Yigal Levin:

1. You wrote: “[Y]ou're wrong about Amon, Ra and Aten. Amon/Amun and
Re/Ra were the two often-identified sun-gods, long considered the patron
deity of the kings.”

For once, I fear you have made a mistake here. Amen is not a sun-god. In
fact, Amen was a dark, mysterious god, having nothing to do with the sun at
all. (There was a short time when the Egyptians experimented with putting
two very different gods together, and came up with Amen-Ra, which is perhaps
what you are remembering. But that was a short-lived, unsuccessful
experiment.)

2. You wrote: “Aten was also a son-god, but he was claimed to be
different. Re/Ra was NOT used for Aten.”

That simply is not true. Akhenaten’s two youngest daughters have Re in
their names, but not Aten. That makes no sense if Re was not considered by
Akhenaten to be on some level equivalent to Aten.

To further prove the point, here are the first several lines of Akhenaten’s
world-famous Great Hymn to the Aten (copied from the touregypt website).
Note that Akhenaten explicitly identifies Aten with Re in the last line cited:

Thou appearest beautifully on the horizon of heaven,
Thou living Aton, the beginning of life!
When thou art risen on the eastern horizon,
Thou hast filled every land with thy beauty.
Thou art gracious, great, glistening, and high over every land;
Thy rays encompass the lands to the limit of all that thou hast made:
As thou art Re, thou reachest to the end of them;

3. You wrote: “So any references to Re actually point AWAY
from the rule of Akhenaten.”

The references in the Patriarchal narratives to Re are directly comparable
to the references to Re in the names of Akhenaten’s two youngest daughters.
It’s hard to imagine stronger evidence than the names of Akhenaten’s own
children.

The name of Joseph’s father-in-law, the priest from On, is PW+Y PR(. I see
each P as meaning “the” in Egyptian. Per the Amarna Letters (e.g. Amarna
Letter EA 289: 31), the west Semitic rendering of the Egyptian sun-god Re
might be expected to be R(. So P-R( in the text of Genesis may well mean
“the
Re”. That would be a blatantly monotheistic name! If that name is coming
out of the 2nd millennium BCE, that would be a shockingly monotheistic name,
which would not be possible except at Amarna. (On the other hand,
centuries later the Egyptian definite article eventually lost its force from
overuse, and eventually became like the English word “the”, often not having
much
meaning.) Akhenaten was the first pharaoh to use “the”, instead of the
more formal “that”. Akhenaten took “the” from street language and made it
into formal Egyptian. But even Akhenaten, the religious zealot, only put P/“
the” in the name of one of his 6 daughters, being daughter #3. The evidence
from these names is very powerful.

4. You wrote: “Besides which, the whole Akhenaten – monotheism idea
is highly exaggerated. Amenhotep IV, AKA Akhenaten, was not a monotheist.
He never denied the existence of other gods.”

That’s true. That’s why I often use the term “semi-monotheist”. On the
other hand, Akhenaten was unique in Egyptian history as having only one god
officially worshipped at the royal court. That’s a type of monotheism. No
other Egyptian pharaoh ever did anything like that. Of course, the Egyptian
sun-god Aten has very little similarity at all to the west Semitic-type
deity YHWH.

I wonder if you may possibly be misunderstanding the AKA you cite.
Akhenaten hated the god Amen, so he refused to continue to use the name
AMEN-hotep
IV. He changed his name (as did each of Abraham and Jacob) to honor the
deity he favored, which in Akhenaten’s case was Aten. Akhenaten brutally
attacked the cult of Amen, while building up the cult of Aten. Believe it or
not, by Year 15 or so Akhenaten did not even allow the “Amen” element to be
used in rendering the name of his father, Amen-hotep III. There’s no Amen at
Amarna! Nor in the Patriarchal narratives.

5. You wrote: “He simply transferred Royal support from the
all-powerful priests of Amun/Amon/Re/Ra to the priests of Aten that he
appointed. A brilliant political move.”

There’s a lot of truth to that. That’s what Genesis 47: 13-26 is all
about. Pharaoh confiscates all the land along the Nile River of the
super-wealthy Amen priests in Year 15. (Genesis does not say that the
persons who lost
their land were Amen priests, but that’s what happened historically. The
priests whose land the text says Joseph did not confiscate would be only the
priests of the cult of Aten, historically, who in fact did not own much
land.) Most every important historical event concerning Amarna in Years 12 –
15
is right there in the text of the Patriarchal narratives.

But though there definitely was a political element here, I myself see
Akhenaten as a sincere religious zealot, not a hypocrite on the religious
front
who was just out for political power. Politics in fact was not Akhenaten’s
long suit.

For purposes of the b-hebrew list, the one language issue that is important
here is that the references to Re in the Patriarchal narratives are
definitely consistent with the Amarna Age. So is the complete and total
absence of
any reference whatsoever, even in passing, to the favorite god of the
Egyptians in all the rest of the New Kingdom: Amen.

Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois




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