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  • From: berlant AT advanced-studies.org
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [b-hebrew] Egyptian Deities in Hebrew
  • Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2010 06:37:00 -0400

At 01:20 PM 3/9/2010, Bart wrote:

I am trying to investigate the relationship between the ancient Hebrews and the worship of the Egyptian gods. I was wondering how the Hebrews would have referred to the Egyptian gods in the Hebrew language. Is there a list of the Hebrew renderings of the names of the Egyptian gods? I am particularly interested in the bull god "Apis".


I can't tell you anything about Apis, because I haven't looked closely at it. OTOH, since I have looked very closely at the names of a number of other Egyptian deities, I can tell you with a fair degree of certainty that some of those names exist in Hebrew as nouns and verbs, either because they were derived from the same roots or in parallel from the same morpheme.
In either case, to understand how and why this is so, it is first necessary to recognize that (1) the earliest word roots were probably mono-consonantal and highly polysemous, and (2) ancient wordsmiths typically used figurative associations to derive new words by differentially vowelizing and voicing the these consonants.

To wit, the consonantal name R of the Egyptian solar deity that Egyptologists have commonly vocalized as Ra and Re ­ mainly because nobody knows for sure how the Egyptians vocalized these and many other words ­ arguably, if not certainly, exists in Hebrew differentially vowelized as the word "Aleph-Vov-Resh" for the sun in, for instance, Job 31:26: "If I beheld the sun (Aleph-Vov-Resh) when it shined, or the moon walking [in] brightness." Moreover, since the sun was the prototypal source of light, Aleph-Vov-Resh also exists in Hebrew as the word for light, discussed more in the thread on PTR.

Many, if not most, of the world's words for brightness, the day, etc. clearly reveal that they were derived from words for light . Hence, Egyptian R and Heb. "Aleph-Vov-Resh" are also transparently cognate with Ugaritic "R" 'to be bright', and Acadian "uRRu" 'day'. Moreover, since seeing and looking were light-dependent, many of the world's words for seeing and looking reveal that they, too, were derived from or are cognate with these words for light and/or the names of solar deities. Consequently, Heb word for seeing Resh-Aleph-Heh reveals that it is an extended form of the name R' of the Egyptian solar deity Ra.

The name HRW of the Egyptian solar deity that the Romans called Horus then reveals that it is an aspirated and extended form of R that appears in Acadian "hurašu", Heb haras, Gk khrusos "gold", and Skt. "hari" ‘gold' — deducibly because the sun was prototypal referent of these and most of the world's other words for gold. Moreover, there are very good reasons for believing that the root HR came into Gk differentially vowelized as, for instance, as (1) "hora" ‘time, season', which was coined to associate the time and season's with Horus's movement; (2) "heuriskein" to shed light on', and (3) "horos" which subsequently yielded "horizein" for the sun's boundaries.

The name of the fallen deity the Egyptians originally called Setek or Sutek, and later only Set also arguably, if not certainly, also appears in Heb. differentially vowelized as the root of the word "Set" ‘revolter', "Sut" ‘sin' "sata" ‘to turn aside', "satam" ‘to hate, oppose' and personified as "Satan" ‘adversary'. Since Set was said to have burst forth from the earth, there are also reasons for believing that Heb. "satar" ‘to burst forth' is also cognate with these words.
In the epic Egyptian myth, Set, the personification of evil, battles Horus, the personification of light. So, there are also reasons for believing that the battle between Satan and Christ — who many authors have argued was a Christianized solar deity — recapitulated in name and form this battle between Horus and Set . However, a fuller discussion of this relationship is beyond this list's scope.

Regards,

Steve Berlant










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  • [b-hebrew] Egyptian Deities in Hebrew, berlant, 03/16/2010

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