Biblical Hebrew Forum

[berlant AT advanced-studies.org]

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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