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 "hurau", 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