Did Akhenaten’s Monotheism Influence Moses?

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In late spring, 1349 B.C., the chariot of the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten drew up in an open space before a dazzling white inscription on a cliff face overlooking the Nile. There Akhenaten and his queen Nefertiti made lavish offerings to the solar god Aten.

Then the pharaoh addressed his assembled courtiers: “I shall make Akhetaten for the Aten, my father, in this place … I will make for myself the apartments of Pharaoh. I will make the apartments of the Great King’s Wife in Akhetaten.”

His pronouncement must have sent shivers of apprehension through the court traditionally based at Memphis or Thebes, for he was speaking at neither. He was speaking at a new site halfway between Memphis and Thebes. The deserted but spectacular semicircle of fertile land and cliffs, now known to archaeologists as El-Amarna, would become Akhetaten, the new capital of his domains. To leave no one in any doubt of his commitment, Akhenaten also ordered that tombs for himself, his wife and family be built in the cliffs nearby.

Almost overnight, centuries of traditional religious belief passed into near-oblivion by pharaonic decree. Ancient doctrines held that before the creation of the world, there had been a featureless sea. Then a primordial mound rose from the waters, perhaps a symbolic depiction of the receding Nile inundation that nourished the land of Egypt. Eight gods, known as the Ogdoad, presided over creation, among them the self-engendered deity Atum and his progeny Ptah (the patron of craftspeople) and the transcendent god Amun. This theology varied from place to place, but at Thebes it was proclaimed that Amun was the hidden force behind everything, fused with the primordial sun god to become Amun-Re, the supreme deity of the pantheon. The grand temple 043 044 045 at Karnak, with its courts, colonnades and columns, proclaimed the supremacy and might of Amun and the power and wealth of his priests. In time, Amun merged with Horus as the hawk-headed Re-Horakhty, “Horus of the Two Horizons,” ruler of the sky, the earth and the underworld.

For centuries, Egyptians had worshiped an elaborate and beloved pantheon that presided over this cosmic balance. A serene oversight sustained a society with a deep belief in cosmic harmony and a tradition of order in the face of chaos and opposed to change.

Now Akhenaten had decreed a radical change: Aten, the solar disk with its life-giving illumination, was not a mere object, but the sole ruling deity. Known as “the living one, Re-Horakhty who rejoices on the horizon,” Aten was the king of kings with no queen, no threatening enemies, the only god. And Akhenaten believed he was the only son of Aten, his chosen prophet. With an apparently fanatical devotion to Aten, this obscure, short-ruling Pharaoh Akhenaten appears to have laid claim to being the world’s first monotheist.

Were Akhenaten’s monotheistic beliefs the forebears of Israelite monotheism some five centuries later?^a Was this something the Israelites picked up in Egypt? Was Moses possibly a priest of Aten who fled prosecution after Akhenaten’s death, as some have proposed?¹

Controversies over these questions have raged for more than a century, often championed by believers in the literal truth of the Scriptures.² Three quarters of a century ago, several Egyptologists even went so far as to proclaim that Akhenaten was a failed version of Christ.³ Few scholars would agree with this today. But, as several authorities have pointed out,⁴ Akhenaten did have some unusual religious commitments by Egyptian standards, believing as he did that he was his divine father’s image on earth.

For 11 years, Akhenaten reigned in what is today El-Amarna, where he was a humane teacher of the true god. He had impeccable royal credentials. He was the second son of one of Egypt’s greatest pharaohs, Amenhotep III. His elder brother died prematurely, so he became pharaoh as Amenhotep IV in 1350 B.C. Ever since he was young, the new king had been mesmerized by the dazzling solar imagery at Thebes, with its spectacular, meticulously choreographed rituals.⁵ Probably even before he became Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, he was preoccupied with the brilliant orb of the sun, known as the Aten (or Aton). Aten was nothing new. He had been a relatively minor aspect of the sun god Re-Horakhty, venerated as early as the Old Kingdom, two thousand years earlier. The new pharaoh’s father was wary of the growing power of the priests of Amun and may have sought to curb it by favoring Aten. His son took matters even further with his obsessive worship of what he believed was a living solar disk. Depictions of Aten showed his protective solar rays terminating in hands adorned with the Ankh hieroglyph, proclaiming life. When the new pharaoh announced that he was the only person with direct access to Aten, he 046 made an interceding priesthood unnecessary. Aten was now the sole ruling deity; he was not just the sun’s disk, he was also its life-giving illumination. He was the king of kings, the only god with no queen, no threatening enemies. And now Akhenaten was his chosen prophet. Fixated on Aten, the pharaoh effectively became a monotheist within the context of native Egyptian cosmology.

At first, Amenhotep IV ordered the construction of an Aten temple next to Amun’s shrines at Karnak near Thebes, but the two cults could not exist alongside each other. In Year 6 of his reign, he changed his name to Akhenaten, “Effective for Aten,” closed Amun’s temples, abolished the priesthood, took over its revenues and then moved to his new capital, Akhetaten, “the Horizon of the Aten,” archaeology’s El-Amarna. He is said to have composed the well-known Hymn to the Aten, in which he proclaimed, “There is none who knows thee save thy son.” For the remainder of his reign, Akhenaten devoted himself to his religious obsession and to adorning his new capital Akhetaten with lavish temples to the god. His courtiers were careful to embrace these new doctrines, at least in public. Judging from figures unearthed in private houses, however, most people still discreetly worshiped the traditional pantheon.

The pharaoh’s precipitous shift to Aten must have sent shockwaves through the elite and the all-powerful conservative priesthood of Amun. The ancient chants and dances, songs and offerings, ceased. The great temples at Memphis and Thebes fell silent and no longer honored their deities. Why Akhenaten made the sudden move is unknown. It may have simply been a matter of passionate belief. Some commentators believe he had escaped assassination at the hands of the priests of Amun or their agents, but this seems improbable. Most likely, he may have decided to centralize religious authority and enhance his power, perhaps in response to pressure from below in order to erode royal religious prerogative and decorum. With ill-concealed dissent on many sides, Akhenaten traveled everywhere surrounded by armed guards.

What was Akhenaten like? Like all pharaohs, he presided over a court of adoring sycophants. They describe him as a teacher of righteous conduct. His writings are lost except for the Hymn to the Aten, which he claimed to have written.

The art style he perpetuated reveals a single-minded ruler who tried to make his people accountable for their conduct in the face of Aten. The 047 pharaoh’s artists depicted him as a long-faced man with a sharp chin, narrow, almond-shaped eyes, full lips, a soft belly and enlarged breasts. His peculiar appearance defies modern explanation and may simply have been artistic convention. Akhenaten called himself “The Unique One of Re,” for Aten was both father and mother of humanity. Thus artists depicted him as the living god on earth, as androgynous—just like the god.

Of Akhenaten’s character we know nothing, except for scenes of domestic harmony showing the Aten’s beams casting light on the pharaoh and his wife with their young children. For all we know, he may have been kind, and he may have been a brave warrior. We can be certain from his public pronouncements, however, that he was decisive when it came to his religious beliefs and the image of his sacred capital. Every mortal was supposed to worship the king as a living god. Meanwhile, the affairs of the Egyptian state continued to lumber along in the hands of an entrenched bureaucracy that followed the secular and religious precedents of centuries.

We get a different view of Akhenaten’s court from an entirely different source—the archaeological recovery known as the Amarna tablets. The first tablets came to light during secret diggings by local farmers in 1887, unearthed from a building now known as the Bureau of Correspondence of Pharaoh. They were sold on the antiquities market and widely scattered, most of them now residing in Germany. Egyptologist Flinders Petrie unearthed 21 tablets in 1891–1892; a few others have been found since then. Three-hundred eighty-two tablets are known, comprising more than 300 diplomatic letters and miscellaneous educational and literary materials, written in Akkadian cuneiform, the diplomatic lingua franca of the day. They span about 30 years, from late in Amenhotep III’s reign in the 1390s B.C. until the second year of Tutankhamun’s rule in 1332 B.C., when Amarna was abandoned. They reveal a volatile geopolitical world that pitted the Hittites in Anatolia and northwestern Syria against Egypt, as well as the Hurrians, Assyrians and Babylonians. The Egyptians controlled their economic interests through a patchwork of client states in the region now comprising Israel, Lebanon and Syria. The tablets are mainly letters received, not communications written in Egypt. Some letters come from kings in Assyria and Babylonia and from the Hittites, but most were from the rulers of vassal states in Syria-Palestine. Most deal with exchanges of gifts between rulers and with arranged marriages, the diplomatic currency of the day. There are requests for information about events in distant cities, pleas to the pharaoh for grain, wood and other commodities and concerns about the rising military threat of the Hittites on the northern borders of Egyptian influence.

The correspondents include Rib-Hadda, the quarrelsome ruler of Byblos, and Abdi-Heba, ruler of Jerusalem, who was concerned about marauding nomads known as Hapiru, whom some equate—without historical proof—with the Hebrews. Abdi-Heba protested his loyalty to the pharaoh in the face of accusations of rebellion: “At the feet of the king, my Lord, seven times and seven times I prostrate myself.” Abdi-Heba begged for garrison troops: “All the territories of the king have rebelled … May the king take care of this land … If there are archers [here] this year, all the territories of the king will remain [intact]; but if there are no archers, the territories of the king, my Lord, will be lost.” His plea was in vain, like that of other threatened 048 049 rulers, who were left to their own devices by their Egyptian overlord.

At this time, Egypt was a superpower in the Eastern Mediterranean world. In Year 12 of his reign, Akhenaten held a magnificent diplomatic reception to “receive tribute from Kharu [Syria-Palestine] and Kush [Nubia], the West and East.” The offerings laid at the king’s feet came from a patchwork of alliances and tribute states that linked the Nile and the Levant with copper-rich Cyprus, the Aegean islands and Greece.

The Amarna letters make no mention of Aten, monotheism or of any efforts by Akhenaten or other pharaohs to spread Egyptian religious beliefs. The Egyptians come across as arrogant, assured and convinced of their superiority. No convincing case can be made for linking Hebrews and Akhenaten’s obsessive monotheism through the Amarna Tablets.

There’s another elephant in the academic room—that of Moses. He’s a well-known holy man revered by all three Eastern Mediterranean major faiths.⁶ Yet the only evidence that he existed comes from the Biblical Book of Exodus. There is no precise time frame for the events that are said to have occurred, nor do we know which pharaoh exiled Moses and the Israelites from Egypt. No trace of Moses has come to light either in archaeological contexts or in historical records. This contrasts with Akhenaten, who was definitely a historical figure.

The most famous advocate of a connection between Akhenaten’s monotheism and Israelite monotheism was Sigmund Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis. In his last book, Moses and Monotheism, published in 1939, Freud argued that Moses was an Egyptian priest of Aten who befriended an Israelite tribe and was forced out of Egypt after Akhenaten’s death. Freud also argued that monotheism was an Egyptian, not an Israelite, invention, originating in the Aten cult. He contended that Moses was murdered by his followers, who joined another monotheistic tribe based in Midian that worshiped a volcanic god named Yahweh. To put it mildly, the book was highly controversial, and had no basis in historical fact, but Freud did make the important point that Israelite religion was a distinctive faith because of its belief in an invisible god. This, he argued, made it a powerful sensory perception that prepared believers for powerful abstraction. Moses and Monotheism was an extension of Freud’s work on psychoanalytic theory as a way of generating hypotheses about historical events, not a history of actual events. Although a vigorous literature surrounds Freud’s last book, it does not provide a credible perspective on Akhenaten and Judeo-Christian monotheism.

Akhenaten may have been a passionate monotheist, but he was, in the final analysis, culturally an Egyptian. He ruled by precedent over a deeply religious society—a remote, isolated figure except for formal appearances, separated by a vast chasm from his people. He was probably a driven religious fanatic, even a monomaniac, but he was certainly not a missionary. Culturally, he was a ruler who believed in conquest, client states and tribute. Spreading new religious beliefs overseas would have been far from his mind. Above all, his generals on the eastern frontier, notably Horemheb, eventually destined to become pharaoh, were conservative in their religious beliefs. We know this because

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Horemheb was a leading figure in the restoration of Amun and the traditional pantheon after Akhenaten’s death.

Moreover, Israelite monotheism is very different from Akhenaten’s monotheism. The pharaoh came from a society with a long tradition of governance by precedent and a well-established cosmology that melded art and material representations of deities in both public and private contexts. Akhenaten favored Aten as the supreme god, lord of the cosmos, appointing himself the representative of the god on earth. Akhenaten suppressed other deities, apparently as a matter of personal belief that he imposed on his subjects. That this was a matter of only individual conviction seems obvious, given the abrupt restoration of the pantheon after his death.

Of all the Semitic peoples, only the Israelites achieved pure monotheism, through the teaching of their prophets, a process that took a long time. As Mark Smith has pointed out, Biblical monotheism is a complex narrative, usually much simplified.⁷ At first, Yahweh was considered their God, but not the only one: “Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods?” wrote the poet (Exodus 15:11). He was eventually recognized as the God of Holiness in a form of absolute monotheism that culminated in the teachings of Isaiah: “I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god” (Isaiah 44:6). The unity of God was a revealed truth for the Israelites and the leading tenet of the faith. Israel’s monotheism developed in a volatile political landscape, where polytheism also flourished, known, for example, from the rich textual materials (cuneiform tablets) from the Bronze Age port city of Ugarit. Israelite monotheism developed through centuries of discussion, declarations of faith and interactions 071 with other societies and other beliefs. In contrast, Akhenaten’s monotheism developed very largely at the behest of a single, absolute monarch presiding over an isolated land, where the pharaoh’s word was divine and secular law. It was an experiment that withered on the vine.

A great deal of scholarship has been devoted to Biblical monotheism and its origins,^b but, to an archaeologist schooled in the importance of accurate dating and historical contexts, there are no connections between two quite different forms of monotheism—the one an expression of pharaonic authority imposing religious conformity, the other a matter of profound abstraction. And it’s important to realize that the cultural milieu of both Egyptian and Israelite religious beliefs were entirely different and far from compatible. There were two experiments in monotheism—the Egyptian one, which vanished, and the more abstract Israelite version that ensued and survived.

Tutankhaten (later Tutankhamun, also known in modern times simply as King Tut) was the second son of Akhenaten, born in 1332 B.C. He was frail from birth and ascended to the throne at age eight or nine. The young pharaoh was literate and must already have been trained in ritual and Aten’s ideology. His principal advisers, among them Ay, “Father of the Gods,” and General Horemheb, soon restored the old order in the king’s name. They arranged his coronation before Amun at Memphis.

A stela in front of a pylon at Karnak proclaimed that the boy king “restored everything that was ruined … to be a monument for ever and ever … He has vanquished chaos from the whole land.”

Tutankhamun’s secular and religious authority, honed by hundreds of years of carefully nurtured precedent, helped his advisers to banish monotheism from Egypt. Akhenaten’s brief flirtation with monotheism vanished into oblivion. It was a brief deviation from the course of Egyptian history that seems to have little or no effect outside the Nile Valley.

In late spring, 1349 B.C., the chariot of the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten drew up in an open space before a dazzling white inscription on a cliff face overlooking the Nile. There Akhenaten and his queen Nefertiti made lavish offerings to the solar god Aten. Then the pharaoh addressed his assembled courtiers: “I shall make Akhetaten for the Aten, my father, in this place … I will make for myself the apartments of Pharaoh. I will make the apartments of the Great King’s Wife in Akhetaten.” His pronouncement must have sent shivers of apprehension through the court traditionally based at […]