Audience Questions
Question: Was Akhenaten’s sun worship simply a religious reform, or was it also a means of consolidating political power?
Donald B. Redford: It’s been suggested that Akhenaten had a hidden agenda when he started out. I’m not quite sure about that. But we do know, from the inscriptional material that’s coming to light from Karnak, that Akhenaten’s new sun temples had thousands of priests associated with them. Maybe these new priests were simply the old priesthood taken over into the new regime. We know that the revenues of the older temples (which all had landed estates to support them) were now being funneled into the new sun temples. Everyone focused their attention on the new sun temples, worshiping Akhenaten and worshiping the sun. Toward the end of his reign and shortly thereafter, when the country was on the rocks economically, people went back to old temples and found them in ruins. They were completely abandoned; weeds were growing in the courtyards. This situation was easily explained: The gods had turned their backs on Egypt.
Q: In the literature about Akhenaten, there seem to be two main schools, one disparaging and one emphasizing his significance as a precursor of Judaic monotheism. The former suggests that he just worshiped an object, the sun, as opposed to a more abstract being. Those who give Akhenaten more credit refer to the phrase you used earlier about the spirit that dwells in the light of the sun, suggesting that he really did have an abstract concept of a godhead pervasive in the universe.
Redford: Well, I don’t think his thought was too abstract. At least, what has survived does not suggest that it was. In fact, he has been called a crass materialist.
Q: Perhaps “abstract” is not the word I want. Did he have either a pantheistic or a universal concept of the deity?
Redford: Universal it was, but not pantheistic. As for the two schools you mentioned, it used to be customary to describe Akhenaten as the mentor of Moses, a Christ-like figure, a martyr, and on and on. This caught the attention of writers of fiction. So we have a number of pieces, right up into the 1950s, that portray him exactly that way. It’s unfortunate that this is the one period of Egyptian history that has spawned a secondary and now a tertiary literature. The fictional sources are sometimes consulted as primary evidence, and its hard to get people to go right back to the original texts. If there is a turning against Akhenaten, it is partly a reaction against the romanticism of earlier times.
Q: In Akhenaten’s day, Egypt became in effect a world power. Isn’t the concept of a universal god more befitting a world power than an individual nation?
Redford: I’ll concede that. The Sun-disc is the god of all lands, the creator of all peoples, regardless of race or language. But you can find the roots of that idea already in the earlier theology devoted to Amun [the chief god of the Egyptian pantheon]. So the idea of a universal god is not entirely new, but Akhenaten certainly does dwell on it.
Q: You indicated that Queen Nefertity may have had more influence on Akhenaten’s ideas than originally thought. Would you elaborate on that?
Redford: Yes, the Nefertity phenomenon. This came as a real shock, considering that Egyptian culture always concentrates on the pharaoh; he’s the kingpin of the whole system. So it was surprising to discover that one of Akhenaten’s Theban temples was built for the queen alone. She alone is depicted in it doing exactly what her husband does elsewhere, making an offering to the Sun-disc and worshiping the Sun-disc. The king does not appear anywhere in the temple. Also surprising is the fact that Nefertity is depicted twice as often as Akhenaten in these early reliefs. Some scholars believe that this evidence suggests her political importance, or perhaps that she played a real role in the new program. Unfortunately, Nefertity is a completely unknown quantity. We do have a letter to her mother-in-law, Queen Tiye, which gives us some impression of Tiye. But Nefertity, no. We have no correspondence to her or from her. She’s a mystery.
Q: To what extent, in your judgment, did Akhenaten’s ideas survive? They seem to have been almost an isolated eruption, and then the old ways came back again. But was there a memory of his ideas, however you characterize them?
Redford: I’m not sure that the content of Akhenaten’s teaching lived on—only his hegira to Amarna, his death and then the return to normalcy. These things may have survived in Egyptian folklore. Unfortunately, we only have the account of Manetho, a third century B.C.E. Egyptian priest who wrote down Egyptian history in Greek for the Ptolemaic kings. Manetho almost certainly worked from king lists, of which there were probably many copies in the third century B.C.E., and filled them in with material he collected. At the point where you would expect an account of the Amarna period, Manetho thrusts in an interesting story—one that was much debated in Judeo-Hellenistic polemics. The question was, Do Moses and the Israelites turn up in any ancient Egyptian text? The denigrators of the tradition would say, “No, of course he doesn’t.” But Manetho attempts to answer “yes”; he trots out a long story, from the reign of a “King Amenophis”’ that involves sending people off to work in the quarries. So one wonders whether this story preserves a memory also preserved in the Bible. That’s a fascinating possibility.
Q: Could you repeat your distinction between one-godism and monotheism?
Redford: I was not making a distinction. I was just trying to get away from the term that is used as the title of this seminar, “Monotheism.”
Q: Would you agree that the pyramidal structure itself suggests monotheism, which then carries down through the ages?
Redford: Oh I see, the pyramidal structure …
Q: Because it goes up into …
Redford: Into an apex. I’m not sure whether it was ever interpreted that way, but the pyramidal form has been linked, probably correctly, to an icon sacred to the sun god-namely the Benben stone. According to records from Heliopolis, the Benben stone contained a depiction of the sun’s rays and was worshiped as a sacred fetish. The stone doesn’t exist anymore; it’s been suggested that it was a meteorite. But it is pictured as pyramidal in shape. It seems somehow to have been tied into the shape used for the mortuary structures we call the pyramids.
Q: Is Psalm 104 the prayer of Akhenaten? And if it is, is this continuity a sign that the [monotheistic] idea was carried on?
Redford: Half of the psalm is, but the other half isn’t. One half of the psalm appears to paraphrase passages in the Hymn to the Sun-disc, which was carved on the tomb of Akhenaten’s royal secretary, Ay, in Amarna. But it’s not a direct translation at all. The rest of the psalm dwells on the heroic, macho aspect of God—and that does not come from Akhenaten’s hymn. There’s another intriguing example. We have an Amarna letter from the king of Tyre, on the coast of modern Lebanon, to Egypt. In his letter, written in Akkadian, the king quotes a hymn that is a perfect translation of an Egyptian sun hymn. How did this happen? The king of Tyre was probably brought up in the pharaoh’s court, as were many of these young kids, these Canaanite village head men. When their dads died, they returned home to take over the reigns of Canaanite towns. Many of them would have come back little Egyptians, speaking Egyptian and able to put into Akkadian the hymns they had heard in the court. These hymns certainly had an oral life after Akhenaten. Other things may have survived in the oral culture as well.
Q: Is there any evidence to support Freud’s idea that Moses was an Egyptian?
Redford: The name Moses has been compared with a verbal form mose, which occurs in names like Thutmose. The formula means simply that god X is born. Interestingly, Egyptian names could be abbreviated by eliminating the theophoric element [the divine name attached to a word], so that you might end up with mose as a nickname.
Q: You’ve spoken of a three-part, or triune, aspect of Egyptian deities. Does the Christian Trinity go back to this triune?
Redford: That’s something for a church historian. The triune aspect I spoke of with respect to Egypt comes out of a very interesting hymn to the god Ptah. After lauding Ptah and various other deities, the hymn makes the pointed statement that all gods are three: Amun; the hidden, the latent power; Re, the sun; and Ptah, the earth. Then it goes on to say that there are cities—Thebes, Heliopolis, Memphis—that abide on earth for all time. The interesting component of this tripartite group is Ptah, the central figure in what we call the Memphite theology. This hymn reads as though it were written by one of the pre-Socratic philosophers; Ptah is made the very essence of the universe and is present whenever rational thought or even the articulation of thought is possible. So Ptah exists within his creation, commanding and willing whatever he wants. The hymn is a fascinating document. But it’s more a product of syncretism than of monotheism, it seems to me.
Q: I’d like to ask about the possible influence of the Egyptian one-godness on the broad range of phenomena in Israel. We have Israel coming out of Egypt. I don’t know when you date Moses, if there was a Moses—who may have had an Egyptian name, as you point out. Egypt dominated what would be Israel for a long time. We have in the archaeological record artifacts that are often called “Egyptianizing,” meaning that they look Egyptian but are not exactly Egyptian. There’s Egyptian influence in Judah and Philistia. And it has been pointed out that Psalm 104 is in part a copy of an Egyptian text. Time and again, we see strong Egyptian influence, explicitly, implicitly, textually, archaeologically. All of this suggests that Egyptian one-godness may have had an influence on Israelite one-godness. Is that sensible, or off the wall?
Redford: I wouldn’t characterize it either way. But I’d like to point out that Egyptian-looking artifacts found in Iron Age Israel and Judah are often really Phoenician.
William G. Dever: Absolutely correct. That’s the point. There’s much more Phoenician influence. The Egyptian influence is at one remove, via Phoenicia.
Redford: So Phoenicia was the sieve through which Egyptian stuff arrived in Israel. What amazes me is how few of the remains found in the Negev and in Judah were imported from Egypt. As a student studying Egypt, I was taken on [Kathleen] Kenyon’s dig at Jerusalem. She had something like 40 squares going, but we found only two amulets that could possibly be of Egyptian origin. Now that’s Jerusalem in Iron Age II [1000–586 B.C.E.]. So I think that the Negev and Sinai deserts were a significant barrier to contact. At the very least, there was not the kind of cultural contact that we might have expected. No, I don’t see any influence.
Now, there are literary affinities. Part of Psalm 104 derives from the Hymn to the Sun-disc. Proverbs 22:17–23:14 seem to derive from an Egyptian text called the Wisdom of Amenemope. There are other passages, too. In the first chapter of 1 Samuel, for instance, Hannah, just before she gives birth, breaks into a paean about how the mighty are brought low and the low exalted, how the sad are happy and the happy are now sad, and how the poor are made rich and the rich made poor. This is straight out of Ipuwer [whose Admonitions dates to about the 22nd century B.C.E.]. So you do have themes that seem to have been circulating, almost in the air. But I wonder how direct the contact was.
Q: In your judgment, did Egyptian one-godness influence early Israelite theology?
Redford: Well, if you mean Akhenaten, I don’t think it did at all. There is the fact that the traditional monotheism of Moses speaks of one god and Akhenaten makes it clear that he is dealing with a single god. But Egypt in the Iron Age and later, when Israel and Judah were coming into contact with it, was noted for the multiplicity of its deities. Egypt was anything but monotheistic during the Iron Age. Moreover, the monotheism of Akhenaten is so distinct from Yahwism that I wonder why the two are compared. Really, there’s very little to Akhenaten’s religion. It’s been pointed out, or example, that Akhenaten’s religion is devoid of ethical content; in Mosaic monotheism, the ethical content is quite extensive. No, I don’t see any link.
Dever: There’s also too great a time lag—five or six centuries before Israelite monotheism really emerges. So there couldn’t have been any very direct connection, perhaps only an oral tradition that remained underground for all those centuries.
Q: Can you give a date to the emergence of Israelite monotheism?
Dever: The archaeological evidence is ambiguous, I think. We can say that these mother-goddess figurines, and all the rest, remained in use through the very end of the monarchy. And it is a fact that there are more of them from the eighth and seventh centuries than from the tenth and ninth centuries.
Q: Does the evidence of these figurines necessarily rule out the existence of a theological strand of monotheism, on the part of an official elite or perhaps even a mainstream Judaism?
Dever: I don’t doubt that such a strand existed. My point is simply that there is another stream in the archaeological material that is usually overlooked. I don’t mean to disparage the biblical text. But I think we have to deal with the question of literacy: How many people in ancient Israel could read the text that later came to make up the Bible? Very few. Most estimates of literacy in antiquity range from one to two percent. And so we’re talking about a literate tradition that did not reflect the actual lives of most people. I’m putting in a plea for the common man, and woman. I’ve never met them, but I’ve heard they exist.
Q: On the basis of the biblical text, when do you see Israelite monotheism as emerging?
P. Kyle McCarter, Jr.: The kind of monotheism that is characteristic of the region is the worship of the national god. And that is distinct from the religion of the preceding period, the late Middle Bronze Age through the Late Bronze Age [1750–1200 B.C.E.], during which there were numerous local places of worship. The national god is characteristic of the Iron Age; I see it emerging sometime after the 12th century, though we don’t have any texts from this period that make it clear. The standard type of religion in the southern Levant during the Iron Age, perhaps with the exception of the Phoenician coast, was basically monotheistic; but the national god could have hypostatic forms that could become independent quasi-independent.
The interesting question, it seems to me, is when does Yahweh become the national god of Israel? When does Yahwism emerge? One way to approach that question is to ask when the first Yahwistic name appears in Israelite tradition. Who is the first person with a Yahwistic name? I think you’ll find that the answer lies in the time of the United Monarchy, as early as Saul. The patriarchs do not have Yahwistic names. In the period of the Judges there are no Yahwistic names. But Saul has a son with a Yahwistic name [Malchishua], as well as a son whose name includes the Canaanite god Ba‘al as a theophoric element [Eshbaal].
Q: You talked about national gods. I used to think of that as henotheism: There’s a national god who rules us, but other peoples have their own gods. The national god is not a universal God. When did Yahweh become universal?
McCarter: I think you’re right. The term “henotheism” fits better with the national god phenomenon. As for your question, When did true monotheism emerge out of the national god phenomenon of Iron Age Yahwism? I think there were two major movements. One was the reform movements [of Hezekiah and Josiah], with the repudiation of the various representations of the deity and the repudiation of local cults. The centralization of worship in Jerusalem put a great emphasis on the oneness, the abstractness of the deity.
Second, with the destruction of Jerusalem, God was separated even from that one place; God was ripped out of a geographic limitation and became increasingly abstract. This concept of the universal God was the great achievement of the priestly synthesis in the sixth century B.C.E. That was the seminal moment in which Jewish monotheism was created, in the sixth century.
John J. Collins: There are probably some other points that you can mark along the way. Clearly, the seventh-century destruction of local cults is one, and the priestly synthesis in the sixth century is another. Something else happens in the Hellenistic period [332–37 B.C.E.]. It’s only in the Hellenistic period, I would say, that the question of the existence of other gods is raised.
Q: What about Deutero-Isaiah, written around the mid-sixth century B.C.E.? Doesn’t it raise the question of the existence of other gods?
Collins: I don’t think Deutero-Isaiah is really questioning their existence. I think it’s questioning their power. But let me add one other point. Even down through the Hellenistic period and later, even with the rabbis, you sometimes get the idea that other nations should worship their own gods, and that it is impious of other nations not to worship their own gods. At the same time, in some Hellenistic Jewish literature the strong claim is made that all nations should worship the God of Judaism.
Dever: Now see what my colleagues are all doing. They’re talking about the literary tradition. When does monotheism appear in the literary tradition? That’s one question. I ask a different question: What about the religious practices of most people? For instance, we speak of Edomite religion as being monotheistic, because we know the name of only one deity; Qos. We don’t know the name of any female Edomite deity. But the Edomite shrine at Qitmit contains both male and female figurines. In the popular religion you have something entirely different from what the Bible describes.
Collins: When does the cult of goddesses die out?
Dever: The answer is never. In so-called primitive religions, goddess figurines are still prominent. If you want to see a version of spring fertility rites, I can invite you to the campus of the University of Arizona in March. You will see them there, much as in ancient Canaan.
Q: It’s interesting that you have all of these little female goddess figurines, all around the Mediterranean. But it seems to me that women are being systematically squeezed out of the important parts of the system, the parts that have power and status. Frankly, I’m not satisfied with a bunch of little dolls.
Dever: Well, as I’ve said, the goddess figurines are dangerous, and you have to be careful. I have the heretical opinion that the cult of Asherah was systematically driven underground by the late reform movements in Israel and Judah. And it’s clear that the later rabbis didn’t quite understand who she had been. It’s sort of like the word miples
Redford: One comment that might warm your heart: In the Hellenistic and early Roman periods, one of the most dominant cults in the entire Mediterranean was that of Isis.
Collins: We did attempt revival of domestic religion with the Virgin Mary. But it seems to have “Petered” out.
Q: I tend to connect the rise of national Israelite religion with the prophet Amos and universal religion with prophets like Isaiah and Ezekiel. Can you comment on that?
McCarter: I referred earlier to the political units that emerged after the Iron Age was underway, a bit earlier than Amos or Isaiah. It wasn’t until the time of Saul or David (10th century B.C.E.)—at least, according to tradition—that nation-states emerged by unifying several city-states. The subjects of this new, larger political unit would worship a common national god. These nation-states had other characteristics. One of the best examples is language. National dialects arose at the same time. Hebrew, for example, became different from Ammonite, or from Edomite. After the split-up of the Israelite United Monarchy, the same phenomenon occurred; we can point to the differences between the Hebrew dialects of the north [Israel] and south [Judah]. Even the handwriting was different. The point is that these nation-states had various national characteristics, and religion was one of them. In Israel, the prophets also played a role in solidifying the nation. I should say here that in distinguishing between “popular” and “official” religion, we’ve neglected the prophetic stream, which is preserved in the Bible. Bill [Dever], it’s not only an elite group.
Dever: No, I agree with you.
McCarter: One of the remarkable things about the Bible is that it does embrace the loyal and not always so loyal opposition along with the official royal position—and they don’t always agree.
Dever: Yes, I couldn’t agree more. Between the two extremes that I was positing, you do have the prophetic stream, which has to be characterized separately.
Q: How would you characterize the prophets you mentioned? Is it fair to say that Amos wrote in a national context and that Ezekiel wrote in a universal context?
McCarter: Ezekiel, living during the Babylonian Exile [after 586 B.C.E.], was forced to take a more universal view. Amos is more puzzling. He depicts Yahweh as saying, “I brought Israel out of Egypt, and I brought the Philistines out of Caphtor,” as though Yahweh is the god of other nations as well. You’d almost think there’s a deliberate element of hyperbole, to make a point about Yahweh’s greatness. So, yes, I would agree with you; Amos takes a more or less national view, whereas Ezekiel’s view is much broader.
Q: Professor Dever did a very good job of showing that there were female goddess figures that are not mentioned in the Bible. But he then disparages the text by saying, “The Bible doesn’t tell us what people were like.” Couldn’t we say, however, that even in historical terms it was the idealism of the literature that was carried forward? And that this is what matters?
Dever: Literature is not life. It’s the result of the creative imagination of a few. It reflects life, of course, real life, but also a kind of life to which few have access. And almost all of our reconstructions of the past have been based on great literary traditions—and to that extent they have excluded the majority of people who ever lived. I’m only trying to put in a plea for those others who have been all but forgotten, except by archaeology. I believe that what they did does matter, and I believe that today we have the means of finding out something about them. One other comment: I am not saying that those women—and the men as well—in the villages of Judah who used these female figurines were not Yahwists. I think they were. They would have thought of themselves as Yahwists. This was one aspect of Yahweh’s creative activity, as far as they were concerned. In a way, the ancients were more sophisticated than we are.
Q: I was struck by your associating the Holy Spirit with Wisdom, which in turn is connected to femaleness. In Hellenistic literature there’s the goddess Athena. And in Jewish literature the figure of Wisdom, h
Collins: You could make a good case for that historically—though later, in patristic Christian theology, the Spirit wasn’t feminine. Still later, in some strands of Christian belief during the Middle Ages, you do get a feminine Spirit.
Q: Where in the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament does the concept of the Holy Spirit emerge?
Collins: Well, you have the spirit of God in the Hebrew Bible from quite an early point, as a mold of God’s action. More immediately relevant to the Christian idea of the Spirit, though, is the notion of Wisdom. Wisdom was sometimes identified as the Logos; it was also sometimes called the Pneuma, or Spirit, which was another formulation for the Stoic concept of the Logos—meaning a kind of world soul, or the spirit of God in the world. To a great degree, in both Stoicism and in Hellenistic Judaism, the Spirit and the Logos are the same thing. But in Christianity, Christ is identified with the Logos and the Spirit is understood as a separate entity.
Question: Was Akhenaten’s sun worship simply a religious reform, or was it also a means of consolidating political power?
Donald B. Redford: It’s been suggested that Akhenaten had a hidden agenda when he started out. I’m not quite sure about that. But we do know, from the inscriptional material that’s coming to light from Karnak, that Akhenaten’s new sun temples had thousands of priests associated with them. Maybe these new priests were simply the old priesthood taken over into the new regime. We know that the revenues of the older temples (which all had landed estates to support them) were now being funneled into the new sun temples. Everyone focused their attention on the new sun temples, worshiping Akhenaten and worshiping the sun. Toward the end of his reign and shortly thereafter, when the country was on the rocks economically, people went back to old temples and found them in ruins. They were completely abandoned; weeds were growing in the courtyards. This situation was easily explained: The gods had turned their backs on Egypt.