EGYPT, ISRAEL AND BEYOND – THE OVERLAYING COMMONALITIES
I believe I have shown that many features of Akhenaten’s monotheism later became exclusive to the Qumran-Essenes, when compared to the practices of the surrounding Israelite community. However, many more ‘overlaying commonalities’ of general Egyptian beliefs and traditions were, and still are, practised by mainstream Judaism. Tracing back these ‘commonalities’ shows that the Essenes undoubtedly formed a musical workshop for the orchestra of Christianity and, by extension, of Islam.
BEYOND THE ‘REED CURTAIN’
Although mainstream Judaism has always acknowledged an ancestral relationship with pharaonic-Egypt, it has never acknowledged any fundamental religious derivations, nor any cultural, social or doctrinal factors. Any discussion of the possible derivation of these from Egypt is cut off by a ‘Reed Curtain’, which rarely takes account of pre-Exodus Egypt. Nevertheless, the heritage and religious importance of Egypt is unambiguously spelled out in Isaiah 19. We are told (in verses 18–25) how the spirit of God, having descended onto the Egyptians, is soon abused and they return to their idols. Later, when five cities*52 speak the language of Canaan and there is an outpost on the border (probably referring to the Island of Elephantine, see Chapter 19), Isaiah predicts that the Egyptians will begin the process of returning to God. Eventually, when Israel, Assyria and Egypt are at peace:
In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and with Assyria, even a blessing in the midst of the land: whom the Lord of hosts shall bless, saying, ‘Blessed be Egypt My people, and Assyria the work of My hands, and Israel Mine inheritance.’1
Isaiah 19:24–25
The Bible, in the words of Isaiah, is saying that Christians, Jews and Muslims are equally acceptable in the eyes of God and, by inference, peoples of all religions and nations throughout the world. (See Glossary on ‘Contemporary Movements’.)
There is not space here to analyse all the analogies of the characteristics of Egypt that have been absorbed into Judaism, and then often forward into Christianity and Islam. Some of them have already been discussed briefly, and other writers cover them in much more detail – writers such as Sir Ernest Wallis Budge,2 Dr H. Brugsch,3 Robert Eisenman and Michael Wise,4 Theodor Gaster,5 Irving Zeitlin6 and Siegfried Morenz.7
These, and others, have long recognized that there are extensive commonalities between the pharaonic-Egyptian religions and the roots of western religions. These commonalities have been acknowledged by historians and academics, but only in a limited way by modern religious writers.
Sir Ernest Wallis Budge (Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), one of the most venerated historians of his day, had no doubts about the concepts ancient Egyptians had about God.
A study of ancient Egyptian religious texts will convince the reader that the Egyptians believed in One God, who was self-evident, immortal, invisible, eternal, omniscient, almighty, and inscrutable.8
One of his contemporaries, Dr H. Brugsch, collected epithets from the histo-Egyptian texts, which led him to conclude that:
…the ideas and beliefs of the Egyptians concerning God were identical with those of the Hebrews and Muhammadans at later periods.9
The idea that the writings of the ancient Egyptians were no more than isolated collections of stories, and that their scribes did not have the inclination to collate them into an overall pattern of scriptures is incorrect.
Apart from the Pyramid and Coffin Texts, which have been gathered together and, in themselves, form an interlocking picture of ritual life, there is the New Kingdom period ‘Amduat’ or ‘Book of That Which Is In the Otherworld’. This attempts to encompass not only ideas of the royal resurrection but also the basic structures behind the resurrection and the calendar that controls the cyclical pattern of life. Versions appear in many royal tombs of the New Kingdom, including that of Tutmoses III, and they were a stage in the progressive development towards the simplicity of Akhenaten’s religion. Unlike the post-Akhenaten tomb of Tutankhamun, which held all manner of adornments and numerous shrines and representations of the gods attending the sarcophagus*53 of the dead king, Tutmoses III’s tomb is empty of garnishings and stripped of ritual furnishings. As John Romer put it in his BBC television series:
The religious ‘books’ of the New Kingdom theology, of which the Amduat is but one example, were a codification and unification of these age-old beliefs, made by the priests pressurized by the acute enquiries of a new era.10
There was, therefore, ample precedent for the production of a codified work, encompassing the religious beliefs of the age.
A specific example that links Biblical texts to a body of Egyptian texts (significantly, precisely dated to the time of Akhenaten) can be seen in the similarities between Psalm 104 of the Old Testament and the Great Hymn to Aten found at the tomb of Ay at El-Amarna.
| Psalm 10411 | Great Hymn to Aten12 |
| Bless the Lord, O my soul | An adoration of Aten… |
| O Lord my God, thou art very great;... | Lord of all…Lord of heaven, Lord of earth… |
| Thou art clothed with honour and majesty | Thou are splendid, great, radiant, uplifted above every land. |
| Who coverest Thyself with light | Thy rays embrace the lands to the extent |
| as with a garment | of all that Thou hast made. |
| …Who laid the foundations of the earth… | …Thou layest the foundations of the earth |
| …He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man: | …Animals of all kinds rest on their pastures: trees and herbage grow green: |
| …O Lord, how manifold are Thy works! In wisdom hast Thou made them all | …How manifold are the things which thou hast made! |
| …There go the ships: | …The ships, too, go down and up the stream; |
| …That Thou givest them they gather: | …The land depends on Thee, even as Thou hast made them; |
| Thou openest Thine hand, they are filled with good. | When Thou dawnest they live, |
| Thou hidest thy face, they are troubled: | When Thou settest they die. |
| Thou takest away their breath, they die, And return to their dust. | |
| Thou sendest forth Thy spirit, they are created… | Thou in Thyself are length of days; life is from Thee… |
The conventional explanation, for the close fit of Psalm 104 to the Great Hymn of Akhenaten, is to pass it off as deriving from the generality of Egyptian hymns that must have somehow percolated through into the Hebrew consciousness – in many instances sequence for sequence and word for word! This vague sidestepping explanation completely fails to explain how a unique literary work, engraved in hieroglyphs on the wall of a remote tomb at Akhetaten, in a place lost even to Egyptian history, within thirty or forty years of the destruction of Akhenaten’s Holy City, could have been transmitted to the Israelites.
Jan Assmann, Professor of Egyptology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, has gone over the original work of Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (see notes 7 and 8 in Chapter 20) and come to the conclusion that not only was Freud basically correct in relating many of Akhenaten’s teachings to those of the Hebrews, but that Psalm 104 was a special case of synchronism. He sees Akhenaten’s Great Hymn as: ‘not just a variation on a theme, but a fundamental change which affects the central Egyptian concepts of kingship, state, and political action.’ In the third stanza, which deals with ‘the night’, Professor Assmann, like Professor Erik Hornung, of the University of Basel, sees the negation of the netherworld, the realm of Osiris and of the dead, as being: ‘perhaps the most revolutionary of all. There is no Egyptian text, outside Amarna, that depicts the night as divine absence’, Professor Assmann asserts.
In other words, the Great Hymn’s congruencies with Psalm 104 are not due to a vague assimilation of ideas from the generality of Egyptian prayers, but it incorporates concepts that were not seen in Egyptian writings before Akhenaten or after his so-called heretical period. For the Hebrews to have picked up these unique beliefs they must have had access to a source of secretive texts, for which no mechanism of transfer is known by conventional scholarship, or one is forced to the only logical conclusion - they had an historical presence at Amarna.
Perhaps, even more remarkable, are the findings of Messod and Roger Sabbah, described in their book Les Secrets de l’Exode (see note 35, Chapter 20), where they relate specific hieroglyph letters and words in the Great Hymn to derived Hebrew letters that appear in exactly the same sequences of Psalm 104 and carry the same philological sense.
The Psalms, as a body of works, encompass a wide period of Biblical history, and many have distinctive overtones of ancient Egyptian style, content and feeling. They have had a profound effect on western religious belief and therefore have considerable significance to the narrative.
THE MUSICAL PSALMS
The 150 Psalms in the Old Testament form a unique corpus of literature, comparable with the Sonnets of Shakespeare in their profoundly beautiful imagery, literary quality and intellectual depth. In his classic work on Jewish music, Professor A. Z. Idelsohn, of the Hebrew Union College in America, calls them: ‘…the fountain from which millions of souls draw their inspiration and through which they have voiced their devotion for more than two thousand years’.13 The reason for their power is expressed by many Church Fathers, such as Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, who lived from 295 to 373 CE. He said of the Psalms: ‘They embrace the entire human life, express every emotion of the soul, every impulse of the heart.’14
The Psalms were written down somewhere between 800 and 200 BCE, but some are associated with even earlier periods.15 Their content and phraseology find their way into many other sections of the Bible. They were employed in Israel as songs or chants to be performed in the Temple at Jerusalem as processions wound their way within the Temple during sacrificial, coronation or offering ceremonies.
Whilst the lyrics of these ‘processionals’ were well documented, from other descriptions and depictions, and because many are introduced as ‘songs’ or as dedicated ‘to the Chief Musician’, it is certain that music accompanied the words. What this music was like is not known, although the nearest tunes in existance today are thought to be those preserved in the traditional chants of Yemeni Jewish ceremonies. However, circumstantial evidence and rhythm analysis indicates that the ‘singing’ was derived from ancient Egyptian temple music, dating back beyond the Eighteenth Dynasty.
Professor Idelsohn refers to Egyptian temple music as having ‘a certain dignity and holiness’, with the priests resisting any attempts to change the sacred melodies. He concluded, as did Alfred Sendrey in his Music in Ancient Israel,16 that ancient Egyptian music and instrumentation were the primary influences on the music of ancient Israel, with some borrowings from Assyria, and virtually none from Phoenicia – Israel’s nearest neighbour. With regard to the music of the Psalms, Idelsohn states: ‘…from the composition of the orchestra of the First Temple, we learn that Israel accepted some of the arrangements of the religious orchestra used in Egypt at the time of its cultural height’.17
Many of the ‘orchestral’ instruments used in the Jewish Temple, such as the silver trumpet (chatzotzera),*54 the ten- and twelve-stringed lyres (kinnor and nevel ), the flute (uggav) and the cymbals (metziltayim) were replicas of Egyptian instruments. In addition, little bells (paamonim) were attached to the skirts of the High Priest, as described in Exodus 28:35:
…and his sound shall be heard when he goeth in unto the holy place before the Lord, and when he cometh out, that he not die.
This custom is very reminiscent of the Egyptian usage of ‘Sistrum’ (tinkling bells) that, according to the Greek historian Plutarch (46–120 CE), were used to call the attention of worshippers to the sacred function in their sanctuary, and to drive away the evil spirit. Other instruments particularly associated with Egyptian temple worship included clappers, cymbals and bells.
The similarities between instruments used in the Temple at Jerusalem and Egyptian instruments are evidenced by numerous archaeological and inscriptional discoveries. The earliest form of kinnor, for example, is illustrated on a vase dated to c.1025 BCE, found at Meggido in Israel, which bears a striking resemblance to a lyre illustrated on a tomb wall at Thebes, dating to c.1420 BCE.18
Themes in the Psalms
The proximity of ideas between the Wisdom books of Egypt*55 and the Bible – which are particularly notable in the Book of Proverbs – are also touched on in areas of the Psalms. The bulk of the Psalms, however, have much more similar ring to the prayers to Aten of the Eighteenth Dynasty, and other prayers to be found in older tomb texts. The themes of light and shadow, praise to God, love of righteousness, hate of wickedness and judgement run through the Psalms and can be readily identified with the themes contained in processional prayers performed in earlier Egyptian temple ceremonies.
Almost half of the Psalms are attributed to King David; significantly, the only one attributed to Moses – Psalm 90 – is, as would be expected, redolent with references to light and the effects of the sun.
For a thousand years in Thy sight
Are but as yesterday when it is past,
And as a watch in the night.
Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as sleep:
In the morning they are like grass which groweth up.
In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is
cut-down, and withereth.
For we are consumed by Thine anger,
And by Thy wrath are we troubled.
Thou hast set our iniquities before Thee,
Our secret sins in the light of Thy countenance.
Psalm 90:4–8
King David himself, according to tradition, went into battle with a shield inscribed with the words from Psalm 67: ‘May God be gracious to us, and bless us and make His face to shine upon us.’
This theme of light and the sun’s influence runs throughout the Bible: it brightly colours the writings of the Qumran-Essenes, occurs in numerous prayers in all three monotheistic religions and persists today in the Jewish celebration of ‘Blessing the Sun’. This takes place every twenty-eight years – the last one was in 1981 and the next is due in 2009.
The origins of monotheism in Egypt can be traced back to the sun worshipping priests of ‘On’ at Heliopolis, culminating in the full emancipation of the belief with Akhenaten. His praise in the Hymns to Aten, the sun as Creator, can readily be compared to the Psalms of praise to God of the Old Testament, in terms of the intensity of feeling and devotion. But it was not the old sun god of Heliopolis that Akhenaten was worshipping. He had made the religious, and scientific, breakthrough of realizing that the sun merely represented the power of an abstract, supreme God.
Cave 11 at Qumran yielded the so-called ‘Psalm Scroll’, which was translated by James A. Sanders, Professor of Old Testament at the Union Theological Seminary, New York, between 1965 and 1967.19
The ‘Psalm Scroll’ mixes details of Psalms, supposedly composed by King David, into a setting of the Qumran-Essenes’ unconventional 364-day solar calendar, making it difficult to reconcile the supposed dates of their original composition. Unless the solar calendar was in force at the time of King David, in 1000 BCE, for which there is no Biblical evidence, one is forced to look further back in time to when a solar calendar might have applied and is led inexorably to a period when the Hebrews were still in Egypt.
SOCIAL MORALITY
Examples of Egyptian social conventions that have penetrated the religious morality of Judaism, Christianity and Islam today are not easily detected. There are some, however, that can be readily identified.
Homosexuality
In orthodox Judaism homosexuality is looked on as a sin. This follows on the injunction in the Bible that labels the practice as ‘an abomination’ in the sight of God. Modern ‘Progressive’ movements of Judaism, such as Reform and Liberal in Britain, and Conservative in America, are more tolerant, but generally still will not sanction any formal acknowledgement of homosexuality within a synagogal environment.
In the surrounding, and often dominating cauldron of ancient cultures that helped shape Jewish social attitudes, there was little objection to homosexuality. It was fully accepted in the ancient Greek world of Pericles and Plato, and even encouraged between teenage boys and older men. The one adjacent culture that did condemn homosexuality, and had done so for a time well before the Exodus, was that of Egypt.20 It is not unreasonable to assume that this is a possible source from where the Judaic antipathy emerged.
THE EGYPTIAN ‘WISDOM’ WRITINGS AND ARCHETYPE STORIES
Many of the Hellenistic influences that colour the New Testament are well documented. Some of the Egyptian influences are also a consequence of the original translation of the Torah – as it was translated into Greek by a team of seventy scribes working at Alexandria, in Egypt in the third century BCE. This ‘Septuagint’ is the Old Testament ‘gospel’ to which all three of the great monotheistic religions refer.
Whilst stories from Egyptian literature are relatively easy to identify earlier on in the Old Testament, they become less obvious as one goes further into the Book. This has led some historians to doubt the significance of Egypt and to look for other sources. I believe the more obscure correspondences have always been there but were not recognized by earlier researchers, and that their lack of findings discouraged others from looking more intensely for a number of decades. One of these researchers was Siegfried Morenz, a Director of the Institute of Egyptology in Leipzig, who concluded:
Unfortunately the degree to which this influence [Egypt’s on the Old Testament] is perceptible stands in indirect proportion to the significance of the facts.21
He even postulates that this ‘influence’ might have been in reverse – the Old Testament on Egyptian religious literature! Even after quoting endless citations of Egyptian socio-religious correspondences, he still did not appear to believe his own evidence.
Others, like myself, do not agree with this viewpoint.
The influence of ‘Wisdom writings’ from Egypt can still be seen quite far on into the Old Testament; for example, in the so-called ‘Succession Narratives’ in the Books of Samuel and I and II Kings, where the author (probably a contemporary of King David), draws heavily on Egyptian style and insights. As R. N. Whybray puts it in his book on the Succession Narratives: ‘Whether the author of the Succession Narratives knew the Egyptian literature of the Twelfth Dynasty [or not]…that such a literature was among his models must be regarded as extremely probable.’22
It is not only the philosophical and religious patterns which have been imported into the Old Testament, but also local stories, expressions and phrases. A number of examples of this type of ‘story copying’ have already been cited – the Two Brothers’ story (see Chapter 10), and the tradition of seven lean years followed by seven years of plenty – seen in a modified form in the Biblical texts are but two of them.
EGYPTIAN INFLUENCES ON THE NEW TESTAMENT
There are also instances where Egyptian influences have ‘jumped’ the Old Testament to arrive in the New. We find this in the Gospel of St Luke 16:19–31. This is the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, where Lazarus, a wretched sick beggar, is left to rot outside the gate of a very wealthy man. Both die, but the beggar is carried up to Abraham’s bosom whilst the rich man goes to hell. The rich man sees Abraham in the distance and cries out for mercy and for Lazarus to bring him water. Abraham tells him that the gulf between them is too great. Again the rich man calls to Abraham, asking if he will at least send Lazarus to his house to warn his five brothers of the torment that lies ahead if they behave the way he himself had done.
Abraham’s reply speaks volumes:
And he said unto him, ‘If they hear not Moses and his prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead.’
Luke 16:31
When this parable is compared to the ancient ‘Setna Story’, which was written in demotic Egyptian, there are notable similarities. Here, the hero learns that in the realm of the dead a sinful rich man has lost all the ostentation and finery on his tomb to a poor but righteous man. The poor man is comforted beside Osiris, whilst the rich man is relegated to the terrors of hell.23
The idea behind Jesus’ parable of the rich man and Lazarus has been shown to have been transmitted through Jewish literature from Egyptian origins,24 as was the acclamation by early Christian communities of ‘God is One’.25
The non-canonical saying attributed to Jesus: ‘Nothing is buried which will not be raised up’,26 is found inscribed on a mummy bandage from an ‘Oxyrynchus’ fish, sacred to the goddesses Hathor, Isis and Mut, of which there is an example in the British Museum.
The sentiment of heaping ‘coals of fire’ on one’s enemy’s head, which occurs in the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans (Romans 12:20), is very reminiscent of the Egyptian reverential rites. When St Paul talks of the absolute power of the Creator to confer honour and dishonour, he is paraphrasing thoughts in the ‘Instruction of Amenemope’ dating from eighth century BCE Egypt:27
For man is clay, and the God is his builder.
He is tearing down and building up every day.
He makes a thousand poor men as he wishes,
He makes a thousand men as overseers.
Compare this to the New Testament quotation:
Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?
Romans 9:20
Picked up in Judaic philosophy, this idea sharply delineates the line between Creator and created.
The ‘second death’ judgement of the already dead, in the Revelation of St John the Divine (20:14), can be linked directly to the Egyptian concept of ‘second mortality’ in the Coffin Text – a ‘Spell of not dying a second time in the realm of the [already] dead’, and in the Papyrus of Ani, Chapter 44.28 As can the ‘crown of righteousness’ of II Timothy 4:8 and the First Epistle of Peter 5:4 be linked to the ‘crown of life’ of Egyptian theology.29
The concept of the trinity, already discussed in Chapter 5, which entered into Greek tradition a century or so before Christ, was well known in Egypt many years earlier. In Egyptian theology three gods were often combined as one and addressed in the singular. As Siegfried Morenz puts it:
In this way the spiritual force of Egyptian religion shows a direct link with Christian theology…The multifarious links between Egypt and Judaeo-Christian scriptures and trinitarian theology can already be traced with some degree of plausibility.30
In addition to these examples of Egyptian influence on Judaism, it is possible to note many conceptual and stylistic effects on the Old and New Testaments. Gathering these examples together, they can be listed as follows:
- The Egyptian Court ‘chronicles’ style of literature influenced the chronicled accounts of David and Solomon in the Bible.
- Isaiah’s list of appellations for the Prince of Peace were derived from the five titulary ways of addressing the Egyptian King.31
- Wisdom literature, which Siegfried Morenz calls ‘a gift of Egypt’,32 can be seen in many parts of the Bible, particularly in the Book of Proverbs.
- The ‘Instructions of Amenemope’ and the Biblical Book of Proverbs bear remarkable similarities.
- The Book of Psalms echoes many Egyptian temple prayers. A specific example being Psalm 104.
- Musical instruments used in both the First and Second Temples to accompany the Psalms were similar, if not the same, as those used in Egyptian temple ceremonies.
- Egyptian lists of knowledge formed the basis of the proverbs of King Solomon.33
- The Koheleth teachings of Solomon in Ecclesiastes, exemplified by the ‘Horace–Williams’-type injunction, ‘carpe diem’ – ‘seize the day’,*56 which appeared in the ‘Songs of the Harpers’, had long influenced Egyptian thought.34
Another example is the idea current in the ‘Songs of the Harpers’ from the Middle Kingdom period of Egypt (and as testified to by the Greek historian Herodotus) that it was the fashion to pass around a casket at a banquet, containing the remains of a dead person, with the reminder: ‘gaze here, and drink and be merry; for when you die, such will you be’35 - The concept of ‘do not change any of the words, and add nothing thereto, and put not one thing in the place of another’, which comes at the end of the ‘Instructions of Ptah-hotep’, has been taken up in Deuteronomy, and in the Revelation of St John the Divine at the very end of the New Testament.36
- The appellations for God. For example, in the earliest known translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, we find in Deuteronomy 9:26: ‘Lord, Lord, king of the gods…’. This is an unknown phrasing for Israelite literature, but was a normal invocation for the High God in ancient Egypt.
- As said above, the trinity of Egyptian gods and their precedence for Christian theology has already been commented on.
- Well over forty Egyptian words can be identified as being adopted into the original translation texts of the Bible.37
One could go on and on, and I am sure readers will discover many for themselves, by accident or design.
THE BODY OF EVIDENCE
Look at the evidence presented here. Weigh it all up and see what conclusion you come to. I believe the evidence I have presented is overwhelming.
The close resemblance of Psalm 104 and a hymn dating back to the time of Akhenaten (and very possibly composed by him) has been remarked on before, but the connection has never been explained. How could it be that a psalm, supposedly written down after 800 BCE, is so similar to a work written in hieroglyphs at least 500 years earlier, which was found in a place unfrequented by Egyptians and inaccessible to Hebrew scribes hundreds of kilometres distant – unless awareness of Akhenaten’s Hymn came out of Egypt with the Exodus? The breadth of influence of ‘wisdom literature’, too, and the proverbs that can be traced back to ancient Egyptian lore, is so extensive that one has to pose the question: ‘Was not the famous wisdom of Solomon really the concentrated wisdom of Egypt?’
There will inevitably be those who cannot, or dare not, take on board the conclusions that emerge because they present too many challenges to traditional beliefs. But look for one moment at a couple of ‘what ifs’.‘What if I am correct?’ ‘What if the origins of monotheism do go back to the time of Akhenaten?’ Does this knowledge change fundamental religious beliefs? Not really. It does, however, change the perspective of how some customs and practices have become erroneously entrenched in modern attitudes. The misconceived role of women and the need for animal sacrifices are obvious examples. It does also give us the opportunity to look at texts and prayers in an Egyptian context and, in many instances, to discover emotive and moving passages that are still relevant today.
Let me make an analogy. The contemporary phrase ‘Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?’ is quoted in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations as coming from Jeremiah 13:23. A similar phrase, deriving from an apparently much earlier date than Jeremiah (who fled to Egypt c.600 BCE), appears in an Egyptian papyrus in the British Museum known as ‘The Instructions of Ankhsheshonq’. Here we read: ‘There is no tooth that rots and stays in place. There is no Nubian [the ancient term for Ethiopian] who leaves his skin.’38 All right, so the origins of the phrase may be much earlier than most people have acknowledged, and it may come from Egypt not Israel, but the essence of the saying and its validity remain unaltered.