Modern Judaism - an Extension of Egypt's Atenist culture

"An oracle concerning Egypt...In that day Israel will be the third with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth, whom the Lord of hosts has blessed, saying, "Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel my heritage."  Isaiah 19:24
 

One will hardly be immersed in controversy if you were to define the historical origin of Judaism
as beginning immediately after the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt under their first and
greatest leader, Moses.

But if one were to propose that the true basis of Judaism, with Moses at the helm, was developed
altogether differently, and that Ancient Egypt played the most profound role in the Jewish idea of
"God" in that development, many would reject it as a paradox or contradiction.  After all, it would
seem on the surface to be absurd to imagine that the enslaved would ever have adopted the
religion of their enslavers. Concerning this idea, it is useful to recall that Anna Freud, during
World War II, defined a type of similar association as: "identification with the aggressor", and
later we had the more-familiar term, "Stockholm syndrome", coined in 1974 to describe the
psychological phenomenon in hostages to develop a sympathy for, or to identify with, their
captors.  But after thousands of years of its history, it is difficult to simply Judaism in that context.

There were and are a number of vehement critics of the hypothesis that Judaism evolved from
Egyptian sun-worship, the most recent being Jonathan Kirsch who as a Los Angeles newspaper
correspondent seems to make a well-versed attempt at character assassination of the famous
Jewish pychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud(1856-1939), more or less denouncing him in  this 500-page
fairy-tale book on the life of Moses.  Fairy tales with no more or less speculation than from the
man he rebukes.

Freud's theory would not be so outlandish for the open-minded, Kirsch obviously isn't one of
them, in the light of an examination of the evidence contained in this hypothesis.  In his last
work entitled "Moses and Monotheism" essentially completed in the last years of his life in 1937,
Freud laid out a very convincing argument for such a possibility, that Israel imported its
monotheism from Ancient Egypt.

We believe that the current diplomatic reapproachment of Egypt and Israel, something
inconceivable between Arabs and Jews, is proof in 2004 that there is some alluring attachment to
a possibility that extends beyond political diplomacy between Egypt and Israel, and beyond the
fact that the two nations are adjacent to each other.  We also believe that such a theory would be
more incredible for Orthodox Judaism, for reasons stated already, as some would assume it is a
theory of the hostage identifying with the terrorists who have abducted or (temporarily) enslaved
them.  Again, this is not entirely accurate.

It should be noted that our paper will not concern itself primarily with the nuances of modern
Judaism except as a brief introduction for the sake of informing the ignorant reader and how
certain of those characteristics were likely imported from Egypt.  To further delve into great
detail of the complexities and ritualistic dogma of modern Judaism is a task we shall relinquish to
others.  Instead we think that the most critical task for understanding any religion, especially a
large and established world religion such as Judaism, is to envision its original genesis.  Because a
casual examination of most religions appears to demonstrate that they quickly change, evolve
rapidly and metamorphosize into entirely different systems after centuries and millennia of
existence.  God and the worship of God does not take place in a vacuum!

Look how the Asian religion Buddhism was transformed from the initial experiences of an Indian
prince (Siddhartha Gautama), who in or around 500 B.C renounced a life of luxury and affluence
to become a penniless monk in search of an elusive Nirvana.  From there, a myriad of sects and
cults sprang from this:  Zen Buddhism in Japan, Won Buddhism in South Korea, Tibetan
Buddhism, Chinese Buddhism, Indian Yoga, even influencing metaphysical religions like
Spiritualism, Theosophy and its off-shoot, Rudolf Steiner's Anthrosophical Science.. Each of
them are divergent with each other, in one aspect or another.

In Islam, there are the Sunni and Shiite factions which are largely incompatible with each other,
although both are descended from the same founder, Mohammed the Prophet. This is not to say
they are inimical to each other, as the Americans are learning in Iraqi today.  Sunni and Shia
guerrillas are freely cooperating with each other everywhere in the Iraqi countryside, putting
religious differences aside, and giving the invading and occupationalist armies there a new Arabic
quagmire from which they will surely have to extricate themselves soon.  But we must not
digress here just to show the complex interactions between religions and sects and societies in the
Middle East.

As another analogy,  take the vast transformation of the simple teachings of Jesus Christ, who
taught compassion and forgiveness and pacifism, and compare it to the sacrosanct rationale for
cruelty, war-mongering and massive human rights violations of all kinds which were justified in
His name: the Holy Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and in America, the Salem Witchcraft trials
(and even today, the church and the state are not kept entirely separate, as demanded by our
Constitution and Bill of Rights).

And again, with the ideology that sprang from Jesus, we have today instituted a myriad of cults
and sects,  such as Catholicism, Protestantism, Greek Orthodoxy, the Anglican Church, ect..
Depending on the specific issue, anyone of them might be relatively incompatible with the other in
their underlying philosophies.  To say nothing of the fact that Orthodox Judaism itself has always
refused to recognize the divinity of Jesus Christ, much less His resurrection from death on the
cross).

Never mind!  Based on the inherent tendency of changeability in religions (surely it would require
a separate scientific field of inquiry to examine this phenomenon) as stated earlier, we wish to
avoid the examination of the modern rituals of Judaism as it evolved over several thousand years,
and feel it would be far more productive instead to concern ourselves with its origin.  And that it
in fact began with Egypt.

Modern Judaism as descendant from the Ancient Egyptian cult of Aten

As noted by the author Jan Assman, Akhenaten was a figure exclusively of history and not of
memory (his name erased from the king-lists, his monuments dismantled, almost every trace of his
chronicles of existence and his religion at Armana was obliterated) and it was not until the19th
century that his reality in Egyptian antiquities began to emerge.  On the other hand, Moses was a
figure of memory but not of history.  No historical evidence has to date surfaced to gives us any
clues of his life.  Thus we are left with the task of synchronizing the specific historical records
from Egypt with the mnemonic records stemming from the Mosaic Law of the Jews, and from
that we hope to arrive at a plausible conclusion, based on oral and written traditions and an
archaeological history based on the scientific method.

The discovery of the short-lived dynasty of Akhenaten in Egypt in the 18th century B.C.,
uncovered in the 19th century A.D., and  the later unearthing of the sacred tomb of the boy-king
Tutankhamun ("King Tut") who was a part of that historical record for better or worse, both of
those records helped to authenticate the histories of the much-despised Akhenaten and his wife
Nefertiti, histories which were almost totally erased by the Egyptian old-guard priesthood of
Amun and Amon-Ra.  Fortunately, human pride prevented them from hiding the history of the
re-coronation of their young protege, the legitimate heir to the throne, the boy-kind
Tutanankum(on the other hand, recording the physical location of his resting place was a matter
of utmost secrecy).

As Jan Assman notes, almost immediately after the history of Akhenaten was resurrected, scholars
of antiquity soon realized that this iconoclastic Pharaoh Amenophis IV had done something very
similar to what memory had ascribed to Moses: The abolishment of cults and idols and the
institution of a purely monotheistic religion.  The American scholar James Henry Breasted
demonstrated the importance of this religious revolution in a Berlin dissertation of 1894.  Others
followed.  Arthur Weigall established the fact that Psalm 104 was very likely a Hebrew translation
of Akhenaten's hymn to the Solar Disk, Aten.  And were not the Egyptian "Aton" ("Aten") and
the Hebrew "Adonai" the one and the same name?"

Even the name Moses derives from the Egyptian vocabulary.  From Breasted, an author whose
History of Egypt is regarded as authoritative. "It is important to notice that his name, Moses, was
Egyptian. It is simply the Egyptian word 'mose'  meaning 'child,' and is an abridgement of a fuller
form of such names as 'Amen-mose' meaning 'Amon-a-child' or 'Ptah-mose,'  in the
list of Egyptian kings, such as Ah-mose, Thut-mose (Thotmes), and Ra-mose (Ramses).

Sigmund Freud's contribution to the Atenist theory was and still is of inestimable value.  As noted
previously, in his book "Moses and Monotheism", among other things he wished to clarify the
date of the Exodus of the Israelites with Moses from Egypt.   His evidence suggests that it was in
fact immediately after the 18th Dynasty, and not the Pharaoh Ramssees II as Hollywood and the
mainstream historical records attempt to mythologize.  If it was the 18th Dynasty, that is to say,
the reign of the glorious Akhenaten or Pharaoh Amenophis IV, then a lot of pieces of the puzzle
would begin to fall in place.

As for the days of captivity in Egypt, Freud doesn't address this history, and some have theorized
that there was probably embellishment in the traditional reckoning of the period of the Israelites'
captivity, because the Egyptians left no record of 10 plagues that ever descended upon their lands,
and they were consistently good record-keepers.  In any case,  the question of the plagues is
irrelevant to our debate because we are not concerned with the traditions of memory but the
historical record which can be independently verified.

Circumcision and the aversion of pork meat are characteristics that are integral in the Jewish faith
today, but they were in fact practiced solely by the Ancient Egyptians and no other cultural group
in that day.  It is almost certain that the Israelites under Moses were the first to bring those
cultural mores into their daily life.  And it could only have come from Egypt!

Ahmed Osman has made a striking comparison between the Decalogue (the 10 Commandments)
and the Chapter 125 of the Book of the Dead (ibidem pp.130-1). Only the first two
Commandments which forbid the worship of other gods and images, and the fifth that demands
them to honor their parents, do not belong there, but all the other seven are found in the Book of
the Dead.

In Osman's view, it was not Moses who spoke about God to Pharaoh, but Pharaoh who taught
Moses about the unique God. Moses did not flee from Pharaoh into the wilderness. Instead of
competing with Moses in the magical arts, the Egyptian priests taught Moses violently to oppose
all magic and to reject all mysteries.

Freud's logic for the chronology of the historical date of the Exodus is plausible, based soundly on
biblical scripture in the Old Testament.

In David Rowl's book, the author also quotes the same source, specifically I Kings 6:1, in which
the Exodus from Egypt occurred 480 years before the founding of the Temple of Jerusalem in the
fourth year of King Solomon: "Solomon was not a ruler of the Iron Age IIA, but instead reigned
during the last century of the Late Iron Age...Solomon succeeded David in 970 B.C.

But it is generally thought that the temple was founded in 928 B.C., almost half a century after
Rowl's date.  Nonetheless he argues that the Israelites and Moses left Egypt 480 years earlier, in
1447 B. C.   From those dates, Rowl attempts to prove that Moses was born during a relatively
obscure Pharoah Khenephres by backtracking the years in Egyptian history, which is something
akin to putting the chariot before horse.  By interpolation, he assumes that since Moses might
have been born at that time, then  the Exodus happened under the reign of Dudimose, the 36th
ruler of the 13th Dynasty, in 1447 B.C.

Rowl's "New Chronology" puts Akhenaten's reighn almost 500 years forward in time!

It should be noted that his  "New Chronology", used to base all his dates, was determined from a
1988 research project concerning "astronomical recalculation",  using powerful mainframe
computers and the most advanced software available at the time. The focus of their research was
a small clay cuniform tablet excavated from the Armana region where Akhenaten ruled,
KTU-1.78, describing a rare solar eclipse right before sunset in the kingdom of Ugarit
during the months between April and May in our Julian calendar.  From their calculations, it came
out to a date of May 9, 1012 B.C, thirty minutes before sunset.  From that date, Rohl was able to
declare that the reign of Akhenaten and the 18th dynasty was in 1194 B.C, which was several
centuries before conventional chronology dates the 18th dynasty, in circa 1570 B.C.  As he states,
"A late 11th century BC date for Akhenaten simply has to be correct!"

Thus, Rowl appears to disprove the idea that Moses exited Egypt with the Israelites during
Ahhenaten's time.

Sigmund Freud addressed this issue based on the facts available to him at the time, which assumed
that Moses lived in a different period of time:

"If Moses lived, it was likely in the thirteenth or fourteenth century B.C.; in any case, we have no
word of him except from the Holy Books and the written traditions of the Jews. Although the
decision lacks final historical certainty, the great majority of historians have expressed the opinion
that Moses did live and that the exodus from Egypt, led by him, did in fact take place.

"...[T]hat the Jewish religion did not speak of anything beyond the grave, for such a doctrine is
reconcilable with the strictest monotheism. This astonishment disappears if we go back from the
Jewish religion to the Aton religion and surmise that this feature was taken over from the latter,
since for Ikhnaton it was a necessity in fighting the popular religion, where the death-god Osiris
played perhaps a greater part than any god of the upper regions. The agreement of the Jewish
religion with that of Aton in this important point is the first strong argument in favour of our
thesis. We shall see that it is not the only one."

"...overthrow of the official Aton religion completely put an end to the monotheistic trend in
Egypt. The School of Priests at On, from which it emanated, survived the catastrophe and might
have drawn whole generations after Ikhnaton into the orbit of their religious thought. That Moses
performed the  deed is quite thinkable, therefore, even if he did not live in Ikhnaton's time and had
not come under his personal influence, even if he were simply an adherent or merely a member of
the school of On. This conjecture would postpone the date of the Exodus and bring it nearer to
the time usually assumed, the thirteenth century B.C.; otherwise it has nothing to recommend it.
We should  have to relinquish the insight we had gained into Moses' motives and to dispense with
the idea of the Exodus being facilitated by the anarchy prevailing in Egypt. The kings of the
Nineteenth Dynasty following Ikhnaton ruled the country with a strong hand. All conditions,
internal and external, favouring the Exodus coincide only in the period immediately after the death
of the heretic king."

From Sigmund Freud, "Moses and Monotheism"

Clearly Freud is giving himself the benefit of a doubt concerning his own theory, a sign of true
intelligence that is sorely lacking in his various critics.  It is possible Moses could have lived
before or even after Akhenaten.

"If, then, Moses was an Egyptian, the first gain from this suggestion is a new riddle, one difficult
to answer.  When a people of a tribe(1) prepares for a great undertaking, it is to be expected that
one of them should make himself their leader or  be chosen for this role....(1)  We have no inkling
what numbers were concerned in the Exodus."

According to our construction, the Exodus from Egypt would have taken place between 1358 and
1350 BC - that is to say, after the death of Ikhnaton and before the restitution of the authority
of the state by Haremhab. (*)

(*) This would be about a century earlier than most historians assume, who place it in the
Nineteenth Dynasty under Merneptah; or perhaps a little less, for official records seem to include
the interregnum in Haremhab's reign.

"I compared earlier the Jewish religion with the religion of the Egyptian people and noted how
different they were from each other.  Now we shall compare the Jewish with the Aton religion and
should expect to find that they were originally identical.  We know that this is no easy task.  Of
the Aton religion we do not perhaps know enough, thanks to the revengeful spirit of the Amon
priests.  The Mosaic religion we know only in its final form as it was fixed by Jewish priests in the
time after the Exile, about eight hundred years later.  If, in spite of this unpromising material, we
should find some indications fitting in with our supposition, then we may indeed value them
highly."

"There would be a short way of proving our thesis that the Mosaic religion is nothing else but that
of Aton: namely, by a confession of faith, a proclamation.  But I am afraid I should be told that
such a road is impracticable.  The Jewish creed, as is well known, says: "Schema jisroel Adonai
Elohenu Adonai Echod."
 

"If the similarity of the name of the Egyptian Aton (or Atum) to the Hebrew word Adonai and the
Syrian divine name Adonis is not a mere accident but is the result of a primeval unity in language
and meaning, then one could translate the Jewish formula: "Hear, O Israel, our God Aton
(Adonai) is the only God." I am, alas, entirely unqualified to answer this question and have been
able to find very little about it in the literature concerned (*), but probably we had better not make
things so simple.  Moreover, we shall have to come back to the problems of the divine name."

(*) Arthur Weigall (The Life and Times of Akhnaton, 1923, says that Ikhnaton would not
recognize a hell against the terrors of which one had to guard by innumerable magic spells.
"Akhnaton flung all these formulas into the fire.  Djins, bogies, spirits, monsters, demigods and
Osiris himself with all his court. were swept into the blaze and reduced to ashes."

Freud continues:

"Then there is the way in which the sun-god is represented:  no longer as in earlier times by a
small pyramid and a falcon, but - and this is almost rational- by a round disk from which emanate
rays terminating in human hands.  In spite of all the love for art in the Amarna period, not one
personal representation of the sun-god Aton has been found, or, we may say with confidence,
ever will be found. (*)

(*) "Weigall, op. cit., p. 103: "Akhnaton did not permit any graven image to be made of the Aton.
The true God, said the King, had no form; and he held to this opinion throughout his life."

"Finally, there is a complete silence about the death-god Osiris and the realm of the dead.  Neither
hymns nor inscriptions on graves know anything of what was perhaps nearest to the Egyptian's
heart.  The contrast with the popular religion cannot be expressed more vividly. (*)"

(*) "Erman, op. cit., p. go: "of Osiris and his realm no more was to be heard." Breasted: Dawn of
Conscience, p. 291.  "Osiris is completely ignored.  He is never mentioned in any record of
Ikhnaton or in any of the tombs at Amarna."

Turning to more recent research, Ahmed Osman, using new archaeological discoveries and
researching existing historical documents, contends that Akhenaten and Moses was one and the
same man. In a stunning retelling of the Exodus story, Osman details the events of
Moses/Akhenaten's life; how, he was brought up by Israelite relatives, ruled Egypt for seventeen
years, angered many of his subjects by replacing the traditional Egyptian pantheon with worship
of the Aten, and was forced to abdicate the throne. Retreating to the Sinai with his Egyptian and
Israelite supporters, he died out of the sight of his followers, presumably at the hands of Seti I,
after an unsuccessful attempt to regain his throne.  This is a radical challenge to long-standing
beliefs concerning the origin of Semitic religion and the puzzle of Akhenaten's deviation from
ancient Egyptian tradition. If Osman's contentions were correct, many major Old Testament
figures would be of Egyptian origin.

Apart from a rather muddled chronology at the start of the Book of Exodus, the story of Moses it
tells is quite straightforward. However, the picture changes when we examine other holy books
and the work of Manetho, the third century BC native Egyptian historian, which was subsequently
transmitted by the Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus. While we know from the Old Testament
that Moses was brought up in the royal palace, it does not suggest that he ever succeeded to the
throne. Yet the story of Moses in the Talmud-the compilation of Hebrew laws and legends, dating
from the early centuries AD and regarded as second only to the Old Testament as an authoritative
source of the early history of the Jews-contains some details not to be found in the Bible and often
parallels Manetho's account of the Exodus, derived from Egyptian folklore. One of the details is
that Moses was a king. According to the Talmud, which agrees that Moses was brought up in
Pharaoh's palace, he grew into a handsome lad, dressed royally, was honored by the people and
seemed in all things of royal lineage.

 Moses, who, according to the Talmud, was made king `in the hundred and fifty-seventh year after
Israel went down into Egypt', inspired the army with his courage and the city eventually fell to
him. The account goes on: `... Bi'lam escaped and fled back to Egypt, becoming one of the
magicians mentioned in the Scriptures. And the Ethiopians placed Moses upon their throne and
set the crown of State upon his head, and they gave him the widow of their king for a wife.'
Moses reigned `in justice and righteousness. But the Queen of Ethiopia, Adonith [Aten-it in
Egyptian], who wished her own son by the dead king to rule, said to the people: "Why should this
stranger continue to rule over you?" The people, however, would not vex Moses, whom they
loved, by such a proposition; but Moses resigned voluntarily the power which they had given him
and departed from their land. And the people of Ethiopia made him many rich presents, and
dismissed him with great honours.'1 So, according to this tradition, which has survived in the
Talmud, Moses was elevated to the post of king for some time before eventually seeking the
sanctuary of Sinai. Furthermore, where Akhenaten, as we shall see, looked upon himself as the
high priest of his God, the Talmud tells us that `Moses officiated as the high priest. He was also
considered the King of Israel during the sojourn in the desert.'

Where did the rabbis obtain the facts in the Talmud? They can hardly have invented them and,
indeed, had no reason to do so. Like the accounts of the historian Manetho, the Talmudic stories
contain many distortions arising from the fact that they were transmitted orally for a long time
before finally being set down in writing. Yet one can sense that behind the myths there must have
lain genuine historical events that had been suppressed from the official accounts of  both Egypt
and Israel, but had survived in the memories of the generations.

In Osman's words: "In my attempt to pursue Freud's theory through the examination of recent
archaeological findings, I came to the conclusion that Moses was Akhenaten himself."

Bibliography

"Moses and Akhenaten: The Secret History of Egypt at the Time of the Exodus", 2nd edition
2002, by Ahmed Osman.  Bear & Company;  ISBN: 1591430046

"Moses - A Life", 1998, by Jonathan Kirsch.   Random House, New York.;  ISBN 0-345-41269-9
(alk. paper)

"Moses the Egyptian - The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism", 1997, by Jan Assman.
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.; ISBN 0-674-58738-3 (alk.)

"Pharaohs and Kings - A Biblical Quest", 1995, by David M. Rohl.  Crown Publishers, New York
10022; ISBN 0-517-70315-7

"Judaism - An Illustrated Historical Overview", 1977, by Monika Grubel.  Baron's, Hauppaige,
NY  11788; ISBN 0-7641-0051-3

"Moses and Monotheism", 1937, by Sigmund Freud. Vintage Books, New York; Dewey dec.
222.92

"The Dawn of Conscience", 1934, by James Henry Breasted.  New York, Charles Scribner's sons.
 
"The Mystery of the Copper Scroll of Qumran - The Essene Record of the Treasure of Akhenaten", 2003, by Robert Feather, Bear & Company, Rochester, Vermont 05767

"Tutankhamun - The Exodus Conspiracy", 2002, by Andrew Collins and Chris Ogilvie-Herald, Virgin Books, London. ISBN 1 85227 972 9.