Akhenaten the Pharaoh-Prophet and Moses as His Spiritual and Political Successor

Entering through the portal of time into the mysterious world of ancient Egypt, guided by an armchair Indiana Jones

In our journey of discovery through the portal of time we seek the real Akhenaten and the real Moses, a quest made possible by a unique perspective that integrates Egyptology and the Bible as a single whole. We discover Akhenaten as a misunderstood high initiate and Moses as the gifted king-prophet who continued the mission of his predecessor.

To a large extent the body of impressive discoveries by archaeologists in the land of the Nile over the last 150 years remain separate from the work of biblical specialists. The latter are cocooned in an outdated system and they are yet to appreciate that figures in the Bible related to the period of ‘Israel in Egypt’ were kings, queens and powerful officials rather than a Hebrew underclass. Our quest is to reconstruct a critically informed history of this time that deciphers biblical legends with the aid of factual perspectives disclosed by Egyptologists.

While my research has been undertaken independently, this essay investigates a conjecture first proposed in the 1930s by Sigmund Freud, the founder of analytical psychiatry. His hunch was that a significant connection existed between Akhenaten and Moses. He drew a clever inference from the fact that the former was the first monotheist in the history of Egypt, while the latter founded Israelite monotheism (Moses and Monotheism, English translation, 1939). In daring to take on a taboo subject, his intuitive insights cut through legends that have been literalized as fact in the two millennia since rabbinic Judaism was founded at the Council of Jamnia (90 CE). In arguing the case, he flatly contradicts the literal sense of biblical stories by claiming that Moses was not a Hebrew, but rather born into Egyptian nobility, and was probably a follower of Akhenaten during an unstable political period.

Through years of intensive research and a method that views the encrypted level of the Pentateuch (explained in post#1) through the lens of Egyptology, I have discovered that Freud’s hunch was prescient - even though convincing arguments are lacking in his work. For instance, one cannot deny that Moses was a ‘Hebrew.’ Rather, the ethnic and cultural meaning of this technical term must be carefully reconstructed in conjunction with ancient Near Eastern studies.

In grappling with problematic biblical legends I see myself as a detective compiling evidence, following hunches, picking up clues, and composing feasible scenarios that explain the facts of the Amarna age and its connection with Moses. The Amarna age is the remarkable period from the beginning of Akhenaten’s reign (c.1372-1355 BCE) to the death of Horemheb (1315 BCE). Intuition and tenacity are necessary with the Bible on one side and Egyptology on the other, and the desire to create a synthesis that does justice to both spheres of knowledge. In this journey let us dare to be truth seekers willing to follow clues and evidence to their logical conclusions, without being swayed by obsolete Jewish and Christian orthodoxies.

We are going through the portal of time into the land of the Nile during the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BCE, and using Egyptology and a distinctive approach to the legends in Genesis and Exodus. This is a matter of literary archaeology, that is, excavating the Irano-Babylonian layer composed by Ezra in the fifth century BCE so that we can access the Egyptian layer composed by Moses.

In mainstream scholarship it remains controversial to propose a hidden linkage connecting Akhenaten and the Israelite prophet Moses. For instance, Donald Redford debunks populist portraits that idealize Akhenaten as an empathetic humanist or ‘tragic “Christ-like” figure.’ An eminent Egyptologist, he nevertheless steps outside his sphere of competence by venturing a dogmatic opinion regarding the pharaoh’s connection with Moses:

Nor is he the mentor of Moses: a vast gulf is fixed between the rigid, coercive, rarefied monotheism of the pharaoh and Hebrew henotheism [belief in a single god without asserting that there is only one god], which in any case we see through the distorted prism of texts written 700 years after Akhenaten’s death (Akhenaten: The Heretic King, p. 232).

Jan Assmann concurs with his colleague since ‘the two religions’ founded by Akhenaten and Moses ‘are worlds apart’ (From Akhenaten to Moses: Ancient Egypt and Religious Change, The American University in Cairo Press, 2014, p. 64). These confident assessments are based on the wrong assumptions and superficial research of biblical specialists who currently have no idea about the factual history of Israel encrypted in the Pentateuch. Against both Egyptologists, there is abundant evidence that the spiritual mission, political career and writings of Moses were shaped by his hidden connection to Akhenaten, with the mysterious figure of Jethro (Ex. 3:1-6; 18:1-12) as the intermediary. Moses reached maturity over a century after the death of Akhenaten so that his Yahwism cannot be simplistically equated with Atenism.

1. Akhenaten as the Aten’s Son Reborn Each Day and the Prophet of a Jealous God

We now turn to the question of Akhenaten’s understanding of his own identity and relationship to the Aten, with the intention of demonstrating conceptual links to Moses and his kingship encrypted in biblical legends.

Bonheme draws attention to ‘the controversy’ amongst modern Egyptologists concerning ‘the degree of divinity that the Egyptians accorded their king,’ noting that Posener thinks ‘the current image of the god-king is excessive’ (OEAE 2, p. 243). The erroneous theory in older scholarship can be consulted in the work of Henri Frankfort:

Pharaoh was not mortal but a god. This was the fundamental concept of Egyptian kingship, that Pharaoh was of divine essence, a god incarnate; … it is wrong to speak of a deification of Pharaoh. His divinity was not proclaimed at a certain moment … His coronation was not an apotheosis but an epiphany (Kingship and the Gods, The University of Chicago Press, 1948, p. 5).

According to this mistaken view the ritual of crowning revealed the innate divinity of the king, rather than elevating him to divine status. John Baines sets the record straight:

The king manifested on earth aspects of the gods, but he was himself a god only insofar as there was no term for a being intermediate between human and god. … A being who could be deified was not a god like the other gods.

This is reinforced by a text from the Middle Kingdom ‘which divides the beings of the cosmos into four categories: the gods; the king; the spirits of the dead; and humanity’ (Ancient Egyptian Kingship, eds. David O’Connor and David P. Silverman, Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1995, pp. 9f.).

Assmann tracks the rise of ‘solar religion in the New Kingdom’ that began around 1555 BCE and climaxed two centuries later with Akhenaten. The former speaks of ‘mysteries’ and ‘a sort of monotheism that regards the sun as the natural manifestation of the uniqueness of god and even precipitates a violent revolution in the form of Amarna religion’ (Egyptian Solar Religion in the New Kingdom, London, Kegan Paul International, 1995, p. 16).

In Year 9 of Akhenaten’s reign he designated the name of the Aten as ‘the Living One, Sun, Ruler of the Horizon, who rejoices on the horizon in his name, which is Sunlight, which comes from the disk.’ Hermann Schlogl observes that ‘The essence of Amarna religion, which inaugurated theocracy and systematic monotheism, revolves around two central themes: the light and the king.’ He comments on the close connection of sunlight and divine life in Akhenaten’s concept of the Aten:

pictured as an orb emitting rays that ended in human hands giving ‘life’ to the nose of both the king and the great royal wife, Nefertiti (OEAE 1, pp. 156,158).

Akhenaten with Nefertiti and their six daughters making offerings to the Aten. Note the top ankh symbol underneath the disk that denotes the life-force in all the rays of light.

This ‘life’ is represented in iconography as a large ankh (a hieroglyphic sign in the shape of a cross with a loop on top) under the sun disk (see the image). For Assmann, ‘Aten personifies the cosmic and the king the personal aspect of the life god’ (p. 196). Redford highlights the intimate relationship of the king to the Aten:

In the first five years [of his reign] the fragmentary texts from the talatat stress the paternity of the Disc and the sonship of the king: the latter is the son of the Sun-disc, the ‘beautiful child of the Disc’ whose ‘beauty’ was ‘created’ by the heavenly luminary. … Akhenaten is ever the physical child of the Sun-disc, ‘thy son who came forth from thy body,’ daily reborn by the sunlight that shines upon him … Akhenaten is king on earth, as his father is king in heaven. He is like his father, in fact he is his father’s image on earth … the king ‘is upon the throne of the Sun-disc that created [him],’ … (Akhenaten: The Heretic King, pp. 178f.; for discussion of the 45,000 talatat, blocks of stone, recovered from Karnak and related to the Amarna age, see pp. 67f.).

This ideology is commensurate with the imagery of the ankh that shows the king breathing in the life-giving power that radiates from the solar rays of the Aten. Every day when the sun was rising above the horizon the king experienced himself being reborn as the Aten’s anointed son.

One problem with transcendental monotheism is the remoteness of God, discussed by Erik Hornung:

The Aten, which is so far removed as to be inscrutable, requires an intermediary in order to be accessible to mankind. Intermediaries had become increasingly important in New Kingdom religion before Amarna, and Akhenaten continued this development. But whereas worshipers had hitherto been able to turn to a variety of intermediaries – sacred animals, statues in temples, dead men who had been deified – their only recourse is now the king, the sole prophet of God (Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1982, p. 248).

In the course of his reign of seventeen years Akhenaten (1372-1355 BCE) eliminated all gods as intermediaries between the Aten and himself. In the Hymn to the Aten he emphasizes that ‘Thou art in my heart, and there is no one else who knows you,’ and he frequently has the epithet Waenre ‘the unique one of Re’ (ANET 3, pp. 248,371). Only he knew his father’s mind and will so that, to cite Redford, ‘True teaching could come only from Akhenaten, and the texts concentrate on this “teaching” without, however, specifying its content’ (p. 179). Hornung sums up this new creed with the formula ‘there is no god but Aten, and Akhenaten is his prophet.’ Further:

As is hardly surprising, the proclamation of the sole god at Amarna is dogmatic in form. There is a ‘teaching’ about the Aten which the king himself elaborates, and his nature is delineated ever more closely and consistently by means of highly complex titularies and definitions. Although his qualities are not absolute, he is a monotheistic God by virtue of his claims to exclusivity – he is a jealous God, who tolerates no other gods beside him (pp. 248f.).

Akhenaten was a king and priest within the stream of pharaonic tradition, but his office as the sole prophet of the Aten was unprecedented in Egyptian history and radically sets him apart from his predecessors. He is uniquely the ‘pharaoh-prophet’ of the Aten.

2. Akhenaten’s Daily Rebirth Transformed into the Biblical Doctrine of Moses’ Rebirth on the Day of His Coronation

This section traces a link from Akhenaten’s royal ideology into the Psalms of the Bible, cultic songs of praise. Sigmund Mowinckel approaches them as ‘real prayers uttered by men of flesh and blood praying in actual situations at a definite period,’ so we need to ‘understand them historically, on the basis of their own times’ (The Psalms in Israel’s Worship 1, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1962, p. 1). The royal psalms were composed for an event in the life of the king.

Mowinckel offers penetrating insights into the spirituality and cultic settings of these songs, but his conventional historical framework must be abandoned. He simplistically equates Zion with Jerusalem: ‘The king in Ps. 2 reigns in Zion (v. 6), the same is the case with the king in Ps. 110:2 …; he is a descendant of David, Ps. 18:51; 89:15; 132:10.17’ (p. 47). Similarly, Limburg assumes that ‘These psalms originated during the period of the Monarchy and functioned during that period. After the fall of Jerusalem in 587 B.C., they took on another significance, projecting into the future a description of an ideal king to come’ (The Anchor Bible Dictionary 5, New York, Doubleday, 1992, p. 533).

While some of the psalms were compiled into a kind of hymnbook of the First Temple (built by Solomon), it does not follow that the royal ideology originated in the period of the Davidic dynasty (c.1000-587 BCE). For instance, Ps. 90 has the title ‘A prayer of Moses, the man of God,’ solid evidence that Mosaic doctrines inform the Psalter. The possibility that some passages in the royal psalms were written by Moses can be entertained when we set aside the fiction that Saul was the first-ever king in Israel (discussed in the next section).

A strikingly similar conception to Akhenaten’s ideology of kingship is attested in two seminal texts in the royal psalms that were used in the Israelite liturgy of coronation. My radical proposal has two parts: first, this royal Israelite ideology is rooted in Amarna theology and, second, it became part of the Yahwistic cult through Moses. The solar imagery related to rebirth is explicit in Ps. 110:3:

Arrayed in majesties of holiness, from the womb of the dawn you receive the dew of your begettings.

The unusual usage of the plural noun ‘begettings’ makes sense in connection with the Amarna ideology that the majesty and life-force of Akhenaten were renewed each day as the light breaks through at dawn.

In Ps. 2:5-6 Yahweh says, ‘I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill,’ and then the king speaks (v. 7):

Yahweh said to me, ‘You are my son, today I have begotten you’.

The verbal root yld ‘give birth’ is attested which, given the male gender of Yahweh, is rendered ‘beget.’ The rebirth of the king signifies a new relationship with the Lord made explicit in the decree, ‘You are my son.’ This denotes legal adoption within the sacred aura of the cult. Akhenaten regards himself as begotten anew each day and speaks of himself as the son of his father the Aten. Clearly he does not envisage himself as the literal biological son of the Aten because the relationship must be renewed each day, so the idea of adoption is implicit. The begetting and formula of adoption are integral parts of the Israelite ideology of kingship, and both are present in Akhenaten’s older theology.

The suggestion is that three changes occurred in the transmission of the tradition to Moses and his reception of it. First, the ‘daily’ begetting of Akhenaten by the Aten was adapted to the singular rebirth experienced by Moses and subsequent Israelite kings through the initiatory rite of coronation. Second the implied doctrine of adoption inherent in the father-son concept at Amarna was made explicit in Ps. 2:7. Third, since it can be shown that Moses believed in the traditional Egyptian pantheon rejected by Akhenaten, we have to determine which god or gods he envisaged as adopting him (the subject of a later essay).

3. Moses the King-Prophet like Akhenaten and Yahweh the Jealous God like the Aten

This section explores the proposition that Moses fulfilled his destiny as a ‘king-prophet like Akhenaten,’ and the concept of the Aten as a jealous God is traced into the legislation of the Pentateuch.

If you consult any standard biblical dictionary or commentary, there is nothing about Moses being a king. As an essential part of his allegorical legends, Ezra (fifth century BCE, see post #1) composed the fiction that Saul was the first-ever king of Israel (late eleventh century BCE, 1 Sam. 8-10). According to this blatant distortion of political history the Israelites had previously rejected the institution of kingship on the grounds that Yahweh is their true monarch. The fiction that there were no Israelite kings before Saul is meticulously maintained throughout the Pentateuch and Former Prophets.

Light is shed on Ezra’s encryption device by consulting the political rhetoric of Hammurabi, an Amorite king ruling the city-state of Babylon in the eighteenth century BCE. In the introduction to his famous legal code he waxes lyrical: ‘Hammurabi, the shepherd, called by Enlil, am I’ (ANET 3, p. 164). Despite being the ruler of an urban population, he styles himself as a shepherd like his tribal ancestors and this political fiction hearkens back to a golden era of nomadism. In the Bible ‘Every shepherd is an abomination to the Egyptians’ (Gen. 46:34) is an obvious reference to the Hyksos who probably originated in Syria and ruled Egypt for over a century. Manetho (third century BCE) characterizes these Asiatic pharaohs as ‘king-shepherds’ (Manetho, Loeb Classics, W. G. Waddell, 1940, pp. 83-85).

Ezra exploited this widespread political rhetoric by composing elaborate fictions that elegantly encrypt the royal identities of the patriarchs. For instance, after gaining privileged access to Pharaoh at his court Abraham is described as being rich in sheep and cattle (Gen. 12:16). Jacob was a skilled shepherd and animal husbandman (Gen. 30:25-43), and from his teenage years Joseph was a shepherd (Gen. 37:2). I refer to this encryption strategy as the nomadic ideal of Semitic kingship.

Against this pervasive fiction, there are clues and evidence that Moses was a king. The royal blood of Moses can be established by reference to a remarkable text:

Bithiah, the daughter of Pharaoh, … she conceived and bore Miriam (1 Chron. 4:17-18).

V. 17 has ‘she bore Miriam’ without naming the woman, and v. 18 has ‘Bithiah, the daughter of Pharaoh’ who must be the subject of the first clause. But Miriam was the sister of Moses (Ex. 15:20; Num. 26:59) so it follows that his mother was ‘the daughter of Pharaoh,’ the exact designation of the woman who adopts him in the birth legend (Ex. 2:5-10). This enables a fiction to be removed from the birth legend, namely, Moses was raised as a prince at the Egyptian court but the princess was his birth mother not his adoptive one.

Ezra allows the political reality of Moses’ kingship to shine through in Deut. 33:4-5:

Moses commanded us a law, as a possession for the assembly of Jacob. Thus he [i.e. Moses] became king in Jeshurun.

Some English Bibles and commentators render ‘he’ (e.g., KJV, NIV) as Yahweh (e.g., RSV; ABD 3, pp. 771f.), but it is nonsense to suggest that the Lord of the earth was a monarch in the parochial locality of ‘Jeshurun.’ Further, in Deut. 32:15; 33:26 Jeshurun is disclosed as the name of someone, clearly the throne name of Moses. Given the nomadic ideal, the statement ‘Now Moses was shepherding the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian’ (Ex. 3:1) is a cryptic reference to the former’s kingship using the phraseology of the nomadic ideal. When we realize that Moses had a legitimate claim to the Egyptian throne and was a real threat to the reigning pharaoh, the power struggle played out over several years makes sense. It is then possible to probe the legend of the ten plagues (Ex. 7-12) and to disclose a factual political scenario.

In a conversation with Aaron and Miriam, Yahweh tells them that for an ordinary prophet, ‘I make myself known to him in a vision, I speak with him in a dream. Not so with my servant Moses; … With him I speak mouth-to-mouth, clearly, and not in dark speech. And he beholds the form of Yahweh’ (Num. 12:6-8). William Propp goes to the nub of Moses as the channel of the Lord:

Moses may be considered the archetypal Israelite prophet, transmitting God’s word to kings and peoples and working miracles in an international arena. Yet in the Torah, only Deuteronomy calls Moses a nabi ‘prophet’ (Deut 18:15; 34:10; cf. Hos 12:14). … Moses alone directly experiences God (Num 12:6-8), ... Only Moses, God’s most trusted courtier, is privileged to speak with him ‘mouth-to-mouth’ as a virtual equal (Num 12:8). We might more accurately describe … Moses as a superprophet ... And, like the later Samuel, Moses is no less judge and priest than prophet (Exodus 1-18, New York, Doubleday, 1999, pp. 230f.).

While Ezra has censored texts in the original Torah that disclosed Moses as the king of Israel, he transmits the fact that he was the prophet of Yahweh. We can therefore characterize him as the ‘king-prophet’ of Israel and this unique role reveals him as the spiritual successor of Akhenaten. In a mysterious sense Moses assumed the mantle of Akhenaten with prophetic, royal and priestly roles.

It is not surprising that distinctive Amarna teachings have a prominent place in the Torah of Moses (archaic Genesis, Exodus and Numbers). The precept that Yahweh is an extremely jealous God is a favourite theme of evangelical preachers and its importance in biblical thought needs little justification. A few texts suffice to make the point. In the first commandment:

You will have no other gods before me. … for I Yahweh your God am a jealous God (Ex. 20:3-5).

You will worship no other god, for Yahweh, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God (Ex. 34:14).

Yahweh your God is a devouring fire, a jealous God (Deut. 4:24; cf. 5:9).

As Hornung notes (cited above), for Akhenaten the Aten ‘is a jealous God, who tolerates no other gods beside him’ (p. 249). This doctrine stems directly from Akhenaten and it was transmitted in pure form by Moses.

Without the audacity of this innovator ahead of his time, I am convinced that there would have been no Moses, the history of Israel would have been entirely different, and the Hebrew Bible as we know it would not exist! With the significant advantages of a unique biblical perspective, informed by the hard political facts of Egyptology, we can utterly reject Redford’s biased assessment that the Amarna experiment was a spectacular failure! On the contrary, Akhenaten changed the world to an extraordinary degree.

4. The Next Post and Essay: Moses’ Composing the Original Creation Story Using Akhenaten’s Famous Hymn as the Primary Source

We have introduced the conjecture that the life, teachings and career of Moses were informed by the direct but hidden influence of Akhenaten. Our next exploration substantiates this theory via a literary investigation in which I demonstrate that Moses used Akhenaten’s Hymn to the Aten as the primary literary source in writing part of the archaic version of the creation story in Genesis.

Abbreviations

Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 3rd ed., Princeton University Press, 1969 ANET 3

The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, 3 vols., Oxford University Press, 2001 OEAE