[ahtimeline-event-heading]
The Hymn to the Aten is considered by many to be the greatest piece of literature ever produced by the Egyptians. As with so much from the Amarna period, it is unique in as much as it does not employ the language of magic and incantations. Rather, the pharaoh seems to really exult in the beauty of the created world simply because it is the creation of the Aten. Compare, for example these two hymns. The first is a traditional solar hymn typical of any period before or after the Amarna period.
A Hymn to the Sun from the Papyrus Ani
Homage to thee who risest as Ra and settest as Tem in beauty.
Thou risest and shinest on the back of thy mother [the Sky-goddess], O thou who art crowned king of the gods.
Nut (the Sky-goddess) pays homage to thee, and Maat (the goddess of Law and Truth) embraces thee at morn and eve.
Joyfully thou stridest over the heavens and the Lake of Testes (a part of heaven) is content thereat. Thine enemy Sebau is cast down headlong, his arms and hands are cut off, and thy dagger has severed the joints of his backbone.
Ra has a fair wind, the Seqtet Boat advances and comes into port.
The gods of the South, the North, the West and the East praise thee, O thou divine substance, from whence all forms of life sprang.
Notice how the solar hymn quoted above is primarily concerned with listing the names of the gods and their manifestations but doesn’t seem to take any interest in nature Compare that with this section from the Hymn to the Aten:
The Hymn to the Aten
Beautiful you appear from the horizon of heaven, O living Aten who
initiates life —for you are risen from the eastern horizon and have
filled every land with your beauty; for you are fair, great, dazzling
and high over every land,
And your rays enclose the lands to the limit of all you have made;
For you are Re, having reached their limit and subdued them your beloved son;
For although you are far away, your rays are upon the earth and you are perceived…
When the chick is in the egg, speaking in the shell, You give him breath within it to cause him to live; And when you have made his appointed time for him, so that he may break himself out of the egg, he comes out of the egg to speak at his appointed time and goes on his two legs when he comes out of it.
It is clear from the above reading that “The Hymn to the Aten” is not your standard Egyptian fare. It lacks the rigid, repetitive style of other solar hymns, whether they be early or late. That being said, it is going to far to declare this hymn the first expression of monotheism.
As with all things ancient, our knowledge of what people believed is fragmentary at best. We are more likely to find evidence for
polytheism than for monotheism for the simple reason that monotheists
are often also adverse to creating an image of the one god. We know about the cult of Aten because Akhenaten carved his creed into the rock and his nobles recorded the words of one of the hymns to Aten on the walls of their tombs. But I think it is worth bearing in mind that expressions of belief in one God are not as rare as one might think. Already, in Mesopotamia, we find the god Marduk ascribed with the names of all of the gods, so that each god becomes an aspect of Marduk. In Egypt, we find, in addition to Atenism, the fragment of a papyrus that equates the three major gods of Egypt: Amun, Re and Ptah.
While this expression is slightly later than Akhenaten, it seems to have an entirely different genesis. The Bible makes reference to a priest of God Most High.
From the 1st century BC onwards, groups living in Anatolia set up altars to Theos Hypistos which means “God Most High”. Augustine believed that the early Romans were quasi-monotheistic. Among the Romans we encounter individuals such as Cicero and Epictetus who express ideas that could be taken from the Bible.
In an interesting twist, an Egyptian inscription has recently garnered attention among Egyptologists. It dates to the New Kingdom period, but refers back to the Hyksos. In it, the Hyksos are accused of worshiping only one god, who is identified as Seth, to the exclusion of all others. It is impossible to determine the exact relationship between the Hyksos and the Israelites but it is at least noteworthy that an Egyptian inscription refers to a group of Asiatics living in Egypt as being devoted exclusively to their god, to the detriment of the Egyptian gods.
None of the examples cited above can be taken as evidence for monotheism in the strict Mosaic sense of the word. But I don’t think we can assume that the ancient world was consistently polytheistic until the solitary figure of Akhenaten, “the first revolutionary”, came onto the scene.
Psalm 104 and the Hymn to the Aten
Let us turn now to another question that has intrigued scholars since the discovery of the Hymn to the Aten inscribed on the wall of the Tomb of Ay at Amarna.
I remember a conversation I had with a tour guide who was leading a Smithsonian tour in Egypt. He asked me if I thought the Exodus occurred and if so, when did I think it occurred. I wanted to ask him the same question. I answered that I had always been struck by the fact that, if we use the chronology presented in the Bible, the Amarna Period comes just a century after the Exodus. It seemed to me that perhaps there was some connection, howbeit ever so distant, between the two events.
I expected some push back to this theory, but our guide replied by telling me a story about his early days as a student at a university in Cairo. He was assigned to read a text from Amarna popularly known as the Hymn to Aten. He said that he was amazed when he first read it. It was so different from traditional Egyptian texts. He thought he was reading a psalm from the Bible, and not an Egyptian text. Indeed, many scholars have pointed out the similarities between Psalm 104 and the Hymn to the Aten.Whether it’s author made use of line from the hymn to the Aten or vice versa, is a question we will never be able to properly answer.What I think is most intriguing about this is that most scholars today are adament in placing the composition of Genesis 1 into the Babylonian or Persian periods! But this is a difficult proposition to sustain since Psalm 104 is clearly much older than that, and this psalm is built around the framework found in Genesis 1. Genesis 1 is like a coin of which Psalm 104 is an impression. You need the coin first before you can make an impression. The idea that Genesis 1 is a late invention of Israelite priests in the exilic period is a feverish German fantasy. Genesis 1 might be compared to a photograph. It form is clear and concise. Psalm 104 is a painting from the photograph. It takes artistic liberty, makes use of flowery, poetic language. But Genesis 1 is clearly prior to Psalm 104. It is therefore, quite mistaken to assign such a late date to Genesis 1.
Monotheistic?
The religion of Akhenaten is often described as the first monotheistic religion. For an older generation of scholars, Akhenaten was the first romantic. Thus James Breasted writes,
In this aspect of Ikhnaton’s movement, then, it is a gospel of the beauty and beneficence of the natural order, a recognition of the message of nature to the soul of man, which makes it the earliest of those revivals which we call in the case of such artists as Millet and the Barbizon school, or of Wordsworth and his successors, “a return to nature.” (James Henry Breasted, Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt, 1912)
More recently, scholars have focused on the exclusivity of the Amarna revolution, its active suppression of other forms of religious worship in Egypt. This criticism of Aten worship is then projected onto the phenomenon of monotheism as a whole. The Egyptologist, Jan Assmann, for example, argues that the monotheism of Akhenaten (and Moses) represent a “radical and complete break with traditional religion.” Donald Redford similarly notes that, “monotheism does not appear through amalgamation and syncretism but rather through the annihilation of other gods.” Small wonder, Redford writes, “that the three great monotheisms we are familiar with celebrate themselves in hymns larded with military jargon.” Both Redford and Assmann take monotheism to be a reaction to polytheism – or, in Assmann’s words, a “counter-religion”.
However, by defining monotheism by what it is against, these scholars fail to acknowledge the essential distinctions between monotheism and polytheism. Monotheism encompasses a broad range of ideas, some of which are undoubtedly ‘exclusive’ of polytheism, but this does not make ‘exclusivism’ the defining characteristic of monotheism. A better definition of monotheism is offered by Yezekel Kauffman.
The mark of monotheism is not the concept of a god who is creator, eternal, benign, or even all-powerful; these notions are found everywhere in the pagan world. It is, rather, the idea of a god who is the source of all being, not subject to a cosmic order, and not emergent from a
pre-existent realm; a god free of the limitations of magic and mythology.
One may worship God or Nature. This is the essential difference between monotheism and polytheism. By this definition, was the worship of Aten monotheistic? It seems to me that the worship of Aten does have some of the characteristics of monotheism in as much as it has disposed of the rituals surrounding the cult image in the temple and the mythological journey of the sun through the underworld. However, it remains an open question to what degree Akhenaten and Nefertiti were made into objects of veneration. It also seems as though the Aten never fully loses its identification with the sun disk. The Aten is viewed rather as a force or energy that animates and creates the world, but there is no evidence that the Aten was anything more than a force. If it cared about morality and justice, which was the most important characteristic of the sun god in Egyptian religion, the texts from Amarna give no indication of it. For this reason, the religion of Amarna seems rather to be closer to what might be termed ‘vitalism’ or ‘pantheism’ rather than monotheism.
The Evolution of Religion
In fact, expressions of belief in one God are not as rare as one might think. Already, in Mesopotamia, we find the god Marduk being ascribed with the names of all of the gods, so that each god is viewed as being an aspect of Marduk. In Egypt, we find, in addition to Atenism, the Leiden Papyrus.
From the 1st century BC onwards, there was a religion dedicated to Theos Hypistos “God Most High” in Anatolia. Among the Romans, we encounter individuals who express ideas that seem like they could have been taken from the Bible. Cicero and Epictetus come to mind.
As with all things ancient, we must remember that our knowledge is partial. Furthermore, we are more likely to find evidence for polytheism than for monotheism for the simple reason that monotheists are often also adverse to creating an image of the one god. It so happened that Akhenaten carved his creed into the rock and thus it is preserved for us today.
Monotheism
Our interpretation of the religion of Akhenaten is influenced by philosophical questions that have to do with how religion develops. Scholars of the 19th century began to view the development of religious ideas as a evolutionary process. Monotheism was viewed as something superior to polytheism, thus once one had achieved a monotheistic conception of god, one wold never go back to a polytheistic conception of deity. In contrast, the Bible describes polytheism and monotheism as two very different ways of understanding god, the cosmos, and ourselves. While the Bible presents us with a vision of one God who alone is worthy of our worship, it nevertheless acknowledges that the temptation to worship nature in its various aspects is a powerful one. To see this process at work, we need only look around us. Whereas several centuries ago, most westerners would have subscribed to some form of monotheistic belief, since the middle of the 19th century, it has become more common to view Nature as a separate, eternal, and self-generating power. As we’ve seen, the deification of Nature is really at the heart of polytheism, and it is very much in vogue today among scientists and laymen alike.
[ahtimeline-event-heading]
The Hymn to the Aten is considered by many to be the greatest piece of literature ever produced by the Egyptians. As with so much from the Amarna period, it is unique in as much as it does not employ the language of magic and incantations. Rather, the pharaoh seems to really exult in the beauty of the created world simply because it is the creation of the Aten. Compare, for example these two hymns. The first is a traditional solar hymn typical of any period before or after the Amarna period.
A Hymn to the Sun from the Papyrus Ani
Homage to thee who risest as Ra and settest as Tem in beauty.
Thou risest and shinest on the back of thy mother [the Sky-goddess], O thou who art crowned king of the gods.
Nut (the Sky-goddess) pays homage to thee, and Maat (the goddess of Law and Truth) embraces thee at morn and eve.
Joyfully thou stridest over the heavens and the Lake of Testes (a part of heaven) is content thereat. Thine enemy Sebau is cast down headlong, his arms and hands are cut off, and thy dagger has severed the joints of his backbone.
Ra has a fair wind, the Seqtet Boat advances and comes into port.
The gods of the South, the North, the West and the East praise thee, O thou divine substance, from whence all forms of life sprang.
Notice how the solar hymn quoted above is primarily concerned with listing the names of the gods and their manifestations but doesn’t seem to take any interest in nature Compare that with this section from the Hymn to the Aten:
The Hymn to the Aten
Beautiful you appear from the horizon of heaven, O living Aten who
initiates life —for you are risen from the eastern horizon and have
filled every land with your beauty; for you are fair, great, dazzling
and high over every land,
And your rays enclose the lands to the limit of all you have made;
For you are Re, having reached their limit and subdued them your beloved son;
For although you are far away, your rays are upon the earth and you are perceived…
When the chick is in the egg, speaking in the shell, You give him breath within it to cause him to live; And when you have made his appointed time for him, so that he may break himself out of the egg, he comes out of the egg to speak at his appointed time and goes on his two legs when he comes out of it.
It is clear from the above reading that “The Hymn to the Aten” is not your standard Egyptian fare. It lacks the rigid, repetitive style of other solar hymns, whether they be early or late. That being said, it is going to far to declare this hymn the first expression of monotheism.
As with all things ancient, our knowledge of what people believed is fragmentary at best. We are more likely to find evidence for
polytheism than for monotheism for the simple reason that monotheists
are often also adverse to creating an image of the one god. We know about the cult of Aten because Akhenaten carved his creed into the rock and his nobles recorded the words of one of the hymns to Aten on the walls of their tombs. But I think it is worth bearing in mind that expressions of belief in one God are not as rare as one might think. Already, in Mesopotamia, we find the god Marduk ascribed with the names of all of the gods, so that each god becomes an aspect of Marduk. In Egypt, we find, in addition to Atenism, the fragment of a papyrus that equates the three major gods of Egypt: Amun, Re and Ptah.
While this expression is slightly later than Akhenaten, it seems to have an entirely different genesis. The Bible makes reference to a priest of God Most High.
From the 1st century BC onwards, groups living in Anatolia set up altars to Theos Hypistos which means “God Most High”. Augustine believed that the early Romans were quasi-monotheistic. Among the Romans we encounter individuals such as Cicero and Epictetus who express ideas that could be taken from the Bible.
In an interesting twist, an Egyptian inscription has recently garnered attention among Egyptologists. It dates to the New Kingdom period, but refers back to the Hyksos. In it, the Hyksos are accused of worshiping only one god, who is identified as Seth, to the exclusion of all others. It is impossible to determine the exact relationship between the Hyksos and the Israelites but it is at least noteworthy that an Egyptian inscription refers to a group of Asiatics living in Egypt as being devoted exclusively to their god, to the detriment of the Egyptian gods.
None of the examples cited above can be taken as evidence for monotheism in the strict Mosaic sense of the word. But I don’t think we can assume that the ancient world was consistently polytheistic until the solitary figure of Akhenaten, “the first revolutionary”, came onto the scene.
Psalm 104 and the Hymn to the Aten
Let us turn now to another question that has intrigued scholars since the discovery of the Hymn to the Aten inscribed on the wall of the Tomb of Ay at Amarna.
I remember a conversation I had with a tour guide who was leading a Smithsonian tour in Egypt. He asked me if I thought the Exodus occurred and if so, when did I think it occurred. I wanted to ask him the same question. I answered that I had always been struck by the fact that, if we use the chronology presented in the Bible, the Amarna Period comes just a century after the Exodus. It seemed to me that perhaps there was some connection, howbeit ever so distant, between the two events.
I expected some push back to this theory, but our guide replied by telling me a story about his early days as a student at a university in Cairo. He was assigned to read a text from Amarna popularly known as the Hymn to Aten. He said that he was amazed when he first read it. It was so different from traditional Egyptian texts. He thought he was reading a psalm from the Bible, and not an Egyptian text. Indeed, many scholars have pointed out the similarities between Psalm 104 and the Hymn to the Aten.Whether it’s author made use of line from the hymn to the Aten or vice versa, is a question we will never be able to properly answer.What I think is most intriguing about this is that most scholars today are adament in placing the composition of Genesis 1 into the Babylonian or Persian periods! But this is a difficult proposition to sustain since Psalm 104 is clearly much older than that, and this psalm is built around the framework found in Genesis 1. Genesis 1 is like a coin of which Psalm 104 is an impression. You need the coin first before you can make an impression. The idea that Genesis 1 is a late invention of Israelite priests in the exilic period is a feverish German fantasy. Genesis 1 might be compared to a photograph. It form is clear and concise. Psalm 104 is a painting from the photograph. It takes artistic liberty, makes use of flowery, poetic language. But Genesis 1 is clearly prior to Psalm 104. It is therefore, quite mistaken to assign such a late date to Genesis 1.
Monotheistic?
The religion of Akhenaten is often described as the first monotheistic religion. For an older generation of scholars, Akhenaten was the first romantic. Thus James Breasted writes,
In this aspect of Ikhnaton’s movement, then, it is a gospel of the beauty and beneficence of the natural order, a recognition of the message of nature to the soul of man, which makes it the earliest of those revivals which we call in the case of such artists as Millet and the Barbizon school, or of Wordsworth and his successors, “a return to nature.” (James Henry Breasted, Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt, 1912)
More recently, scholars have focused on the exclusivity of the Amarna revolution, its active suppression of other forms of religious worship in Egypt. This criticism of Aten worship is then projected onto the phenomenon of monotheism as a whole. The Egyptologist, Jan Assmann, for example, argues that the monotheism of Akhenaten (and Moses) represent a “radical and complete break with traditional religion.” Donald Redford similarly notes that, “monotheism does not appear through amalgamation and syncretism but rather through the annihilation of other gods.” Small wonder, Redford writes, “that the three great monotheisms we are familiar with celebrate themselves in hymns larded with military jargon.” Both Redford and Assmann take monotheism to be a reaction to polytheism – or, in Assmann’s words, a “counter-religion”.
However, by defining monotheism by what it is against, these scholars fail to acknowledge the essential distinctions between monotheism and polytheism. Monotheism encompasses a broad range of ideas, some of which are undoubtedly ‘exclusive’ of polytheism, but this does not make ‘exclusivism’ the defining characteristic of monotheism. A better definition of monotheism is offered by Yezekel Kauffman.
The mark of monotheism is not the concept of a god who is creator, eternal, benign, or even all-powerful; these notions are found everywhere in the pagan world. It is, rather, the idea of a god who is the source of all being, not subject to a cosmic order, and not emergent from a
pre-existent realm; a god free of the limitations of magic and mythology.
One may worship God or Nature. This is the essential difference between monotheism and polytheism. By this definition, was the worship of Aten monotheistic? It seems to me that the worship of Aten does have some of the characteristics of monotheism in as much as it has disposed of the rituals surrounding the cult image in the temple and the mythological journey of the sun through the underworld. However, it remains an open question to what degree Akhenaten and Nefertiti were made into objects of veneration. It also seems as though the Aten never fully loses its identification with the sun disk. The Aten is viewed rather as a force or energy that animates and creates the world, but there is no evidence that the Aten was anything more than a force. If it cared about morality and justice, which was the most important characteristic of the sun god in Egyptian religion, the texts from Amarna give no indication of it. For this reason, the religion of Amarna seems rather to be closer to what might be termed ‘vitalism’ or ‘pantheism’ rather than monotheism.
The Evolution of Religion
In fact, expressions of belief in one God are not as rare as one might think. Already, in Mesopotamia, we find the god Marduk being ascribed with the names of all of the gods, so that each god is viewed as being an aspect of Marduk. In Egypt, we find, in addition to Atenism, the Leiden Papyrus.
From the 1st century BC onwards, there was a religion dedicated to Theos Hypistos “God Most High” in Anatolia. Among the Romans, we encounter individuals who express ideas that seem like they could have been taken from the Bible. Cicero and Epictetus come to mind.
As with all things ancient, we must remember that our knowledge is partial. Furthermore, we are more likely to find evidence for polytheism than for monotheism for the simple reason that monotheists are often also adverse to creating an image of the one god. It so happened that Akhenaten carved his creed into the rock and thus it is preserved for us today.
Monotheism
Our interpretation of the religion of Akhenaten is influenced by philosophical questions that have to do with how religion develops. Scholars of the 19th century began to view the development of religious ideas as a evolutionary process. Monotheism was viewed as something superior to polytheism, thus once one had achieved a monotheistic conception of god, one wold never go back to a polytheistic conception of deity. In contrast, the Bible describes polytheism and monotheism as two very different ways of understanding god, the cosmos, and ourselves. While the Bible presents us with a vision of one God who alone is worthy of our worship, it nevertheless acknowledges that the temptation to worship nature in its various aspects is a powerful one. To see this process at work, we need only look around us. Whereas several centuries ago, most westerners would have subscribed to some form of monotheistic belief, since the middle of the 19th century, it has become more common to view Nature as a separate, eternal, and self-generating power. As we’ve seen, the deification of Nature is really at the heart of polytheism, and it is very much in vogue today among scientists and laymen alike.