Akhenaten: The Heretic Pharaoh and His Singular God
Pharaoh Akhenaten (18th dynasty), son of Amenhotep IV and husband of Queen Nefertiti, has often been described as a “rebel” or “heretic” in historical literature.
Upon his death, enemies of his religious reforms systematically destroyed monuments built during his reign, including his temple in Karnak. They even struck his name from tablets with the goal of wiping him from the historical record.
This enmity came from Akhenaten’s religious reforms, which firmly placed the Land of Egypt under a unique and solitary God, who was to be the sole object of worship and not to be represented in human or animal form.
The worship of a single God is often called “monotheism” in modern discourse, but as the British Egyptologist Dominic Montserrat instructs us there’s a crucial distinction here with another concept:
It’s important to differentiate monolatry – the representation of a single god as an object of worship in religious contexts – from monotheism, which is the belief in a single god. It seems to me that many discussions of Akhenaten’s religion do not make this distinction clear enough.
From the surviving religious liturgy, we know that Akhenaten was definitely monolatrous – the God that sent down the Aten was his God. For instance, the beautifully composed “Hymn to Aten” proclaims:
Sole God beside whom there is none!, who created the world alone, according to your desire. Humans, cattle, wild animals, and all creatures on earth and in the sky, are your creation. The lands of Syria, Nubia, and Egypt are shaped by your will, and you provide for their needs.In a time period where ethnic groups and nations often claimed sole access to particular gods, the universality of Akhenaten’s God is striking.
Many scholars have noted striking similarities in the conception of God and religious practice between Akhenaten’s religion and Judaism and other Abrahamic religions such as Islam, including:
Priests wearing white linen clothing in worship
Prayers timed precisely to align with the Sun’s journey, most importantly sun rise, noon, and sun set
Use of sidelock’s to represent a person as a child of god
Similarly, Christian texts like Psalm 104:20 demonstrate striking similarity to the Hymn of Aten. Since the Hymn of Akhenaten is older than the Bible, this indicates the spiritual wisdom found in Biblical verses was also present in the Land of Egypt and therefore inspired the writers of the Bible.
The famous Jewish thinker Sigmund Freud argued in his final book, Moses and Monotheism, that the Jewish patriarch Moses was in-fact Egyptian and a priest within Akhenaten’s religion before becoming a leader for Jews and establishing a new religion for them inspired in part by Akhenaten, while some Israeli scholars argue that Akhenaten’s religious influence penetrated deeply into Jewish communities in Canaan prior to Moses as Canaan often fell into the influence and control of Egypt.
As both Christianity and Islam acknowledge the spiritual genealogy of prophets of Jewish origin and borrow some thought from Jewish practices, Judaism’s connection to Akhenaten is an exciting avenue of ongoing scholarly dialogue that suggests very powerfully that before the Old Testament there was awareness and reverence for a single deity who like the sun shone brightly for all lands and peoples.
Resources:
Akhenaten: History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt by Dominic Montserrat
Moses and Monotheism by Sigmund Freud