Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [41]
Freud popularized the notion that Israelite monotheism came originally from the Egyptian heresy of Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, Akhenaten, but Freud’s chronology was off by centuries. As Akhenaten worshiped the disk of the sun and the cult that he founded was all but erased afterwards, it seems unlikely that it could have converted the Hebrews centuries later, when even Hebrew imagery about God is so different. There is a certain amount of evidence that Hebrew psalms occasionally borrowed from Egyptian sources. For instance, Psalm 104 seems to incorporate aspects of The Hymn to Aten, but the specific traces of Egyptian religion were removed, leaving only the suspicion that some Hebrew intellectual admired the turn of phrase of the heretical “monotheistic” Egyptian priesthood.
So, in general, if Egyptian thought is present in some attenuated way in Jewish or Christian thinking, it is hard to demonstrate. The Egyptians spoke an afterlife far away in another place, sometimes in the stars, and accompanied by a long and dangerous journey, with a postmortem judgment scene. The Biblical Israelites of the First Temple period spoke hardly at all of an afterlife. In the Hellenistic period, Jews living in the land of Israel most often spoke about a reconstructed earth at the end of time, with a judgment scene there and no resurrection until then, and no embalming or mummification.71
It is true that the Exodus narrative says that Joseph’s body was mummified but that is specific to his adventures in Egypt, a little historicizing detail inserted into the narrative, not a pattern that Israelites followed. Egyptian religion was based on the hieroglyphic script and was always very graphic, while Israelite thought was, in general, aniconic. It is worth noting that Egyptian imagery has little in common with Israelite notions. The only exception to this would be the obvious borrowing of the figure of the Madonna and child from the Mysteries of Isis (Isis with Horus on her lap) into Christianity, which is as likely to have taken place first in Rome as in Egypt. This illustrates the phenomenon that images sometimes move where sense might more easily forbid their entry. This phenomenon will be more obvious in the relationship between Israel and its close Canaanite neighbors.
Instead, what most strikes any reading of the vast Egyptian traditions on the subject is not just the complete lack of parallel in Israelite thought but Israel’s opposition to Egyptian religion, and vice versa. The Egyptian figuration of Seth is in important ways a caricature of the gods of the Semitic Shepherd Kings, the Hyksos, evincing a polemical edge to Egyptian mythology, as happens in every culture. Israelite tolerance of Egyptian religion can hardly be expected to be any better, considering how widely Egyptian religion was itself satirized. The story of the golden calf is a satire on religious practices amongst the Canaanites and the Egyptians but is also likely to be a product of the civil war between the North and South in dynastic Israel.72 Here, one sees clearly, the victory of the Judean version of monotheism, which predominates in the Bible, over the Northern cult is extremely important. For the Hebrews, the sky could not contain Osiris, as it already contained YHWH, and the dead, who were at best spirits, could not travel there.
Egyptian notions of the preservation of the body may at first seem related to the Second Temple period Jewish notion of resurrection. But this connection too becomes a contrast when one considers the differences in the treatment of the body. The Egyptians considered the preservation of the body necessary for the journey to heaven, as life would continue there in much the same way as here. But they did not envision the afterlife in the physical body. The Hebrews held no such