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By Root 656 0

of the old gods is a standard practice for prophets of a new faith, monotheistic or not; monotheism is by its very nature intolerant. Polytheistic religions are usually able and willing to identify gods of other regions with their own, or to add a few new ones. The Romans did not throw the Christians to the lions because they were heretics, but because they refused to acknowledge the divinity of the emperor. Hence Akhenaton’s persecution of the gods of Egypt can, I believe, be taken as an argument for the monotheistic character of his faith, rather than the reverse.

The terms don’t really matter all that much. What matters is that Akhenaton worshipped one god and one god only, in all his manifestations. The particular bitterness of his attack upon Amon may have been influenced by fear of the threat posed by the wealth and power of the Amon priesthood, but the great Aton hymn, which expresses Akhenaton’s devotion, does not sound like the work of a politician who cloaks pragmatic deeds in eloquent but empty words. Breasted believed it was composed by the king himself. Whether Akhenaton actually sat down with pen and papyrus in hand (though I love the image of him chewing on the end of his reed pen while he tries to find the right word) is irrelevant. The so-called hymn wouldn’t have been inscribed in various courtiers’ tombs if it had not been official dogma.

Its striking parallels with the 104th Psalm were first pointed out by Breasted:

ATON HYMN

When thou settest in the western horizon of heaven The world is in darkness like the dead…. Every lion cometh forth from his den, The serpents they sting. Darkness reigns…. Bright is the earth when thou risest in the horizon…. The two lands are in daily festival, Awake and standing upon their feet…. Then in all the world they do their work. How manifold are all thy works! They are hidden from before us. Oh thou sole god, whose powers no other possesseth. Thou didst create the earth according to thy desire, being alone: Men, all cattle, large and small; All that are upon the earth.

PSALM 104

Thou makest darkness, and it is night: wherein all the beasts of the forest do creep forth. The young lions roar after their prey, and seek their meat from God…. The sun ariseth, they gather themselves together, and lay them down in their dens. Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening…. Oh Lord, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all; the earth is full of thy riches.

These similarities do not mean that there is a direct connection between Atonism and Hebrew mono the ism, or that Moses learned about God at the court of Amarna. Rather, the Aton hymn and the psalm represent two examples of a literary tradition that flourished throughout the Near East over a vast span of time. Certain of the concepts, and even certain of the phrases, of the Amarna hymn occur in earlier Eighteenth-Dynasty Egyptian hymns and persist after the heresy of Akhenaton had disappeared from Egypt. Still, it is interesting to see, in so familiar a volume as the Bible, echoes of the beliefs of an Egyptian pharaoh of the second millennium before Christ.

These beliefs, as we know them, were beautiful and kindly—the love of the creator of all things for his creatures, and their jubilant adoration of him. All creatures, even the humblest, hail the god’s rising:

All cattle rest upon their herbage, all trees and plants flourish; The birds flutter in their marshes, their wings uplifted in adoration to thee. All the sheep prance upon their feet, all winged things fly; they live when thou hast shone upon them.

Aton is the god of Syria and of Nubia also:

Their tongues are diverse in speech, and their forms and their skins likewise; for thou, Divider, hast divided the peoples.

A spirit of joyousness and of sunlit, open space and an appreciation of the manifold beauties of nature breathe in the liturgy of the Aton faith and are found in other elements of the worship. No longer was the god adored, as was Amon, within a windowless, darkened shrine. The temples of the Aton were