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Was the jealous YHWH inspired by the religious policies of the Pharaoh Akhenaton, who reigned in Egypt from 1353 to 1336 B.C.? Closing the temples of the powerful priesthood of Amon, this royal Egyptian heretic established the state cult of a godhead embodied in the sun disk, or Aton. In Moses and Monotheism, Sigmund Freud speculated that Moses was actually an Egyptian who passed single-deity worship derived from Akhenaton to the Jews. (Was there not, he asked, an echo of Aton in Adonai?) Other scholars, like German academic Jan Assmann, author of Moses the Egyptian, believe Moses and Hebrew monotheism are a memory of Akhenaton, whose name was purged from all lists of rulers when the priests of Amon retook power.
Other assessments of Akhenaton's religion render the Aton-Adonai connection less convincing. In his new book, The Lost Tomb, Kent Weeks, the Egyptologist who in 1995 discovered the tomb of Rameses II's sons, describes Akhenaton's monotheism as full of grotesque images and semidivine, yet vaguely sexual earthbound relationships. It appears an odd ancestor to the austere religion of YHWH.
Let my people go.
The Pharaoh refuses. And so, at Moses' direction, Moses' brother Aaron touches the Nile with his staff, and it turns to blood. Egypt is then infested successively by frogs, gnats, flies, a pestilence on livestock, boils on people and beasts, hail, locusts and "a darkness that can be touched." Scientific skeptics have assigned them myriad natural explanations, including a comet and a volcanic eruption on the Mediterranean island of Santorini. The most ingenious effort is an ecological domino theory proposed in the 1950s by a scholar named Greta Hort: the Nile's many tributaries flood, infesting the great river with blood-red soil from the high plateaus and reddish micro-organisms usually confined to up-country lakes. These micro-organisms poison the fish, whose rotting bodies pollute the frogs' habitats, forcing them to hop onto dry land. Insects (gnats, flies) feeding on the dead fish proliferate and convey the anthrax that eventually infects livestock (pestilence) and humans (boils).
After the ninth plague, God warns Moses that the Israelites should sacrifice a lamb and paint their doorways with its blood. And that midnight, in a scene equally eerie in the Bible, live-action movie or animated cartoon, God kills the Egyptian firstborn males. A great cry goes up in Egypt. Is there archaeological evidence of this disaster? Weeks' discovery of the tomb of the sons of Rameses II at first led to much excitement. Could it provide evidence of the final plague? Weeks says there is no way to know whether one of the sons in the tomb was Pharaoh's firstborn.
And the Israelites went into the sea on dry ground, the waters forming a wall for them on their right and on their left.