Pod Insights Empire: World History 368. Ancient Egypt: The Origin of Abrahamic Religions? (Ep 7) About this episode Was monotheism passed down from Pharaoh Akhenaten of Ancient Egypt? Who was the ancient goddess Asherah? How did exposure to other empires shape the Hebrew Bible?
William is joined by Francesca Stavrakopoulou, author of God: An Anatomy, to explore the evolution of the deity Yahweh, and Freud’s theory that Jewish monotheism was passed down from Ancient Egypt.
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2:37 Speaker 03 On his deathbed in 1938, Sigmund Freud wrote his final, and in many ways, his most original work. But the most famous psychologist in history wasn't writing about the unconscious mind or the ego. He was writing about the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten. And he was asking whether Akhenaten's radical religious beliefs laid the seeds from which Judaism, Islam, and Christianity grew. In this episode, we're going to be exploring that. And we're welcoming to the studio, I'm afraid it's just me today, no, no, Anita, she's busy. But it gets me all the more time with one of my favorite authors, who I have completely loved the work of,
3:22 Speaker 03 Francesco Stavrocapulo. Francesco, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. So everyone, put your seatbelts on, because what you're going to get is certainly very different from what I understood to be the origins of monotheism, which is what we're looking at today. We're asking two questions, in a sense. What was the beginnings of monotheism? Was Akhenaten's Aten faith a form of monotheism or not? We looked a bit at that with Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, but we're going to go now forward with Francesco and ask a second question. What are the origins of the cult of Yahweh? And how far did Akhenaten's thought and ideas, which seemed to be so thoroughly smashed
4:06 Speaker 03 when we last looked in the last episode with the end of Tell El Manah and the abandonment of this entire world and the revolution even by the time of Tutankhamun, his son. How much can we see the influence of that in what became the three great monotheistic Abrahamic religions? So tell us about Freud, first of all, Jessica. How did he come to this? And does anyone take this book at all seriously?
4:30 Speaker 04 Oh, gosh, that's a huge question. So Freud, as you said, Freud is writing in the late 1930s and he's living in a world in which it's not easy to be Jewish. He's Jewish.
4:44 Speaker 03 Yeah, 1938 to be Jewish is not a, even in your London is quite uncomfortable.
4:48 Speaker 04 Exactly. And so this is a time of heightened anxieties, heightened, certainly heightened antisemitism. Antisemitism was a part of British culture anyway, but obviously what's going on in with the rise of Nazism in Germany and obviously the Second World War is just around the corner. It's a very difficult time. But he's also writing at a time in which everything ancient Egypt is mega exciting still. So if you think about it, Tutankhamun, the tomb was discovered in 1922.
5:18 Speaker 03 So it's all quite new stuff.
5:19 Speaker 04 That is still really new. I mean, even in terms of the rediscovery of Akhenaten and the very distinctive qualities and aspects and artwork, for example, of his reign. That was only in the late 19th century. So, you know, it's, this is, we're now in the early 20th. This is still, Egypt mania is still a big thing. So he's writing at this time and for him to be Jewish at a time when there is so much hostility and violence, I think it's safe to say that he's looking at.
5:50 Speaker 04 The ways in which to be Jewish is not to be shameful. And I think to link the Jewish faith and it's particularly its monotheism to the kind of the glories, if you like, of ancient Egypt. And everything that was seen as it was seen as so sophisticated, you know, by nineteen twenties, nineteen thirties, um, European culture. It was seen as exciting, as as refined.
6:14 Speaker 03 We still see it as exciting.
6:15 Speaker 04 Oh, exactly. And so I think, I think that was probably very appealing. And also, you know, this is a, this is a guy who goes to dinner parties, you know, he's a very intellectual man, he socialises. This is kind of dinner party talk as well.
6:27 Speaker 03 We should say at this point that it is significant that it is, he has a Jewish publisher. I think it's my great, great, great uncle, Leonard Wolf. Or by Virginia is my great, great aunt. I'm not related to Leonard except by marriage. But yes, and, and, and that was the publisher, the Hogarth Press was the publisher that published this book.
6:43 Speaker 04 Absolutely. So I think there's all sorts of, which is very exciting, by the way, about Virginia Woolf being your great, great aunt. I think there's all sorts of reasons why this is a very important work for Freud. But it also plays into a lot of what he's interested in intellectually and in terms of his, his understanding of, of, of human psychology. In the sense that for him, Akhenaten's monotheism, if that's what we're to call it, it's not a label I'm particularly comfortable with. But his kind of version of one god theology, one god religion is for Freud, I think, one of those great, great forces. And it's a force that for him is repressed and denied and eradicated. But then suddenly reemerges much later for, for some scholars, but for, for Freud
7:28 Speaker 04 reemerges at the time of Moses, who he dates to around the same time as Akhenaten. And it's Moses that passes this monotheism on to the Israelites.
7:38 Speaker 03 Now, obviously, whole libraries have been written on this subject since then. Uh, it's a long time ago in theology, nineteen thirty eight. And a lot of what Freud said has been poo-pooed by academic sense. But what did he get right? What elements of that book stand up, if any?
7:54 Speaker 04 I find it very hard to, uh, as an academic, to say this is what he got right, or this is what stands up. I think making the link.
8:03 Speaker 03 When was he on the right trail, shall we say?
8:05 Speaker 04 I think he's on the right trail to say that there is a certain kind of, um, that one god religion. That it does pop up, it reemerges because it's a very powerful notion, it's a very powerful idea. And it's, and because it's so contrary, it's so different in some ways to the norm, to the cultural norm. So in the ancient world, across ancient southwest Asia, North Africa, the Mediterranean, polytheism is the norm, the worship of many gods, and the gods are all networked together.
8:32 Speaker 03 Right, through to obviously the Hindu gods of, of, of India, the ones I'm.
8:36 Speaker 04 Absolutely, and some could argue due to certain forms of Christianity today as, as well. That's another story for another time.
8:41 Speaker 03 Another, another one for another day. We're gonna get you back, Francesca, don't worry, not getting away with just one episode here.
8:46 Speaker 04 It's a very controversial idea, one god theology in, in this context. And so I think the idea that somehow these sorts of things can come back with a force, that they can't be, that these things don't just disappear. You can't just get rid of, like, you can't get rid of the whole notion of polytheism without it reemerging or, or kind of adapting later on. And so too with the notion of one god religion, you can't just get rid of that idea, it does come up later on. Now, whether there's a direct DNA link, if you like, between Akhenaten's.
9:13 Speaker 03 Biological link between the two ideas.
9:15 Speaker 04 If there's a direct link between Akhenaten's theology and his religious preferences and those that we find in the Hebrew Bible, so Old Testament, and in ancient Judaism, Christianity, et cetera, no, there's no direct link, I would go as far as to say that. But there are cultural similarities and it's not a surprise that we find cultural similarities in this part of the world.
9:35 Speaker 03 Now, Francesca, in your wonderful book, God and Anatomy, which I recommend everybody to go out and buy now, because it's just blew my mind. And it's an extraordinary, extraordinary book. But your kind of main argument is that the god of the later Hebrew Bible, well, he's the same god, but he's very, very differently presented to the god of the earliest Israelite religion, or the gods, as you put it, of the earliest Israelite religions, and that.
10:06 Speaker 03 Yahweh has a much more tangled, complicated and geographically expansive origin than conventional Jewish or Christian, or indeed Muslim theology would need us to believe.
10:23 Speaker 04 Yeah, so in essence, Judaism and Christianity in Islam share many scriptural traditions. And one of the scriptural traditions they share is this notion that God, or Yahweh as he's known within Jewish cultures and traditions, that God was essentially always a solitary deity. There were no other gods that should be worshipped. They were false gods, if there were any other gods that were around. And this was a universal deity, a universal deity in the sense that this was a God who had a universal reach and a universal control. This was a God who plucked Abraham out of Mesopotamia, so what we now know as modern day Iraq, and said, right, I'm going to give you this homeland for your descendants, off you go, and it's called Canaan. So Canaan is the label in biblical texts that's given to the region we know as the southern Levant.
11:08 Speaker 04 So in other words, what's now modern day Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, etc. So this is a universal solitary creator god, a male god, interestingly. But that kind of notion of God is a relatively late development within Yahweh worship of the Iron Age. So the earlier form of Yahweh, the original form of Yahweh was quite different. He was one of a number of deities. He was a warrior god. He had a consort, the goddess Asherah. And he was a god who was gradually, slowly prioritized as a political patron over several centuries by particular ruling groups within the communities that we know as ancient Israel.
11:50 Speaker 03 Now, you've just said a lot of stuff that you packed into two sentences enough to sort of blow the minds of every believing one of the Israel of three religions. So let's go very, very slowly through this, what you've just said.
12:06 Speaker 03 I suppose first of all, to unpack it, what era, what dates are we talking for the very first mentions of Yahweh? Let's go, let's do time, then place, and then look at exactly what he is originally.
12:16 Speaker 04 Yeah, so in terms of the earliest uncontested.
12:22 Speaker 04 Reference to Yahweh, we're basically talking early Iron Age. So we're talking around the ninth to the eighth centuries BCE. Ninth century BCE.
12:30 Speaker 03 So that's in, in, in kind of ancient Mesopotamian terms, quite late in the day. We've seen the rise and fall of Earth. We've seen the Syrians, Babylonians, all sorts of stuff going on.
12:40 Speaker 04 Yeah, absolutely. So this is, it is, it is relatively late. We're talking kind of like, you know, ten to midnight in the kind of the world clock of time. This is a deity who's mentioned absolutely a clear attestation of a deity Yahweh linked to Israel and kings of Israel. In the ninth century BCE, and that comes in the Mesher Stele, which is a stone inscription, a monument. That was set up by a Moabite king called Mesher. Moab is where we now identify Jordan. That's our earliest unattested reference to Yahweh.
13:10 Speaker 03 And that's not quite an exact date, isn't it? What's the date?
13:13 Speaker 04 It's around, it's the mid ninth century BCE.
13:15 Speaker 03 Midnight century. Just to go into, again, slightly more contentious territory, before that, before the link of Yahweh with Israel, which is that, that's stellar. From the mid ninth century, we have other references to Yahweh. Uh, in slightly different form, way to the south and not associated with Israel.
13:37 Speaker 04 Possible references to Yahweh.
13:38 Speaker 03 Possibly, yeah. That is contentious, so, yeah.
13:40 Speaker 04 So some scholars have argued that we have in certain Egyptian materials, Egyptian texts, references to. What appear to be nomadic or semi-nomadic tribal groups in this kind of this pocket of territory that the bottom of the southern Levant and into some of what was ancient Egypt. Some Arabian territories that seems to refer to a Yahhu or Yaho. Now, we know from later Hebrew inscriptions that that is a very common form of the name Yahweh, the divine name Yahweh. But in these ancient Egyptian materials that are much earlier, from around fourteenth century, thirteenth century BCE. Doesn't look to be the name of a deity. It doesn't look to be a proper personal name. It looks to be a place name.
14:24 Speaker 04 Rather than a personal name. So some scholars have said, this is a place name. Could this be a place at which a deity? Takes his name. Possibly.
14:35 Speaker 03 But less contentious is the fact that early references to Yahweh seem to come or point to the south, even within the Hebrew Bible.
14:45 Speaker 04 Yeah, so that's where that's where we're on kind of slightly firmer territory, slightly firmer ground. So some of the earliest poetry that we have in the Hebrew Bible, Hebrew Bible is the name that we give to the Old Testament, what people know as Tanakh, Christians know as the Old Testament. The Hebrew Bible's earliest poetry refers to Yahweh as a deity, as this kind of warrior god, a god who's a fighter, who comes from the sort of arid regions of the south, so Edom in particular. So again, the territory that we would associate now with southern Jordan. And these these seem to give a sort of an origin story.
15:22 Speaker 03 That sort of Petra region or further deeper south?
15:24 Speaker 04 Further, further south than that. But the red, you know, that very red soil and sand and rock of Petra, it's that same, it's the word Edom is linked to the word for red, to the word for blood. So it's that red kind of desert wilderness territory is where Yahweh is given his origins in a lot of early Hebrew Bible poetry. So most scholars think that he has this very southern wilderness origin.
15:47 Speaker 03 And that he and possibly the tribes who worship him are migrating northwards into what is now Israel. Over time, is that is that firmer territory? No, by your expression, not.
15:59 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah. What what we know, so that the Hebrew Bible tells the story that Israel's origins begin as they are a loose tribal network, various nomadic and semi nomadic groups who go into Egypt and then find themselves coming out of Egypt and into the land of Canaan, so the southern Levant. Many scholars now are very iffy about the historicity of those tribal traditions. It may be that this is something that has been retrojected back into the story at a later date. So what we do know is that-
16:34 Speaker 03 They're quite down on the whole notion that there was an exodus. This is not considered to be historical anymore by academics.
16:41 Speaker 04 No, it's most academics would say. Would say perhaps something happened.
16:46 Speaker 03 And there's definitely toing and froing between what's now Israel and what's now Egypt.
16:50 Speaker 04 Absolutely. I mean, it's interesting. This is like the late Bronze Age, early Iron Age, and it's a time that's got remarkable similarities to today in the sense that it is a time of mass movement of peoples and migrations because there is economic collapse on the brink. There is climate crisis going on. It's the collapse of like a lot of the the late Bronze city states.
17:08 Speaker 03 We've done with Eric Klein, a series on the Bronze Age collapse. So our listeners know all that stuff and Lou Garrett and all those those sea peoples turning up.
17:19 Speaker 04 It's a really sort of, it's it's a time of huge mobility. And this little, this little corridor of land, as today, is still a hugely important piece of land in terms of trade, economics and migration, people going down, you know, from Africa, like into Africa, up again into Mesopotamia and round again. So it's, it's, there's always people going in and out of Egypt, basically. And we know that this this carries on right into the Roman era and beyond.
17:45 Speaker 03 Now, in that detonator sentence that you gave us ten minutes ago, which we're unpicking the resonance of now, there was another little reference to the fact that Yahweh has a wife, a share, and weirdly, this is the least contentious, as you said. This seems to be completely established in the early days, something that no monotheist wants to hear, but it's there, you'd say, pretty firmly in the archaeology and the inscriptions of evidence.
18:14 Speaker 04 From the eighth century BCE, from sites in and around Judah, ancient Judah, so in and around the West Bank, today's West Bank, near Jerusalem, we have inscriptions. We also have inscriptions in the Sinai Desert, again, dated to the eighth century BCE. You know, it's almost like a motorway kind of service station, the equivalent in the ancient world. And we have inscriptions there too. And these inscriptions, written in Hebrew, ask for blessings from Yahweh and his Asherah. Now, we know Asherah really well. We know her from late Bronze Age texts from the Syrian city states of Ugrat.
18:45 Speaker 03 He's one of the big gods of the Levant at this period.
18:48 Speaker 04 She's a major.
18:49 Speaker 03 Yeah.
18:50 Speaker 04 Yeah, she's a big deal. She's a huge deal. She's almost like the first lady. If you like, of kind of the the ancient.
18:56 Speaker 03 The queen of heaven to to to use a phrase that is used of her, yeah.
19:00 Speaker 04 Exactly.
19:01 Speaker 03 That was something I had in my Catholic upbringing, but didn't refer to Shara.
19:04 Speaker 04 No, but you could see how much recycling goes on in.
19:08 Speaker 03 Exactly.
19:10 Speaker 04 Asherah, known as Atherat in other parts of of the Levant, she is most often coupled with the high god of the pantheon, the high god of the pantheon, who is most often sort of semi-retired deity. He's the kind of the father god, he's leaving the business of running the cosmos up to his younger generation of gods and goddesses.
19:29 Speaker 03 And again, this is something that blew my mind when I read your book, and something that we should all know. That god is not initially yellowing, and the Israelites' first god is El.
19:40 Speaker 04 The god Ale, and his name is preserved in Israel Ale. So this is, I mean, his name simply means deity, but it also serves as a proper name. And Asherah is the consort of the high god Ale, and they have sons and daughters, like in many other pantheons we find across the across the world. It's their sons and daughters who are the kind of the active gods, they're the frontline deities, you know, warrior gods and weather gods and fertility deities and such like. So Asherah is really important. So in the eighth century BCE, it's no surprise in some ways to find that the chief deity of ancient Israelite and Judeite religion is partnered with the goddess Asherah. It gives him credibility as much as anything else, that this is a high god who can take charge of
20:26 Speaker 04 this household of other deities and this portfolio of cosmic responsibilities.
20:30 Speaker 03 And just very briefly to go into these other deities, there is an entire council. There is like Mount Olympus, there's a whole world of gods. And this is, again, uncontroversial to academics, this is something that most serious theologians studying this period will accept, that there is a whole world of many, many gods that the early Israelites and their neighbours are sharing.
20:52 Speaker 04 Yeah, so the Hebrew Bible is very explicit about this. It makes several, I mean, hundreds of references to the divine council of of Yahweh or the divine council of Ale. The two names are very interchangeable in lots of Hebrew Bible texts because they become identified at this point.
21:06 Speaker 03 One thing, is there a is there a phonetic link between El and Allah? Is that the same sort of semantic root?
21:14 Speaker 04 Yeah, same root, absolutely.
21:15 Speaker 03 So Allah, El, Israel.
21:19 Speaker 03 All have etymological links to each other.
21:21 Speaker 04 Um hum. Yeah.
21:23 Speaker 03 And that is enough.
21:24 Speaker 04 Semitic languages.
21:25 Speaker 03 Detonate other minds on its own, even before we go any further with with God's wife and any of the rest of it. And again, this is another crucial point that that in in terms of academics is not uh controversial. That this early Israelite world of deities, which El and Yahweh are part, is not exclusive to the Israelites. That the other Canaanite tribes, although they didn't seem to call themselves Canaanites, that's what Egyptian sources said when they called them. That they all more or less share the same pantheon.
21:54 Speaker 04 Not so much sharing the same pantheon in common, but their their local pantheons all look really similar. They often have the same names and they have deities that that serve pretty much the same roles. So it's not direct translation, if you like, but it's but they're sufficiently similar that everybody can understand that the world of the gods is mega important. And you don't annoy somebody else's deity.
22:14 Speaker 03 Yes, that you're tolerant of each other's deities. Yeah. And one of these gods is one that appears a lot in the Old Testament, who is Baal. Who's he?
22:22 Speaker 04 Ah, Baal, I love Baal. He's one of my favourites. So Baal, the name basically means master or lord. And so we find various forms of Baal all over ancient South West Asia. Um. In the Levant, he's particularly associated with, he's a storm god essentially. But as a storm god, he's also a warrior deity. So his weapons are.
22:40 Speaker 03 So related to Zeus, he's got thunderbolts and that sort of stuff.
22:43 Speaker 04 Very similar. Zeus is basically a form of Baal. Absolutely. And and later Greek writers would and would understand Phoenician forms of Baal as a form of Zeus. So it's really, really similar. But yeah, his weapons are thunderclouds and lightning and rainstorms. Um. Big, heavy clouds. He's he's known as the rider on the clouds. He's the charioteer of the clouds, which is such a lovely image.
23:06 Speaker 03 Sounds very, very Jim Morrison. Riders on the storm, yeah.
23:10 Speaker 04 But that's exactly what Yahweh is called in many Hebrew Bible texts as well. So as well as taking on aspects of ale, Yahweh's also taken on lots of aspects of Baal. So he's combining the kind of top tier semi-retired father god profile of deity with the kind of warrior god, storm god, ferocious fighter, patron deity, defender of his chosen cities and peoples portfolio.
23:33 Speaker 03 Not only do you have this very unfamiliar world of many gods and a goddess, but Asherah, like the female gods of Mesopotamia that we meet in Gilgamesh and so on, is quite sensual. This is not a sort of chaste and goody-two-shoes goddess.
23:52 Speaker 04 Yeah, and all the gods are, all the deities are these sensory-bodied deities. They have human-shaped bodies, they have human-like emotions on a supersized scale quite often. Asherah, she's not a fertility goddess, she is a protector, she is a mediator, she's very benevolent, she's got a lot of sway.
24:14 Speaker 03 But there is sacred prostitution associated with her sometimes, no?
24:18 Speaker 04 No.
24:18 Speaker 03 You don't believe that. Some scholars have said that.
24:20 Speaker 04 Yes, and they're absolutely wrong because it's ancient world polemic, trying to basically belittle and sort of other these different sorts of goddesses in religion.
24:29 Speaker 03 This is, this is early sexism, trying to pollute this cult.
24:33 Speaker 04 And xenophobia too, quite, quite often.
24:36 Speaker 03 We're going to take a break now, but after the break, we'll find out how this very unfamiliar world gets edited to the more familiar world that we read about in the current edition of the Old Testament.
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26:28 Speaker 03 Welcome back, Francesca. So, we opened with this very unfamiliar world of many gods and goddesses in worship by the Israelites in a way that, you know, most of our religious educations does not teach us. Now, how do we move from that world to the world that we get read out to us in church or synagogue or mosque today? What is the editing process that means that Yahweh loses his Asherah?
26:54 Speaker 04 So, we need to fast-forward from the early Iron Age to the middle of the Iron Age. So, we fast-forward to the 6th century BCE. By this time, you've got the Kingdom of Israel in the north and the Kingdom of Judah in the south. Samaria, the capital of the northern kingdom, has been decimated in the 8th century by the Assyrian Empire.
27:13 Speaker 03 Samaria is kind of modern Nablus, isn't it?
27:15 Speaker 04 Yeah, so that was the capital. The Assyrians are the big power. The Neo-Assyrian Empire is huge and it is, by the 8th, end of the 8th century, it's world, it dominates the known world, basically. They have completely decimated the northern kingdom of Israel, leaving only Jerusalem. On its own, if you like, that's so that's kind of the the impression that we get. Obviously, it's not wiped off the map. There are still people there and farming there. There's still religion going on there. There's still Yahweh worship going on there. But it it has an impact on those that are left behind in Jerusalem and the Kingdom of Judah. So for some scholars, this, the end of the eighth century, beginning of the seventh century, is the time when a shift towards a programmatic form of monotheism occurs.
27:58 Speaker 04 So we have stories in the Hebrew Bible about King Hezekiah of Jerusalem, who shuts down lots of temples and sanctuaries outside of Jerusalem and says, you can only worship Yahweh in one place, and that's Jerusalem temple.
28:11 Speaker 03 It sounds a bit like either the English Reformation or the Taliban, where you have someone just sort of knocking down gods, destroying things and telling people, you can only worship this, yeah.
28:19 Speaker 04 The English Reformation wouldn't have happened without the biblical accounts of King Hezekiah and later on, King Josiah in the seventh century, basically doing exactly that. It's iconocrazism, just knocking statues down, getting rid of images, saying that this is the way you can worship and you can only worship by means of the temple in Jerusalem and by and following a kind of a script, a religious ideological script, um, known as the Torah. So in other words, that's the Torah simply means teaching. We know it now as the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. Um, but Torah in the late Iron Age probably meant a version of what we know as the Book of Deuteronomy, which is all about one God, one place of worship, one people united. So all Yahweh's worship has come together.
29:03 Speaker 03 And this is an incredibly powerful idea that then gets boosted after the Israelites are defeated, they move to Babylon, their temple is destroyed, and in exile, they rebuild their religion in a very different way. Also, perhaps influenced by another monotheism which precedes it, which is Zoroastrianism.
29:25 Speaker 04 Yeah, so there you've said a lot in two sentences that needs unpacking.
29:30 Speaker 03 My revenge.
29:31 Speaker 04 Exactly. So possibly Hezekiah and Josiah as these religious reformers. Some scholars think this is this is historical fact. Other scholars? Myself included, not so sure. We don't know that this kind of prioritisation of Yahweh over and above all other deities within the local pantheons. We don't really know whether that happened or not. In this particular period, we don't know that a form of the Book of Deuteronomy was written as early as the seventh century BCE. What we are all agreed on is that by the time we get to the sixth century BCE, five eight seven BCE in particular, the Assyrians have been defeated by the Babylonians who now have the upper imperial hand.
30:13 Speaker 04 And as a part of their expansion um down towards Egypt, the Babylonians have destroyed Jerusalem and have taken off into exile the elites of Jerusalem, the monarchy, a lot of the priesthood, a lot of the scribes. You know, the important people, technicians, like the people, the artisans, people that are useful to the empire. Whilst they are in exile in Babylon, these elite group decides they have to figure out what the hell has just happened. Has this happened because Yahweh has been defeated? This warrior god, this father god, this patron of the people, this patron who was who was set to dwell literally in the temple in Jerusalem.
30:53 Speaker 04 How the hell does this happen? Has he been defeated or was this all a part of Yahweh's plan to punish his people for some kind of religious malpractice? And that's basically what those elites, those scribal elites in particular, the intelligentsia in Babylon decide has happened. They said, no, no, the Babylonian gods aren't stronger than Yahweh. Yahweh has used the Babylonians and their gods against us.
31:18 Speaker 03 Because we have sinned and one of the things we've done that is is sinning is by worshipping a sharer.
31:24 Speaker 04 We worshipped other gods and we didn't realise that Yahweh got really upset about that. I will, you know, I would not tolerate this because he is a jealous god. So that's the beginnings of this religious ideology. So how do you account for what's happened? You say, right, Yahweh has to have some kind of universal reach. He's not just a territorial god. He can control the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Egyptians. Therefore, how how how come he can do this? Well, because he's a creator god, he created the whole world. All right. Okay. So if he creates the whole world and he's a universal deity, that means that he could bring the Babylonians in against us. And take us out into exile, destroy his own temple. That's completely fine. And he can be with us in Babylon.
32:06 Speaker 04 Sod the rest of the people who are in Judah. They don't matter. We are the chosen ones. And it's in that context. That this kind of refiguration of Yahweh worship begins to happen, that this is a deity intolerant of any other gods.
32:22 Speaker 03 So there's two different things that happen at this point, if I understand it right. One is that the old books get re-edited.
32:29 Speaker 04 There are no books at this point. This is when
32:31 Speaker 03 Old traditions.
32:32 Speaker 04 Old traditions begin to become compiled and some early forms, like the books of kings, for example, we have probably some early versions of those. By the time the sixth century, but not much else. But early poems, early traditions about prophets, early oracles, early narratives begin to be shaped and reformed. And then from this point on, particularly in the following century, when the Jerusalem temple is rebuilt, because by this point, the Persians are in charge. And Cyrus the Great allows the kind of the movement, the return of various displaced communities to their homelands. Some returning exiles from Jerusalem go back to the city, rebuild it, and they start to reshape and rewrite the past.
33:14 Speaker 04 And the result is quite a few of the books that we now have in the Hebrew Bible. And that writing process continues. New books are written, new scrolls are added all the way through into the Roman period. So it's a very, the Hebrew Bible is a, is a collection of different texts and traditions. It wasn't written beginning with Genesis and all the way through. It's a process of reinvention the whole time. And throughout this whole period, Yahweh, Yahweh's prioritization is becoming such that he becomes a god that doesn't look anything like the Yahweh of the first half of the Iron Age, the kind of
33:47 Speaker 03 Hasn't got a girlfriend, he hasn't got a court, he's on his own.
33:50 Speaker 04 He's pretty much on his own. He has some kind of desensitized, if you like, gods who have now become angels or kind of messengers.
33:57 Speaker 03 Angels, seraphim, cherubim, all these things that we see in, in the Old Testament, but he's lost his rivals. Baal is out of the picture. El is out of the picture.
34:05 Speaker 04 And he's lost his, he's lost his family. He's lost his household. He's, he's lost his kind of, his collaborators, his colleagues. It's terribly lonely, I think, for Yahweh. Which is why you then get stories saying he goes up to, finds Abraham in Iraq and says, hey, do you want to be my friend?
34:23 Speaker 03 So look, we've left Akhenaten way behind this, so let's, two questions. Again, big ones. The Israelites are in Babylon, which is in modern Iraq, which is in the wider Persianate world. The first thing I want to ask is, tell me about Zoroastrianism, because that is also a monotheism, often said to be the first monotheism by those that don't like this idea of Akhenaten. Is that an influence? You've got these, all these Israelite religious figures moved by force from the temple in Jerusalem to the heart of the Zoroastrian world. So what is Zoroastrianism? In what sense is it monotheistic? And is it an influence at this time?
35:02 Speaker 04 Zoroastrianism is the name that's given to a religious system. It's named after one of its key teachers. And around this time, around the 5th century BCE, although it has much earlier traditions. And at its heart is the deity Uhura Mazda. A deity that on the surface looks like really kind of liberal and tolerant. This is a god who's like, welcomes in the gods of all other peoples. And kind of all those deities and their profiles and their kind of portfolios are collapsed into that of Uhura Mazda. So he is known as the god of heaven. He is the god who created heaven and earth. It looks like very fluffy and very nice. It's actually massively imperial. It's a way of saying, it's, it's, it's, Uhura Mazda is a very colonial form of god.
35:46 Speaker 04 It's, it colonizes other people's deities, other people's traditions and takes them on. But it may well be that Uhura Mazda and Zoroastrianism of the 5th century, 4th centuries onwards is a big influence in the re reshaping, reworking of Yahweh worship, particularly because-
36:03 Speaker 03 Because these guys are in the same court. The, the, the Israelites in Babylon are often actually in the court. They're not in prison or kind of working on dams or building bridges.
36:13 Speaker 04 But also because by the time that these elites and their descendants return to Jerusalem and start writing the Hebrew Bible essentially, they're really chummy with the Persian Empire. The Persian Empire, these are the people in power. It's like, oh, what have the Romans ever done for us? Or what have the Persians ever done for us? Well, actually, they're quite good.
36:28 Speaker 03 And it's Cyrus, of course, that lets the Israelites go home. And he's, and he's even referred to possibly by, according to some scholars, as the Messiah.
36:35 Speaker 04 Yeah, he absolutely is referred to as the Messiah in the book of Isaiah. He is, Messiah simply means the anointed one, but he is the one in the book of Isaiah who was chosen by Yahweh to restore his people from exile and to bring them back to the promised land, to the homeland. The Hebrew Bible is a very pro Persia collection of texts in that sense, whereas it's a very anti-Babylonian and anti-Egyptian collection of texts.
37:00 Speaker 03 So Nebuchadnezzar is the baddie, Cyrus is the goodie.
37:04 Speaker 04 Exactly. So yeah, Syiracianism quite possibly has an, has a an impact on the kind of the, the monolatrous. So in other words, it's not so much a monotheistic view of Yahweh, because they're aware that other gods exist. It's an emphasis that only Yahweh should be worshipped.
37:20 Speaker 03 It's not saying there aren't other gods. It's saying that our one is the really powerful.
37:24 Speaker 04 Our one is the god to worship and you can only worship this god. But that's not to say that there's no Egyptian influence.
37:30 Speaker 03 Well, that's where we're coming back to now. So we're, we're in our last home strait now. So the, the Israelites have been in Babylon. Cyrus has let them go, let my people go, and they're, and they're, they're back home now in Jerusalem. Squabbling slightly with the, with the, with the Israelites who've been left behind, who've got their, still got all their old gods. And there's a bit of knocking down of other people's temples and all that sort of stuff going down.
37:51 Speaker 04 And new temples being built, interestingly.
37:52 Speaker 03 And new temples being built. But we're now back on the edge of Egypt. Geographically, being in Israel is closer to Egypt. Now, how far can we see any Egyptian influence? What you've said so far is Israelite thought in reaction to Israelite tragedy, possibly influenced by Persia. What is the influence of Egypt? Take us back to our, our main theme.
38:15 Speaker 04 The influence of Egypt is massive in the sense that it always had been. So even when Egypt is on the wane politically and economically in the ancient world, its cultural influence is still huge. So one of the things, one of the reflections of this we see, so thinking in particular, I know you talked in one of your other episodes about Psalm one hundred and four, which does have massive parallels. But is it direct borrowing or is it not? It's probably not. You know, literature circulated all over the ancient world. You know, that's why we've got lots of different versions of Noah's ark, even before Noah was invented, if you like. That story is, is much older than Noah himself. The hero was named other things in Mesopotamian texts.
38:55 Speaker 03 So he turns up in Gilgamesh and, and all these other earlier texts before he turns up in the, yeah.
39:00 Speaker 04 Psalm one hundred and four does. Have incredible parallels with certain parts of the great hymn to the artan that we find.
39:09 Speaker 03 Can I do a little bit of a reading?
39:11 Speaker 04 Yes, you can.
39:11 Speaker 03 So here is the great hymn to the artan. When you set in the western horizon, the land is in darkness, in the manner of death. Every lion comes forth from his den, all the serpents they sting. Darkness reigns, the world is in silence. He that made them is resting in his horizon. And here is Psalm one hundred and four. You made the moon to mark the season, the sun knows it's time for setting. You make darkness and it is night when all the animals of the forest come creeping out. The young lions roar for their prey, seeking their food from God. When the sun rises, they withdraw and lie down in their dens. So quite a lot of, especially the stuff about lions.
39:52 Speaker 04 Yeah, I mean lions are a key cultural motif all over the ancient world. But interestingly, that psalm also has references to Yahweh riding on the clouds, as I mentioned before. That psalm also has loads of allusions to Baal as a thundering god, as a warrior god. And so this combination of motifs, it kind of looks like, wow, have they taken poetry from ancient Ugrith up in Syria? And have they taken poetry from ancient Egypt? Is this direct influence or borrowing?
40:22 Speaker 03 Which of course makes sense in any culture, any period of time. You have influence of different things coming in, different people carrying their texts.
40:29 Speaker 04 Yeah, but I don't think that somebody stood in the court of the temple on which the great hymn to the artan was written. And copied it down and then took it off to ancient Judah and then wrote it down.
40:41 Speaker 03 Look lads, look what I've got here.
40:42 Speaker 04 Look what I found. I think we can find clues, the Armana letters, so a fourteenth century archive of texts.
40:49 Speaker 03 We know about that, we've done, we compared them to Ravieta biscuits. Or rather, our wonderful producer Nushka came up with this analogy, which has now spawned a million memes on the internet, anyway.
40:59 Speaker 04 I've not thought about those texts being compared to Ravieta, but yes, the Arman letters, so fourteenth century, from various. Kings of the city-states across the southern Levant are writing to our friend Akhenaten and talking about various things. And the language they use is doing exactly the same thing as we find in Psalm one hundred and four. It's combining this imagery about the sun and the moon and the, you know, the dangers of the darkness and lions, but also combining it with Baal imagery, referring to the fairy himself as Baal and talking about him as the thunderer and the warrior god. So in other words, it was already combining these particular turns of phrase was already in the kind of ether in the fourteenth century BCE, southern Levant.
41:43 Speaker 03 What you might call the common culture compost of the region. It's the, it's the area that's giving sustenance to the writers of the Bible when they're beginning to put the stuff together and edit what they've already got in your tradition.
41:56 Speaker 04 When they're compiling the Psalms, and the Psalms are basically ancient bits of poetry and ritual texts that have been mishmashed together and reworked and revamped. It's a natural kind of fit. Yeah. So it's not direct influence of Akhenaten on Yahwehistic monotheism as such, but it shows what's kind of culturally appropriate, culturally suitable.
42:16 Speaker 03 So what's left of Parel Sigmund Freud dying in Hampstead, fleeing the Nazis, sitting in London, the Second World War about to break out, all this sort of stuff. What's left of his thesis? A little bit, a direction of travel.
42:30 Speaker 04 A direction of travel. And where I think he was particularly helpful is in opening up the possibility that we ought to take really seriously the solar imagery that's, that's obviously that the Aton is about the solar globe or the solar disk, that manifestation of deity as the highest god. And I think that was really helpful and has helped scholars really, really pick up on the importance of that solar imagery. One of the most important archaeological discoveries of the last a hundred years when it comes to my sort of stuff was the discovery in a tomb in Ketaphinon, one of the valleys around Jerusalem. Um, a very high status tomb and it's dated to the seventh century BCE. So a hundred years after we find these inscriptions to Yahweh and Asherah.
43:13 Speaker 04 And there are two little silver scrolls rolled up and they were worn little tiny. I mean, they're like two centimetres tall, rolled up.
43:20 Speaker 03 You've got a picture of them in your wonderful book.
43:22 Speaker 04 I do. And they were worn by a very high status person in life and then of course in death as well because they've been buried with them. And when you unroll these scrolls and read this tiny writing on them in Hebrew, we get the earliest version of Numbers six. Um, a little tiny poetic couplet in Numbers.
43:40 Speaker 03 The Book of Numbers in.
43:41 Speaker 04 The Book of Numbers and I'll read it, actually, I'll read it to you because it's really lovely. And in the Book of Numbers, it's known as the pre-seal blessing and it says Yahweh bless you and keep you. Yahweh make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. Yahweh lift up his countenance upon you and give you shalom, give you well-being, give you peace. And this is solar imagery, lift up your face and shine upon you. Interestingly, this, you know, alongside the, these little amulets, also found little Bez figurines. Bez, the little dwarf god from Egypt, who was this kind of monstrous composite deity.
44:09 Speaker 03 Weird face, yeah.
44:10 Speaker 04 Weird face, flaccid penis, huge but flaccid penis. He was meant to scare off demons and, and all sorts of, of other sort of evils. He's alongside these little amulets that have almost exactly this little refrain, the Lord bless you and keep you and his, make his face shine upon you. Protect us from the evil eye. That's what these little scrolls were doing. So that's solar imagery, those little Bez figurines in the seventh century. Inscription in a little amulet in a tomb in Jerusalem. I think that is a kind of a, it's an afterlife of the power of the Arten. And the, the kind of the resonance of what Akhenaten, I think, was, was trying to harness.
44:50 Speaker 04 This idea about protection, that all life and in death, not to be scared of the darkness, that all life and, and sort of protection comes from. The Arten itself, I think that's where we get a resonance of that in Yahweh worship.
45:01 Speaker 03 This is just absolutely gripping stuff. Thank you so, so, so much. Your wonderful book, God and Anatomy, is my book of the year. Please, everybody that, that likes this podcast, go out and buy it now. You will have your mind blown. But more importantly, Francesca, will you come back? We need much more about this. This whole world is totally gripping and totally empire. And I know that our listeners would love a whole series on all this stuff. This whole rich world, which we should know about, but few of us do.
45:29 Speaker 04 Thank you for having me.
45:30 Speaker 03 Goodbye from me, William Durumpur.
45:32 Speaker 04 Goodbye from me, Francesca Stavrapoulous.
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