368. Ancient Egypt: The Origin of Abrahamic Religions? (Ep 7)

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1:53On 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, Francesco Stavracapullo.

2:40Francesco, 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 Aknartan'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 Francesca 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 when we last looked in the last episode with the end of Teleleman 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.

3:40So tell us about Freud first of all, Jessica. How did he come to this and does anyone take this book at all seriously? Oh gosh, that's a huge question. So Freud, as you said, 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. 1938 to be Jewish is not even in your London is quite uncomfortable. Exactly. And so this is a time of heightened anxieties, certainly heightened anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism was a part of British culture anyway. But obviously what's going on with the rise of Nazism in Germany and obviously the Second World War is just around the corner, it's a very difficult time.

4:22But 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. So it's all quite new stuff. 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, 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 the ways in which to be Jewish is not to be shameful.

5:10and I think to link the Jewish faith and 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 1920s, 1930s European culture. It was seen as exciting, as refined. We still see it as exciting. Oh, exactly. And so I think that was probably very appealing. And also, you know, this is a guy who goes to dinner parties. He's a very intellectual man. He socialises. This is kind of dinner party talk as well. We should say at this point that it is significant that he has a Jewish publisher. He's my great, great, great uncle, Leonard Wolfe.

5:50By Wolf, Virginia is my great, great aunt. I'm not related to Leonard except by marriage. But yes, and that was the publisher. The Hogarth Press was the publisher that published this book. Absolutely. So I think there's all sorts of, which is very exciting, by the way, about Virginia Wolfe 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 understanding 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 re-emerges much later for some scholars, but for Freud, re-emerges at the time of Moses, who he dates to around the same time as Akhenaten.

6:50And it's Moses that passes this monotheism on to the Israelites. Now obviously, whole libraries have been written on this subject since then. It's a long time ago in theology 1938 and a lot of what Freud said has been pooh-poohed by academics since but what did he get right what elements to that book stand up if any 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 when was he on the right trail should we say I think he's on the right trail to say that there is a certain kind of that one god religion, that it does pop up, it re-emerges because it's a very powerful notion, it's a very powerful idea.

7:34And 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 South West Asia, North Africa, the Mediterranean, polytheism is the norm, the worship of many gods, and the gods are all networked together. Right, through to obviously the Hindu gods of India, which ones I'm talking Absolutely. Some could argue due to certain forms of Christianity today as well. That's another story for another time. Another one for another day. We're going to get you back, Francesca. Don't worry, you're not getting away with just one episode here.

8:02It's a very controversial idea, one God theology 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 re-emerging 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... Biological link between the two ideas. 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.

8:44I 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. Now, Francesca, in your wonderful book, God and Anatomy, which I recommend everybody to go out and buy now because it 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 Yahweh has a much more tangled, complicated, and geographically expansive origin than conventional Jewish or Christian or indeed Muslim theology would lead us to believe.

9:39Yeah, so in essence, Judaism, Christianity and 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.

10:18So Canaan is the label in biblical texts that's given to the region we know as the Southern Levant. 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.

11:06Now, 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 theists for free religions. So let's go very, very slowly through this, what you just said. 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 what he is originally yeah so in terms of the earliest uncontested reference to Yahweh we're basically talking early Iron Age so we're talking around the ninth to the eighth centuries BCE ninth century BC.

11:47So that's in ancient Mesopotamian terms, quite late in the day. We've seen the rise and fall of Ur, we've seen the Syrians, Babylonians, all sorts of stuff going on. Yeah, absolutely. So it is relatively late. We're talking kind of like 10 to midnight in 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 9th century BC, and that comes in the Mesha Stele, which is a stone inscription, a monument that was set up by a Moabite king called Mesha. Moab is where we now identify Jordan. That's our earliest unattested reference to Yahweh.

12:27And that's got quite an exact date, hasn't it? What's the date? It's around the mid-9th century BCE. Mid-9th century. Just to go into, again, slightly more contentious territory, before that, before the link of Yahweh with Israel, which is that stella from the mid-9th century, We have other references to Yahweh in slightly different form, way to the south, and not associated with Israel. Possible references to Yahweh. Possible, yeah, that is contentious. 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 at the bottom of the Southern Levant and into some of what was ancient Egypt, some Arabian territories that seems to refer to a yahoo or yahoo.

13:21Now 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 14th century, 13th 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 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. But less contentious is the fact that early references to Yahweh seem to come or point to the South, even within the Hebrew Bible.

14:01Yeah. So 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, the 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 seem to give a sort of an origin story.

14:38That sort of Petra region or further deeper south? Further south than that. But you know that very red soil and sand and rock of Petra? It's that same. 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. And that he and possibly the tribes who worship him are migrating northwards into what is now Israel over time. Is that is that former territory? No, by your expression not. Yeah.

15:17What we know, so 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… So they're quite down on the whole notion that there was an exodus. This is not considered to be historical anymore by academics.

15:57No, this is no longest. Most academics would say perhaps something happened. And there's definitely to-ing and fro-ing between what's now Israel and what's now Egypt. 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's 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 a lot of the late Bronze City states. We've done, with Eric Klein, a series on the Bronze Age collapse. So our listeners know all that stuff and who garret and all those those sea peoples turning up.

16:35It's a really sort of 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 migrants and 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 carries on right into the Roman era and beyond. Now, in that detonator sentence that you gave us 10 minutes ago, which we're unpicking the resonance of now, there was another little reference to the fact that Yahweh has a wife, a sharer.

17:15And weirdly, this is the least contemptuous thing you said. This seems to be completely established within the early days. something that no monotheist wants to hear, but it's there, you'd say, pretty firmly in the archaeology and the inscriptional evidence. From the 8th 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 8th century BCE. It's almost like a motorway kind of service station, the equivalent in the ancient world. And we have inscriptions there too.

17:51And 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-state of Ugrit. She's one of the big gods of the Levant at this period. She's a major... Goddesses, yeah. 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 ancient polytheistic system. The Queen of Heaven, to use a phrase that is used of her. Yeah. Exactly. That was something I had in my Catholic upbringing, but didn't refer to Shara. No, but you can see how much recycling goes on in these religions.

18:24Exactly. They were very green. Ashura, known as Aetherat in other parts of the Levant, she's 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. And again, this is something that blew my mind when I read your book. I was going, we should all know that God is not initially Yahweh. And the Israelites' first God is El. The God El. His name is preserved in Israel. So this is, I mean, his name simply means deity, but it also serves as a proper name.

19:05And Asherah is the consort of the high God El. And they have sons and daughters, like in many other pantheons we find 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 8th century BCE, it's no surprise in some ways to find that the chief deity of ancient Israelite and Judahite 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 this household of other deities and this portfolio of cosmic responsibilities.

19:46And 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. Yeah, so the Hebrew Bible is very explicit about this. It makes hundreds of references to the divine council of Yahweh or the divine council of El. The two names are very interchangeable in lots of Hebrew Bible texts because they've become identified at this point.

20:23One thing, is there a phonetic link between El and Allah? Is that the same sort of Semitic root? Yeah, the same root, absolutely. So Allah, El, Israel all have etymological links to each other. Yeah, as Semitic languages. And that is enough to detonate other minds on its own, even before we go any further with God's wife and all the rest of it. And again, this is another crucial point that in terms of academics is not controversial, that this early Israelite world of deities of which El and Yahweh are part is not exclusive to the Israelites. The other Canaanite tribes, although they didn't seem to have called themselves Canaanites, that's what Egyptian sources certainly call them, that they all more or less share the same pantheon?

21:10Not so much sharing the same pantheon in common, but their local pantheons all look really similar. They often have the same names and they have deities that serve pretty much the same roles. So it's not direct translation, if you like, 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. Yes, you're tolerant of each other's deities. And one of these gods is one that appears a lot in the Old Testament, who is Baal. Who's he? Ah, Baal. I love Baal. He's one of my favourites. So Baal, the name basically means master or lord.

21:44And so we find various forms of Baal all over ancient Southwest Asia. 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... So it's all related to Zeus. He's got thunderbolts and that sort of stuff. Very similar. Zeus is basically a form of Baal. Absolutely. And later Greek writers 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, big heavy clouds. He's known as the rider on the clouds. He's the charioteer of the clouds, which is such a lovely image.

22:22Sounds very, very Jim Morrison. Riders on the storm. Yeah. 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, patient deity, defender of his chosen cities and peoples portfolio. 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.

23:03This is not a sort of chaste and goody-two-shoes goddess. 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. But there is sacred prostitution associated with her sometimes? No. No. You don't believe that. Some scholars have said that. 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 and religion.

23:45This is early sexism trying to pollute this cult. And xenophobia too, quite often. 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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26:42welcome back francesca so we opened with this very unfamiliar world of many gods and goddesses in worship uh 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 a synagogue or a mosque today? What is the editing process that means that Yahweh loses his Asherah? 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.