If you’re a god, you have to have confidence to disallow images of yourself. Won’t people forget about you? If Jehovah started off a tribal god, the way theologians claim, he is nevertheless a tribal god that would not allow himself to be represented by images or idols. That circumstance alone suggests that he is not and never was. None of the other gods of the ancient world took that chance. All of them—there were literally thousands in the Mesopotamian world—were somehow represented by physical objects, maybe statues or figurines.
Take the gods of the Exodus drubbing, for example. Every one of them had tangible, physical representations—whether large temple cult gold-covered or stone statues, smaller household idols, amulets, reliefs on walls, or living sacred animals—something. The image of the god was essential. That was how you serviced it, through attendance to its image.
To take some of those Exodus gods and how they appeared, Khnum had the head of a ram, and Osisis, a mummiform man with green skin. These gods were in charge of the Nile. (first of the ten plagues) Heqet took the form of a frog-headed woman. (second plague) Geb, an earth god, was a man with a goose head lying beneath Nut, a sky goddess. (third plague) Khepri was scrub-headed. (fourth plague) Hathor and Apis both looked like cows. (fifth plague) Moo.
Then there was Sekhmet, a lion-headed woman (sixth plague) and Shu. (seventh plague) Osiris, again, trying unsuccessfully to shoo the locusts away, along with Renenutet, a woman with a cobra-head. (eighth plague) Ra and Horus failed to allay darkness, despite the falcon head of the first and scarab of the second (ninth plague) Isis, the protector of children, didn’t protect them too well, nor did Min, assigned to fertility. You would think that Pharaoh, as divine son of Ra, would have some pull, but he did not.
Nonetheless, the God without images clobbered them all. The biblical narrative’s emphasis is on YHWH executing judgment “on all the gods of Egypt” (Exodus 12:12) They were all in charge of stuff that the Hebrew God ran roughshod over. Tribal god, my foot. Tribal gods put their mugs on display, lest people forget they exist, because you sure can’t tell it by their actions. Every one of them was asleep at the switch, as Jehovah took their area of expertise and turned it inside out. None of them would be parting any Red Seas.
And there was Pharaoh, cheering them on as though the mayor of a city with a wretched football team. His players are horrrble. They get creamed every time they take the field. Yet, they ARE his team, so Pharaoh has no choice but to root for them. Why else would he dig his heels in the way he does as, one by one, the ball is stripped from each player. Putting more flesh in the game is the fact that Pharaoh WAS in the game, divine himself. As quarterback, he can hardly roll his eyes as his teammates get shellacked. He’s supposed to be displaying good team leadership. Nonetheless, YHWH stomps upon them all, including Pharaoh.
The ten plagues were 700 years before Isaiah. Why bring them up again? It’s because, to him and all Israel, they were always like yesterday. None of those shown-up gods got fired, and so the prophet, 700 years later, refers to them as examples of the “worthless gods of Egypt.” They haven’t improved: “A pronouncement against Egypt: Look! Jehovah is riding on a swift cloud and is coming into Egypt. The worthless gods of Egypt will tremble before him, And the heart of Egypt will melt within it.” (Isaiah 19:1) I mean, if it happened before, you don’t think it will again?
There was one pharaoh of Egypt, however—I mean, this is really strange—who apparently saw things Isaiah’s way. Not that he turned to worship the Hebrew God, but he did turn to booting out all but one of his own. They could take their horns and feathers and scarab faces and flakey heads and shove em. This was Akhenaten, from the fourteenth century BCE. He promoted one—only one—god, the Aten, represented as a solar disk. All other gods he snuffed out. He closed their temples and funneled all their resources to his one single god. He even founded a new national capital, where Aten could get away from their slimy influence. When this renegade pharaoh died, however, Egypt reverted back to many gods. Akhenaten’s legacy is that of an embarrassment.
Now, all this invites irresistible speculation to any student of the Bible. Maybe he picked it up from Joseph, the Hebrew who entered Egypt as a slave and rose to number two man, second only to the pharoah himself. No, scholars insist. There is a difference of 200-400 years. Joseph came first—and that’s assuming you can arm-twist these great ones to acknowledge that Joseph even existed. Bob Brier is willing to go there. He is the Egyptologist behind a 36-part (it might even be 48) Great Courses Lecture series on Egyptian history, but you get the sense—or maybe it was just me—that he is playing to the crowds. I mean, he didn’t come out with any ringing endorsements. He just acknowledged it was possible. Still, there is no way Joseph influenced Akhenaten, the experts say. In fact, one of them even thought it was the other way around. Sigmond Freud, who thought religion a “neurosis,” wrote that Ahmeneton laid down the template that later Hebrew society ran with. Fortunately, he is discredited on this, as well as virtually anything else he ever wrote, a circumstance that leads one to marvel that he is still regarded as one of history’s greats. First to explore a new genre, I guess it is, even though all of his explorations proved wrong.
Yeah, it is probably that way—no connection between Akheneten and Joseph. On the other hand, maybe, just maybe, the reality is more akin to that of the pyramids themselves. The purpose of the pyramids is settled science, mainstream Egyptologists insist, but has it been settled by decree? No matter how much they insist that pyramids were just gaudy tombstones for the pharaohs, alternative theories pop up regularly that they originated in the craziest of ways to serve the most fantastic of purposes.
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