…and his sound shall be heard when he goeth in unto the holy place before the Lord, and when he cometh out, that he not die.
This custom is very reminiscent of the Egyptian usage of ‘Sistrum’ (tinkling bells) that, according to the Greek historian Plutarch (46–120 CE), were used to call the attention of worshippers to the sacred function in their sanctuary, and to drive away the evil spirit. Other instruments particularly associated with Egyptian temple worship included clappers, cymbals and bells.
The similarities between instruments used in the Temple at Jerusalem and Egyptian instruments are evidenced by numerous archaeological and inscriptional discoveries. The earliest form of kinnor, for example, is illustrated on a vase dated to c.1025 BCE, found at Meggido in Israel, which bears a striking resemblance to a lyre illustrated on a tomb wall at Thebes, dating to c.1420 BCE.18
Themes in the Psalms
The proximity of ideas between the Wisdom books of Egypt*55 and the Bible – which are particularly notable in the Book of Proverbs – are also touched on in areas of the Psalms. The bulk of the Psalms, however, have much more similar ring to the prayers to Aten of the Eighteenth Dynasty, and other prayers to be found in older tomb texts. The themes of light and shadow, praise to God, love of righteousness, hate of wickedness and judgement run through the Psalms and can be readily identified with the themes contained in processional prayers performed in earlier Egyptian temple ceremonies.
Almost half of the Psalms are attributed to King David; significantly, the only one attributed to Moses – Psalm 90 – is, as would be expected, redolent with references to light and the effects of the sun.
For a thousand years in Thy sight
Are but as yesterday when it is past,
And as a watch in the night.
Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as sleep:
In the morning they are like grass which groweth up.
In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is
cut-down, and withereth.
For we are consumed by Thine anger,
And by Thy wrath are we troubled.
Thou hast set our iniquities before Thee,
Our secret sins in the light of Thy countenance.
Psalm 90:4–8
King David himself, according to tradition, went into battle with a shield inscribed with the words from Psalm 67: ‘May God be gracious to us, and bless us and make His face to shine upon us.’
This theme of light and the sun’s influence runs throughout the Bible: it brightly colours the writings of the Qumran-Essenes, occurs in numerous prayers in all three monotheistic religions and persists today in the Jewish celebration of ‘Blessing the Sun’. This takes place every twenty-eight years – the last one was in 1981 and the next is due in 2009.
The origins of monotheism in Egypt can be traced back to the sun worshipping priests of ‘On’ at Heliopolis, culminating in the full emancipation of the belief with Akhenaten. His praise in the Hymns to Aten, the sun as Creator, can readily be compared to the Psalms of praise to God of the Old Testament, in terms of the intensity of feeling and devotion. But it was not the old sun god of Heliopolis that Akhenaten was worshipping. He had made the religious, and scientific, breakthrough of realizing that the sun merely represented the power of an abstract, supreme God.
Cave 11 at Qumran yielded the so-called ‘Psalm Scroll’, which was translated by James A. Sanders, Professor of Old Testament at the Union Theological Seminary, New York, between 1965 and 1967.19
The ‘Psalm Scroll’ mixes details of Psalms, supposedly composed by King David, into a setting of the Qumran-Essenes’ unconventional 364-day solar calendar, making it difficult to reconcile the supposed dates of their original composition. Unless the solar calendar was in force at the time of King David, in 1000 BCE, for which there is no Biblical evidence, one is forced to look further back in time to when a solar calendar might have applied and is led inexorably to a period when the Hebrews were still in Egypt.
SOCIAL MORALITY
Examples of Egyptian social conventions that have penetrated the religious morality of Judaism, Christianity and Islam today are not easily detected. There are some, however, that can be readily identified.
Homosexuality
In orthodox Judaism homosexuality is looked on as a sin. This follows on the injunction in the Bible that labels the practice as ‘an abomination’ in the sight of God. Modern ‘Progressive’ movements of Judaism, such as Reform and Liberal in Britain, and Conservative in America, are more tolerant, but generally still will not sanction any formal acknowledgement of homosexuality within a synagogal environment.
In the surrounding, and often dominating cauldron of ancient cultures that helped shape Jewish social attitudes, there was little objection to homosexuality. It was fully accepted in the ancient Greek world of Pericles and Plato, and even encouraged between teenage boys and older men. The one adjacent culture that did condemn homosexuality, and had done so for a time well before the Exodus, was that of Egypt.20 It is not unreasonable to assume that this is a possible source from where the Judaic antipathy emerged.
THE EGYPTIAN ‘WISDOM’ WRITINGS AND ARCHETYPE STORIES
Many of the Hellenistic influences that colour the New Testament are well documented. Some of the Egyptian influences are also a consequence of the original translation of the Torah – as it was translated into Greek by a team of seventy scribes working at Alexandria, in Egypt in the third century BCE. This ‘Septuagint’ is the Old Testament ‘gospel’ to which all three of the great monotheistic religions refer.
Whilst stories from Egyptian literature are relatively easy to identify earlier on in the Old Testament, they become less obvious as one goes further into the Book. This has led some historians to doubt the significance of Egypt and to look for other sources. I believe the more obscure correspondences have always been there but were not recognized by earlier researchers, and that their lack of findings discouraged others from looking more intensely for a number of decades. One of these researchers was Siegfried Morenz, a Director of the Institute of Egyptology in Leipzig, who concluded:
Unfortunately the degree to which this influence [Egypt’s on the Old Testament] is perceptible stands in indirect proportion to the significance of the facts.21
He even postulates that this ‘influence’ might have been in reverse – the Old Testament on Egyptian religious literature! Even after quoting endless citations of Egyptian socio-religious correspondences, he still did not appear to believe his own evidence.
Others, like myself, do not agree with this viewpoint.
The influence of ‘Wisdom writings’ from Egypt can still be seen quite far on into the Old Testament; for example, in the so-called ‘Succession Narratives’ in the Books of Samuel and I and II Kings, where the author (probably a contemporary of King David), draws heavily on Egyptian style and insights. As R. N. Whybray puts it in his book on the Succession Narratives: ‘Whether the author of the Succession Narratives knew the Egyptian literature of the Twelfth Dynasty [or not]…that such a literature was among his models must be regarded as extremely probable.’22
It is not only the philosophical and religious patterns which have been imported into the Old Testament, but also local stories, expressions and phrases. A number of examples of this type of ‘story copying’ have already been cited – the Two Brothers’ story (see Chapter 10), and the tradition of seven lean years followed by seven years of plenty – seen in a modified form in the Biblical texts are but two of them.
EGYPTIAN INFLUENCES ON THE NEW TESTAMENT
There are also instances where Egyptian influences have ‘jumped’ the Old Testament to arrive in the New. We find this in the Gospel of St Luke 16:19–31. This is the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, where Lazarus, a wretched sick beggar, is left to rot outside the gate of a very wealthy man. Both die, but the beggar is carried up to Abraham’s bosom whilst the rich man goes to hell. The rich man sees Abraham in t
he distance and cries out for mercy and for Lazarus to bring him water. Abraham tells him that the gulf between them is too great. Again the rich man calls to Abraham, asking if he will at least send Lazarus to his house to warn his five brothers of the torment that lies ahead if they behave the way he himself had done.
Abraham’s reply speaks volumes:
And he said unto him, ‘If they hear not Moses and his prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead.’
Luke 16:31
When this parable is compared to the ancient ‘Setna Story’, which was written in demotic Egyptian, there are notable similarities. Here, the hero learns that in the realm of the dead a sinful rich man has lost all the ostentation and finery on his tomb to a poor but righteous man. The poor man is comforted beside Osiris, whilst the rich man is relegated to the terrors of hell.23
The idea behind Jesus’ parable of the rich man and Lazarus has been shown to have been transmitted through Jewish literature from Egyptian origins,24 as was the acclamation by early Christian communities of ‘God is One’.25
The non-canonical saying attributed to Jesus: ‘Nothing is buried which will not be raised up’,26 is found inscribed on a mummy bandage from an ‘Oxyrynchus’ fish, sacred to the goddesses Hathor, Isis and Mut, of which there is an example in the British Museum.
The sentiment of heaping ‘coals of fire’ on one’s enemy’s head, which occurs in the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans (Romans 12:20), is very reminiscent of the Egyptian reverential rites. When St Paul talks of the absolute power of the Creator to confer honour and dishonour, he is paraphrasing thoughts in the ‘Instruction of Amenemope’ dating from eighth century BCE Egypt:27
For man is clay, and the God is his builder.
He is tearing down and building up every day.
He makes a thousand poor men as he wishes,
He makes a thousand men as overseers.
Compare this to the New Testament quotation:
Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?
Romans 9:20
Picked up in Judaic philosophy, this idea sharply delineates the line between Creator and created.
The ‘second death’ judgement of the already dead, in the Revelation of St John the Divine (20:14), can be linked directly to the Egyptian concept of ‘second mortality’ in the Coffin Text – a ‘Spell of not dying a second time in the realm of the [already] dead’, and in the Papyrus of Ani, Chapter 44.28 As can the ‘crown of righteousness’ of II Timothy 4:8 and the First Epistle of Peter 5:4 be linked to the ‘crown of life’ of Egyptian theology.29
The concept of the trinity, already discussed in Chapter 5, which entered into Greek tradition a century or so before Christ, was well known in Egypt many years earlier. In Egyptian theology three gods were often combined as one and addressed in the singular. As Siegfried Morenz puts it:
In this way the spiritual force of Egyptian religion shows a direct link with Christian theology…The multifarious links between Egypt and Judaeo-Christian scriptures and trinitarian theology can already be traced with some degree of plausibility.30
STYLISTIC ASPECTS
In addition to these examples of Egyptian influence on Judaism, it is possible to note many conceptual and stylistic effects on the Old and New Testaments. Gathering these examples together, they can be listed as follows:
The Egyptian Court ‘chronicles’ style of literature influenced the chronicled accounts of David and Solomon in the Bible.
Isaiah’s list of appellations for the Prince of Peace were derived from the five titulary ways of addressing the Egyptian King.31
Wisdom literature, which Siegfried Morenz calls ‘a gift of Egypt’,32 can be seen in many parts of the Bible, particularly in the Book of Proverbs.
The ‘Instructions of Amenemope’ and the Biblical Book of Proverbs bear remarkable similarities.
The Book of Psalms echoes many Egyptian temple prayers. A specific example being Psalm 104.
Musical instruments used in both the First and Second Temples to accompany the Psalms were similar, if not the same, as those used in Egyptian temple ceremonies.
Egyptian lists of knowledge formed the basis of the proverbs of King Solomon.33
The Koheleth teachings of Solomon in Ecclesiastes, exemplified by the ‘Horace–Williams’-type injunction, ‘carpe diem’ – ‘seize the day’,*56 which appeared in the ‘Songs of the Harpers’, had long influenced Egyptian thought.34
Another example is the idea current in the ‘Songs of the Harpers’ from the Middle Kingdom period of Egypt (and as testified to by the Greek historian Herodotus) that it was the fashion to pass around a casket at a banquet, containing the remains of a dead person, with the reminder: ‘gaze here, and drink and be merry; for when you die, such will you be’35
The concept of ‘do not change any of the words, and add nothing thereto, and put not one thing in the place of another’, which comes at the end of the ‘Instructions of Ptah-hotep’, has been taken up in Deuteronomy, and in the Revelation of St John the Divine at the very end of the New Testament.36
The appellations for God. For example, in the earliest known translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, we find in Deuteronomy 9:26: ‘Lord, Lord, king of the gods…’. This is an unknown phrasing for Israelite literature, but was a normal invocation for the High God in ancient Egypt.
As said above, the trinity of Egyptian gods and their precedence for Christian theology has already been commented on.
Well over forty Egyptian words can be identified as being adopted into the original translation texts of the Bible.37
One could go on and on, and I am sure readers will discover many for themselves, by accident or design.
THE BODY OF EVIDENCE
Look at the evidence presented here. Weigh it all up and see what conclusion you come to. I believe the evidence I have presented is overwhelming.
The close resemblance of Psalm 104 and a hymn dating back to the time of Akhenaten (and very possibly composed by him) has been remarked on before, but the connection has never been explained. How could it be that a psalm, supposedly written down after 800 BCE, is so similar to a work written in hieroglyphs at least 500 years earlier, which was found in a place unfrequented by Egyptians and inaccessible to Hebrew scribes hundreds of kilometres distant – unless awareness of Akhenaten’s Hymn came out of Egypt with the Exodus? The breadth of influence of ‘wisdom literature’, too, and the proverbs that can be traced back to ancient Egyptian lore, is so extensive that one has to pose the question: ‘Was not the famous wisdom of Solomon really the concentrated wisdom of Egypt?’
There will inevitably be those who cannot, or dare not, take on board the conclusions that emerge because they present too many challenges to traditional beliefs. But look for one moment at a couple of ‘what ifs’.‘What if I am correct?’ ‘What if the origins of monotheism do go back to the time of Akhenaten?’ Does this knowledge change fundamental religious beliefs? Not really. It does, however, change the perspective of how some customs and practices have become erroneously entrenched in modern attitudes. The misconceived role of women and the need for animal sacrifices are obvious examples. It does also give us the opportunity to look at texts and prayers in an Egyptian context and, in many instances, to discover emotive and moving passages that are still relevant today.
Let me make an analogy. The contemporary phrase ‘Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?’ is quoted in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations as coming from Jeremiah 13:23. A similar phrase, deriving from an apparently much earlier date than Jeremiah (who fled to Egypt c.600 BCE), appears in an Egyptian papyrus in the British Museum known as ‘The Instructions of Ankhsheshonq’. Here we read: ‘There is no tooth that rots and stays in place. There is no Nubian [the ancient term for Ethiopian] who leaves his skin.’38 All right, so the origins of the phrase may be much earlier than most people h
ave acknowledged, and it may come from Egypt not Israel, but the essence of the saying and its validity remain unaltered.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
FINAL CLUES FROM THE COPPER SCROLL – ELEPHANTINE ISLAND AND THE FALASHAS OF ETHIOPIA
The locations indicated by my new interpretation of the Copper Scroll, for the hidden treasures described in it, have led to descriptions of a number of novel places (see Chapter 15). Sometimes these descriptions are in the same areas indicated by previous translations, but often they are of places that have not so far even been considered, let alone excavated. Some four-fifths of the locations I identify are different from those given in conventional interpretations.
I do not believe the Copper Scroll refers to locations other than in Israel or northern Egypt, but by tracking the ‘footprints’ left by the Atenist priests who did not travel out of Egypt with Moses, it is quite possible that other treasures from the Great Temple of Akhetaten may still remain to be discovered.
One of these likely locations is at the ancient temple at On, modern-day Heliopolis. Two others are Elephantine Island in southern Egypt and near Lake Tana, in northern Ethiopia.
The link that has been made between Akhenaten and Judaism, reinforced by the decoding of the Copper Scroll, is instrumental in explaining two long-standing mysteries – that of why Jewish-style settlements existed at Elephantine Island and at Lake Tana. Both communities at these sites practised forms of Judaism quite different from that of the mainstream. The Jewish community at Elephantine, for example, did not know about the Exodus – not surprising, if my theories are correct, since they had not been part of it. Nor did they follow Jewish law but based their ideas on Egyptian experience. Similarly the Ethiopian Jews had no knowledge of the Oral Laws of Judaism and followed different religious practices.
The Mystery of the Copper Scroll of Qumran Page 30