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If you want access to bonus episodes Reading lists for every series of Empire a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening and a weekly newsletter. Sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com.
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so good, so good, so good.
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C
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A
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, Islamic 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 Stavro Capoulo. Francesco, welcome to the to the podcast.
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B
Thank you.
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A
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 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 Telemanna 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?
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B
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?
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A
Yeah, 1938. To be Jewish is not even in your. London is quite uncomfortable.
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B
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 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.
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A
So it's all quite new stuff that
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B
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 and I think to link the Jewish faith and its, 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.
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A
We still see it as exciting.
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B
Oh, Exactly. And so I think. I think that was probably very appealing. And also, you know, this is a guy who goes to dinner parties. You know, he's a very intellectual man. He socializes. This is kind of dinner party talk as well.
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A
We should say at this point that it is significant, that it is. He has a Jewish publisher and he is my great great great uncle. Leonard Woolf, or Bible. Virginia is my great great aunt. I'm not related to Leonard except by marriage, but yes. And that was the publisher of the Hogarth Press. Was the publisher that published this book.
- [05:59]
B
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. 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 forces. And it's a force that for him is repressed and denied and eradicated, but then suddenly reemerges much later for some scholars, but for Freud, 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.
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A
Now, obviously whole libraries have been written on the 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 of that book stand up, if any?
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B
I find it very hard to, as an academic to say this is what he got right or this is what stands up, I think making the link.
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A
When was he on the right trail, shall we say?
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B
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. 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 networks, right through to
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A
obviously the Hindu gods of India. At one time, absolutely.
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B
Some could argue due to certain forms of Christianity today as well. That's another story for another time.
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A
Another one for another day. We've got to get you back, Francesca. No worry. Not getting away with just one episode here.
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B
It'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 reemerging 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 direction, DNA link, if you like, between Akhenaten, biological link
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A
between the two ideas.
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B
Yeah. 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, etc. 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.
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A
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. 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.
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B
Yeah. 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. So Canaan is the label in biblical text 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. 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.
- [11:06]
A
Now, you've just said a lot of stuff that's.
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D
Yeah.
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That you packed into two sentences, enough to sort of blow the minds of every believing monotheist. Three 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 he is originally.
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B
Yeah. So in terms of the earliest uncontested reference to Yahweh, we're basically talking early Iron Age. So we're talking around the 9th to the 8th centuries BCE, 9th century BCE.
- [11:47]
A
So that's in kind of ancient Mesopotamian terms, quite late in the day. We've seen the rising fall of Ur, we've seen the Syrians, Babylonians, all sorts of stuff going on.
- [11:57]
B
Yeah, absolutely. So this is. It is. It is relatively late. We're talking kind of like, you know, 10 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 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.
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A
And that's not quite an exact date. Hasn't it?
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B
What's the date? It's around. It's the mid 9th century BCE, mid 9th century.
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A
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.
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Possible references.
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A
Yeah, I said it's contentious.
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B
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 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 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.
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A
But less contentious is the fact that early references to Yahweh seem to come or point to the south, even within the Hebrew Bible.
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B
Yeah, 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 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
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A
origin story, Petra region or further deeper,
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B
further, further south than that. But the red, 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
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A
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. Well, your expression not
- [15:18]
B
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
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A
they're quite down on the whole notion that there was an exodus. This is not considered to be historical anymore by academics.
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No, most academics would say perhaps something
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A
happened and there's definitely to ing and froing between what's now Israel and what's now Egypt.
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B
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 cities.
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A
We've done with Eric Klein a series on the Bronze Age collapse. So our listeners know all that stuff. Lou Garrett and all those, those sea peoples turning up.
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B
It's a really sort of. It's a time of huge mobility and this little corridor of land, as today, is still a hugely important piece of land in terms of trade, economics and Microsoft, people going down, you know, from 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.
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A
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. And weirdly, this is the least contentious thing you said. This seems to be completely established that 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 inscription of
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B
them 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. 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 Sirius.
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A
She's one of the big gods of the Levant at this Period.
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B
She's a major. Yeah, she is a big deal. She is a huge deal. She's almost like the first lady, if you like, of kind of the ancient
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A
polytheism, the queen of heaven, to use a phrase that is used of her.
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B
Yeah, exactly.
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A
That was something I had in my Catholic upbringing. But didn't refer to Asherah.
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B
No, but you can see how much recycling goes on in.
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A
Exactly. They were very green.
- [18:27]
B
Asherah, known as Atheerat in 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.
- [18:46]
A
And again, this was something that blew my mind when I read your book. We should all know that God is not initially Yahweh and the Israelites first God is El, the God Ael, and
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B
his name is preserved in Israel. 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 Ael. 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 Ashra 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.
- [19:46]
A
And just very briefly, to go into these other deities, there's 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 neighbors are sharing.
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B
Yeah. So the Hebrew Bible is very explicit about this. It makes several, I mean, 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 become identified at this point.
- [20:23]
A
One thing. Is there a phonetic link between El and Allah? Is that the same sort of Semitic language, same root?
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B
Absolutely.
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A
So Allah, El, Israel, all have etymological links to each other.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And that is enough Semitic language detonate other minds on its own, even before we go any further with God's wife and any of 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. That the other Canaanite tribes, although they don'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, not so much sharing
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B
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.
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A
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?
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B
Ah, baal. I love baal. He's one of my favorites. So baal, the name basically means master or lord. And 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 related to Zeus.
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A
He's got thunderbolts and that sort of stuff.
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B
Yeah, very similar. Zeus is basically a form of baal. Absolutely. 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, 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.
- [22:22]
A
It sounds very, very Jim Morrison, Riders of the Storm. Yeah.
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B
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, where the kind of warrior God, storm God, ferocious fighter, patron deity, defender of his chosen cities and peoples portfolio.
- [22:50]
A
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.
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B
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 super sized scale. Quite often Ashra, 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.
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A
But there is sacred prostitution associated with her sometimes. No, you don't believe that. Some scholars have said that.
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B
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.
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A
This is early sexism trying to pollute
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B
this cult and xenophobia too, quite, quite often.
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A
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.
- [24:09]
E
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C
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- [26:42]
A
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. Now how do we move from that world to the world that we get read out to us in church or synagogue or a mosque today? What is the editing process? That means that Yahweh loses his Asherah.
- [27:08]
B
So we need to fast forward from the early Iron Age to the middle of the Iron Age. So 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. Sumeria, the capital of the Northern kingdom, has been decimated in the 8th century by the Assyrian Empire.
- [27:26]
A
Sumeria is kind of modern Nablus, isn't it?
- [27:29]
B
Yeah. So that was the capital. The Assyrians are the big power. The Neo Assyrian Empire is huge. And it is, by the end of the 8th century, its world dominates the known world. Basically, they have completely decimated the Northern kingdom of Israel, leaving only Jerusalem on its own, if you like. So that's kind of the impression that we get. Obviously it's not wiped off the map. There are still people there and farming, there's, 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 8th century, beginning of the 7th century is the time when a shift towards a programmatic form of monotheism occurs. 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.
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A
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 worship this.
- [28:33]
B
Yeah, 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 iconoclasm, it 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 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. 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 worshippers come together and
- [29:17]
A
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.
- [29:38]
B
Yeah, so there you've said a lot in two sentences that needs unpacking.
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A
My revenge.
- [29:45]
B
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 prioritization 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 7th century BCE. What we are all agreed on is that by the time we get to the 6th century BCE, 587 BCE in particular, the Assyrians have been defeated by the Babylonians, who now have the upper imperial hand. And as a part of their expansion 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 that artisans, people that are useful to the empire whilst they are in exile in Babylon, these elite group decide 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 is, who's set to dwell literally in the temple, in Jerusalem. How the hell has this happened? 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
- [31:30]
A
gods against us because we have sinned. And one of the things we've done that is, is sinning is by worshiping a sharer.
- [31:38]
B
We worshiped other gods and we didn't realize that Yahweh got really upset about that. I will, you know, 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 Syrians, the Egyptians. Therefore, how come he can do this? Well, because he's a creator God. He created the whole world. All right, okay, so if he created 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. 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.
- [32:35]
A
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.
- [32:43]
B
There are no books at this point. This is when old traditions, 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 6th 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. 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 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's prioritisation 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 girlfriend.
- [34:02]
A
He hasn't got a court. He's on his own.
- [34:04]
B
He's pretty much on his own. He has some kind of desensitized, if you like, gods who have now become
- [34:10]
A
angels or angels, seraphim, cherubim, all these things we see in the Old Testament. But he's lost his writings. BAAL is out of the picture.
- [34:19]
B
And he's lost his family, he's lost his household, he's lost his. 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?
- [34:37]
A
So look, we've left Akhenaten way behind this. And 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?
- [35:15]
B
Zoroastrianism is the name that's given to a religious system. It's named after one of its key teachers at around this time, around the 5th century BCE, although it has much earlier traditions. And at its heart is the deity Ahura 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 Ahura 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 huura. Madhur is a very colonial form of God. It colonizes other people's deities, other people's traditions and takes them on. But it may well be that Ahura Mazda and Zoroastrianism of the 5th century, 4th centuries onwards is a big influence in the reshaping reworking of Yahweh worship. Particularly because.
- [36:17]
A
Because these guys are in the same court.
- [36:19]
B
Yeah.
- [36:19]
A
And basically the Israelites in Babylon are often actually in the court. They're not in prison or kind of working on dams or building bridges.
- [36:26]
B
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 done for us? Well, actually they're quite good.
- [36:41]
A
And it's Cyrus, of course, that lets the Israelites go home. Exactly. And he's even referred to possibly by, according to some scholars, as the Messiah.
- [36:49]
B
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 is chosen by Yahweh to restore his people from exile and to bring them back to the promised land, to the homeland. So 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.
- [37:14]
A
So Nebuchadnezzar is the baddie, Cyrus is the goody.
- [37:17]
B
Exactly. So yeah, Zoroastrianism quite possibly has an impact on the kind of the monolatrius. 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.
- [37:34]
A
And so it's not saying there aren't other gods. It's saying that R1 is the really
- [37:37]
B
powerful God, is the God to worship and you can only worship this God. But that's not to say that there's no Egyptian influence.
- [37:44]
A
Well, that's where we're coming back tonight. So we're in our last home straight now. So the Israelites have been in Babylon, Cyrus has let them go, let my people go. And they're back home now in Jerusalem squabbling slightly 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.
- [38:04]
B
And new temples being built, interestingly, and
- [38:06]
A
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.
- [38:29]
B
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, particularly, I know you talked in one of your other episodes about Psalm 104, 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 much older than Noah himself. The hero is named other things in Mesopotamian texts.
- [39:08]
A
So he turns up in Gilgamesh and all these other earlier texts before he turns up in the.
- [39:13]
B
Yeah, Psalm 104 does have incredible parallels with certain parts of the great Hymn to the Aten that we find.
- [39:23]
A
Can I do a little bit of a reading?
- [39:25]
B
Yes, you can.
- [39:25]
A
So here is the Great Hymn to the Aten. 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 104. You made the moon to mark the season. The sun knows its 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.
- [40:05]
B
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 Ugrit up in Syria and have they taken poetry from ancient Egypt? Is this direct influence or borrowing?
- [40:36]
A
Which of course makes sense in any culture, any period of time, you have
- [40:39]
B
influence of different things coming in, different
- [40:41]
A
people carrying their texts.
- [40:43]
B
Yeah, but I don't think that somebody stood in the court of the temple on which the great Hymn to the Aten was written and copied it down and then took it off to ancient Judah and then wrote it down.
- [40:54]
A
Look, lads, look what I've got here.
- [40:56]
B
Look what I found. I think we can find clues. The Amarna letters. So a 14th century archive of texts.
- [41:03]
A
We know about them, we've done our. We compare them to Ravita biscuits, or rather our wonderful producer Nuscha came up with this analogy, which is now spawned a million memes on the Internet.
- [41:12]
B
But anyway, I've not thought about those texts being compared to Ryvita. But yes, the oman letters, so, 14th 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 104. 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 pharaoh 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 14th century BCE Southern Levant, what
- [41:57]
A
you might call the common culture compost of the region. It's the area that's giving sustenance to the writers of the Bible, when they're beginning to put this stuff together and edit what they've already got in the
- [42:09]
B
oral tradition, 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 by everyone. That's all kind of fit. Yeah. So it's not direct influence of Akhenaten on Yarwistic monotheism as such, but it shows what's kind of culturally appropriate, culturally suitable.
- [42:30]
A
So what's left of poor old 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, a directional travel.
- [42:45]
B
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 obviously that Aten 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 100 years, when it comes to my sort of stuff, was the discovery in a tomb in Ketef Hinnom, one of the valleys around Jerusalem, a very high status tomb, and it's dated to the 7th century BCE. So 100 years after we find these inscriptions to Yahweh and Asherah. And they're two little silver scrolls rolled up. And they were worn little, tiny. I mean, they're like 2 cm tall rolled up.
- [43:34]
A
You've got a picture of them in your wonderful book.
- [43:36]
B
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 6, a little tiny poetic couplet
- [43:53]
A
in numbers, the Book of Numbers. In the Book of Numbers.
- [43:55]
B
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 priestly 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 these little amulets, we also found little Bez figurines. Bez, the little dwarf God from Egypt, who was this kind of monstrous with
- [44:22]
A
a kind of weird face.
- [44:23]
B
Yeah, weird face, Flaccid penis. Huge but flaccid penis. He was meant to scare off demons and all sorts 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 make his face shine upon you. Protect us from the evil eye. That's what these little scrolls were doing. So that solar imagery, those little Bez figurines in the 7th 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 Aten and the kind of the resonance of what Akhenaten, I think, was trying to harness this idea about protection that all life and in death not to be scared of the darkness that all life and sort of protection comes from the art in itself. I think that's where we get a resonance of that in Yara.
- [45:15]
A
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 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 open 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.
- [45:43]
B
Thank you for having me.
- [45:44]
A
Goodbye from me.
- [45:44]
B
William Duranpool Goodbye from me Francesca Stavracopoulo.
- [45:54]
D
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