Francesca Stavrakopoulou

It's combining this imagery about the sun and the moon and 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.

So when they're compiling the Psalms, and the Psalms are basically ancient bits of poetry and ritual texts that have been mishmashed together and reworked and revamped.

It's a natural kind of fit.

Yeah.

So it's not direct influence of Akhenaten on Yahwistic monotheism as such,

But it shows what's kind of culturally appropriate, culturally suitable.

A direction of travel.

And where I think he was particularly helpful is in opening up the possibility that we ought to take really seriously the solar imagery.

That's 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 understand

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 Ketev 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 two centimetres tall rolled up.

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.

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 in Numbers 6.

The Book of Numbers.