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Chapter 1: What is the relationship between Pharaoh Akhenaten and the origins of monotheism?
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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. who is 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 Stavrakopoulos. 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 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 Tutankhamen, 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?
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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Chapter 2: Who was Freud and what was his theory about Jewish monotheism?
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.
It's all quite new stuff.
That is still really new. 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. We're now in the early 20th. Egypt mania is still a big thing. 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 Jewish faith and particularly its monotheism to the glories, if you like, of ancient Egypt and everything that was seen. It was seen as so sophisticated 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, this is a guy who goes to dinner parties. He's a very intellectual man. He socializes. 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 is my great, great, great uncle, Lennon Wolfe. Well, Virginia is my great, great aunt. I'm not related to Lennon 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 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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Chapter 3: What were Akhenaten's radical religious beliefs?
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.
Yeah, so in essence, Judaism and 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 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
Chapter 4: What are the origins of the cult of Yahweh?
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 prioritised as a political patron over several centuries by particular ruling groups within the communities that we know as ancient Israel.
Now, you've just said a lot of stuff that you packed into two sentences, enough to sort of blow the minds of every believing monotheist for 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 do time, then place, and then look at exactly what he is originally called.
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.
So 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 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. And that's got quite an exact date, doesn't it? What's the date? It's around, it's the midnight century BCE.
Midnight century. Just to go into, again, slightly more contentious territory, before that, before the link of Yahweh with Israel, which is that stellar from the mid-ninth century, we have other references to Yahweh in slightly different form, way to the south, and not associated with Israel.
Possible references to Yahweh.
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Chapter 5: How did the concept of Yahweh evolve over time?
You made the moon to mark the season. The sun knows it's 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.
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 Ugarit up in Syria?
And have they taken poetry from ancient Egypt? Is this direct influence or borrowing?
Which, of course, makes sense in any culture, any period of time. You have influence of different things coming in, different people carrying their texts.
Yeah, but I don't think that somebody stood in the court of the temple on which the great hymn to the Atum was written and copied it down and then took it off to ancient Judah and then wrote it down. Look, lads, look what I've got here. Yeah, look what I found. I think we can find clues, the Armana letters, so a 14th century archive of texts.
We know about that. We've compared them to Riveta biscuits, or rather our wonderful producer Anushka came up with this analogy, which has now spawned a million memes on the internet. But anyway.
I've not thought about those texts being compared to Ribita. But yes, the Amman 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 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 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 the stuff together and edit what they've already got in the oral tradition. Exactly.
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