The Pharaoh of the Exodus

The Pharaoh of the Exodus

Is it possible that the exodus from Akhet-Aten and the Biblical Exodus are one and the same story? Sigmund Freud suspected that the origin of the Biblical Hebrews was related to the story of Akhet-Aten. More recent research indicates that Freud was correct in his speculation and that much that is written in the books of Genesis and Exodus is linked to the City of Gold and Light.

Archeologists and historians have spent two centuries looking for evidence of the Exodus described in the Bible. They have always come up empty-handed. Champollion, the great French Egyptologist who first deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics, insisted that it was necessary to understand the Egyptian experience in order to bring the Exodus into the field of history. He was on the right track. He wrote:

The tribes [Hebrews] that had, by a ruse, escaped from a people much more advanced than they were themselves, could not, just by entering the desert, simultaneously rid themselves of concepts of order and civil habits. Nor could they forget the practice of the arts acquired during their prolonged stay on the banks of the Nile, within an agricultural nation. The Hebrew leader renewed the most ancient form of Egyptian government, the theocracy, which lent itself in a most efficient way to the accomplishment of his views. He left the Valley of Egypt, not to lead the tribes back to their primitive state, to the nomad and pastoral life of their fathers, but with the preconceived design of placing them in a limited territory, acquired by conquest, and to establish them, like the Egyptians, as a sedentary nation composed of cities, cultivating the land, and devoting themselves to all the industrial arts. To the extent that local circumstances allowed, Moses applied the civil institutions of the Egyptians to the organization of Hebrew society. He proclaimed religious dogmas essentially distinct from those of Egypt. But, in the exterior forms of worship, and particularly in the material of the religious ceremonies, he had to imitate, and actually did imitate Egyptian practices. Study of Egyptian monuments, whether interior or exterior, in Moses' time, will give more complete understanding of the original texts of the Bible.1

Sigmund Freud, in Moses and Monotheism, declared: "We must choose the interregnum sometime after 1350 as the date of the Exodus. The later periods, up to the definitive implantation in the land of Canaan, are particularly impenetrable to investigation."

The era Freud mentions corresponds to the one immediately following the death of Akhenaten. The era is that of Pharaoh Smenkhkare, who became pharaoh after Akhenaten. Smenkhkare's brother, Tutankhamun, was "exiled" to Thebes for his coronation before the abandonment of the city of Akhet-Aten. It is possible to deduce that the Exodus took place at the beginning of the reign of King Tutankhamun, coinciding with the desertion of the monotheistic capital. The Egyptologist Cyril Aldred also places the abandonment of Akhet-Aten during the first year of Tutankhamun's reign.2

When he was eight years old, Tutankhamun succeeded Smenkhkare. He does not fit the description of the pharaoh of the Exodus. The eight-year-old would hardly be the pharaoh who was so evil, obstinate, and pitiless towards the Hebrews. Besides, the pharaoh of the Bible had a firstborn son, according to the story. Tutankhamun was eighteen years old when he died, without an heir.

If the Exodus took place at the beginning of King Tutankhamun's reign, we are led to reconsider the troublesome period Freud discussed, beginning with the ephemeral reign of Smenkhkare. In the Biblical tale (Exodus 1:22) Pharaoh orders the death of all the first-born Hebrew sons. Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, in her book Ramesses II, The True Story, says there was never any time in Egyptian history when a massacre of infants would have been possible. No document or fresco attests to the historical reality of any such event, nor to the plagues described in the Book of Exodus.

There is, however, a clue in the Book of Exodus that relates to a situation in Akhet-Aten. It is the mention of the increase in the birthrate that apparently so bothered the pharaoh of the Bible. In the ruins of Akhet-Aten, the most recent research reveals the presence of delivery rooms, which indicates a cult of midwives.

The great increase in the birthrate in Akhet-Aten was the result of the increase in the number of women. Beautiful foreign women kept arriving in the city, princesses who were offered to Pharaoh.

At the beginning of Exodus, the midwives are described as courageous, disobeying Pharaoh's orders by allowing male new-borns to live.

So the Elohim3 were kind to the midwives. And because the midwives feared the Elohim they gave them families. Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, "Every boy that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile, but you shall let every girl live." (Hebrew Bible, Exodus 1:20-22)

Pharaoh was well aware of Egyptian wisdom teachings and was conscious of the sacred character not only of human life but of animal life as well. He would not have been able to commit such an abomination. Pharaoh could not have been Smenkhkare. One of the very rare representations of him shows him to be an affable man in the company of his wife, Merit-Aten, one of Akhenaten's surviving daughters. Smenkhkare was a monotheist who practiced the religion of his father Akhenaten. He was an adept of the philosophy of ancient Egypt. That philosophy taught respect for human life, love of beauty and of nature, as revealed in the Hymns to Aten and Amun. In those hymns it is stated that the king must consider foreigners as human beings created by God.

As Akhenaten's co-regent after Nefertiti's death, Smenkhkare was indoctrinated with these teachings from his earliest years. He never wished to return to the polytheistic religion of Amun deliberately, nor did he modify his name. In Egyptian tradition, just as in the Bible, to change one's name implied a change of religion or of destiny. His persistent monotheism is further demonstrated by the double cartouche of Smenkhkare, bearing the name of the "One God," Aten. Faithful to the religion of his father, Smenkhkare had to endure enormous pressure from the High Priest Ay to return to the old religion. His refusal to abandon his One God, Aten, probably cost him his life.

Ay wanted to deport all of the priests of Akhet-Aten from Egypt. Smenkhkare was clearly opposed to that exodus. As a monotheistic pharaoh, he does not fit the description of the pharaoh of the Book of Exodus. Yet, Smenkhkare was the firstborn son of Akhenaten. The Bible recalls that the Pharaoh was a firstborn son who asked Moses and Aaron for divine benediction. While Smenkhkare was chronologically the pharaoh at the time of the Exodus, his actual behavior does not fit the description of that pharaoh's actions. So, who held the power to cause the actual exodus?

The ephemeral reign of Smenkhkare and the youth of Tutankhamun make it obvious that power was held entirely by the one man influential enough to make all the religious, political, and military decisions. That man was the Divine Father Ay, High Priest of Akhet-Aten, and regent vizier.

The Divine Father Ay worshipped by the priests and population of Akhet-Aten after having been honored by Akhenaten with a gift of gold necklaces.

Ay's decisions would transform the reign of Tutankhamun into the time of the return of Amunian orthodoxy and the exile of the monotheistic priests. It was the Divine Father Ay who succeeded Tutankhamun as pharaoh, and pursued the policy of restoring the old religion.

During Akhenaten's reign, Ay had an important governmental role. Akhenaten was thoroughly preoccupied by the cult of Aten that he had instigated. He was adored by his courtesans and was continually receiving foreign emissaries offering slaves, women, and material gifts. He was busy distributing gifts and largess to the people from his view window. With all these concerns, he did not have time to bother himself with the affairs of Egypt. The affairs of state he left entirely in the hands of his grand vizier, the Divine Father Ay. It was Ay who traversed all the country's provinces to attend to the task of governing. Ay was diplomatic and intelligent, and had a perfect knowledge of Egypt's political situation. As Akhenaten's reign was approaching its end, Ay found the country in a state of decay, and its people in distress.

Akhet-Aten - the holy city among all cities, the terrestrial paradise - had as its corollary the great misery of the rest of Egypt. At Akhenaten's death the unhappy condition of the land outside the holy city impelled Ay to make his irrevocable decision. The monotheistic religion, the worship of Aten alone, had proved catastrophic for the country. Ay concluded that the hardships endured by the country were caused by the abandonment of the old gods. The monotheistic priests seemed to be to blame for the wrath of the gods. Like the pharaoh of the Bible, Ay had a large number of people that he had to dispose of in some manner.

The Bible places the number of Moses' people in the thousands: "The Children of Israel journeyed from Ramesses to Succoth, about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides women and children. A great multitude also went up with them, as well as very many cattle, both flocks and herds" (Hebrew Bible, Exodus 12:3738).

Most of the numbers mentioned in Exodus are contested. Chaim Potock estimates the numbers to be clearly exaggerated, since it brings the total number of people to around two million.4 Such a displacement of population was impossible for the period, since the number represents nearly the whole population of Egypt. Besides, six hundred thousand men on foot, that is to say, armed, could have held back the Egyptian force without any difficulty, even if that force was quite powerful. Finally, these two million people could never have been able to live in one single region of Egypt - the region of Goshen mentioned in the Bible - without leaving any trace. The exaggerated numbers are attributed to scribes who, according to Redford5 and Friedman,6 wrote the Exodus story about seven hundred years after the event.

According to all the evidence, if the Hebrew people had represented such power in Egypt, they would have left an imprint on Egyptian writing, art, or literature. We do know that Amenhotep III organized a census of the population because of the growth of foreign residents in Egypt.7 The Book of Numbers tells of a census of the tribes of people who left Egypt. The verse mentions a "great multitude"8 which accompanied the people of the Exodus. This multitude appears to be a mixture of converts that followed the monotheists. The Bible does not tell us anything about those hordes that accompanied the Hebrews, but a mixed multitude of people had dwelt in Akhet-Aten. John Pendlebury, an Egyptologist at the beginning of last century, wrote that the city of Akhet-Aten was quite cosmopolitan. "It was," he said, "during its short existence, the greatest imperial city in the world. All matters of the kingdom were dealt with there. In its streets all nations of the known world rubbed elbows, the Minoans, the Mycenaeans, the Cypriots, the Babylonians, the Jews,9 and many other races."10

When Ay became pharaoh, the Egyptians became, again, worshipers of Amun and the other gods. They were relentless in effacing all traces of Pharaoh Akhenaten.11 However, this has not impeded archeologists from reconstructing a large part of that king's history. Sculptures, names, psalms, prayers, family scenes, vestiges and objects of all kinds, including bricks, were retrieved from inside the foundation of the pylons of the Temple of Karnak.

With all this excavation and research, much has been learned about Akhenaten. But in all that archeological treasure trove there does not exist the least trace of Hebrews in Egypt.

One theory proposed by historians is that the Hebrews were the Apiru. The Apiru were a semi-nomadic people who possessed none of the culture, traditions, or language of the Egyptians, and were dispersed all over Egypt and Canaan. The temptation to confuse the Hebrews with the Apiru is quite strong. But the more archeologists have learned about the Apiru, the more they admit the absence of any connection with the Hebrews of the Bible.

The population of Akhet-Aten consisted essentially of priests, their families and slaves, and a multitude of workers and peasants. On leaving the city, the population appeared like nomads, but their vocation was never nomadic, since they profoundly aspired to establish themselves in the Promised Land. To agree to leave a city as beautiful as Akhet-Aten, there would have to have been a promise of "a marvelous land flowing with milk and honey."

Egypt had suffered for the glory of Akhet-Aten. The bulk of the wealth produced by the country made its way to the capital. The city had not only become the sacred center of Egypt, but its economic one as well. Christian Jacq notes, "Everything that the land of Egypt produced had to come to the temple [of Akhet-Aten] to be consecrated and then redistributed to the population."12 Just as at the time of Solomon, this redistribution couldn't be made until after an appropriate percentage was skimmed off for the new capital.

Akhenaten had already levied a sacred tax on the country and had set up numerous forced labor projects for the construction of the Theban temples as well as other temples to Aten in the rest of the country. Then he decided that a large part of the revenues of the old capital of Thebes would be directed to Akhet-Aten. He doubtless did the same to the other cities of Egypt,13 strangling, bit-by-bit, the whole country to the profit of the City of Light. All Egypt worked for the grandeur of its god-king Akhenaten.

The writers of the Bible describe such a situation. "Yahwe said to Moses, 'I have heard the wailing of my people who are in Egypt. I have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings'" (Hebrew Bible, Exodus 6:5). The Biblical scribes have to be describing the afflictions of the Egyptian people, since the Hebrews have no historical reality in ancient Egypt.

Brickmaking plays an important part in the Biblical tale of the Exodus. Archeology and history teach us that brickmaking was an essential part of ancient Egyptian life. The Hebrew Bible tells us the same in Exodus 5:12: "So the people were scattered throughout all Egypt, to gather stubble for straw [to make adobe bricks]."

Akhenaten had the idea, still in use today, of replacing the enormous, heavy cut stones with bricks of smaller size, which could be carried by a single man. These bricks, called "talatates," allowed the buildings and temples of Aten in Karnak to be built rapidly. To build Akhet-Aten, however, it was necessary to redouble the speed of construction, so Pharaoh also used bricks made of straw and clay, building the capital in record time. Memories of the forced labor, as well as of the bricks of straw and clay, remained engraved in the memory of the Biblical scribes: "The same day, Pharaoh ordered the taskmasters of the people and their foremen, 'You shall no longer supply the people with straw to make bricks, as you did before'" (Hebrew Bible, Exodus 5:6-7).

These verses must indeed deal with the suffering of the Egyptian people who constructed Akhet-Aten, the magnificent city.

All over Egypt they made bricks (Karnak talatates).

Akhenaten had an interesting strategy to entice the clergy of the polytheistic Amun religion to the holy city of gold and light. According to the Amarna Letters,14 he had the most beautiful women of Egypt brought there, as well as numerous Canaanite, Phoenician, and Mitanite princesses, along with their retinues and their dowries, offered by subject kings. The priests of Amun were invited to change their residence and their religion and move into the grandiose city teeming with beautiful women, leaving behind the cities and temples of their ancestors.

Akhenaten used both sex and material enticements to attract priests and worshipers to his new monotheistic religion. Princesses, foreign women, and slaves were waiting for the new adherents. Akhenaten also distributed jewels and material riches. This extract from one of the El Amarna letters is an example of the approach Pharaoh took toward his vassals:

To Milkilul, a man of Gazru: Thus speaks the king [Akhenaten]: I send you this tablet saying, "With this he sends Hanya, a guard of the archery cavalry, along with all he needs for the purpose of acquiring very beautiful serving-wenches: money, gold, linen clothing, carnelian, all kinds of stones [precious], an ebony chair; all of them equally beautiful things: Total value: 160 dibans.15 A total of 40 serving wenches, 40 sides of silver being the price of one serving wench." (EA 369)

Princesses and women of lesser rank, chosen for their beauty, were installed at Akhet-Aten to marry royal princes or priests. The train of servants that accompanied them augmented the female population of the city even more. The new capital of the Egyptian Empire became, for several years, a veritable paradise, a Garden of Eden, peopled by the most beautiful women in the world.

In this way, Pharaoh attracted and converted the priests of Amun into priests of Aten, enticing them into a true "golden trap" - Akhet-Aten.

During this time, the rest of Egypt was ignored and abandoned. The populace was condemned to forced labor and great suffering. The centralization desired by Pharaoh was also the cause of that subversion which spread through the cities that formerly were sacred, like Thebes, Heliopolis, Memphis, and Hermopolis.

This double Egypt, one composed of the beautiful city with the beautiful people, one composed of the struggling masses, was seen by the pharaohs following Akhenaten and Smenkhkare as unacceptable. Their successors returned to the old polytheistic religion of Amun, abandoning the religion of Aten. If the inhabitants of Akhet-Aten had freely consented to return to the old religion, they never would have had to abandon the capital. All that would have been needed was to transform the temples of Aten into temples of Amun, remove Aten's names, and build new temples (as Akhenaten had done for his reformation).

Egyptian life would then have returned to its normal course. But, the new religion had taken firm root in the hearts of its converts who lived the good life in the golden city.

Some partially damaged stone inscriptions provide important clarifications about the new religion. According to Pierre Grandet's commentary:

The king affirmed that the gods, so far as they were known, were only statues created by human hands, in a form which immemorial tradition had seemed to lend a sacred character. But the gold and gems with which they were ornamented did not manage to hide that they were merely useless objects.16

During his reign, Akhenaten, as teacher to his disciples, preached the new doctrine, which carried a revolutionary notion concerning the concept of the divine. This teaching, glorifying One God, later became the basis of the ideology of an abstract god, invisible, transcendent, omnipresent, and omniscient. This One God, Aten, incited in his followers the will to eliminate the ancient cult of images and idols. The concepts of the ancient polytheistic religion were anathema to the people of Akhet-Aten. The uniqueness and exclusivity of Aten were paramount - concepts repeated over and over in the psalms and hymns of Akhenaten.

The Little Hymn to Aten, which is found in five tombs of Akhet-Aten, is distinguished by the notion of a venerable, unique god, who

... was fashioned by himself alone. Who created the earth and all that is found thereon: all people, herds, and wild beasts, all trees which thrust themselves from the ground. They live when Thou appearest for them. Thou art the father and the mother of all that Thou hast created. Thou art the Living Aten, whose symbol endureth. Thou hast created the far heavens, there to shine forth, to observe what Thou hast created. Thou art the One in whom is found a million lives.17

The verses of this hymn contain the foundation of the Biblical religion: the worship of the One God, the creator of the universe. The Great Hymn to Aten repeats the same ideas:

One God without equal, Thou didst create the universe according to the consciousness of Thy heart, so that Thou art One alone. Thou extractest eternally thousands of forms originating from Thyself. Thou dwellest in Thy Unity. No being engendered by Thee exists for any reason other than to contemplate Thyself Alone.

The religion of Aten revealed a truly new form of divinity. The ancient wisdom of Egypt had already advocated the virtues of the One God before the writers of the Bible had transcribed it. The Stela of Lyon is an Egyptian monotheistic poem:

Thou art One.

Thou art the being whose manifestation existed before manifestation.

Thou art the creator of the heavens and the earth,

Who offerest ceaselessly the plenitude of all being.18

The scribes who wrote the Books of Genesis and Exodus tell of how the One God was revealed to the patriarchs. The story is followed by describing the gift of the Tables or Tablets of the Law on Mount Sinai. The Biblical story was recounted out of memories engraved in the consciousness of the Jewish people. The oral tradition, handed down from generation to generation after leaving Egypt, had to be integrated into a politico-religious context in order to conform to the beliefs of kings and emperors who dominated the Middle East in their own lifetime.

The hypothesis that the Bible was written in part in Babylonia has been put forward by numerous historians.19 At the time of the Jewish exile to Babylon, in the time of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, the Judahite survivors found themselves in a new land, and they submitted to their new masters. The story of Esther indicates that this adaptation succeeded and was brought to completion when some of the exiles returned home under the reign of Cyrus the Great. At that time, it was the priest and scribe Esdras who, having returned to his homeland, reassembled with the blessing20 of King Artaxerxes I (486 BC) the Five Books of the Bible.21 The lands of Canaan, Judah, and Israel were no longer vassals of Egypt. Babylonia had conquered them, and Pharaoh was a distant memory. By then Egypt had become the hereditary enemy of the Hebrews. A hundred years before, at the beginning of the Babylonian Exile in Nebuchadnezzar's time, the prophet Ezekiel had composed the Oracles of Condemnation and of Chastisement against the "seven nations: Ammon, Moab, Edom, the Philistines, Sidon, and particularly against Tyre and Egypt." He held them responsible for the fall and deportation of the people from Judah and the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple.

It was during the Babylonian Exile, a period of total submission to the Persian kings (Cyrus was called the Messiah) that the Bible was modified, and that the story of the Exodus was recast to the detriment of the Kingdom of Egypt, which, by then, had also submitted to the Persians.

The scribes in Babylon could remake the Exodus story only by conserving the authentic framework of a minute part of the truth. It is impossible to determine how long this practice lasted. Rashi22 confirms in his Commentary on Exodus 12:41, "This is one of the passages of the Torah that was modified for King Ptolemy."

How many passages of the Bible were modified to suit the kings and emperors who ruled over the Hebrews after the exodus from Egypt, masking the historical reality?

Notes

1.  Grammaire egyptienne, principes generaux de l'ecriture sacree egyptienne appliquie a representation de la langue parlee. Champollion le Jeune. Reissued as Grammaire egyptienne de Champollion by Christian Jacq, Solin, 1997.

2.  Cyril Aldred, Akhenaten, King of Egypt. Le Seuil, 1997, p. 192.

3.  The Hebrew word Elohim is usually translated as God or Lord. However, it is definitely a plural, and refers to Gods, Sons of God, or the Family of God. The translators have left the original words, "the Elohim" wherever they appear in quoted Bible verses.

4.  Chaim Potock, Une histoire des Juifs. Ramsay, 1996.

5.  D. Redford, An Egyptological Perspective on the Exodus Narrative, Egypt, Israel Jnl. 1987. pp. 137-69.

6.  Richard Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? Exerge, 1997.

7.  Philipp Vandenberg, Nefertiti. Pierre Belfond, 1987, pp. 117-18.

8.  Exodus 12:38.

9.  Pendlebury assumes the Biblical evidence of a Jewish people.

10.  Christian Jacq, Nefertiti et Akhenaton. Perrin, 1996.

11.  Cyril Aldred, Akhenaten.

12.  Christian Jacq, Nefertiti et Akhenaton, p. 146.

13.  Claude Vanderseyen, Egypt and the Valley of the Nile, Vol. 2. Nouvelle Clio, 1995, p. 435.

14.  The El Amarna Letters are clay tables written in cuneiform, discovered in 1887 in the ruins of

The administrative buildings of the capital Akhet-Aten, dating from 1350 BC.

15.  The El Amarna Letters, 10 sides = 1 diban = 91 grams of gold.

16.  Pierre Grandet, Hymnes de la religion d'Aton. Le Seuil, 1995, p. 17.

17.  Christian Jacq, Nefertiti et Akhenaton.

18.  Christian Jacq, La sagesse vivante de l'Egypte ancienne. Robert Laffont, 1998, p. 35.

19.  Richard Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? See also D. Redford, An Egyptological Perspective on the Exodus Narrative, pp. 137—69.

20.  Dictionnaire Encyclopidique du judaisme. Le Cerf, 1993, p. 326.

21.  Richard Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? D. Redford, An Egyptological Perspective on the Exodus Narrative, pp. 137—69.

22.  Rashi (Rabbi Shelomoh ben Yishaq), AD 1040-1105. French-Jewish scholar and commentator on the oral tradition concerning the Pentateuch. His teaching is one of the most important in the Jewish tradition. It is based on written and oral traditions and he used the Aramaic Bible as his reference source.