The connection of the individual to right behavior is seen over the greatest sweep of time in Egypt. There it can be argued that the idea of justice, macat, is a very old one which Old Kingdom rulers believed was to be imposed by them upon their subjects. J. Assmann says that macat or justice is best seen as a term for traditional religion, which was only effective when the state and king were strong (1990: 18-19). This justice was not automatic but was willed both by king and community, and individual officials could thwart it, though all texts argue that they really should not.
In the New Kingdom, by 1250 bce, however, a new idea of how the world worked appears to have become current. Though the term macat still was used, good things came to be seen not as the result of justice proceeding from a well-ordered state with a good ruler but rather as a special grace of the gods. The gods thus became more important and also more arbitrary; not everyone got the deserved rewards, it was now clear, even when the society as a whole was trying to pull together. The human being became less a cooperating part of a larger whole and had to pray individually for the extension of the grace of the gods. This may mean that persons thinking in those terms were more alone, less corporately oriented, less likely to obey old norms just because they were old. In the New Kingdom we know of remarkable scandals involving stealing from the dead and even assassinating the king, but that knowledge may be a function of the larger number of preserved texts we have than earlier (Assmann 1990: 252-60).
The policy of Akhenaton, the so-called heretic pharaoh in the middle of the New Kingdom, has been understood as showing that the king could exercise extensive individual freedom to change old norms, and he established the sun’s disk as a different supreme god for all of Egypt. He tried to explain everything by the principle that the sun’s light was the source of all power. While this may be physically true for people on earth, Akhenaton was a one-sided proto-fundamentalist and therefore was likely to fail (Hornung 1999: 125-6). His reforms did not last and in most particulars were decisively rejected in later generations, as rulers and the populace ostentatiously returned to the old ways. Akhenaton’s excesses of individualism were condemned, and his monuments defaced. And yet something had been changed, at least in art, where there persisted more interest in realism and the depiction of movement (Freed 1999).
The long tradition of wisdom literature in Egypt and in Israel argues for a continuity in the way the individual was supposed to act, however justice might have been conceived. The earliest example, of Ptah-hotep, from after the Old Kingdom, addressed an individual heir to high office and suggested that especially the sin of greed ought to be avoided. The presumed reason is that greed undermined group solidarity and commitment to justice by the society as a whole. If one succumbed to the materialism of the age, one might have fun in the short run, but in the long run, one’s own authority as an independent arbiter would be undermined. In later wisdom texts macat may not have played the same role, and one could always be disappointed by the actions of an arbitrary divinity. But one should behave in ways protective of the downtrodden and not behave in too haughty a manner; the norms appear not to have changed much, even in first millennium texts like the Instructions of Amenemope, part of which was translated into the Biblical Book of Proverbs. The assumption in Proverbs too was that rich young men had the power to make their own decisions, which really ought to conform to old and accepted norms. The language was mostly about individual persons, who were addressed by the second person masculine singular.
The Book of Job and the analogous Mesopotamian texts did not resort to the logic that the person was being punished because of something done wrong by his group or family. In those texts, all of which came from the mid-first millennium or later, it was never assumed that collective responsibility might explain current pain, but the moral responsibility of the individual was asserted. The gods might on occasion actually cause the individual to do evil, but the individual was still responsible for the evil and had to suffer for it (Moran 2002: 195-6).
World History
