Hymn to Aten
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Psalm 104
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| Sole God beside whom there is none! |
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YHWH my God you are very great.
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| How many are your deeds … You made the earth as you wished, you alone, All peoples, herds, and flocks.
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YHWH, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.
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| When you set in western lightland, Earth is in darkness as if in death |
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You make darkness, and it is night, when all the animals of the forest come creeping out.
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| Every lion comes from its den |
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The young lions roar for their prey .. when the sun rises, they withdraw, and lie down in their dens.
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| When you have dawned they live, When you set they die; |
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When you hide your face, they are dismayed; when you take away their breath, they die
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You set every man in his place, You supply their needs; Everyone has his food.
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These all look to you to give them their food in due season. |
| The entire land sets out to work |
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People go out to their work and to their labor until the evening
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| The fish in the river dart before you, Your rays are in the midst of the sea. |
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Yonder is the sea, great and wide, creeping things innumerable are there |
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Birds fly from their nests, Their wings greeting your ka |
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By the streams the birds of the air have their habitation; they sing among the branches |
| He makes waves on the mountain like the sea, To drench their fields and their towns. |
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You make springs gush forth in the valleys; they flow between the hills … The trees of YHWH are watered abundantly
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The Hymn to the Aten, supposedly composed by the king, Akhenaten, shows undoubted similarities to Psalm 104.
- Both the hymn and Akhenaten’s repeated statements to the effect that Aten was the one true god have been used by many scholars (including Freud) to argue that the religion of the Amarna period was a precursor to the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic monotheism
- Careful analysis of the relevant texts, however, indicates that, unlike the God of the OT, the Aten was an essentially isolated and amoral deity who could be approached only via the Egyptian king.
- The similarities b/w the Hymn to Aten and Psalm 104 are perhaps better explained in terms of the common literary tradition of ancient Egypt and Israel.
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I recommend the writings of Egyptologist David Rohl, and specifically with regards to this page, “From Eden to Exile”, chapter 15. Unfortunately it’s only available in hard copy. Rohl’s “New Chronology” of Egyptian history perfectly explains the linkage between David’s psalm and Akhenaten’s hymn by removing the centuries in time that separated the two men. Rohl’s NC is not yet widely accepted, but I believe it will be. It’s certainly worth consideration by a group such as this.
Great recommendation! Thanks! I’ll have to check it out. (Sorry for the late response.)
Ummm… Rohl’s new chronology absolutely won’t be accepted by academia, ever, because it’s demonstrably wrong. Even if you ignore radiocarbon dating, thermoluminescence dating, pottery shared analysis, the various kings lists etc. There are hundreds of written correspondences between Egyptian Pharaohs and various known rulers throughout antiquity which tie people together chronologically. The current dating models harmonize all of these synchronism and can only be shifted a few years here and there (not by a century or more like Rohl proposes). There’s a reason why no one in academia takes Rohl seriously. He’s a fringe egyptologist practicing pseudo-history. Save your money and buy a real text book.
It shows similarity because every lie contains some truth. The bible was written from the stealing of Ancient text! Akhnetan…book of the dead…142 laws of MAAT. THEY simply hate all the lies and always taking credit for “People of colors work”. People of colors are the originators…. The other are the emulative imitators…. Throughout entire HISTORY..SAD
Great recommendation regarding David Rohl’s work. He has it figured out. Akhenaten and David were contemporaries. The truth of his theories will surely be accepted in time.
Nope.
There is no evidence of any King David anywhere, so far as I know. Read The Bible Unearthed./
The new chronology puts Ahknaten before Moses. When Moses was still a prince in Egypt, did he meet up with one of the hidden priests of the now forbidden monotheistic god? Endless speculation
Mosses is a mythical character based on the story of king Sargon the Great, the founder of the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia. There are no archaeological evidences that lead us to believe that Joseph and the Hebrews settled in Egypt nor the exodus of Mosses and his people from there. The majority of the stories in the Bible are based on previous myths from Mesopotamia, Canaan, Persia and Egypt.
Taking Thutmoses III as the Exodus Pharaoh also causes Akhenaten and his likely composition of the Hymn to Aten to be contemporary to David and Psalm 104… Plus the added bonus of WHY Akhenaten became monotheist!
http://www.bible.ca/archeology/bible-archeology-exodus-date-1440bc.htm
As for David Rohl’s work… I have found the following videos to be excellent synopses of his work.
Presentation with many slides and photos, Rameses II being 2 Chronicles 12’s Shishak – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEm-ovpMM5c&t=3522s
Pharaohs & Kings documentary series:
1) Introduction to Rohl’s redating reasons – https://vimeo.com/105431010
2) Rameses II as Shishak, Solomonic archaeology – https://vimeo.com/105431013
3) Joseph, Saul and the Exodus in Egyptian archaeology – https://vimeo.com/105431012
Rohl extending his work to the earlier parts of Genesis – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjuYYFn1cXk
Podcast interview with Rohl – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2YacYRLGSI
And finally, I learnt about the (self proclaimed agnostic) Rohl’s work through this article – https://www.pfander.uk/debate-topics/historical/a-new-chronology/
[…] [2] https://projectaugustine.com/biblical-studies/ancient-near-east-studies/parallelism-between-the-hymn… […]
[…] Parallelism between “The Hymn to Aten” and Psalm 104 […]
Psalm 104 is one of the most beautiful psalms in the bible, and it is important to note that it references the gods of at least two neighbouring cultures: Aten, as we have just seen, and the storm god who vanquishes the sea, who is referenced in verses 1-18. However, having referenced these other gods, the writer of the psalm does something very special: he puts the Lord God, YHWH, above these gods, saying that it is the LORD who ‘makes darkness’, not Aten, and the LORD who has ‘made the moon’, not Aten, and that ‘the sun knows the time for its setting’ under the control of the God of Israel, ie. Aten is below YHWH. This Psalm consciously subverts the neighbouring pagan religions, and puts God above them.
Moreover, power-hungry monarchs do not have a good record of having original ideas: there is a good case that simply inventing a religion would have been much too risky for Akhenaten, the Pharaoh who created Aten – people genuinely believed in polytheism. There would have had have been a pre-existing religion that there were large numbers of followers of in order to make it worthwhile him switching to a ‘new’ religion. Maybe Judaism or a monotheistic Egyptian cult? We have examples of similar situations throughout history, from (arguably) Constantine hijacking the truth of Christianity for his own political ends, to Ivan the Terrible of Russia converting to Orthodox Christianity. It is probable that Judaism is older than Aten, so this may well be yet another example of power-hungry rulers seizing upon the ‘remarkable’ plausibility of Judeo-Christian religions for their own ends.
It shows how beautiful and wonderful the faith of Israel is that they can subvert this subversion of the truth.
Akhenaten applied simple logic in deriving his original monotheism. He comments in Year 2 as to the undoubtable reality that a man-made representation of a god held no permanence; he contrasts the inherent decay of idols with the unquestionable permanence of the sub; and notes emphatically the energy (warmth and light) through which the sole god transmits his love to earth through the Aten>
Akhenaten showed a willingness to be ‘his mortal sole’ on the correctness of his revisionist understanding. In his view, it seems certainly convinced that he was the first of humanity to solve the ‘great mystery,’ i.e. ‘What is God?’ He tells us this repeatedly – as he also reminds the Aten of his ‘grand solution.’ Through this learning and renaissance understanding, he chose his burial to the east of the Nile, toward the rebirth, rather than to the west, toward the underworld.
That Akhenaten chose the east, at least to my view, reflects his utter conviction in the monotheistic underpinning of his belief/ He remained tainted by millennia of Egyptian thought vis a vis magical influences – and yet, contrived this religeon.
The early Jews seem to have gone one step further – i.e., questioned, ‘Who created the Aten and it’s light?’
One must remember that even the Bible says that Moshe (Moses) was trained in all the ways of the Egyptians and not the other way around.
Before Moshe went to Mt. Sinai to receive the supposed 10 commandments he was taught the Egyptian negative confessions or 42 laws of Ma’at which more than parallel the 10 commandments.
Truth sometime is difficult to swallow, but is always better than lies which mislead people.
This is no different than the comic books of Marvel and DC whose writer’s use the ancient Egyptian world for ideas for some of their characters.
‘tut’moses,tut= twt = dvd = david, tutmoses 3 being the only king to ever rule from the nile to the euphrates. jacob = sumerian yakub, ‘ladder’, and = the ‘dream stelle’ of tutmoses 4, grandson of tutmoses 3 and grandfather of akhenaten . joseph = yuyu, grandfather of akhenaten and prime minister of egypt, moses being contemporary with akhenaten
Akhenaten = a-hah-ron
first, we know the Exodus would of happened in the reigns of Ahmose and Amenhotep. So Akhenaten would be of that same dynasty a few generations after the Exodus. We know the Kolbrin and some other Egyptian text bear witness to this same event of ten plagues (Manuscripts 6). We also know due to the evidence 9/ 10 plagues actually was residue in the Nile from Santorini in Greece (big explosion)- Despite some of your deniers of reality (ie certain blind scholars- not all)
(see Exodus Decoded, and Exodus Documentary).
So therefore the Pharaoh that ordered the death of the first born Jews/ Hykthos/ Sashu- was Ahmose I (died 1525 BC).
We also know that the pharaoh then that presided during the plagues is Amenhotep I (died 1504 BC)
we also know Amenhotep’s son -Amenemhat died early and most likely was a victim of the tenth plague leaving him no heir. (the rest of his children were female btw)
Now they may of kept the average Egyptian stupid for control. However lets think of these events together being retold generations.
by the time we get to Akhenaten/ Amenhotep IV, he would see this on historical record. Akhenaten (a just man) is trying to make since of what happened to his 7x father or six times grandfather 5x great grandfathers life looking into his own families history. looking to that one event. why do you think monotheism seems to come out of now were in Egypt. If you’d stop ignoring the bible or certain religious text of other religions and disregarding them. things would begin to make more since. – because with out Moses, why would Akhenaten just out of no were abandon the gods like Horus Ra Isis Sobek and Osiris for some god Aten which he seemingly made up.
So then why then is it a question that Psalm 104 and the hymn to the Aten is so similar and in reality being the same text?
word of advice look at things with out bias yet critically. let the evidence speak for itself and there wouldn’t be as much of a problem.
[…] Parallelism between “The Hymn to Aten” and Psalm 104 […]
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