Word: atonement
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Ikhnaton set aside the prevailing pantheism, in which the god Amon and Amon's priests ruled over a motley array of other deities. It is also true that the Pharaoh moved his capital downriver from Thebes to a new city built in honor of the new sun god Aton. But his actions had little to do with religion. They were the work of an inbred neurotic, a king of erratic, often clouded mind, whose strange, troubled life was set on its eccentric course by an obsessive fear of the dark...
...never entered a temple of Amon again. Turning against the priests, he withdrew their profitable monopoly in the Nubian gold fields and won powerful support by giving it to the army. With the help of a minor priest, he invented a sun-drenched theology based on the insignificant deity Aton, built a new city, Aketaten, and chiseled the name of Amon from every temple in the land...
Since courtiers must have a court, the nobility followed Ikhnaton to the half-finished city and mumbled nimbly when priests chanted new hymns. But however fervent the chanting and however often the courtiers assured Pharaoh that he would not die (death was expunged in the new theology), Aton worship was never more than a plaything, tolerated because it kept Ikhnaton from more destructive games...
From Egypt to Sinai. Fast agrees with Freud and others that Moses' monotheism is traceable to the great Egyptian monarch, AkhenAton (also known as Ikhnaton), who forswore all gods save the Sun-God Aton. But where Freud guessed that Moses was an Egyptian by birth. Novelist Fast makes him an Egyptian merely by adoption and education. As Fast tells it, fear of the old gods and their priests caused AkhenAton's successors to denounce Aton worship, but not before the idea of monotheism had taken root in some Egyptian minds. In Fast's account, every priest...
...Moses grows up amid the hundred-odd bastard princelings who throng the palace, the Aton underground works on him steadily, guiding and teaching him. Ramses, kept informed by his spies, visits a lot more than ten plagues on Moses, until he finally escapes from Egypt, crosses the Red Sea and sets out "into the Wilderness of Sinai." Author Fast handles his subject matter skillfully, is at his best in descriptions of palace life, battle scenes, landscape studies. His Moses is reasonably convincing as a potential lawgiver who comes to believe that the god Aton is really justice. But Howard Fast...