Word: atones
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...jealous YHWH inspired by the religious policies of the Pharaoh Akhenaton, who reigned in Egypt from 1353 to 1336 B.C.? Closing the temples of the powerful priesthood of Amon, this royal Egyptian heretic established the state cult of a godhead embodied in the sun disk, or Aton. In Moses and Monotheism, Sigmund Freud speculated that Moses was actually an Egyptian who passed single-deity worship derived from Akhenaton to the Jews. (Was there not, he asked, an echo of Aton in Adonai?) Other scholars, like German academic Jan Assmann, author of Moses the Egyptian, believe Moses and Hebrew monotheism...
Other assessments of Akhenaton's religion render the Aton-Adonai connection less convincing. In his new book, The Lost Tomb, Kent Weeks, the Egyptologist who in 1995 discovered the tomb of Rameses II's sons, describes Akhenaton's monotheism as full of grotesque images and semidivine, yet vaguely sexual earthbound relationships. It appears an odd ancestor to the austere religion of YHWH...