True enough, from the Biblical perspective - I dare say Adam and Noah were monotheists as well. I’m fine with calling him a Renaissance man…in Nimrod’s Babylon, deeply into idolatrous polytheism, to re-discover monotheism would have been quite a feat as well.
Spiritus Mundi:
Sure, but naturally you’ll get better-verified records of what a King did than of what a nomadic shepherd did. Not only does Akhenaten come later than Abraham by several centuries, the years of his reign definitely fall (according to traditional Jewish chronology) within the time-frame of the Israelites’ slavery in Egypt, and possibly even overlap Moses’s youth in Pharaoh’s palace! It’s certainly not inconceivable that Akhenaten’s brand of monotheism owes a lot to what he picked up from Hebrews in Egypt.
Kimstu:
That’s certainly possible, but not in the Babylon of that era, which was a) the background in which Abraham was raised, making this very much an original idea, even if it existed to some degree in other, far-away cultures, and b) the cradle of what has spread to become the essence of Western civilization, making his innovation the one that our culture (justifiably or otherwise) considers important.
Freyr:
Akhenaten, mentioned above, is the Pharaoh you’re thinking of. See above.
Sxyzzx:
Yes, but he knew of monotheism because he had direct contact with G-d. Abraham was the first to have independently deduced it.
Nice pickup on Akhnaten, folks. Chaim, some scholars, working just from the historical data, have suggested that Moses picked up the monotheism concept from Atenism, rather than the other way around. (Under this theory, Abraham and descendents would be monolatrists or henotheists – It hadn’t gone out of style yet! – with Moses targeting the concept of “there** is** only one god” for the first time.)
Atenism recognized a single deity, conceptually symbolized by the disk of the sun (“aten” in Egyptian) – though there is some evidence that this was merely a symbol and not an identity. As such, it incorporated Ra the sun god and Horus-of-the-Horizon, a manifestation of that deity as god of sunrise and sunset – the precise distinctions of Egyptian deities get a bit fuzzy. Akhnaten as Pharaoh was divine, Son of the Sun, but God J.G. to Aten Himself. The devotion to Aten started under Akhnaten’s father Amenhotep III, but not in an exclusivist role, became exclusivist under Akhnaten and continued under his successor Smenkhkare (John Corrado may have some comments on this), and was phased out under the boy king who took the throne as Tutankhaten and died as Tutankhamen, in a sort of Counter-Reformation move by the politically powerful priesthood of Amen-Ra in Thebes. Nefertiti (of the polychrome bust) was the wife of Akhnaten. There are a lot of nebulous areas around this whole historical thing, not least because as much as possible of the “Amarna Revolution” was eradicated by the restored polytheism. But it is clear that Aten was a man in love with the truth, and insistent that royal portraiture, for example, be realistic rather than stylized. He was focused on a single deity – his own role as divine was apparently simply an accommodation to Egyptian religious paradigms – and had some interesting physical problems and a psychology which Freud analyzed several millennia after the fact. Allen Drury did a fictional biography of him that apparently comes quite close to the truth.
Gaudere – at least “henotheism” has a flavor of scholarliness to it – even if it does sound like religious answers to “Why did the chicken cross the road?” Monolatry sounds like the technical term for some sexual practice that SqrlCub has yet to define for us.
Well, that’s all nice and good, but I can’t help wondering why they devised such a theory, except perhaps for the sake of being Biblically contrarian. I mean, granted, there’s no external (to the Bible) verification of Abraham’s existence or beliefs…for that matter, the same is true of Moses. So what do we have in the way of evidence?
Proof of Akhnaten’s beliefs, and the known chronology of Egyptian kings.
The Biblical chronology which places Moses in Egypt during Akhnaten’s time.
The Biblical accounts of Moses’s ancestry and of Abraham.
Now, if you’re going to discount the Bible, that’s one thing. But if you’re going to consider it for the sake of #2, then it makes no sense to discount #3, and if you’re not, to assume that Moses’s ancestors were monotheists, but of a different sort, and he picked up the actual Judaic monotheism from a totally independent source (Akhnaten) and based his future beliefs on that. If Moses’s ancestor was a monotheist and Moses was a monotheist, and there’s no source indicating that Abraham was one of these “monoaltrists” or “henotheists”, and, while Moses (and other descendants of Abraham) are in Egypt, a king happens to arise from a polytheistic society who comes up with some monotheistic ideas…seems to me more likely that Moses’s heology was Abraham’s, and Akhnaten’s derived from it. It takes very selective reading of the Bible, plus invention of new material that does not exist (such as the assumption that Abraham believed that there were other dieties invested with power independent of the diety he worshipped) to paint Akhnaten as preceding Abraham in the roots of Judaic belief.
I’d like to know who those scholars are. I know that very late in his life Freud wrote a book called, if I’m remembering this right, “Moses and Monotheism” in which he made some interesting logical deductions and stretched his psychological theories to try and explain Moses. A fun read, but I never heard of anyone trying to explain the genesis (NPI) of modern monotheism from this tract or the theories expounded in it.
– with Moses targeting the concept of “there** is** only one god” for the first time.)