© Charles Chandler

 

Post	Time (EST)	Name	Statement(s)
1	2011-11-25, 12:32	Moses de la Montagne	Was Akhenaten, the Egyptian Pharaoh who instituted monotheistic worship in his kingdom, the inadvertent founder of Judaism and Christianity?
2	2011-11-25, 01:53	spin	No. You're caught up in the claim that early Hebrew religion was monotheistic, but it wasn't.
4	2011-11-25, 12:05	Destroyer	I think that there is a real possibility that the concept of monotheism as introduced by Akhenaten, is where Moses derived his inspiration for that concept (we cannot know this, of course).
5	2011-11-25, 12:35	smudge	I rather thought the monotheistic shift probably grew from rubbing up against Zoroastrianism during the Babylonian exile?
8	2011-11-25, 01:39	Agrippina	I don't believe that Moses existed, and that the Exodus actually happened, but I do think that the writers of the OT were aware of all the fashions in religion that were there for them to cherry-pick for ideas.
17	2011-11-25, 10:03	spin	[Monotheism] was essentially a political development in which the pharaonic family attempted to assert their independence from the power of Amun, starting with Tuthmosis IV, Akhenaten's grandfather.
18	2011-11-26, 12:29	Moses de la Montagne	I am far from arguing for a real exodus: in an Akhenaten theory, the "exodus" would need only consist of an Egyptian Moses exiling himself and taking his Atenist priesthood and doctrine along with him—either hoofing it with a coterie of Jews, or happening upon them on his way.
19	2011-11-26, 12:38	Moses de la Montagne	[smudge previously mentioned Finkelstein and Silberman's The Bible Unearthed]   My only acquaintance with biblical scholarship is Robin Lane Fox's The Unauthorized Version (a copy of which I picked up because it was name-dropped in The God Delusion). Lane Fox explains that the scholarly consensus favors, as Destroyer has argued, a gradual development of Hebrew monotheism. His summation of the issue, however, doesn't seem so confident as to entirely rule alternative theories out. I recently stumbled onto the Akhenaten theory in a Joseph Campbell book, Occidental Mythology.
23	2011-11-26, 05:29	Agrippina	The Moses story is a rewrite of the story of Sargon the Great who was also placed in a basket in the river, the basket coated with tar to make it waterproof and found by a princess.
70	2011-11-28, 06:15	spin	The Marduk creation had been around for a millenium when the Jews wrote Gen 1. The only struggle is with watery chaos, a battle that has been sublimated, but traces of which are still to be found in the Hebrew bible. Just look at Isa 27:1 though in the future tense, is extremely similar to a passage from Ugarit which described the struggle with the watery dragon, called Lotan in Ugarit and Leviathan in Hebrew.
73	2011-11-29, 04:36	Agrippina	What is very interesting about the Bible is the non-inclusion of the Books of the Maccabees in the standard Bible. It's part of the Jewish tradition, but not the Christian one. My opinion for this is that it didn't fit the prophecy of the Messiah, and the idea that the worship of Yahweh was what caused them to live as "his people" for 500 years before the Romans sent them into exile again.