© Charles Chandler

 

In 1329 bce, the capital had been moved back to Thebes, but for the time being, Atenism was still tolerated in Egypt — the Aten had simply been demoted to one of the lesser gods in the Egyptian pantheon, and the state religion had been returned to the worship of Amun-Ra. But the Atenists were slow to go back to the old ways. By 1312 bce, Horemheb decided to force the issue, outlawing Atenism. Ramose complained — he thought that he should be allowed at least to lead the people on a three-day journey into the wilderness, to a point just beyond the Egyptian border, so they could pray to Adonai without breaking the law. But he wasn't able to develop much interest in this — the people seemed content just serving their Egyptian masters.

 

Horemheb wanted the Atenists to mount an outright insurrection, so that he could move in with troops and wipe them out. But he failed to incite any violence. The most that he could muster was a large-scale act of civil disobedience, wherein the Atenists dumped a bunch of animal blood into the Nile. Unfortunately, this turned into an environmental disaster, leading to a series of plagues. Horemheb was so infuriated that he got his guards to find out who had been involved, and to mark their doorposts with animal blood. Fear spread through the community, that some sort of punishment was soon to follow. This convinced them that the time was right to go on the weekend retreat suggested by Ramose. Fearing thievery as well as violence, they took their gold & silver with them, and that of their neighbors, for safe keeping.

 

So the civil activists left Avaris and went to Succoth. Ramose steered them around the Philistines, who might have put up a fight, and the Atenists weren't looking for a fight — that's what they were trying to avoid. From Succoth they went to Etham, at the edge of the wilderness, which was as far as they expected to go. They had their feast just beyond the Egyptian border. They came to call it the Feast of the Passover, because when "God" (Horemheb) came through to kill the first-born, he passed over the houses with marked doorposts (because nobody was home). The people also vowed to remember the event as the "night of watching," trusting in their God, but suspicious of who else might be in the neighborhood with malintent, which is an echo from Horemheb's henchmen targeting Atenist civil activists.

 

After the feast, the Atenists headed back to Egypt, thinking that the purges were over. Unfortunately for them, they weren't going to get off that easy — the Egyptian army came out against them, to make sure that the Atenists couldn't return to Egypt. Still they declined to fight, and Horemheb himself had to rally them to go up against the Egyptian army. Once both sides had been bloodied, there was no going back, since now the Atenists were combatants, subject to execution on capture. This is when the situation transitioned, from the Feast of the Passover, to the Exodus. Pretending to be their friends, Horemheb promised the Atenists a land of milk and honey that would be theirs forever if they would just leave. The Atenists were skeptical of Horemheb's generosity, but had little choice — they had been tricked into leaving the country, and then forcefully prevented from returning. Thus began their journey across the Sinai Desert.

 

As they had feared, the Exodus brought one hardship after another, including bouts with dehydration, starvation, plague, and hostile locals. This whittled down their numbers, leaving little doubt that the Exodus was a bait-and-switch — the Atenists had been generously promised land on the frontier, only so that they could be slaughtered in the wilderness, out of sight of the larger majority of people back in Egypt, who would have rallied if they had witnessed their friends getting murdered.

 

Ramose worked tirelessly to minimize the conflicts. Had he been just the instrument of Horemheb's will, his elaborate efforts, such as on the Book of the Law, would have been senseless. So Ramose was the true champion of the faith. But Horemheb was the more powerful of the two, and he wanted to make an example of the Atenists. It also seems that he wanted for there to be an alternative religion on the frontier, perhaps to counter the Druze. So Isaac's son Jacob was recruited into a scheme that would pit the clan of the Patriarchs against the Levites & the Habirus who had fallen in with them.

 

While still at Mount Sinai, Ramose spent 40 days working out the strategy with Horemheb. Meanwhile, the Atenists became restless, and under Aaron's direction, decided to melt down all of their gold jewelry and cast it into a golden calf that was dedicated to Jacob. The choice of idols was significant. Cows were revered by the Hindus, and the golden calf would have appealed to Jacob's Hindu upbringing.