Empire: World History - 368. Ancient Egypt: The Origin of Abrahamic Religions? (Ep 7)

Episode Date: June 14, 2026

Was monotheism passed down from Pharaoh Akhenaten of Ancient Egypt? Who was the ancient goddess Asherah? How did exposure to other empires shape the Hebrew Bible?  William is joined by Francesca Stavrakopoulou, author of God: An Anatomy, to explore the evolution of the deity Yahweh, and Freud’s theory that Jewish monotheism was passed down from Ancient Egypt.  Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott Editor:  Imogen Marriott Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Forward slash trial to try three months of the London Review of Books for free. Just do it. It's the most wonderful journal in the country and you will never regret it. This spring, denim gets a softer, lighter update. Introducing Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg, a new fit that moves with you. It's everything you want denim to feel like for summer. Easy, breathable, and effortlessly cool. With a fit that creates natural movement and a wide leg that feels modern, not overwhelming.

Plus, that signature, wait, for this price, moment. Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg. On his deathbed in 1938, Sigmund Freud wrote his final, and in many ways his most original work. But the most famous psychologist in history wasn't writing about the unconscious mind or the ego. He was writing about the Egyptian pharaoh Aknarton. And he was asking whether Acknarton's radical religious beliefs laid the seeds from which Judaism, Islam and Christianity grew. In this episode, we're going to be exploring that.

And we're welcoming to the studio. I'm afraid it's just me today. No, Anita, she's busy. but it gets me all the more time with one of my favourite authors who I have completely loved the work of, Francesco Stavrakapulo. Hi. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you.

So everyone put your seatbelts on because what you're going to get is certainly very different from what I understood to be the origins of monotheism, which is what we're looking at today. We're asking two questions in a sense. What was the beginnings of monotheism? Was Acknartan's Aten faith a former monotheism or not? We looked a bit at that with Lloyd Llewellyn Jones. But we're going to go now forward with Francesca and ask a second question. What are the origins of the cult of Yahweh?

And how far did Acknartan's thought and ideas, which seemed to be so thoroughly smashed when we last looked in the last episode with the end of Telelelemanna and the abandonment of this entire world and the revolution, even by the time of Tutankham and his son, how much can we see the influence of that in what became the three great monotheistic Abrahamic religions? So tell us about Freud, first of all, Jessica. How did he come to this? And does anyone take this book at all seriously? Oh, gosh, and that's a huge question. So Freud, as you said, Freud is writing in the late 1930s and he's living in a world in which it's

not easy to be Jewish. He's Jewish. Yeah, 1938 to be Jewish is not a, even in New or London is quite uncomfortable. Exactly. And so this is a time of heightened anxieties, heightened, certainly heightened anti-Semitism. Antisemitism was a part of British culture anyway. But obviously what's going on

with the rise of Nazism in Germany and obviously the Second World War is just around the corner. It's a very difficult time. But he's also writing at a time in which everything ancient Egypt is mega exciting still. So if you think about it, Tutankhamun, the tomb was discovered in 1922. So it's all quite new stuff. That is still really new. I mean, even in terms of the rediscovery of Akanatin and the very distinctive qualities and aspects and artwork, for example, of his reign,

that was only in the late 19th century. So, you know, it's, this is, we're now in the early 20th, this is still, Egypt mania is still a big thing. So he's writing at this time. And for him to be Jewish at a time, when there is so much hostility and violence, I think it's safe to say that he's looking at the ways in which to be Jewish is not to be shameful. And I think to link the Jewish faith and particularly its monotheism to the kind of the glories, if you like, of ancient Egypt and everything that was seen as it was seen

so sophisticated, you know, by 1920s, 1930s, European culture. It was seen as exciting as refined. We still see it as exciting. Oh, exactly. And so I think that was probably very appealing. And also, you know, this is a guy who goes to dinner parties. You know, he's a very intellectual man. He socialises.

This is kind of dinner party talk as well. We should say at this point that it is significant that it is, he has a Jewish publisher. I think he is my great, great, great uncle, Lenny Wolf. Or Virginia is by great, great aunt. I'm not related to Leonard except by marriage. But yes. And that was the publisher, the Hoganth Press, is the publisher that publishes.

Absolutely. So I think there's all sorts of, which is very exciting, by the way, about Virginia Woolf being your great, great aunt. I think there's all sorts of reasons why this is a very important work for Freud. But it also plays into a lot of what he's interested in intellectually and in terms of his understanding of human psychology,

in the sense that for him, Akenartan's monotheism, if that's what we're to call it, is not a label I'm particularly comfortable with, but his kind of version of one-god theology, one-god religion, is for Freud, I think, one of those great forces. And it's a force that for him is repressed and denied and eradicated,

but then suddenly reemerges, much later for some scholars, but for Freud reemerges at the time of Moses, who he dates to around the same time as Akanaten. And it's Moses that passes this monotheism on to the Israelites. Now, obviously, whole libraries have been written on this subject, since then. It's a long time ago in theology 1938. And a lot of what Freud said has been poo-pooed by academics since. But what did he get right? What elements to that book stand up, if any? I find it very hard to, as an academic, to say this is what he got right. Or this is

what stands up. I think making the link... When was he on the right trail, should we say? I think he's on the right trail to say that there is a certain kind of, that one God, that it does pop up, it reemerges, because it's a very powerful notion, it's a very powerful idea. And because it's so contrary, it's so different in some ways to the norm, to the cultural norm. So in the ancient world across ancient Southwest Asia, North Africa, the Mediterranean, polytheism is the norm, the worship of many gods, and the gods are all networked together. Right, through to obviously the Hindu gods of India, the ones I'm working with. Absolutely. Some could argue due to certain forms of Christianity today as well. That's another story

for another time. Another one for another day. We're going to get you back, Francesca. Don't worry. You're not getting away with just one episode here. It's a very controversial idea, one God theology in this context. And so I think the idea that somehow these sorts of things can come back with a force, that they can't be, that these things don't just disappear. You can't just get rid of, like you can't get rid of the whole notion of polytheism without it re-emerging or kind of adapting later on. And so too with the notion of one-god religion. You can't just get rid of that idea. It does come up later on. Now, whether there's a direct DNA link, if you like, between Akhenartan's.

Biological link between the two ideas. Yeah, if there's a direct link between Akhenaten's theology and his religious preferences and those that we find in the Hebrew Bible, so Old Testament and in ancient Judaism, Christianity, etc. No, there's no direct link. I would go as far as to say that. But there are cultural similarities and it's not a surprise that we find cultural similarities in this part of the world. Now, Prattisca, in your wonderful book, God and Anatomy, which I recommend recommend everybody to go out and buy now because it just blew my mind and it's an extraordinary,

extraordinary book. But your kind of main argument is that the god of the later Hebrew Bible, well, he's the same God, but he's very, very differently presented to the God of the earliest Israelite religion, or the gods, as you put it, of the earliest Israelite religions. And that Yahweh has a much more tangled, complicated and geographically expansive origin than conventional Jewish or Christian or indeed Muslim theology would need us to believe. Yeah, so in essence, Judaism and Christianity in Islam share many scriptural traditions and one of the scriptural traditions they share is this notion that God or Yahweh as he's known within Jewish cultures and traditions, that God was essentially always a solitary deity.

There were no other gods that should be worshipped. They were false gods, if there were, any other gods that were around. And this was a universal deity. A universal deity in the sense that this was a god who had a universal reach and a universal control. This was a god who plucked Abraham out of Mesopotamia, so what we now know is modern day Iraq, and said, right, I'm going to give you this homeland for your descendants, off you go, and it's called Canaan.

So Canaan is the label in biblical texts that's given to the region we know as the Southern Levant. So in other words, what's now modern day Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, etc. So this is a universal solitary creator god, a male god, interestingly. But that kind of notion of God is a relatively late development within Yahweh worship of the Iron Age. So the earlier form of Yahweh, the original form of Yahweh was quite different. He was one of a number of deities. He was a warrior god. He had a consort, the goddess Ashera.

And he was a god who was gradually, slowly prioritised as a political patron over several centuries by particular ruling groups within the communities that we know as ancient Israel. Now, you've just said a lot of stuff that you packed into two sentences enough to sort of blow the minds of every believing one of the years. three religions. So let's go very, very slowly through this, what you just said. I suppose, first of all, to unpack it, what era, what dates are we talking for the very first mentions of Yahweh? Let's go, let's do time, then place, and then look at exactly what he is originally. Yeah. So in terms of the earliest uncontested reference to Yahweh, we're basically talking early Iron Age. So we're talking around the 9th to the 8th centuries BCE. 9th century BC. Well, that's quite in kind of ancient Mesopotamian terms, quite late in the day.

We've seen the rise and fall of Ur, we've seen the Syrians, Babylonians, all sorts of stuff going on. Yeah, absolutely. So this is, it is relatively late. We're talking kind of like, you know, 10 to midnight in the kind of the world clock of time. This is a deity who's mentioned absolutely a clear attestation of a deity Yahweh linked to Israel and kings of Israel in the 9th century BC. And that comes in the Meshe Steeley, which is a, stone inscription, a monument that was set up by a Moabite king called Mecca. Moab is where we now identify Jordan. That's our earliest, unattested reference to Yawai.

And that's got quite an exact date, doesn't it? What's the date? It's around the mid-ninth century BCE. Midnight century. Just to go into, again, slightly more contentious territory, before that, before the link of Yahweh with Israel, which is that stellar from the mid-ninth century. We have other references to Yahweh in slightly different form, way to the south and not associated with Israel. Possible references to Yardway. That is contentious. Yeah.

So some scholars have argued that we have in certain Egyptian materials, Egyptian texts, references to what appear to be nomadic or semi-nomadic tribal groups in this kind of this pocket of territory that the bottom of the southern Levant and into some of what was ancient Egypt, some Arabian territories, that seems to refer to a Yahu or Yahu. Now, we know from later Hebrew inscriptions that that is a very common form of the name Yerwe, the divine name Yerwe, but in these ancient Egyptian materials that are much earlier from around 14th century, 13th century BCE, doesn't look to be the name of a deity. It doesn't look to be a proper personal name. It looks to be a place name rather than a personal name. So some scholars have said, this is a place name, could this be a place at which a deity takes his name? Possibly.

But less contentious is the fact that early references to Yahweh seem to come or point to the south, even within the Hebrew Bible. Yeah. So that's where we're on kind of slightly firmer territory, slightly firmer ground. So some of the earliest poetry that we have in the Hebrew Bible, Hebrew Bible is the name that we give to the Old Testament, what people know as Tanakh. Christians know as the Old Testament. The Hebrew Bible's earliest poetry

refers to Yahweh as a deity, as this kind of warrior god, a god who's a fighter who comes from the sort of arid regions of the south. So Edom in particular. So again, the territory that we would associate now with Southern Jordan.

And these seem to give a sort of an origin story. That sort of Petra region or further deeper south? Further south than that. But the reds, you know that very red soil and sand and rock of petra. It's that same. It's the word Edom is linked to the word for red, to the word for blood. So it's that red kind of desert wilderness territory is where

Yahweh is given his origins in a lot of early Hebrew Bible poetry. So most scholars think that he has this very southern wilderness origin. And that he and possibly the tribes who worship him are migrating northwards into what is now Israel over time. Is that? Is that? Is that? That's the same a territory? No, by your expression, not. Yeah. What we know, so the Hebrew Bible tells the story that Israel's origins begin as they are a loose tribal network, various nomadic and semi-nomadic groups who go into Egypt and then find themselves coming out of Egypt and into the land of Canaan, so the Southern Levant. Many scholars now are very iffy about the historicity of those tribal traditions.

It may be that this is something that has been retrojected back into the story at a later date. So what we do know is that... So they're quite down on the whole notion that there was an exodus. This is not considered to be historical anymore by academics. No, most academics would say perhaps something happened. And there's definitely towing and throwing

between what's now Israel and what's now Egypt. Absolutely. I mean, it's interesting. This is like the late Bronze Age early Iron Age and it's a time that's got remarkable similarities to today in the sense that it's a time of mass movement of peoples and migrations

because there is economic collapse on the brink. There is climate crisis going on. It's the collapse of a lot of the late Bronze City States. We've done Eric Klein a series on the Bronze Age collapse. So our listeners know all that stuff and who Garrett and all those sea peoples turning up. It's a really sort of, It's a time of huge mobility.

And this little corridor of land, as today, is still a hugely important piece of land in terms of trade, economics, and migrants. And people going down, you know, from Africa, like into Africa, up again, into Mesopotamia and round again. So it's, it's, there's always people going in and out of Egypt, basically. And we know that this, this carries on right into the Roman era and beyond. Now, in that detonated sentence that you gave us 10 minutes ago,

which were unpicking the resonance of now, there was another little reference to the fact that Yahweh has a wife, a sharer. And weirdly, this is the least contemptuous, you said. This seems to be completely established that in the early days, something that no monotheist wants to hear, but it's there, you'd say,

pretty firmly in the archaeology in the inscriptional evidence. From the 8th century BCE, from sites in and around Judah, ancient Judah, so in and around the West Bank, today's West Bank, near Jerusalem. We have inscriptions. We also have inscriptions in the Sinai Desert, again, dated to the 8th century BCE. It was almost like a motorway kind of service station, the equivalent in the ancient world. And we have inscriptions there too. And these inscriptions written in Hebrew ask for blessings from Yahweh and his Asherah. Now we know Asher really well. We know her from

late Bronze Age texts from the Syrian cities of Uyghrit. He's one of the big gods of the Levant at this period. She's a major... Goddesses. Yeah. Yeah. She's a big deal. She's a huge deal.

She's almost like the first lady, if you like, of kind of the ancient polytheistic system. The Queen of Heaven. The Queen of Heaven. To use a phrase that is used of her. Exactly. That was something I had in my Catholic upbringing, but didn't refer to Chera. No, but you can see how much recycling goes on in these regions. Exactly.

They were very green. Asher, known as Athyrat in other parts of the Levant. She's most often coupled with the heart. God of the Pantheon, the High God of the Pantheon, who is most often sort of semi-retired deity, he's the kind of the Father God, he's leaving the business of running the cosmos up to his younger generation of gods and goddesses. And again, this is something that blew my mind when I read your book, I'd something like, you should all know. That God is not initially Yewai-Way. And the Israelites' first God is El. The God Aal. His name is preserved in Israel. So this is, I mean,

his name simply means deity, but it also serves as a proper name. And Ashera is the consort of the high god Ale. And they have sons and daughters, like in many other pantheons we find across the world. It's their sons and daughters who are kind of the active gods. They're the frontline deities, you know, warrior gods and weather gods and fertility deities and such like. So Asher is really important. So in the 8th century BCE, it's no surprise in some ways to find that the chief deity of ancient Israelite and Judeaite religion is partnered with the goddess Ashera. It gives him credibility as much as anything else

that this is a high god who can take charge of this household of other deities and this portfolio of cosmic responsibilities. And just very briefly to go into these other deities, there is an entire council. There is like Mount Olympus. There's a whole world of gods. And this is, again, uncontroversial to academics.

This is something that most serious theologians studying this period will accept that there is a whole world of many, many gods that the early Israelites and their neighbours are sharing. Yeah, so the Hebrew Bible is very explicit about this. It makes several, I mean, hundreds of references to the divine council of Yahweh or the divine council of Aal. The two names are very interchangeable in lots of Hebrew Bible texts because they become identified at this point. One thing, is there a phonetic link between El and Allah? Is that the same sort of Semitic root. Yeah, the same route, absolutely. So Allah, El, Israel all have etymological links to each other. Yeah. And that is enough to detonate other minds on

its own, even before we go any further with God's wife and the rest of it. And again, this is another crucial point that in terms of academics is not controversial, that this early Israelite world of deities of which El and Yahweh are part is not, it's not. to the Israelites, that the other Canaanites, although they didn't seem to have called themselves Canaanites, that's what Egyptian sources certainly call them, that they all more or less share the same pantheon. Not so much sharing the same pantheon in common, but their local pantheons all look really similar. They often have the same names and they have deities that serve pretty much the same roles. So it's not direct translation, if you like, but they're sufficiently similar

that everybody can understand that the world of the gods is mega important. And you don't annoy somebody else's deity. Yes, that you're tolerant of each other's deities. And one of these gods is one that appears a lot in the Old Testament, who is Bal. Who's he? Ah, Bar, I love Bar. He's one of my favourites. So, Bal, the name basically means master or lord. And so we find various forms of Baal all over ancient South West Asia.

In the Levant, he's particularly associated with, he's a storm god, essentially. But as a storm god, he's also a warrior deity. So his weapons are... It's related to Zeus. He's got thunderbolts and that sort of... Yeah, very similar. Zeus is basically a form of Baal, absolutely. And later Greek writers would and would understand Phoenician forms of Baal as a form of Zeus. So it's really, really similar.

But yeah, his weapons are thunder clouds and lightning and rainstorms, big heavy clouds. He's known as the rider on the clouds. He's the charioteer of the clouds, which is such a lovely image. It sounds very, very Jim Morrison. It doesn't. The riders on the storm, yeah. But that's exactly what Yawai is called in many. Hebrew Bible texts as well. So as well as taking on aspects of ale, Yahweh's also taken on lots of

aspects of Baal. So he's combining the kind of top-tier semi-retired father god profile of deity with the kind of warrior god, storm god, ferocious fighter, patient deity, defender of his chosen cities and peoples portfolio. Not only do you have this very unfamiliar world of many gods and a goddess. But Ashera, like the female gods of Mesopotamia that we meet in Gilgamesh and so on, is quite sensual. This is not a sort of chaste and goody-to-shoes goddess. Yeah, and all the gods are, all the deities are these sensory-bodied deities. They have human-shaped bodies, they have human-like emotions on a supersized scale quite often.

Asha, she's not a fertility goddess. She is a protector. She is a mediator. She's very benevolent. She's got a lot of sway. But there is sacred prostitution associated with her sometimes? No. You don't believe that.

Some scholars have said that. Yes. And they are absolutely wrong because it's ancient world polemic, trying to basically belittle and sort of other these different sorts of goddesses and religion. This is early sexism, trying to pollute this cult. And xenophobia, too. quite often. We're going to take a break now, but after the break,

we'll find out how this very unfamiliar world gets edited to the more familiar world that we read about in the current edition of the Old Testament. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Gollhangers, The Rest is Science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

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So we opened with this very unfamiliar world of many gods and goddesses in worship by the, Israelites in a way that most of our religious educations does not teach us. Now, how do we move from that world to the world that we get read out to us in church or synagogue or a mosque today? What is the editing process that means that Yahweh loses His Nashara? So we need to fast forward from the early Iron Age to the middle of the Iron Age. So we fast forward to the 6th century BCE. By this time, you've got the Kingdom of Israel in the north and the kingdom of Judah in the south. Samaria, the capital of the Northern Kingdom, has been decimated in the 8th century by the Assyrian Empire.

Samaria is kind of modern Nablus, isn't it? Yeah, so that was the capital. The Assyrians are the big power, the Neo-Assyrian Empire is huge, and it is, by the end of the 8th century, it dominates the known world, basically. They have completely decimated the Northern Kingdom of Israel, leaving only Jerusalem on its own, if you like. So that's kind of the impression that we get. Obviously, it's not wiped off the map. There are still people there and farming there. There's still religion going on there.

There's still Yahweh worship going on there. But it has an impact on those that are left behind in Jerusalem and the kingdom of Judah. So for some scholars, the end of the 8th century, beginning of the 7th century, is the time when a shift towards a programmatic form of monotheism occurs. So we have stories in the Hebrew Bible about King Hezekiah of Jerusalem, who shuts down lots of temples and sanctories outside of Jerusalem and says you can only worship Yahweh in one place, and that's Jerusalem Temple. It sounds a bit like either the English Reformation or the Taliban,

where you have someone just sort of knocking down gods, destroying things and telling people you can worship this. The English Reformation wouldn't have happened without the biblical accounts of King Hezekiah and later on King Josiah in the 7th century, basically doing exactly that. It's iconocasm, just knocking statues down, getting rid of images, saying that this is the way you can worship, you can only worship by means of the temple in Jerusalem and by following a kind of a script, a religious ideological script known as the Torah. So in other words, the Torah simply means teaching. We know it now as the first five books of the Hebrew Bible.

But Torah in the late Iron Age probably meant a version of what we know as the Book of Deuteronomy, which is all about one God, one place of worship, one people united. So all Yahwehs worship has come together. And this is an incredibly powerful idea that then gets boosted after the Israelites are defeated. They move to Babylon. Their temple is destroyed. And in exile, they rebuild their religion in a very different way. Also, perhaps influenced by another monotheism, which precedes it, which is surrealism.

Yeah. So there, you've said a lot in two sentences that needs unpacking. My revenge. Exactly. So possibly Hezekiah and Josiah as these religious reformers, some scholars think this is historical fact. Other scholars, myself included, not so sure. We don't know that this kind of prioritisation of Yahweh over and above all other deities within the local pantheons. We don't really know whether that happened or not.

In this particular period, we don't know that a form of the Book of Juderonomy was written as early as the 7th century BC. What we are all agreed on is that by the time we get to the 6th century BC, 587 BC in particular, the Assyrians have been defeated by the Babylonians who now have the upper imperial hand. And as a part of their expansion down towards Egypt, the Babylonians have destroyed Jerusalem and have taken off into exile the elites of Jerusalem, the monarchy, a lot of the priesthood, a lot of the scribes. you know, the important people, technicians, like the people that, they're artisans, people that are useful to the empire, whilst they are in exile in Babylon, these elite group decide they have to figure out what the hell has just happened. Has this happened because Yahweh has been defeated?

This warrior god, this father god, this patron of the people, this patron who is set to dwell, literally in the temple in Jerusalem, how the hell has this happened? Has he been defeated? Or was this all a part of Yahweh's plan to punish his people for some kind of religious malpractice. And that's basically what those elites, those scribal elites in particular, the intelligentsia in Babylon, decide, has happened. They said, no, no, the Babylonian gods aren't stronger than Yahweh. Yawai has used the Babylonians and their gods against us. Because we have sinned. And one of the things we've done that is sinning is by worshipping Asherah. We worshipped other gods and we didn't realize.

that Yahweh got really upset about that. I will, you know, I will not tolerate this because he is a jealous god. So that's the beginnings of this religious ideology. So how do you account for what's happened? You say, right, Yahweh has to have some kind of universal reach. He's not just a territorial god. He can control the Babylonians, the Syrians, the Egyptians. Therefore, how come he can do this?

Well, because he's a creator god. He created the whole world. All right. Okay. So if he creates the whole world and he's a universal deity, That means that he could bring the Babylonians in against us and take us out into exile, destroy his own temple, that's completely fine, and he can be with us in Babylon, sod the rest of the people who are in Judah.

They don't matter. We are the chosen ones. And it's in that context that this kind of refiguration of Yahweh worship begins to happen, that this is a deity intolerant of any other gods. So there's two different things that happen at this point, if I understand it. Right. One is that the old books get re-edited. There are no books at this point.

Old traditions. Old traditions begin to become compiled and some early forms, like the books of kings, for example, we have probably some early versions of those by the time of the 6th century, but not much else. But early poems, early traditions about prophets, early oracles, early narratives begin to be shaped and reformed. And then from this point on, particularly in the following century,

when the Jerusalem temple is rebuilt because by this point the Persians are in charge and Cyrus the Great allows the kind of the movement, the return of various displaced communities to their homelands. Some returning exiles from Jerusalem go back to the city, rebuild it, and they start to reshape and rewrite the past. And the result is quite a few of the books that we now have in the Hebrew Bible. And that writing process continues. New books are written, new scrolls are added, all the way through into the right. Roman period. So it's a very, the Hebrew Bible is a collection of different text and traditions. It wasn't written beginning with Genesis and all the way through. It's a process of reinvention

the whole time. And throughout this whole period, Yawai, the Yawai's prioritization is becoming such that he becomes a god that doesn't look anything like the Yaway of the first half of the Iron Age. The kind of the YAR way of... He hasn't got a friend. He hasn't got a court. He's on his own. He's pretty much on his own. He has some kind of desensitizing. if you like, gods who have now become angels or kind of messengers, seraphim, cherubim, all these things that we see in the Old Testament. But he's lost his rivals. Baal is out of the picture.

And he's lost his family. He's lost his household. He's lost his kind of his collaborators, his colleagues. It's terribly lonely, I think, for Yahweh, which is why you then get stories saying he goes up to finds Abraham in Iraq and says, hey, do you want to be my friend? So look, we've left Acknathan way behind this. So let's two questions. Again, big ones.

The Israelites are in Babylon, which is in modern Iraq, which is in the wider Persianate world. The first thing I want to ask is tell me about Zoroastrianism, because that is also a monotheism, often said to be the first monotheism, by those that don't like this idea of Acklaten. Is that an influence? You've got all these, all these, Israelite religious. religious figures moved by force from the temple in Jerusalem to the heart of the Zoroastrian world. So what is Zoroastrianism? In what sense is it monotheistic and is this time? Zoroastrianism is the name that's given to a religious system. It's named after one of its

key teachers. At around this time, around the 5th century BC, although it has much earlier traditions, and at its heart is the deity Ahura Mazda, a deity that on the surface looks like really kind of liberal and tolerant. This is a god. who's like welcomes in the gods of all other peoples and kind of all those deities and their profiles and their kind of portfolios are collapsed into that of a Huramaster. So he is known as the God of heaven. He is the God who created heaven and earth. It looks like very fluffy and very nice. It's actually massively imperial. It's a way of saying, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, Ahura Mazda is a very colonial form of God.

It colonises other people's deities, other people's traditions and takes them on. But it way well be that Ahura Mazda and Zoroastrianism of the 5th century, 4th centuries onwards is a big influence in the reshaping, reworking of Yahweh worship, particularly because... Because these guys are in the same court. The Israelites in Babylon are often actually in the court. They're not in prison or kind of working on dams or building bridges. But also because by the time that these elites and their descendants return to Jerusalem and start writing the Hebrew Bible essentially, they're really chummy with the Persian Empire. The Persian Empire, these are the people in Paris. It's like, oh, what are the Romans ever done for us? Or what are the Persians ever done for us? Well, actually, they're quite good. And it's Cyrus, of course, that lets the Israelites go home. And he's even referred to possibly, according to some scholars, as the Messiah.

Yeah, he absolutely is referred to as the Messiah in the Book of Isaiah. He is the Messiah simply means the Anointed One. But he is the one. in the Book of Isaiah, who was chosen by Yahweh to restore his people from exile and to bring them back to the promised land, to the homeland. So the Hebrew Bible is a very pro-Persia collection of texts in that sense, whereas it's a very anti-Babolonian and anti-Egyptian collection of texts. So Nebuchadnezzar is the bad E, Cyrus is the goody. Exactly. So, yeah, Zoroastrianism quite possibly has an impact on the kind of the monolatrous. So in other words, it's not so much a monotheistic view of Yahweh, because they're aware that other gods exist. It's an emphasis that only Yahweh should be worshipped.

So it's not saying there aren't other gods. It's saying that R1 is the really powerful big guy. R1 is the god to worship and you can only worship this god. But that's not to say that there's no Egyptian influence. Well, that's where we're coming back to that. So we're in our last home straight now. So the Israelites have been in Babylon. Cyrus has let them go, let my people go, and they're back home now in Jerusalem.

squabbling slightly with the Israelites who've been left behind, who've got their old gods, and there's a bit of knocking down of other people's temples and all that sort of stuff going down. And new temples being built, interestingly. And new temples being built. But we're now back on the edge of Egypt. Geographically, being in Israel is closer to Egypt. Now, how far can we see any Egyptian influence? What you've said so far is Israelite thought in reaction to Israelite tragedy, possibly influenced by Persia.

what is the influence of Egypt? Take us back to our main theme. The influence of Egypt is massive in the sense that it always had been. So even when Egypt is on the wane politically and economically in the ancient world, its cultural influence is still huge.

So one of the things, one of the reflections of this we see, so thinking particularly, I know you talked in one of your other episodes about Psalm 104, which does have massive parallels. But is it direct borrowing or is it not? It's probably not.

You know, literature circulated all over the ancient world. You know, that's why we've got lots of different versions of Noah's Ark, even before Noah was invented, if you like. That story is much older than Noah himself. The hero is named other things in Mesopotamian texts. So he turns up in Gilgamesh and all these other earlier texts before he turns up in the, yeah. Psalm 104 does have incredible parallels with certain parts of the great hymn to the Uttan

that we find. Can I do a little bit of a reading? Yes, you can. So here is the great hymn to the Arton. When you set in the western horizon, the land is in darkness, in the manner of death. Every lion comes forth from his den, all the serpents they sting. Darkness reigns. The world is in silence.

He that made them is resting in his horizon. And here is Psalm 104. You made the moon to mark the season. The sun knows it's time for setting. You make darkness and it is night when all the animals of the forest. forest come creeping out. The young lions roar for their prey, seeking their food from God. When the sun rises, they withdraw and lie down in their dens. So quite a lot of, especially the stuff about lions. Yeah, I mean, lions are a key cultural motif all over the ancient world.

But interestingly, that psalm also has references to Yahweh riding on the clouds, as I mentioned before, that psalm also has loads of allusions to Baal as a thundering god, as a warrior god. And so this combination of motifs, it kind of looks like, wow, have they taken poetry from ancient Ugris up in Syria and have they taken poetry from ancient Egypt, is this direct influence or borrowing. Which of course makes sense in any culture, any period of time. It makes sense. It makes sense.

But I think... Different people carrying their texts. Yeah, but I don't think that somebody stood in the court of the temple on which the great hymn to the artisan was written and copied it down and then took it off to ancient Judah and then wrote it down. Look, lads. Look what I've got here. I think we can find clues. The Armana letters, so a 14th century archive of text. We know about that. We've done it. We compare them to Ravita Biscuits or rather our wonderful producer, Nushika came up with this analogy, which has now spawned a million memes on the internet. Anyway, I've not thought about those texts being

compared to Rhybita. But yes, the Amman letter, so 14th century, from various kings of the city-states across the Southern Levant are writing to our friend Akanatan and talking about various things. And the language they use is doing exactly the same thing as we find in Psalm 104. It's combining this imagery about the sun and the moon and the dangers of the darkness and lions,

but also combining it with Baal imagery, referring to the pharaoh himself as Baal and talking about him as the thunderer and the warrior god. So in other words, it was already, combining these particular turns of phrase was already in the kind of ether in the 14th century BC Southern Levant. What you might call the common culture compost of the region. It's the area that's giving sustenance to the writers of the Bible when they're beginning to put the stuff together and edit what they were already got in the oral tradition.

When they're compiling the Psalms, and the Psalms are basically ancient bits of poetry and ritual texts that have been mishmashed together and reworked and revamped. It's a natural kind of fit. Yeah. So it's not direct influence of Akanatan on Jalwistic monotheism as such, but it shows what's kind of culturally appropriate, culturally suitable. So what's left of poor El Sigmund Freud dying in Hampstead, fleeing the Nazis, sitting in London, the Second World War, about to break out, all this sort of stuff,

what's left of his thesis? A little bit. A little bit. A direction of travel. A direction of travel. And where I think he was particularly helpful is in. opening up the possibility that we ought to take really seriously the solar imagery that's obviously that the Atten is about the solar globe or the solar disk, that manifestation of deity as the highest God. And I think that was really helpful and has helped scholars really pick up on the importance

of that solar imagery. One of the most important archaeological discoveries of the last 100 years when it comes to my sort of stuff was the discovery in a tomb in Kethevhinom, one of the values, around Jerusalem, a very high-status tomb. And it's dated to the 7th century BC. So 100 years after we find these inscriptions to Yahweh and Asherah, and their two little silver scrolls rolled up, and they were worn, little tiny, I mean, they're like two centimetres tall rolled up. You've got a picture of them in your wonderful book.

I do. And they were worn by a very high-status person in life and then, of course, in death as well, because they've been buried with them. And when you unroll these scrolls and read this tiny writing on them in Hebrew, We get the earliest version of Numbers 6, a little tiny poetic couplet in Numbers. The Book of Numbers. And I'll read it. Actually, I'll read it to you because it's really lovely.

And in the Book of Numbers, it's known as the Priacy Blessing. And it says, Yahweh bless you and keep you. Yahweh make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. Yahweh lift up his countenance upon you and give you shalom, give you well-being, give you peace. And this is solar imagery, lift up your face and shine upon you. Interestingly, this, you know, alongside these little amulets, also found little Bez figurines. Bez, the little dwarf god from Egypt, who was this kind of monstrous composite deity. Weird face, flaccid penis, huge but flaccid penis.

He was meant to scare off demons and all sorts of other sort of evils. He's alongside these little amulets that have almost exactly this little refrain, the Lord bless you and keep you and make his face shine upon you. Protect us from the evil eye. That's what these little scrolls were doing. So that solar imagery, those little best figurines in the 7th century inscription in a little amulet in a tomb in Jerusalem, I think that is a kind of a, it's an afterlife of the power of the Aten and the kind of the resonance of what Akan Aten I think was trying to harness this idea about protection, that all life and in death, not to be scared of the darkness, that all life and sort of protection comes from the artin itself. I think that's where we get a resonance of that in Yawbe worship. This is just absolutely gripping stuff.

Thank you so, so much. Your wonderful book, God and Anatomy is my book of the year. Please, everybody that likes this podcast, go out and bite. Now you will have your mind blown. But more importantly, Francesca, will you come back? We need much more about this. This whole world is totally gripping and totally empire. I know that our listeners would love a whole series on all this stuff,

this whole rich world, which we should know about, but few of us do. Thank you for having me. Goodbye from me, William Duremberg. Goodbye from me, Francesca Stavrakapoulou. Are you one of those media strategy people clicking through slides, scrolling spreadsheets? Yes?

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