by
Damien F. Mackey
“Hazael said, ‘How could your servant,
a mere dog, accomplish such a feat?’”
2 Kings 8:13
Introduction
This, one of the more incredible stories of (ancient) history - yet to be fully told - has become possible due only to Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky’s felicitous recognition, in his Ages in Chaos (I, 1952), that the El Amarna (EA) age must be re-located down the timescale from the C14th to the C9th BC.
Arguably the most convincing thesis to be read within this context was Dr. Velikovsky’s identification of two EA strong men of Amurru, the succession of Abdi-ashirta and Aziru, with the Syrian (biblical) succession of, respectively, Ben-Hadad and Hazael.
This Amurru-Syrian pairing was well received amongst readers of Dr. Velikovsky’s revised historical series - even by some who would later abandon Dr. Velikovsky’s entire corpus to pursue so-called ‘new’ chronologies. Two of these former enthusiasts were Peter James (RIP) and Dr. John Bimson, the latter even going so far as to add a “third generation” as I noted in my postgraduate thesis (2007, Volume One, p. 52):
…. The same writer, using the Hittite records for the late to post-EA period, would in fact take Velikovsky’s Syrian identification into even a third generation, his “slightly later period”, when suggesting that Aziru’s son, Du-Teshub, fitted well as Hazael’s son, Ben-Hadad II (c. 806- ? BC, conventional dates), thus further consolidating Velikovsky’s Syrian sequence for both Amarna and the mid-C9th BC. [‘Dating the Wars of Seti I’, p. 21].
1. Hazael and Aziru
Dr. Velikovsky had picked up what he would call “three turns of speech” from Hazael in the Bible common to what we read about his proposed alter ego, Aziru, in the EA letters. I referred to this in my thesis (ibid., pp. 96-97):
This chapter [4] will be built largely around the terms of the Sinai commission to the prophet Elijah … (1 Kings 19:15-17):
Then the Lord said to [Elijah], ‘Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus; when you arrive, you shall anoint Hazael … as king over Aram. Also you shall anoint Jehu … son of Nimshi as king over Israel; and you shall anoint Elisha … son of Shaphat of Abel-meholah as prophet in your place. Whoever escapes from the sword of Hazael, Jehu shall kill; and whoever escapes from the sword of Jehu, Elisha shall kill …’.
Thus Hazael, Jehu and Elisha were to form a triumvirate to wipe out the House of Ahab and to eradicate the worship of Baal in the region.
….
Velikovsky had already ‘enlarged’ Hazael by his identifying of him with EA’s Aziru, son of Abdi-ashirta.
….
Velikovsky had also, in his discussion of idioms that he thought were common to EA and the Old Testament, referred to certain texts culminating in the prophet Elisha’s weeping at the prospect of the mighty deeds – but terrible to Israel – that Hazael would accomplish. He had observed that certain idiomatic phrases in the EA correspondence occurred again in the Old Testament for the C9th BC. For instance, the use of the term ‘brother’, or ‘my [thy] brother’, was, as we have seen, very common amongst the more powerful of the EA kings. Another recurring EA idiom was the use of the term/phrase: ‘[a] [the] dog[s]’. Velikovsky had noted for instance in regard to Hazael of Syria’s reply to the prophet Elisha, ‘… is thy servant a dog [כִּי מָה עַבְדְּךָ הַכֶּלֶב], that he should do this great thing?’, when Elisha had foretold that Hazael would set on fire Israel’s strongholds (2 Kings 8:13), that:
[Hazael’s] expression, ‘is thy servant a dog ...?’ which incidentally escaped oblivion, was a typical figure of speech at the time of the el-Amarna letters. Many chieftains and governors concluded their letters with the sentence: ‘Is thy servant a dog that he shall not hear the words of the king, the lord?’
Velikovsky found the idiom used again by Rib-Addi of Gubla with reference to Aziru and his father Abdi-Ashirta:
Letter 125: Aziru has again oppressed me …. My cities belong to Aziru, and he seeks after me … What are the dogs, the sons of Abdi-Ashirta, that they act according to their heart’s wish, and cause the cities of the king to go up in smoke?
Whilst that was an encouraging find, some of these idioms - including the two just mentioned (‘am I a dog’ and ‘[my] brother’) - were also used at the time of kings David and Solomon (cf. 1 Samuel 17:43 and 1 Kings 9:13), and the second at least is found again in the C6th BC Lachish letters, a fair spread of time of about half a millennium; so these idioms apparently were not peculiar to EA. I had also pointed out that ‘brother’ was a term used by Iarim-Lim of Iamkhad to the prince of Dêr in Mesopotamia; though not in a fraternal, but in a threatening, business-like context.
Velikovsky, as we saw earlier, had quoted another EA letter, too, in connection with the Old Testament, in which Rib-Addi had reported that Abdi-Ashirta had fallen seriously ill:
Letter 95: Abdi-Ashirta is very sick, who knows but that he will die?
About which Velikovsky commented: “He died on his sickbed, but not from his disease; he was killed”. Then, connecting all this with Elisha’s statement, Velikovsky was able to make this most striking observation:
In the only dialogue preserved in the Scriptures in which Hazael participates, there are three turns of speech that also appear in his [EA] letters. The context of the dialogue - the question of whether the king of Damascus would survive, and the statement that he, Hazael, the new king, would cause the cities of Israel to go up in smoke - is also preserved in the el-Amarna letters. It is therefore a precious example of the authenticity of the scriptural orations and dialogues.
While Dr. Velikovsky here had used the typical translation of 2 Kings 8:13, ‘… is thy servant a dog? …’, it more likely means that Hazael was a mere low-born commoner, not expecting to be elevated to the throne - what the ancients called “son of a nobody” (Akkadian: mār lā mamman), or “a dog”.
Thus Nabonidus, who became King of Babylon, had proclaimed himself in like terms: ‘I am Nabonidus, the only son, who has nobody. In my mind there was no thought of kingship’ (Beaulieu, Paul-Alain, The Reign of Nabonidus, King of Babylon. 556-539 B.C., 1989, p. 67).
First conclusion:
Hazael, king of Syria, is EA’s Aziru, king of Amurru, as Dr. Velikovsky had discovered.
So far so good.
But did Dr. Velikovsky also miss a trick here by not taking further his Aziru identification, to include the Irsu, or Arsa, of the Great Papyrus Harris (GPH) - whom Dr. David Rohl calls Aziru - enabling for Aziru (Hazael) to penetrate right into Egypt and overthrow the Egyptian gods, “… plundered their (the Egyptians’) possessions. They made gods like men and no offerings were presented in the temple”.
I think that he well may have.
2. Aziru (Hazael) and Irsu
In my thesis (2007, p. 226), I referred to:
…. the ‘Great Papyrus Harris’ which tells of an ‘Aziru’ (var. Irsu, Arsa), thought to have been a Syrian, or perhaps a Hurrian. …. I have already followed Velikovsky in identifying Hazael with EA’s Aziru; though Velikovsky, owing to the quirks of his revision, could not himself make the somewhat obvious (to my mind) connection between EA’s Aziru and Aziru of the Great Papyrus Harris. ….
And further, thesis pp. 227-228:
This document was perhaps inspired by Horemheb (e.g. Doherty calls it ‘Horemheb’s Manifesto’); Horemheb having carved his name on it over Tutankhamun’s name.
• The Papyrus Harris narrative continues on to the next phase, though closely connected to the first I believe, with the introduction of one ‘Aziru [the] Syrian’, or Hurrian, during those “empty years” (when the throne was considered effectively to have been vacant, or usurped). This Aziru I am convinced can only be EA’s Aziru (biblical Hazael).
(I have taken the liberty here of changing Rohl’s version of this person’s name, Arsa, to the equally acceptable variation of it, Aziru):
This was then followed by the empty years when [Aziru] – a certain Syrian – was with them as leader. He set the whole land tributary before him. He united his companions and plundered their (the Egyptians’) possessions. They made gods like men and no offerings were presented in the temple.
LeFlem, borrowing a phrase from Gardiner, has asked this question with reference to Aziru: …. “Who was this so-called ‘Syrian condottiere’?” LeFlem’s question by now I think emphatically answers itself: he was EA’s Aziru! This was the foreign takeover of Egypt, an action of the Sinai commission, to depose the irresponsible Akhnaton and his régime and to re-establish ma'at (order, status quo). Though Aziru’s involvement was not necessarily so highly regarded by later Ramessides.
[LeFlem, K. A., ‘Amenophis, Osarsiph and Arzu. More on the Third Intermediate Period of Egypt, SIS Workshop, vol. 5, no.1 (1982), p. 15. Cf. footnote 61 above].
Except Aziru and his army did not come to Egypt to, as I wrote above, “depose the irresponsible Akhnaton and his regime” (see, below, section: Aziru and Akhnaton).
Second conclusion: Aziru (Hazael), king of Syria, is GPH’s Syrian, Irsu.
3. Hazael’s Syrian origins
Why did the Lord choose Hazael, a Syrian, to assist the prophet Elijah and his coalition in the extermination of the House of Ahab and the pagan Baal worship? Presumably this Hazael was, prior to his rise to the throne, a typical Syrian official of the time, himself a worshipper of pagan gods.
Well, yes and no.
Hazael, also known as Na’aman, had been a typical Syrian of the time, the right-hand man of the mighty king, Ben-Hadad, who rested on his official’s arm when bowing down before the god Rimmon in the temple (2 Kings 5:18): ‘But may the Lord forgive your servant for this one thing: When my master enters the temple of Rimmon to bow down and he is leaning on my arm and I have to bow there also—when I bow down in the temple of Rimmon, may the Lord forgive your servant for this’.
Now, ironically, the god Rimmon was basically the same as Baal, whose religion Hazael would be commissioned at Sinai to help exterminate:
https://www.biblegateway.com/resources/encyclopedia-of-the-bible/Rimmon
“Rimmon …. A Syrian deity, a local representation of Hadad the god of storm, rain and thunder. In Syria this god is called “Baal,” ie the lord par excellence”.
The leprous Na’aman, as a pagan Syrian, would have considered the rivers of Syria to have been a gift of his gods, meaning that there is much more to his proud rejection of the prophet Elisha’s offer for a cure than simply bathing in the Jordan River.
What Elisha was asking of the Syrian was nothing less than to embrace the sacred river of Yahweh (once the river of Eden: Genesis 2:10) in preference to the rivers of his own gods. He was asking Na’aman to convert to the religion of Israel, to place his full trust in Yahweh.
This, Na’aman was not initially prepared to do (2 Kings 5:11-12):
But Naaman went away angry and said, ‘I thought that he would surely come out to me and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, wave his hand over the spot and cure me of my leprosy. Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? Couldn’t I wash in them and be cleansed?’ So he turned and went off in a rage.
Thanks to the intervention of his servants, Na’aman calmed down and did what the prophet Elisha had asked of him – no small ask, despite the simplicity of the action (vv. 13-14):
Naaman’s servants went to him and said, “My father, if the prophet had told you to do some great thing, would you not have done it? How much more, then, when he tells you, ‘Wash and be cleansed’!” So he went down and dipped himself in the Jordan seven times, as the man of God had told him, and his flesh was restored and became clean like that of a young boy.
More than half a millennium later, Jesus Christ, preaching in Nazareth, will recall this wondrous moment (Luke 4:27): ‘And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian’. These words so enraged those in the synagogue that they attempted to throw him over a cliff (vv. 28-29).
A vital connection between the converted Na’aman and King Hazael, chosen as a leader of the Sinai triumvirate (I Kings 19:15-16): “The Lord said to [Elijah], ‘Go back the way you came, and go to the Desert of Damascus. When you get there, anoint Hazael king over Aram. Also, anoint Jehu son of Nimshi king over Israel, and anoint Elisha son of Shaphat from Abel Meholah to succeed you as prophet’”, perfectly answers my earlier question: Why did the Lord choose Hazael, a Syrian, to assist the prophet Elijah and his coalition in the extermination of the House of Ahab and the pagan Baal worship?
No longer was Hazael (Na’aman) the typical pagan Syrian worshipper of Baal. He was now a thoroughgoing Yahwist (Kings 5:17): “… said Naaman, ‘please let me, your servant, be given as much earth as a pair of mules can carry, for your servant will never again make burnt offerings and sacrifices to any other god but the Lord’.”
As we are going to learn, the Syrian stuck to his promise, even to the extent of enforcing his newly-acquired religion upon idolatrous Egypt, whose supreme god (state deity) was the Baal-like Amun(-Ra).
No wonder that the Lord had chosen him!
Third conclusion: Aziru (Hazael) is the Syrian convert, Na’aman.
In 2 Kings 5:1, we learn that Na’aman was “a great in the sight of” his king, having delivered Ben-Hadad an important military victory: “Now Naaman was commander of the army of the king of Aram [Syria]. He was a great man in the sight of his master and highly regarded, because through him the Lord had given victory to Aram. He was a valiant soldier …”.
Ben-Hadad, EA’s Abdi-ashirta (Dr. Velikovsky), is generally considered to have been amongst the vassal kings of the EA era, who appeared to grovel before the Pharaohs and before several other Great Kings.
Nothing, I think, could be further from the truth, at least in the case of Abdi-ashirta.
As Ben-Hadad, he was what I have called ‘a master-king’, having 32 other kings in tow
(I Kings 20:1).
Now who in antiquity, to that stage, was like this?
The great Yarim-Lim of Yamkhad had had an impressive 20 kings in tow:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yarim-Lim_I
“By the time of his death, Yarim-Lim, had more than twenty kings as vassals and allies. According to Historian William J. Hamblin he was at the time the "mightiest ruler in the Near East outside of Egypt” ….
Ben-Hadad would have more than half of that again.
On this basis, I have concluded that Ben-Hadad/Abdi-ashirta, the master-king of his era, could not have been confined just to Syria (Damascus), but that he was the same as the famous EA correspondent, Pharaoh of Egypt, Nimmuria, better known as Amenhotep ‘the Magnificent’.
In other words, before the forceful incursion of Aziru into Egypt, his predecessor’s kingdom had already spilled over into that country, not to mention his control of much of the Levantine coast, threatening Byblos.
In various articles, I have merged this great Pharaoh into Amenhotep II, making him even greater (but reducing his III to a II).
We have briefly considered the good relationship between Ben-Hadad and his chief official, Hazael (Na’aman). It was so good that Ben-Hadad had no problems with his official going to Israel for a potential cure for his leprosy (2 Kings 5:5): “By all means, go,” the king of Aram replied. “I will send a letter to the king of Israel”.
Now, can we find an official with the same sort of very good relationship with pharaoh Amenhotep ‘the Magnificent’, an alter ego of mine for Ben-Hadad/Abdi-ashirta?
All our attention now turns to Egypt.
4. Hazael as Amenhotep son of Hapu
Yes, he is the enigmatic Amenhotep son of Hapu, fittingly a commoner, who rose to the highest honours in Egypt:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Amenhotep-son-of-Hapu
Amenhotep, son of Hapu, was a high official of the reign of Amenhotep III of ancient Egypt (reigned 1390–53 bce) [sic], who was greatly honoured by the king within his lifetime and was deified more than 1,000 years later during the Ptolemaic era.
Amenhotep rose through the ranks of government service, becoming scribe of the recruits, a military office, under Amenhotep III. While in the Nile River delta, Amenhotep was charged with positioning troops at checkpoints on the branches of the Nile to regulate entry into Egypt by sea; he also checked on the infiltration of Bedouin tribesmen by land. On one of his statues, he is called a general of the army.
Some time later, when he was placed in charge of all royal works, he probably supervised the construction of Amenhotep III’s mortuary temple at Thebes near modern Luxor, the building of the temple of Soleb in Nubia (modern Sudan), and the transport of building material and erection of other works. Two statues from Thebes indicate that he was also an intercessor in Amon’s temple and that he supervised the celebration of one of Amenhotep III’s Heb-Sed festivals (a renewal rite celebrated by the pharaoh after the first 30 years of his reign and periodically thereafter). The king honoured him by embellishing Athribis, his native city. Amenhotep III even ordered the building of a small funerary temple for him next to his own temple, a unique honour for a nonroyal person in Egypt.
Amenhotep was greatly revered by posterity, as indicated by the reinscription of the donation decree for his mortuary establishment in the 21st dynasty (1075–c. 950 bce) and his divine association with Asclepius, the Greek god of healing, during the Ptolemaic period.
[End of quote]
Though essentially based in Syrian Damascus, the mobile Ben-Hadad could have, during his decades-long reign, had a significant impact upon Egypt as well, he being well served in both significant locations by Hazael.
But how to explain why the now Yahwistic Hazael would murder his king and patron, Ben-Hadad?
That is not an easy question to answer.
Maybe he was prompted by Elisha’s telling him the shock news that he was going to be the King of Syria (Aram) - and/or realizing that he, being a commoner, was never going to be elected king, but would have to force the issue himself. Moreover, Ben-Hadad would now represent for Hazael the idolatrous world that he had been divinely commissioned to eradicate.
Our account of the Syrian “dog” made good, which received an enormous boost with the hero’s dramatic conversion to Yahwism, after experiencing a miracle, now goes into overdrive with the recognition that the brilliant Amenhotep son of Hapu, was to become the pharaoh known as Amenhotep IV (now my III), or Akhnaton (Akhenaten).
All of a sudden, the completely mysterious shroud that surrounds Akhnaton prior to his ascension to the throne of Egypt - for instance, did he spend his early years amongst the Mitannians? - has been lifted right away in the new knowledge that Akhnaton was indeed Amenhotep, but the one who had long served Amenhotep ‘the Magnificent’, who, as Ben-Hadad, had been well served by Hazael (Na’aman).
Fourth conclusion: Aziru (Hazael) was Amenhotep son of Hapu.
5. Hazael as the semi-legendary Osarseph
As now inimical towards his idolatrous master, Ben-Hadad, Hazael perhaps emerges in a garbled tradition from Josephus as the renegade Osarseph/Osarsiph, especially given the latter’s association with lepers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osarseph
According to Josephus, the story depicts Osarseph as a renegade Egyptian priest who leads an army of lepers and other "unclean" people against a pharaoh named Amenophis, who was the son of Ramses and the father of another Ramses, and whose original name was Sethos (Seti).[1] The pharaoh is driven out of the country and the leper-army, in alliance with the Hyksos (whose story is also told by Manetho) ravage Egypt, committing many sacrileges against the gods, before Amenophis returns and expels them. Towards the end of the story Osarseph changes his name to Moses.[2]
Fifth conclusion: Aziru (Hazael) could just possibly have been the model for Josephus’s garbled Osarseph.
There appears to be evidence that Amenhotep ‘the Magnificent’ showed some favouritism towards Atonism (Atenism):
https://media.australian.museum/media/dd/documents/New_Kingdom_Egypt_Amenhotep_III_to_the_Death_of_Ramesses_II_-_Activity_two.bc57759.pdf
“Amenhotep III’ would put an increasing emphasis on the worship of Aten elevating them from a minor god to a solar disc that provided life-giving energy to the world. He would give Aten royal patronage through temples such as Maru Aten and his own epithet Aten-tjehen, which means ‘the Dazling Sun Disk”. Whilst he did not promote Aten as an exclusive god, his successor Akhenaten would. Akhenaten made radical changes to the religious landscape of Egypt, imposing the status of the sun god Aten as an exclusive deity, replacing Egypt’s polytheistic belief system, and displacing the state-deity Amun-Re. This period became known as the Amarna period after Akhenaten’s relocation of the capital from Thebes to modern day Tell el-Amarna …”.
6. Hazael as pharaoh Akhnaton
By now I have written various articles connecting the Syrian convert Na’aman (Hazael) to the extraordinary pharaoh Akhnaton.
The following one covers much of it:
Akhnaton one of the most influential men who ever lived
https://www.academia.edu/103257906/Akhnaton_one_of_the_most_influential_men_who_ever_lived
“Novelists and historians, essayists, cultists, cranks, theologians,
archaeologists, documentary makers and Hollywood film makers all give
very different interpretations to his life, his beliefs, his personality,
his motivations, what he intended to do and what he did”.
Mohamed Hawass
What to make of pharaoh Akhnaton, his lovely wife, Nefertiti, and the city of Akhetaton?
Mohamed Hawass tells of the vast range of opinions expressed about Akhnaton, in his article:
Akhenaten and Nefertiti: The Controversy and the Evidence
(3) Free PDF Download - Akhenaten and Nefertiti: The Controversy and the Evidence | Mohamed Hawass - Academia.edu
(pp. 3-5):
…. Akhenaten has often been acclaimed not only as the founder of monotheism and the first man to worship a benevolent God, but as the first individual in history: he also emerges as one of the most controversial. Despite massive amounts being written about both him and Nefertiti, despite being amongst the few figures from Ancient Egypt to achieve lasting fame, few writers can give a shared overall opinion. They do not even agree on how to spell Akhenaten’s name, giving at least four choices! Some writers may agree on what some points mean, but even there wide disagreement seems more common. Novelists and historians, essayists, cultists, cranks, theologians, archaeologists, documentary makers and Hollywood film makers all give very different interpretations to his life, his beliefs, his personality, his motivations, what he intended to do and what he did. Fascination with Akhenaten has long ago reached the stage where that fascination itself has become the subject of a book, Dominic Montserrat’s interesting Akhenaten: History Fantasy and Ancient Egypt. (2003).
Montserrat asks the very good question why are people fascinated by an Egyptian pharaoh who died over three thousand years ago? First he remains an enigma and they always fascinate. This enigma takes a form, being also a mystery that essentially divides between resolving him to be either a hero or a villain, which was he? Many people still see personalities in this simple, divisive way. A third point is that his intensely dramatic story attracts creators of fiction, historians and their readers. The final reason concerns what may well be his great importance on influencing human history. His attempt to establish monotheism, and a seemingly benevolent monotheism for all humanity, may have been an isolated attempt that was several hundred years ahead of its time and died out unremembered and unknown – or it may have heavily influenced the development of Mosaic Judaism, which of course went on to influence Christianity and then Islam. Did the religion of the Aten stop without further influence? Or was there a now untraceable and developing path from Atenism into Judaism? The answer remains unknown; thin evidence exists for this, but that evidence offers no proof, only grounds for speculation. Even so, most of the world remains dominated by laws and religions which now express concept’s [sic] first expressed in Akhenaten’s Hymn to the Aten, inscribed on the wall of the Amarna tomb of Ay, a leading Atenist. ….
If the links are ever found this would make Akhenaten one of the most influential men who ever lived. It would also change our perceptions of the origins of the world’s dominant religions.
Much of this theological development may have come from Nefertiti. While some consensus on Nefertiti exists, the listing below gives some idea of how numerous, divergent and oppositional views of Akhenaten are. This is of course simplified as many writers are cautious in expressing opinions. Others allow for mixtures of the views listed below.
Akhenaten was a visionary and a religious genius aiming to unite all the peoples of his empire in a rule of peace. He was an internationalist and a pacifist.
Akhenaten was a short sighted political leader who probably could not see that his empire was disintegrating. If he could see he did not care.
Akhenaten was a great man, hundreds of years ahead of his time, brought down by small minded people.
Akhenaten was a naïve fool and perhaps a lunatic, who devastated Egypt and had to be stopped.
Akhenaten was a liberator, aiming to establish a humane religion based in one benevolent God who would overcome the darkness and fear that came from superstition.
Akhenaten was a tyrant and a megalomaniac, enforcing a cruel religion with a god he created as a reflection of himself.
Akhenaten was a uxorious husband and a devoted family man to his children.
Akhenaten was a bisexual, a womaniser and an incestuous paedophile who exiled Nefertiti.
Akhenaten was a true and original revolutionary, rapidly changing Egyptian religion, society and culture.
Akhenaten was only developing ideas and trends that had emerged in his father’s reign.
Akhenaten was the first monotheist.
Akhenaten was not a monotheist. He allowed other religions and never denied the existence of other gods.
Fiction writers give us many such views and all of these views have some basis in evidence. In Mika Waltari’s Sinuhe The Egyptian (1949) Akhenaten talks like a 1930s peace pledge parson, making naïve sentiments about peace, the brotherhood of man and the love of God. While he dreams of such a world his undefended kingdom experiences invasion and near civil war rips Egypt apart. The same idea emerges in the 1954 film version of that book, The Egyptian. Both these works show a mentality influenced by the 1930s failure of those European leaders who wanting peace, and in striving for that, failed to contain Hitler. These 1950s depictions also reflect the naivety of those in the west who hoped for peace during the Cold War. Coming from the opposite direction, seeing humanist calls for peace and equality as desirable, something of this mentality seems evident in historian F. Gladstone Bratton’s admiring 1961 work The Heretic Pharaoh. Here Akhenaten’s humanity and genius is emphasised and he seems to be a figure striving for peace and international goodwill. In Allen Drury’s A God Against the Gods (1976) and the sequel Return to Thebes (1977) this novelist strives to create an epic explaining the conflicting evidence. Here Akhenaten emerges as a well-intentioned religious genius, but a disastrously inept politician unable to make judgements on realities.
He is naïve and his homosexual relationship with Smenkhkare alienates Nefertiti, the mainstay of his religion. Something of the mid 1970s disillusionment with the idealism of the Vietnam War era comes through in Drury’s two books. By 1984 when Pauline Gedge’s The Twelfth Transforming was published, the world was very disillusioned with alternative religions, utopias, and radical messiahs of assorted kinds. This attitude comes through in her portrayal of Akhenaten, a simpering, egocentric, hideously deformed megalomaniac with a taste for incest. He has to be stopped before his wild schemes to transform Egypt destroys that civilisation. By the time this novel was written Akhenaten had been the subject of over a hundred novels. …. Clearly writers perceive Akhenaten not only through interpreting primary source evidence, but through the developments of their own eras and the influence of the dominant or striking personalities of their times.
[End of quote]
I myself had once, in a university thesis (2007), simply dismissed Akhnaton as “the oddest of pharaohs” (Volume One, p. 210), without having been able - {nor even really being concerned about it} - to penetrate the mystery.
What I did fully realise back then, though, and am still convinced of to this day (13th June, 2023), was that any mystery surrounding Akhnaton and his city of Akhetaton would be more easily solved were one to embrace Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky’s downward revision of this era (as argued in Ages in Chaos and Oedipus and Ikhnaton) to the C9th BC (conventional dating).
This massive alteration brings with it a radical new perspective.
Akhnaton’s Hymn to the Aten, so like in many ways King David’s Psalm 104 - as many have recognised - far from having influenced the Hebrew version, would have post-dated the latter by over a century.
So, if anyone was doing the influencing here, then it was King David.
And that chronological fact alone would require a modification of the suggestion in the article of Mohamed Hawass above - based upon a conventional dating of Akhnaton to the C14th BC - that Akhnaton’s “… attempt to establish monotheism … may have heavily influenced the development of Mosaic Judaism …”.
Apart from the fact that Moses preceded Akhnaton by a good half a millennium, the best one could say is that Akhnaton had been influenced by (and had not influenced) a “Mosaic Judaism” filtered through an updated Davidic Judaism.
What one might be able to say, and some indeed have said it, is that the religious monotheism of pharaoh Akhnaton is akin to that one reads about in the Pentateuch, and which kings David and Solomon had inherited. The latter brought some of this to Egypt where he, as Senenmut, famously officiated as ‘the power behind the throne’ of the woman pharaoh, Hatshepsut. On this, see e.g. my article:
Solomon and Sheba
(4) Solomon and Sheba | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu
So who, then, was this, the most unusual character in ancient Egyptian history, Akhnaton?
And from whence did he come?
To answer the last question first, as King Hezekiah had done in the instance of Isaiah’s uncomfortable interrogation of him regarding the Babylonian envoys of King Merodach-baladan (Isaiah 39:3), Akhnaton was a Syrian, not a native Egyptian.
Hence he was geographically closer, than were the Egyptians, to the Israelites, and to their prophets and teachings - during the era of the Divided Kingdom of kings Ahab (with Jezebel) and the godly Jehoshaphat.
Not entirely surprising, then, that we find it likely that:
Akhnaton’s Chief Minister [was] an Israelite?
(4) Akhnaton’s Chief Minister an Israelite? | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu
The one who came to be called Akhnaton (meaning “Effective for the Aten”) in Egypt - {and whose prenomen would be Neferkheperure (Waenre) (meaning “Beautiful are the Forms of Re, the Unique one of Re”), which name (Neferkheperure) is the occasionally-met variant, Naphuria, or Napkhuria, of the El Amarna correspondence} - was, in fact, a Syrian military man and foreigner with regard to Egypt.
That would explain also why his new city of Akhetaton (meaning “Horizon of the Aten”) was like a military camp, and why many of its inhabitants were ‘Asiatic’ (read Syro-Palestinian):
Akhetaton was ‘an armed camp’
(4) Akhetaton was 'an armed camp' | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu
So, any naïve suggestion that pharaoh Akhnaton was like some ancient version of New Age “pacificist” (a word we encountered above) is always going to be very wide of the mark – for any ruler in ancient times, let alone for one like Akhnaton, who obviously flaunted his military.
Like the prophet Jonah, before he could minister to the Assyrians, the Syrian Na’aman must needs be ‘baptismally’ immersed in the water before he was deemed “clean” (2 Kings 5:14) enough to spread his monotheism (to the Egyptians). Verse 17: ‘… please let me, your servant, be given as much earth as a pair of mules can carry, for your servant will never again make burnt offerings and sacrifices to any other god but the LORD’. This:
Akhnaton’s Theophany
(8) Akhnaton's Theophany | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu
is, I believe, the key to understanding pharaoh Akhnaton and his monotheistic Atenism.
Sixth conclusion: Aziru (Hazael) was Pharaoh Akhnaton (Akhenaten).
