Aten living daily content in the sky,\r\nYour offspring, your august son, Sole one of Re;\r\nThe Son of Re does not cease to extol his beauty,\r\nNeferkheprure, Sole-one-of-Re.<\/em>\r\nI am your son who serves you, who exalts your name.\r\n\r\nLichtheim, Literature<\/em>, 2:91-92.<\/cite><\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nThe theological implication of this is important.\u00a0 James Hoffmeier summarizes this situation as \u201cthe anointing of the king to make him the Son of God.\u201d\u00a0 Kingship in Atenism is the manifestation of the incarnate Aten. The reference to a unique son speaks to a common theme in ancient Near Eastern literature, which is the idea of an offspring that will carry the legacy of the parent.\u00a0 This motif appears in the inheritance laws of ancient Mesopotamia.\u00a0 It also is found in early Israelite thought with the promise of a son to Abraham even though he already had a son in Ishmael.\u00a0 In ancient Egypt, inheritance often was associated with the passing on of a title or occupation as well as property.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nAtenism differed from classical Egyptian thought in the belief of creation.\u00a0 Traditional Egyptian belief focused upon creation myth as foundational.\u00a0 But Atenism disregarded physical creation altogether while maintaining the Aten as creator.\u00a0 Akhenaten extolled the Aten as the \u201ccreator of all, who makes them live, Great Falcon, bright of plume; a beetle who raised himself, he who was self-created, he who was never born.\u201d\u00a0 Atenism accepted the idea of immanence in the act of continuous creation.\u00a0 The substance and breath of the Aten made every living being alive.\u00a0 \u201cYou are One, yet a million lives are in you, To make them live <you give> the breath of life to their noses.”\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nAten was bidirectionally eternal.\u00a0 That is the Aten was in eternity past the same as he is today and going forward will remain the same.\u00a0 Thus, the answer to the question of origins always centered upon manifestations of the Aten.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nThis sort of divinity was not quite henotheism in the classical sense nor was it any kind of monotheism per se<\/em>.\u00a0 Because Atenism popularized \u201cthe One and the Many\u201d theology, Akhenaten’s religious reforms transformed Egyptian religion from a plurality of gods to one deity radiating from a single source incorporating the substance of all other gods. Atenism was the ultimate deconstruction of deity that Amenhotep III had first attempted, carving out of Egyptian religion a monolatrous pantheism.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nThe preceding\u00a0 preview was an edited extract taken from a book chapter recently submitted to Oxford University Press.<\/em>\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have recently given a lot of thought into the relationship between Atenism and monotheism.\u00a0 Donald B. Redford (1976) described Atenism as after having stripped mythology from Egyptian religion, all that remained “were the concepts of universalism, dependence of life on the sun, transcendence, creativity, cosmic regularity, and absolute power,” concluding Atenism was a monotheism.\u00a0…<\/p>\n

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