The Origins of Monotheism

Focus on Akhenaten's "Hymn to the Sun" and the Leiden Hymns; Genesis 1–11

"[The literature of the ancient Hebrews] is founded on the idea of one God, the Creator of all things, all—powerful and just—a conception of the divine essence and the government of the universe so simple that to those of us who have inherited it, it seems obvious." - Introduction, The Invention of Writing and the Earliest Literatures, p. 5

"Akhenaten emphasized the universal supremacy of the sun, and the images he uses to evoke the scope and death of Aten's powers suggest an emerging monotheism. . . . The poem cycle is in large part built up by the repetition of titles such as these that are associated with individual gods. The effect, however, is to create the image of a god who is greater and more powerful than all individual gods." - Introduction, Ancient Egyptian Poetry, p. 41
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The earliest surviving literature records an apparently universal human need to understand the sources of power in the cosmos and an apparently instinctive sense that power compels worship. In the ancient Near East, where ideas circulated across the body of water the Egyptians called the "Great Green Sea" and Romans the "Mediterranean," we can chart a gradual shift from polytheism to monotheism. This map gives some sense of how close to each other the cultures of the ancient world actually were.
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Evolving Notions of the Divine

Gods and mythology

Our understanding of ancient mythology is far from perfect, not only because evidence is scanty and incomplete but also because mythologies by their very nature describe the universe in magical and metaphorical terms. They are pre-rational, nonlinear, and embrace mutually contradictory narratives, some of which apply at some moments but not others. But all mythological systems are codes that signify human beings' experiences of the vast and frightening world in which they find themselves.

Typically, the primal gods and goddesses represent the sky, land, and ocean; often, they are seen as the progenitors of families in conflict, families in which animal and human features mingle. And frequently, the most powerful of human beings—kings and their families—are represented as having special links to the divine.

In the millennia before the common era, a fascination with mythologies and their representation of reality through stories about the gods' convoluted adventures begins to shift to a new interest in the interaction between the human and the divine and the responsibilities each has to the other.

Emerging monotheism

Monotheism today is primarily associated with the Peoples of the Book—the Jews, Christians, and Muslims who trace their belief in a single, all-powerful God to a man born Abram, who became Abraham. But before Abraham smashed his father's idols, an Egyptian pharaoh excised the names of all but one divinity from the stone monuments that he briefly had under his control. In other parts of the ancient world, even in South Asia, where the monotheist's devotion to a single, exclusive god to whom everyone ought to pray never took hold, we see the sophisticated, increasingly perceived pantheons composed of individual divinities in charge of discrete forces of nature as personifications of a unitary divine power in which all cosmic powers were united.

We can make explicit connections among the major cultures studied in Volume A. Certainly, the monotheism of the Hebrews reflects and reacts to the influence of their immediate Egyptian and Mesopotamian neighbors.

Egyptian | Mesopotamian | Greek | Hebraic | South Asian

Egyptian Gods: Towards Abstraction

"During the reign of Amen-hotpe IV—Pharaoh Akhenaten of the eighteenth dynasty, who reigned from 1375 to 1358 B.C.—the royal family elevated worship of the sun disc, Aten, above that of other deities and of Amun-Re, the imperial and universal god of the New Kingdom in particular." (p. 41)

Akhenaten's reforms were short-lived. Yet both his "Hymn to the Sun" and the Leiden Hymns, composed in a slightly later era, reveal how perceiving the ruling divinity as an abstraction changes the emphasis of religious thought.

Akhenaten's "Hymn to the Sun" and the Leiden Hymns speak of several gods but praise the sun as the supreme creative force. Local climate and landscape play an important part in any culture's worldview. The interaction of the overflowing Nile River (acknowledged as the god of the river's yearly flooding, Hapy, in the poems) and the baking rays of the sun made Egypt a rich and prosperous country. Like all religious systems, traditional Egyptian belief was therefore preoccupied with the cycle of life and death, to which the great pyramids and tombs attest, and with perpetuating the fertility of the land. Many of the images in the "Hymn to the Sun" and the Leiden Hymns provide verbal equivalents of the concerns made manifest in the visual arts of ancient Egypt, as illustrated below.

The gods are everywhere

References to the gods are ubiquitous in ancient Egyptian writing. The Leiden Hymns begin by celebrating one of the several sun gods of ancient Egypt, "Horus of the Twin Horizons." The lovesick female speaker of one of the love lyrics, "I was simply off to see Nefrus my friend," begs help from "Mother Hathor" (a goddess in the form of a cow) when she fears the young man for whom she longs will see her:

Make me a small creeping thing
To slip by his eye
(sharp as Horus')
unseen. (ll. 11–14)

Here is an image of the goddess Hathor in human form with the Pharaoh Sethi I.
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Here is Horus, the falcon-headed god of dawn and dusk, represented as the protector of the Pharaoh.
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Here is an elegant artistic representation of the Eye of Horus, which, along with the Eye of Re, figured into the elaborate mythological explanations of the transference of power when one king died and the next succeeded. The Eye of Horus, like Horus himself, represented the morning star.
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One theory links the sun and the moon to these eyes, which were robbed from their owners and restored as power moved from one ruler to the next. In visual terms, such representations of astronomical phenomena appear to prefigure the kind of abstraction embodied in the sign of Aten, the sun disc that Akhenaten made supreme.

The elaborate creation story of Ancient Egypt that describes the movement of these disembodied eyes is abandoned by Akhenaten when he praises the sun as the creator of all things. However, the "Hymn to the Sun" does not offer a systematic description of the process of creation with which we are familiar, such as the one beginning the Hebrew Book of Genesis.

Amun, another sun god, was more important to the conservative priestly class, whose enmity Akhenaten earned for displacing them and their god.
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Personalizing the relationship between human and divine

As we see in his "Hymn to the Sun," Akhenaten also personalized his relationship to Aten, an abstract symbol of the sun's power, in ways that shocked the priests, who previously had performed ritual functions that Akhenaten took into his own hands. Thus he ends the hymn, addressing the sun but also embedding in his praise an advertisement for himself:

        Then, Shine reborn! Rise splendidly!
        my Lord, let life thrive for the King!
        For I have kept pace with your every footstep
        Since you first measured ground for the world.
        Lift up the creatures of earth for your Son
        Who came forth from your Body of Fire! (ll. 154–59)

This image of Akhenaten sacrificing a duck was a new departure in the depiction of the relationship between the human and the divine.
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Here is another unprecedented representation of Akhenaten, Nefertiti, his queen, and their daughters sacrificing to the disk.
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Mesopotamian Gods: Taming Animal and Natural Powers

The gods as natural forces

These figures are votive statues, showing the importance of worship in ancient Sumeria and the efforts individual human beings made to show their devotion to the gods.
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The Epic of Gilgamesh begins with the creation of the hero by the gods. Gilgamesh is "terrifying like a great wild bull. Two thirds they made him god and one third man." This type of imagery can be seen in this great statue of a human-headed winged bull and winged lion, dating from the Neo-Assyrian period (883–839 B.C.).
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The gods themselves are linked to different natural realms and are deeply involved in human activities. They include "Shamash the glorious sun . . . Adad the god of the storm . . . the god of the firmament Anu . . . and Ishtar the goddess of love" (p. 13).

Ishtar (an Akkadian name) is another form of Inanna (the Sumerian goddess of love, associated with Venus. The Greek Aphrodite, goddess of love, is clearly related to these divinities.) Here is an image of Inanna, whose sexual characteristics are carefully depicted in this statuette.
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Here is Ishtar receiving worship, carved into a cylinder seal.
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Taming natural forces

This famous plaque is attached to the bull-headed lyre from the Royal Tombs of Ur. The top image shows the importance of taming the wild in the form of a hero who has exerted control over two bulls. Many of the episodes in the Epic of Gilgamesh deal with taming. Enkidu is brought into being by Aruru, the goddess of creation, in order to repress the arrogance of Gilgamesh. Sexual love domesticates and urbanizes Enkidu, who is then brought to the temple of Anu and of Ishtar. When Enkidu and Gilgamesh seek to exert human power over the forces of nature—to tame the wild—they discover the limits of mortality.
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The flood story

In what is thought to be a late addition to the compilation of stories that make up the Epic of Gilgamesh, the story of Utnapishtim and the great flood is introduced. Gilgamesh's encounter with Utnaphistim reinforces his understanding of death, but the flood story itself, as it is told here, is also a narrative about taming. The father god Enlil's desire to rid the world of human noise pollution provokes a serious moral discussion among the other gods, who can be seen as taming their own powers in the wake of the destruction wrought by the flood. The connection to the flood story in Genesis helps us see how ideas of monotheism, with their emphasis on moral responsibility, evolved in the Ancient Near East.

Greece: The Anthropomorphic Gods and the Logos

The family of the gods

Readers of Homer are familiar with the Olympian gods, who are descended from Gaea, "Earth," the archetypal mother who without a male consort gives birth to Uranus the Sky and Pontus the Sea. By mating with her offspring, she brings forth the gods. Zeus is the grandson whom Gaea protects when his father Kronos tries to wrest him from his mother, Kronos's sister, Rhea. Kronos has been systematically swallowing his children before any one of them can overthrow him—as has been prophesied. This kind of family struggle lies behind the loss and restoration of the eye of Horus in Egyptian mythology, and has its counterparts in other Indo-European mythological systems as well.

Most of us recognize images of the Olympian gods, who, like the gods of Egypt and Mesopotamia, rule over different natural forces. Zeus is most powerful because he controls the thunderbolts, and he is frequently depicted as preparing to hurl one, as in this powerful statuette from Dodona, dating from about 470 B.C.
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This great bronze statue depicts either Poseidon or Zeus in a similar posture.
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The gods can also transform themselves into natural forms at will in order to impose their desire on human beings. Here is an image of Zeus in the form of a swan, ravishing Leda.
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The influence of climate

Poseidon, who rules the sea, is the brother of Zeus and Hera (the goddess of marriage). The Olympian sun god (Apollo) and the moon goddess (Artemis) are the children of Zeus, and not quite his equal. Although the sun is paramount in Egypt, reflecting the exigencies of its climate, in the Greek isles and across the Aegean greater respect is given to storms and earthquakes, and, accordingly, the prime figures in the pantheon are Zeus and Poseidon.

Taking responsibility for one's own actions

Although Homer's gods are every bit as involved in human action as are the gods in the Epic of Gilgamesh, they seek to disabuse human beings of the notion that the gods have total control over their actions. Both the Iliad and the Odyssey begin with disclaimers by Zeus, who insists that human beings are responsible for their own fates, and it is notable that Athena makes suggestions to Achilles and Odysseus rather than gives them commands.

Approaching the gods with skepticism

Illustration of a sacrifice
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In the Homeric poems, sensible people make sacrifices to the gods, but they don't pray to them with intense devotion. Indeed, the idea of a unitary "Greece" is unknown to Homer, whose heroes are kings of small cities and islands. These societies lacked the social, political, and religious infrastructure that made an Akhenaten possible as well as dangerous.

Hundreds of years after the Homeric epics were written down, in Ionia and some of the small Greek cities, notably Athens, schools of philosophy arose questioning the power of the gods over human actions. Protagoras of Abdera, whose most famous pronouncement, "Man is the measure of all things," dates from the 430s (when Socrates was also active) wrote in On the Gods:

With regard to the gods, I cannot feel sure either that they are or that they are not, nor what they are like in figure; for there are many things that hinder sure knowledge, the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life. - Quoted in Moses Hadas, A History of Greek Literature, 1950, p. 72

The great Athenian playwrights were formed in this climate of thought. When Aeschylus and his contemporaries speak of "the will of Zeus" (Agamemnon, l. 1513), they are no longer thinking in the anthropomorphic mode. Philosophy was looking for a new terminology. No one in fifth- and fourth-century B.C. Greece theorized monotheism as we understand it, but writers and teachers questioned the kind of control exercised by the gods who are assigned such wonderfully vivid and idiosyncratic personalities in Homer's poems.

The Logos

Thinkers like Xenophon and Heraclitus began to posit an impersonal force, an "Intelligence," as the organizing principle of the cosmos, which "does and does not want to be called Zeus" (quoted in Boardman, Griffin, and Murray, The Oxford History of theClassical World, 1986, p.118). Another name for that intelligence was the Logos, the Greek term for "word," which was to forge a significant link between Greek philosophy's increasingly skeptical view of the anthropomorphic gods and the complex Christian monotheism articulated in the opening of the Gospel According to St. John.

Ancient India: The Many and the One

Direct and frequent contact was established between Greece and India as a result of the invasion of India by Alexander of Macedon in 326 B.C., but it is not necessary to assume any direct influence passing between the two cultures to note a well-established skepticism about the nature and role of the gods in both. By about 1000 B.C., questions about creation and its purpose were posed in one of the creation hymns of the Rig Veda: "Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced?" (p. 882).

Alongside the extraordinary diversity and complexity of Hindu gods, the Upanishads speak of "a single divine essence" (p. 882), showing that a kind of monotheism can coexist with a multitude of individual gods in an all-embracing spiritual culture.

Illustrations of Vishnu

This depiction of a god in human form embracing a lover would be inconceivable in a monotheistic culture. Yet this colorful eighteenth-century Indian painting of the god Krishna, an avatar of Vishnu, typifies the manifestations of divinity in various embodied forms in Hinduism and other South Asian religions.
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This beautiful eleventh-century sculpture from Bangladesh shows the god Vishnu in human form with some of his avatars.
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This illustration of the lingam stone, or egg of the Brahman, is an abstract shape that represents the singular divine power from which all other manifestations flow.
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Judaism: "You Shall Have No Other Gods before Me"

Judaism defined itself in opposition to the idol-worshipping cultures of Mesopotamia and Canaan. Although God walks in his garden and communicates through angels in the early books of the Bible, the essential monotheistic conception of the divinity means that in Jewish tradition, there are no images of God. Instead, the word with which He creates the world provides a characteristic visual representation of His involvement in the world. Here is an illustration of a Bible scroll, the repository of God's words and works that the People of the Book revere (but do not literally worship).
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The monotheistic tradition: Creating the world

There are two sequential creation narratives in the opening chapters of Genesis. In the first, a highly disciplined God proceeds in careful linear fashion to organize the universe. The monotheist's single god takes no physical role in creation. By the power of speech alone all living things are created and put into categories of being. The occasional plural reference may mark the residue of an older, repressed polytheism ("Let us make man in our image, after our likeness," p. 57), as do the moments when God seems to consult with colleagues ("Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech," p.63), but a new relationship between human and divine is clearly established.

The monotheistic tradition: The divine parent

In the second creation story and the subsequent early chapters of the Bible, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and his sons all must make painful choices and live with guilt and sorrow if they err. The portentous dialogues in which the Hebrew God engages his creations sound to our ears like the difficult discussions that we all have had with our parents: in the beginning, God seems to want to establish a familial intimacy with human beings. The complicated story of the creation of Adam and Eve invites various interpretations of gender relations and appropriate roles within the family. Ambiguity and choice enter the divine scheme.

The monotheistic tradition: Moral questions

The early chapters of Genesis put a premium on moral and cerebral activity. It is not sufficient simply to make a sacrifice, as Homer's characters so routinely do; Cain makes a sacrifice, but God knows that something in Cain's spirit negates the act. This monotheistic God requires of humanity a searching introspection that cannot be illustrated or enacted in material terms. As human actions prove disappointing, God begins to examine His motives even as man must. In the flood story, which the writers of Genesis based on the same story we read in Gilgamesh, this is perhaps the most profound change. Where Enlil lashes out because he is annoyed by the cacophony of the human race, the Hebrew God "saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thought of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart" (p. 60). This extraordinary inner life endows an all-powerful creator with a sensibility like his creatures'. Where Akhenaten proclaims his direct link to the sun, the God of the Bible acknowledges His own likeness to his creation.

The monotheistic tradition: The rainbow covenant

When the flood recedes, a rainbow becomes the sign of the covenant, of mutual responsibilities. For the Greeks, the rainbow is represented by the figure of Iris, who serves as a messenger between gods and people. For the Hebrews, the rainbow represents the cosmic imprint of God's concern for humanity, but as a sign to be understood and not as a physical intermediary.