Biblical Hebrew Blog by ClassicalHebrew.com

Early Years

Akhenaten was born into privilege and security. His father Amenhotep III had reigned long, promoting a prosperous Egypt by replacing the damaging military campaigns of the past with international diplomacy for the future. He was a figure who upheld and believed in the traditional religious systems. Amun-Re was viewed and worshipped as the head deity of the nation and around him were a deluge of minor deities of varying importance; a situation also known as a pantheon. The name even of Pharaoh himself reflected this traditional reverence of Amun-Re, with his own name meaning “Amun is Content”. This name, and the traditions linked with it were passed onto his heir, Amenhotep IV who began reigning in the 14^th century BCE.

Amenhotep becomes Akhenaten

However when his son, Amenhotep IV took the throne, he began to make a series of changes that would rock his country to the core. The first step he took was to move the capital city of Egypt from its traditional seat in Thebes (modern day Luxor) to a new site called Akhetaten (el-Amarna). The next step was to change his name to Akhenaten (meaning Effective spirit of Aten), and establishing the Aten “light” as the ‘one god’ of Egypt. The idea of “oneness” in Egyptian religion is not rare, however what is rare is insisting on its exclusivity, which is what Akhenaten did in his promotion of the Aten and his rejection of Amun.

Egyptian Monotheism?

It may be safely stated that Akhenaten’s theology was a radical innovation of prevailing ideas that already existed in Egyptian religion. However is it fair to say the worship of the Aten was “true monotheism”? One offer is that this form of worship at best represents Primal Monotheism; meaning that there exists one Supreme god and all the other gods are but an aspect of this single deity. Another view sees this as plain henotheism, a head deity amongst lesser ones.

However one aspect of Aten worship that one finds intriguing is the state-sponsored destruction of the traditional gods that were still apart of the religious scene. This reminds us of the religious reforms of Kings’ Hezekiah (2 Kings 18) and Josiah (2 Kings 23) of Judah who destroyed various ‘Canaanite’ religious features in an effort to consolidate worship of Yahweh in Jerusalem, a policy which at its core was to promote Yahweh as the one true God.

Like many middle-eastern languages, Hebrew is a member of the family known as the Semitic languages. This name follows the biblical description of the post-deluvian divide between the sons of Noa – Shem, Ham and Japheth, who divided according to their nations and languages. The acknowledgement of this fact and the investigation of the languages surrounding biblical Hebrew can assist us in better understanding the language we strive to learn.

Like any family, a family of languages is defined when we have the ability to define a common source from which all the members of the family evolved, and a set of rules that can explain the different stages of evolution and the outcomes of these processes in the different languages. In the case of Hebrew, the joint ancestor is a conjectured language, of which we have no actual proof, labeled as “proto-Semitic.” This archetypal language developed over many centuries, branched off into many smaller branches, and eventually became many different languages, all similar in some respects but also very different in others, as distant relatives often are. An example of the close kinship between all these different languages can be found in joint vocabulary such as the consonants mlk, which denote the word “king” in many of the members of the Semitic family of languages.

Hebrew is defined as part of the more specific family of North-Western Semitic languages, a branch including Arabic, Aramaic, Canaanite languages and Ugaritic. Most similar to Hebrew are of course her fellow Canaanite languages (or possibly even dialects) such as Ammonite and Moabite. These languages have close vocabulary, grammatical and morphological ties. For example, in all these languages, a long ā sound found in other Semitic languages becomes a long ō sound, a clear-cut characteristic that enables us to identify whether or not a language is Canaanite.

Despite the fact that it is not a Canaanite language, Ugaritic is extremely close to Biblical Hebrew. Seeing that the Ugaritic culture is closely tied with the Canaanite, this is a good example of the fact that culture and language often go together and that the influences of one are often discovered when researching the other.

Once becoming a language of its own, Hebrew also underwent many changes and influences, from early Biblical Hebrew – the earliest recorded form – to Second Temple Hebrew, influenced immensely by Aramaic, the Hebrew of the Rabbis, and finally, Modern Hebrew.

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