During this period, the myth of Osiris became an object of fascination far beyond the borders of Egypt, resonating with dualistic religious views from Persia and Mesopotamia. Seth represented the destructive principle par excellence. On the earthly plane, Osiris is the Nile river and Isis the soil fertilized by it, and the cyclical floods of the Nile are symbolically equivalent to the death and resurrection of Osiris, while a poor flood, leading to drought and famine, was one of the disasters wrought by Seth, the god of the desert. The peasants of the Nile Valley placed themselves under the protection of Osiris and Isis, while Seth was perceived as the god of foreigners and nomads, be they shepherds, hunters, caravan merchants, or invaders.
There is an obvious symmetry between the Egyptian myth of Osiris and Seth, and the biblical story of Cain and Abel. Cain, the elder, is sedentary and cultivates fertile lands like Osiris, while Abel, the younger, is a nomadic shepherd inhabiting arid lands like Seth. Yet the biblical god acts opposite to the Egyptian pantheon: he upsets the social order by favoring the younger brother, thus provoking the elder’s legitimate sense of unfairness. As in a mirror image of the Egyptian myth, the Bible has the elder brother kill his younger brother.
The epilogue added to the Cain-Abel story reinforces the symmetry. Like Osiris, the murdered Abel gets a new life of some kind, when Yahweh grants to Adam and Eve “another offspring, in place of Abel.” And this third son, a substitute or alter ego of the second, is named Seth (Genesis 4:25). This homonymy cannot be a coincidence, but rather strong evidence that the Cain-Abel story, in the form that has come down to us, is dependent on the Osiris-Seth myth. This fits the hypothesis of a biblical redaction in the Hellenistic period. The Yahwist scribes have deliberately reversed the Egyptian myth, by shifting the good role to the younger brother Abel, and naming his resurrected alter-ego after the Egyptian god Seth. Must we conclude that the Levites, motivated by their incurable Egyptophobia, have chosen to redeem the mortal enemy of Egypt’s national god and identify with him? We are encouraged in this conclusion by the many other biblical stories built on the inversion of Egyptian ones that we shall encounter further on.
Adding additional support to that exegetic interpretation, we find that the Hellenistic Egyptians did ascribe to the Jews a sympathy for Seth, which fueled their Judeophobia. According to Plutarch, some Egyptians believed that, after having been banned from Egypt by the gods, Seth wandered in Palestine where he fathered two sons, Hierosolymos and Youdaios, that is, “Jerusalem” and “Judah.” In other words, these Egyptians saw the Jews as “sons of Seth.” There was also a persistent rumor in the Greco-Roman world that in their temple in Jerusalem, the Jews worshiped a golden donkey’s head, the donkey being the animal symbol of Seth. A contemporary of Plutarch, the Roman author Apion, accredited that rumor, which Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, for his part, denied in his treatise Against Apion. Tacitus also mentioned it in his Histories, while noting that Roman general Pompey found no donkey’s head when entering the Holy of Holies in 63 BCE.
Labeling the Jews as worshippers or descendants of Seth may have been an expression of anti-Semitism (to use an anachronistic term). But it is not without historical basis. In the first century CE, Flavius Josephus, relying on the History of Egypt written by the Egyptian Manetho three centuries earlier, identifies the Hebrews with the Hyksos, a confederation of nomadic warriors from Palestine, who reigned over Lower and Middle Egypt for more than a century before being repelled. Josephus estimates that the 480,000 Hyksos fleeing Egypt back to their ancestors’ homeland in Palestine were none others than the twelve Israelite tribes. These Hyksos distinguished themselves by the exclusive worship of Seth. Their King Apophis, reads a slightly later papyrus, “chose for his lord the god Seth. He did not worship any other deity in the whole land except Seth.”37 The Hyksos seem to have considered Seth as a jealous god, since they “destroyed the temples of the gods,” according to Manetho quoted by Josephus. The Hyksos’ tyrannical and brutal government left Egyptians with traumatic memories. Unlike Flavius, Manetho had not identified the Hyksos with the Jews but had simply mentioned that, before being expelled from Egypt as lepers, the Jews had settled in Avaris, the former capital of the Hyksos, consecrated to Seth.
Osirism versus Judaism
The Pentateuch gives us the Jewish viewpoint on Egyptian religion, a viewpoint that Christians have inherited with the Book. To understand the Egyptian viewpoint on Jewish religion, let us delve more deeply into the significance of the Osiris myth, which can be regarded as the cornerstone of Egyptian civilization from the beginning of the first millennium BCE. When he visited Egypt in 450 BCE, Herodotus noted that “Egyptians do not all worship the same gods, except for Isis and Osiris; these two all without distinction worship” (Histories II.17). Until the triumph of Christianity, no other myth contributed more to shaping the spirit of the inhabitants of the Nile Valley, from peasants to pharaohs. On it was crystallized the national identity of the world’s oldest state, as well as individuals’ metaphysical hopes in the most afterlife-oriented civilization ever.
From a strictly narrative viewpoint, the basic plot of the myth follows a universal pattern, best known in the story of Hamlet adapted by Shakespeare from a Scandinavian legend: Osiris is King Hamlet, murdered treacherously by his brother, and Horus is his son, the young prince Hamlet junior, commissioned by the ghost of his father to avenge the killing. Seth is the exact equivalent of the treacherous Claudius, the archetypal villain, whose thirst for power is uninhibited by any moral conscience—what we today would call a sociopath or psychopath. Seth, however, remains in the Egyptian imagination an eternal principle, whose final disappearance no eschatology can foresee. He is the necessary opponent, the destabilizing principle without which humanity would be immobile. Without Seth, there can be no resurrection of Osiris; without a fight against evil, there can be no heroic sacrifice.
The legend of Osiris is a myth of love as much as a myth of resurrection. Both themes are intimately linked in this timeless story of love triumphing over death—the only love story worth telling. It combines the Hamlet plot with another universal scheme that folklorists label by the title of its best-known version, “Beauty and the Beast.” In the tale of “Hamlet,” it is revenge carried out by the son on earth that soothes the spirit of the dead (and heals his injury), while in the tale type “Beauty and the Beast” it is the sacrificial love of a woman that heals the heart of the dead (and breaks the spell that had been put on him).38 Isis was both wife and sister (the “soul mate”) of Osiris, but by giving him life, she also becomes his mother, encapsulating the feminine ideal in its entirety. The myth of Osiris is thus fertile with an imagination that does not restrict Eros to a sexual or even emotional register, but opens onto the spiritual and the universal. Love that triumphs over death is the supreme idea of the relationship between Osiris and Isis. Seth, on the other hand, is portrayed as a debased pervert, as manifested in his attempted rape of Horus.
For the Egyptians, Osiris is the principle of harmony that binds the human community. He brings together all the tribes of Egypt around the nation’s sacred kingship. According to myth, for each of the scattered pieces of the body of Osiris she found, Isis conducted local funeral rites and so left a “tomb of Osiris” in each township. Thus was realized the consubstantial union of the land of Egypt and the body of Osiris. The annual festival of Osiris at Abydos was a celebration of civil peace and national unity against all invaders. Seth, by contrast, was synonymous with “domination and violence,” says Plutarch. He was the god of discord and civil war—the master of fitna in Qur’anic terms, or a kind of diabolos in the etymological sense of “divider.” For the Egyptians, German Egyptologist Jan Assmann writes, “The gods are social beings, living and acting in ‘constellations’; a lonely god would be devoid of any power of personality and would have no impact on the great project of maintaining the world.”39 Seth is the exception that proves the rule: he was a pariah among the gods, who exclu
ded him from their board of directors for disturbing the divine order. His “theophobic” nature agreed with the exclusivity of worship established by the Hyksos, who banished the other religions from the public sphere, adding religious persecution to political oppression.
After the defeat of Seth, Horus inherited the title of king of the world and received the ka of his father—the vital generational principle that lingers on Earth, as opposed to the ba which is the individual soul leaving this world. Horus, the falcon-king, then reigned over the Egyptians through the pharaoh, who was his incarnation on earth. But it is to Osiris that the royalty of the Other World returned. One of the ideas implicit in the myth is that Osiris reigns over the Hereafter, while the earthly world is the land of perpetual struggle between his son Horus and Seth. As long as Horus governs, which is to say when the state is in the hands of worthy representatives of Osiris’s values, Seth is under control. But whenever Seth takes over the management of the world, lies and violence prevail.
While Horus rules over mortals, kingship of the otherworld goes to Osiris. Osiris is opposed to Seth like resurrection is opposed to annihilation; both form the double face of death. Funerary rites of embalming, a ritual reconstitution of the body, find their mythical expression in the reassembly of Osiris’s body. Osiris presides over the judgment of the dead and attracts the purified souls, as Plutarch explains: “When these souls are set free and migrate into the realm of the invisible and the unseen, the dispassionate and the pure, then this god [Osiris] becomes their leader and king, since it is on him that they are bound to be dependent in their insatiate contemplation and yearning for that beauty which is for men unutterable and indescribable” (Isis and Osiris 78). On a personal level, Osiris personifies the virtues, making hearts light and enabling favorable judgments. Seth, conversely, embodies all the vices that prohibit access to immortality: murder, lying, stealing, greed, adultery, homosexuality, blasphemy, and rebellion against parents.
What does all this have to do with Yahweh? Was Yahweh, the god who led the Hebrews out of Egypt, related in any way to the Egyptian Seth, the god of strangers, refugees and nomads, banned from Egypt by his peers? After all, the Torah tells us that Yahweh was formerly known as El Shaddai (Genesis 17:1, Exodus 6:2–3), a Semitic name translatable as “the destroyer god” (from el, “god,” and shadad, “destroy”), an appropriate surname for Seth.
Despite all these similarities, there is no conclusive evidence of a historical link between the cults of Seth and Yahweh. However, it is possible to show that the Egyptians who believed that the Jews had the ass-headed god Seth as their divinity or ancestor, had legitimate reasons to do so. They were simply following the universal practice of translating foreign gods into their own pantheon on the basis of functional resemblances. Indeed, from the point of view of Egyptian metaphysics, the god of the Jews betrays a Sethian character. Yahweh is Seth on an archetypal or paradigmatic level. Such is the thesis we will defend in the following chapters, thereby offering, in certain respects, an Egyptian outlook on the Jewish question.
Yahweh is Seth, first of all, to the extent that he shares the dominant trait of his character, murderous jealousy: “Yahweh’s name is the Jealous One” (Exodus 34:14). As the next chapter shows, Yahweh manifests toward all his fellows an implacable hatred that characterizes him as a sociopath among the gods, very much like Seth. At a time when the pantheons of the world demonstrated courtesy, hospitality, and even fraternity, allowing peoples to recognize each other as living under the same heavens, Yahweh taught the Hebrews contempt for the deities of their neighbors—making them, in the eyes of these neighbors, a threat to the cosmic and social order. It will be shown in chapter 2 that the exclusive monotheism demanded by Yahweh (or “monoyahwism,” as Jan Assmann calls it) is a degraded imitation of that inclusive monotheism toward which all the wisdoms of the world converge by affirming the fundamental unity of all gods. In Canaan, Yahweh’s hatred rages especially against Baal, who is somewhat the equivalent of Osiris: the great universal god, especially honored as an agrarian deity by cultivators, though despised by nomads. Yahweh also attacks Asherah, the Great Divine Mother adored throughout the Middle East under various names, and assimilated to Isis in the Hellenistic period.
Yahweh is also Seth (the anti-Osiris) in his denial of life after death, as I argue in chapter 3. The Hebrew Bible differs from all religious traditions of Antiquity by the inability of its authors to conceive of an afterlife beyond sleep in the humid darkness of Sheol: “For dust you are and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19), without any soul worthy of the name. Yahweh does not care about the dead, whom he “remembers no more” (Psalms 88:6). The Torah constantly identifies individuals with their genetic origin; the only afterlife it offers is through offspring. When Abraham contemplates the starry sky, he does not see spiritualized souls, as do the Egyptians, but the image of his future earthly offspring (Genesis 15:5; 22:17). Only generation allows man to survive; therefore, only the people as a whole is eternal. Here is the explanation for the asymmetry between the myth of Osiris and its biblical inversion: there is no resurrection for Abel, as Seth-Yahweh is the god of death, not resurrection. There is no Other World for the good dead in the Torah: the Yahwist scribes have borrowed Paradise, the land of blessed immortality, from neighboring cultures, but shifted it to the beginning of the story, then closed access to it forever. The originality of the Bible, as we shall see, is often merely the inversion of motifs from other cultures (Egyptian, Canaanite, Babylonian, Persian, and Greek).
If the Hebrew Bible is heavily tainted with Egyptophobia, Egyptian traditions were themselves strongly Judeophobic. The Egyptians of the Hellenistic period knew the Exodus story of how the Hebrews escaped from Egypt after “despoiling” the Egyptians of “silver and golden jewelry, and clothing” that had been entrusted to them as loan guarantees (12:35–36). But they had another version of how the Jews left Egypt: The Jews did not flee Egypt but rather were expelled by royal decree. The earliest known example of that alternative Exodus is found in Hecataeus of Abdera’s Aegyptiaca, written around 300 BCE: “When in ancient times a pestilence arose in Egypt, the common people ascribed their troubles to the workings of a divine agency; for indeed with many strangers of all sorts dwelling in their midst and practicing different rites of religion and sacrifice, their own traditional observances in honor of the gods had fallen into disuse. Hence the natives of the land surmised that unless they removed the foreigners, their troubles would never be resolved. At once, therefore, the aliens were driven from the country.” The greatest number went to Judea under the guidance of Moses. “The sacrifices that he established differ from those of other nations, as does their way of living, for as a result of their own expulsion from Egypt he introduced a way of life which was somewhat unsocial and hostile to foreigners.”40
Another Egyptian version of the Exodus appeared shortly after that of Hecateus in the writing of Manetho, quoted at length by Flavius Josephus in Against Apion. In it Jews are no longer just held responsible for epidemics and other ills by their disregard for the gods, but are themselves contagious lepers, and expelled as such. The same rumor was repeated by several authors. In the first century CE, Pompeius Trogus connects the theme of contagion with that of the legendary antisocial behavior (amixia) of the Jews. He adds—as an echo of Exodus—that Moses, before being expelled, “carried off by stealth the sacred utensils of the Egyptians, who, trying to recover them by force of arms, were compelled by tempests to return home.” Later, “as they remembered that they had been driven from Egypt for fear of spreading infection, [the Jews] took care, in order that they might not become odious, from the same cause, to their neighbors, to have no communication with strangers; a rule which, from having been adopted on that particular occasion, gradually became a religious institution” (Philippic Histories).41
The Roman historian Tacitus stands by this version, which he claims is agreed upon by “most authorities.” After being expelled
as lepers (victims of “a wasting disease which caused bodily disfigurement”), the Jews, under Moses’s guidance, adopted a sort of anti-religion. Tacitus writes: “Among the Jews all things are profane that we hold sacred; on the other hand they regard as permissible what seems to us immoral.” They show a “stubborn loyalty and ready benevolence towards brother Jews. But the rest of the world they confront with the hatred reserved for enemies. […] Those who come over to their religion adopt the practice [of circumcision], and have this lesson first instilled into them, to despise all gods, to disown their country, and set at naught parents, children, and brethren” (Histories V.3–5).
Common sense tells us that this slanderous story of the Jews’ origin as Egyptian lepers is an aggravated expression of the account reported by Hecataeus, which makes them foreigners, not lepers. It is not difficult to see how, in the Egyptian mind, foreigners and wanderers (habiru) who do not respect the Egyptian gods could turn into vectors of disease. In an edict by Emperor Claudius dated 41 CE, it is the spirit of civil war fomented by the Alexandrian Jews that is compared to “a public sickness” infecting the whole Roman world (oikoumene).42
Chapter 2
THE THEOCLASTIC GOD
“Anyone who has intercourse with an animal will be put to death. Anyone who sacrifices to other gods will be put under the curse of destruction.”
From Yahweh to Zion Page 6
