Word: atonement
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...jealous YHWH inspired by the religious policies of the Pharaoh Akhenaton, who reigned in Egypt from 1353 to 1336 B.C.? Closing the temples of the powerful priesthood of Amon, this royal Egyptian heretic established the state cult of a godhead embodied in the sun disk, or Aton. In Moses and Monotheism, Sigmund Freud speculated that Moses was actually an Egyptian who passed single-deity worship derived from Akhenaton to the Jews. (Was there not, he asked, an echo of Aton in Adonai?) Other scholars, like German academic Jan Assmann, author of Moses the Egyptian, believe Moses and Hebrew monotheism...
Other assessments of Akhenaton's religion render the Aton-Adonai connection less convincing. In his new book, The Lost Tomb, Kent Weeks, the Egyptologist who in 1995 discovered the tomb of Rameses II's sons, describes Akhenaton's monotheism as full of grotesque images and semidivine, yet vaguely sexual earthbound relationships. It appears an odd ancestor to the austere religion of YHWH...
...weapon, the 100-megaton bomb would be sheer waste, for there is no major city in the world that cannot be wiped out with one well-directed 20-meg-aton bomb. But for scare value, such a bomb has its own impact. And Nikita Khrushchev was seeking scare value with a vengeance last week. Even as he rattled his H-bombs, the Red army was announcing extended tours of service for Russian soldiers due to be discharged in coming months...
...never entered a temple of Amon again. Turning against the priests, he withdrew their profitable monopoly in the Nubian gold fields and won powerful support by giving it to the army. With the help of a minor priest, he invented a sun-drenched theology based on the insignificant deity Aton, built a new city, Aketaten, and chiseled the name of Amon from every temple in the land...
Since courtiers must have a court, the nobility followed Ikhnaton to the half-finished city and mumbled nimbly when priests chanted new hymns. But however fervent the chanting and however often the courtiers assured Pharaoh that he would not die (death was expunged in the new theology), Aton worship was never more than a plaything, tolerated because it kept Ikhnaton from more destructive games...