Egyptian Sacred Science

A Reappraisal By

Wesley Muhammad, PhD © 2012

TTaabbllee ooff CCoonntteennttss

KKeemmeett aanndd MMeeccccaa:: TTwwoo AAffrriiccaann HHoollyy LLaannddss 11--55

I. All in the Family II. Fruits of the Same Tree

AAttuumm//AAddaamm:: BBllaacckk GGoodd ooff MMaa’’aatt aanndd IIssllaamm 66--2255

I. Atum = Adam II. Atum: The One Eternal God III. Atum: The Black Creator-God of Kemet IV. Atum in the Hebrew Bible IV.1. Adam: The Black Body of God V. Adam/Atum in the Qur’ān

TThhee KKaa’’bbaa aanndd tthhee BBllaacckk GGoodd ooff KKeemmeett 2266--3300

I. Cognate Religions I.1. Ancient Egyptian Ontology

‘‘HHiiss TThhrroonnee iiss EEvveerr oonn tthhee WWaatteerr’’ 3322--5533

I. The Throne of Allah II. God’s Throne on the Waters II.1. God’s Aquatic Body II.2. Yahweh-Elohim (Allah): The Aquatic Body in Biblical Tradition III. The Qur’ān and its Ancient Near Eastern Context/Subtext

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KKeemmeett aanndd MMeeccccaa:: TTwwoo AAffrriiccaann HHoollyy LLaannddss

Kemites (i.e. ancient Egyptians) and Arabian Semites are kith and kin

I. All in the Family The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said:

We, the tribe of Shabazz, says Allah (God), were the first to discover the best part of our planet to live on. The rich Nile Valley of Egypt and the present seat of the Holy City, Mecca, Arabia.

This suggests that Meccan and Egyptian civilization and religious culture originated with different branches of the same ethnic-cultural family. They would be cognate civilizations and cultures: related by blood and descendent from a common ancestor. The ethnographic, linguistic, genetic and archaeological evidence confirms this. Grafton Elliot Smith, Australian anatomist and Egyptologist, was the first chair of anatomy at the Cairo School of Medicine. He authored the pioneering Egyptological work, The Ancient Egyptians and the Origin of Civilization (1923). In an important article in 1909 on the ethnography of Egypt Smith wrote:

it seems probable that the substratum of the whole population of North Africa and Arabia from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf – if not further east – was originally one racial stock, which, long before the earliest predynastic period in Egypt, had become specialized in physical characteristics and in culture in

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the various parts of its wide domain, and developed into the Berber, the Egyptian, the Ethiopian Hamitic and the Arabs populations.1

Smith was still convinced of the ethnic and cultural relatedness of ancient Egyptians and ancient Arabians in 1923 when he published The Ancient Egyptians:

The balance of probability is strongly in favour of the view that the Arabs and the Proto-Egyptians were sprung from one and the same stock, the two divisions of which living in the territories separated by the Red Sea, had become definitely specialized in structure, in customs and beliefs, long before the dawn of the period known as Predynastic in Egypt…the linguistic evidence…according to many scholars, points to a similar conclusion.2

That the Egyptian/Kemetic and Arabian peoples are distinct variations of a common

cultural substratum is indicated as well by the anthropological evidence. As Dana Reynods (Marniche) records in an important article,

Ancient Arabia was occupied by a people far different in appearance than most modern-day occupants.

These were a people who once occupied Egypt, who were affiliated with the East African stocks, and who now

speak the ‘Hamitic’ or Semitic languages…In the days of Mohammed and the Roman colonization of

Palestine, North Arabia and Africa, the term Arab was much more than a nationality. It specifically

referred to peoples whose appearance, customs and language were the same as the nomadic peoples on

the African side of the Red Sea…The evidence of linguistics, archaeology, physical remains and

ethnohistory support the observations and descriptions we find in the histories of the Greeks and Romans

and in later Iranian documents about nomadic Arabians of the early era. The Arabs were the direct

progeny and kinsmen of the dark-brown, gracile and kinky haired ‘Ethiopic’ peoples that first spread over

the desert areas of Nubia and Egypt…

early Greeks and Romans did not usually distinguish ethnically between the people called the Saracens

and the inhabitants of southern Arabia (the Yemen) which was called India Minor or Little India in those

days, nor southern Arabians from the inhabitants of the Horn of Africa. What differences there were

between them were more cultural and environmental than anything else. Strabo, around the 1st century

B.C., Philostratus and other writers, speak of the area east of the Nile in Africa as ‘Arabia’ and the people

are persistently and indiscriminately and sometimes simultaneously referred to as either Arabs, Indians or

Ethiopians…it is clear from the ancient writings on the ‘Arabs’ that the peoples of the Arabian peninsula

and the nonimmigrant, indigenous nomads of the Horn were considered ethnically one and the same and

thought to have originated in areas near the cataracts of the Nile.”3

So too does the linguistic evidence bear out the fact of the cultural and ethnic relatedness of ancient Arabians and ancient Egyptians. Prof Nicholas Faraclas, linguist from the University of Puerto Rico, explain:

1 G. Elliot Smith, “The People of Egypt,” The Cairo Scientific Journal 3 (1909): 51-63. 2 G. Elliot Smith, The Ancient Egyptians and the Origin of Civilization (1923) 101-102. 3 Dana Reynolds (Marniche), “The African Heritage & Ethnohistory of the Moors,” in Ivan van Sertima, Golden Age of the Moor (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1992) 99, 100, 105-106.

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the origins of the Ancient Egyptian, Hebrew, Babylon, Assyrian, and Arabic languages (trace) back to a central African homeland…many of the speakers of the languages from which all these languages developed may have participated in a black civilization that was driven out of Central Africa by the expanding Sahara Desert some 7,000 years ago…When the evidence…is synthesized, the following scenario emerges. At the outset of the last Major Wet Spell, the Ancient Egyptian speakers would have made their way north down the Nile, while the Beja speakers would have gone eastward up the Atbara. The Omotic speakers would have headed south on the White Nile, followed and later almost completely displaced by the Cushitic speakers. The Chadic and Berber groups would have gone west into the marshes and swamps of the of the Chad Basin, where they finally divided and went their separate ways, the Berber speakers to the northwest and the Chadic speakers to the southwest…Finally, the Semitic group would have followed the Blue Nile to the Ethiopian highlands (where the majority of Semitic languages are found to this day) and would eventually have reached the narrow straits that separate the horn of Africa from the Arabian Peninsula. There is convincing toponymic evidence that the Semitic speakers first crossed over into the Middle East via this route. Traces of different subgroups of Semitic are found all along the eastern and western shores of Arabia…available evidence points toward a Middle African origin

not only for Afroasiatic as a whole, but also for the Semitic group…4

This evidence indicates that Kemites (Egyptians) and (Arabian) Semites are siblings,

cousins at the very least. Their ethnic, anthropological, and linguistic relatedness suggest that

we should expect their religio-

cultural heritages to be related in the

same way. The evidence does not

confirm the popular and oft-repeated

claim that Islam derived from

Kemetic Ma’at. Rather, a more

reasonable conclusion that the

evidence allows is that the

remarkable similarities between

Ma’at and (proto-)Islam are due to

them both being variant traditions of

related African peoples who

inhabited opposite sides of the Red

Sea and who may have ultimately

derived from the areas around the

cataracts of Nile. As Prof Benard Leeman, linguist and historian of Africa reports:

“Archaeological evidence shows that a common culture did exist on the opposite shores of the

Red Sea, ca. 1500-1000 B.C.E.”5

It thus should come as no surprise that the religious traditions on both sides of the Red

Sea were remarkably similar. The religion of the prehistoric African Semites of Arabia is the

4 Nicholas Faraclas, “They Came Before the Egyptians: Linguistic Evidence for the African Roots of Semitic Languages,” in Silvia Federici (ed.), Enduring Western Civilization: The Construction of the Concept of Western Civilization and Its “Others” (Westport, Connecticut and London: Praeger, 1995) 175-96 5 Bernard Leeman, Queen of Sheba and Biblical Scholarship (Queensland, Australia: Queensland Academic Press, 2005) 176.

Indigenous Arab Bedouin

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genetic ancestor of the Islam of Prophet Muhammad and the Black Arabs of Late Antiquity.6

The Islam of Prophet Muhammad and the early Muslims was an incarnation or articulation of

an ancient African system of spirituality. Ma’at from Kemet was an earlier and cognate

expression, as were the spiritual/religious systems of ancient Mesopotamia and ancient India.

These are all cognate systems, daughters of the same mother (i.e. African spiritual

consciousness) and father (God’s revelatory wisdom). The similarities that exist across all of

these above cited religious traditions are to be understood in this context. Islam did not derive

from Ma’at of Kemet; they are both branches from a common spiritual trunk, spiritual fruits

from the same African tree.

But this “African Islam” of the Prophet Muhammad7 did not survive much past the first Islamic century. Whites (largely Persians, Byzantines and Turks) converted to Islam and to Arabism, squeezing the original Black Arab founders out politically, militarily, intellectually, and religiously, and in the process they transformed Islam to what would be unrecognizable to the Prophet Muhammad.8 This ‘Aryanization’ broke Islam’s connection with its African past and robbed it of its African spiritual core. As Prof Gerald Hawting observes:

One should not imagine that Islam as we know it came fully formed out of Arabia with the Arabs at the time of their conquest of the Middle East and was then accepted or rejected, as the case might be, by the non-Arab peoples. Although many of the details are obscure and often controversial, it seems clear that Islam as we know it is largely a result of the interaction between the Arabs and the peoples they conquered during the first two centuries or so of the Islamic era which began in AD 622. During the Umayyad period, therefore, the spread of Islam and the development of Islam were talking place at the same time.9

In this writing I hope to give some evidence of the fact that the pre-Aryanized, “African” Islam is cognate with the African Ma’at that developed on the opposite side of the Red Sea millennia earlier. As such, the Qur’an of 7th century CE Arabia and the religious texts of Egypt are all ‘scriptures’ and equally important pieces of the ‘puzzle of truth.’

6 On the Black Arabs of early Islam see Wesley Muhammad, Black Arabia and the African Origin of Islam (Atlanta: A-Team Publishing, 2009) 7 On whom see especially Wesley Muhammad, God’s Black Prophet’s: Deconstructing the Myth of the White Muhammad of Arabia and the Jesus of Jerusalem (Atlanta: A-Team Publishing, 2010); Idem. “Anyone who says that the Prophet is black should be killed”: The De-Arabization of Islam and the Transfiguration of Muhammad in Islamic Tradition,” @ http://drwesleywilliams.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/docs/Muhammad_Article.170121832.pdf; Idem. “Prophet Muhammad and the Black Arabs: The Witness of Pre-Modern Chinese Sources,” @http://drwesleywilliams.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/docs/Muhammad_Black_Arabs_China_Site.187112134.pdf. 8 See Wesley Muhammad, “The Aryanization of Islam,” @ http://blackarabia.blogspot.com/2011/07/aryanization-of-islam.html. 9 Gerald Hawting, The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad Caliphate AD 661-750 (Routledge, 2000).

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II. Fruits of the Same Tree

Baba Rafiq Bilal (d. November 28, 2008) and Thomas Goodwin's 1987 publication, Egyptian Sacred Science in Islam: The Sacred Science of Ancient Egypt as revealed in Al-Islam,” was groundbreaking. Professor Wade Nobles, who wrote the forward to the book, called the work a “thoroughly supported bridge between Islam and the Ancient Kemetic understanding of the most Holy of Holies.” Egyptian Sacred Science in Islam was certainly a trailblazer not unlike Dr Yosef Ben Yochannan’s, The African Origin of the Major ‘Western’ Religions. According to Bilal and Goodwin’s research, “a serious study of the ancient religion of Egypt and the religion of al-Islam reveals the two to actually be different expressions of the same truths”.10 The study of these two traditions convinced Bilal and Goodwin that:

Almighty presented essentially the same truths to the pre-historic Egyptians who built the fabulous civilization upon the principles of the Sacred Revelation, as He presented thousands of years later to Prophet Muhammad Ibn Abd Allah in the Holy Qur’an. Holy Qur’an is the purification and refinement of this ancient system of knowledge. The truth from God is one truth. In order to convey the body of knowledge which they received, the ancient Egyptians developed the most elaborate educational system in the history of man. Prophet Muhammad, the unlettered Prophet (the Umi Prophet) received and transmitted the same body of knowledge through revelation many thousands of years later…11

Bilal and Goodwin set out to document the nexus between the Qur’anic lexicon and historiography and Kemetic Sacred Science, arguing that:

Within the pages of the Holy Qur’an, wrapped in the ancient Arabic language are preserved the following aspects of Egyptian history and sacred science (among others): 1: Concept of God, Nature and Knowledge 2: Egyptian sacred measurements [etc.] …12

I fully concur with Bilal and Goodwin. A close examination of the religious literature of

ancient Egypt and Qur’ānic/Islamic tradition confirms that the two traditions (Kemetic and Islamic) share a basic understanding of God. This concurrence of Kemetic and Islamic theology goes a long way in demonstrating that Ma’at and Islam are cognate traditions and spring from the same African Tree of Spirituality.

10

Rafiq Bilal and Thomas Goodwin, Egyptian Sacred Science in Islam: The Sacred Science of Ancient Egypt as revealed in Al-Islam (n.p.: n.p., 1987)147. 11

Bilal and Goodwin, Egyptian Sacred Science, 8. 12

Bilal and Goodwin, Egyptian Sacred Science, 8.

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AAttuumm//AAddaamm:: BBllaacckk GGoodd ooff MMaa’’aatt aanndd IIssllaamm

Bismillāh ir-raḥmān nir-raḥīm Qul: huwa llāhu āhad Allāhu ṣ-ṣamad Lam yalid wa-lam yulad Wa-lam yakun lahu kufu’an āhad In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful 1 Say: He Allah is One 2 Allah is the Eternal (al-ṣamad) 3 He begets not, nor is He begotten 4 And none is equal to Him.

Sūrat al-Ikhlās [112]

I. Atum=Adam

Bilal and Goodwin write:

The Holy Qur’an specifies and repeats that divine prophecy extends from Adam to Muhammad. Therefore, the first in the line of Osirian-Horian figures was Adam himself. The original name for Adam was (the ancient Egyptian) Tem, or Atem, later Atum. Tem in Egyptian sacred science is the first solar hero, who evolved into Horus, not the first physical man, as taught in Judaeo-Christian mythology. Qur’anic revelation is consistent with the universal principle of Tem found in ancient Egypt.13

This is an important, though admittedly stunning confession by our Muslim brother Rafiq Bilal, but it is right on: The Qur’anic Adam is no doubt the Egyptian Atum. Bilal and Goodwin correctly point out later:

13

Bilal and Goodwin, Egyptian Sacred Science, 95.

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The ancient Egyptian legend of Tem and Tempt (i.e. Tem’s female compliment) is the prototype of the mythology of Adam and Eve in the garden.

This is as true in relation to the Qur’an as it is in relation to the Hebrew Bible. Regarding the latter Dr. Charles Finch pointed out:

The root of ATM is TM (TEM/TUM) which has several meanings, among them ‘people’ and ‘completion’ (Adam represented the completion of God’s work on the 6th day). Atum is no less the COMPLETE OR PERFECT DIVINE MAN. A cognate root of TEM is DEM and this means ‘to name’ (Adam was the namer of all the animals). Thus, the most elementary and indisputable etymological analysis demonstrates that ALL THE ATTRIBUTES OF THE EGYPTIAN DEITY ATUM ARE EMBRACED IN THE HEBREW ADAM.14

That there are the same lexical and mythological connections with the Qur’an’s Adam was equally pointed out by Bilal and Goodwin:

Adam was the first to be taught the names of all things…The word-name ‘Tem’ means to be complete, ‘to make an end of.’ He was known as the Sun-god (principle) which brought the day to an end, i.e. as the

evening or night sun. The Arabic word (with the same letters) is tamma تم which means to become completed, finished done; to came to an end, be or become terminated.15

But the parallels between the Egyptian Atum and the Biblical/Qur’anic Adam go much

deeper than this and the implications for understanding the Qur’an are profound. To truly appreciate this fact, we must understand just who Atum is.

II. Atum: The One Eternal God

Qul: huwa llāhu āhad Say: He Allah (Atum) is One

Like many other readers of Egyptian religious literature Bilal and Goodwin were

convinced that the ancient Egyptians were monotheists, believers in one Supreme God, rather than polytheists, worshipers of an indiscriminant assortment of many gods.

An examination of the earliest religious writings known to man, indicates that the original concept of monotheism was the Egyptian ‘Neter of Neter’ or ‘Great Principle’ or ‘Great God’…In the earliest of texts, the archaic Egyptians give tribute to ‘the Great God’ from which all creation emanated.

They say further:

In the principle (neter) of Amon, the hidden, we have an important aspect of monotheism which is retained in…al-Islam, the unseeable, non-depictable character of the Almighty, The validity of the principle is further illustrated by the name Amen in Christian, Jewish and Islamic prayers. At the end of each prayer, we pronounce the name of this principle when we say: Amen.

14

Charles Finch, Echoes of the Old Darkland (Decatur, Georgia: Khenti, Inc., 1992) 144. 15

Bilal and Goodwin, Egyptian Sacred Science, 95.

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While this later claim is to a certain extant true, it must be severely qualified. Amun is just another name for Atum. As Albert Churchward confirms:

Amen…was another name for Atum…In the hymns to Atem-Ra he is adored as one and the same as Atum, which shows that Amen is a later name for Atum; and he is represented as ‘the hidden god’ of Amenta, or ‘the secret earth.’16

Atum was always depicted as an anthropomorphic deity, i.e. a god with a human (anthropos) form (morphe). Yet Atum, in his guise as Amun, was worshipped as the eternal God.

Amen is the one god who is always depicted in human form…Amen…was the only deity in all Egypt who was expressly worshipped by the title of ‘Ankhu,’ the ever-living one eternal God.17

Atum is thus the ever living one God of ancient Egypt.

Allāhu ṣ-ṣamad Allah is the Eternal

Churchward notes:

Atum-Ra declares that he is the One God, the one just or righteous God, the one living God…He is Unicus, the sole and only one (Rit., Chaps. 2, 17) beside whom there is none other…

At the same time we must not forget that all of these different names of gods (in Egypt) were simply the

attributes of the One God. In the 17th chapter of the (Egyptian) Ritual it says: ‘His names together

compose the cycle of the gods’…In the 17th chapter of ‘The Book of the Dead‘ it is said: ‘I am the Great

God-self created, that is to say, who made his names’ - ‘the company of the gods of God.’18

16

Churchward, Origin and Evolution, 254. 17

Churchward, Origin and Evolution, 255. 18

Churchward, Signs and Symbols, 62.

Atum, Creator God of Kemet

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III. Atum: The Black Creator-God of Kemet

In the ancient city of Annu (Heliopolis), Atum was incorporated into the local divine

triad: Khepri, Ra and Atum.19 These were not viewed as separate deities but as ‘transformations’

(from the Egyptian word kheper, ‘to come into being; to transform’) of the singular solar deity.20

Though Atum’s name closes this triad, he actually opens the Egyptian ‘Myth of Creation.’

Atum, whose name means ‘the All,’ was conceived both as “the totality of being before the

creation set in motion,”21 the “sum of all matter”,22 as well as the “internal, unconscious force,

that became conscious of itself then manifested itself of its own will.”23 In other words, Atum

was the attribute given both to the dark, aquatic primordial matter – elsewhere called Nun –

and the luminous force that resided hidden and unconscious within this matter.24 At a certain

point divine unconsciousness turned into divine consciousness and the divine luminosity

concentrated itself into an atom, symbolized by the luminous egg within the dark ocean.25

Compelled by his own will, the luminous aspect of Atum emerged – self propelled – out of the

19

J. Gwyn Griffiths, “Triune Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt,” Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde 100 (1973): 28-32; Pascal Vernus, The Gods of Ancient Egypt (London and New York: Tauris Parke Books, 1998) 45; David, Religion and Magic, 58. 20

Françoise Dunand and Christiane Zivie-Coche, Gods and Men in Egypt: 3000 BCE to 395 CE (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004) 23: “Despite this tripartition…he was one.” 21

Dunand and Zivie-Coche, Gods and Men in Egypt, 25. 22

Quirke, Cult of Ra, 25. 23

Dunand and Zivie-Coche, Gods and Men in Egypt, 47. 24

On the dark primordial matter and divine luminosity within see Helmer Ringgren, “Light and Darkness in Ancient Egyptian Religion,” in Liber amicorum. Studies in Honour of Professor Dr. C.J. Bleeker. Published on the Occasion of his Retirement from the Chair of the History of Religions and the phenomenology of Religion at the University of Amsterdam Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1969: 140-150; Dunand and Zivie-Coche, Gods and Men in Egypt, 45-46; James P. Allen, “The Cosmology of the Pyramid Texts.” In Religion and Philosophy in Ancient Egypt (New Haven: Yale Egyptological Series, 1989): 1-28. 25

See E.A. Wallis Budge, The Egyptian Book of the Dead (The Papyrus of Ani). Egyptian Text Transliterated and Translated (New York: Dover Publications, Inc. 1967) xcviii, who quotes: “there was in the beginning neither heaven nor earth, and nothing existed except a boundless primeval mass of water which was shrouded in darkness and which contained within itself the germs or beginnings, male and female, of everything which was to be in the future world. The divine primeval spirit which formed an essential part of the primeval matter felt within itself the desire to begin the work of creation, and its word woke to life the world, the form and shape of which it had already depicted to itself. The first act of creation began with the formation of an egg out of the primeval water, from which broke forth Rā, the immediate cause of all life upon earth.” On the cosmogonic egg in Egyptian tradition see further: Ringgren, “Light and Darkness,” 141; Orly Goldwasser, “ ‘Itn – the ‘Golden Egg’ (CT IV 292b-c [B9Ca]),” in Essays on Ancient Egypt in honour of Herman te Velde (Groningen: Styx, 1997): 79-84; Clifford, Creation Accounts, 106, 112; R.T. Rundle Clark, Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1959) 56. On the cosmogonic egg see further Marie-Louise von Franz, Creation Myths revised edition (Boston and London: Shambhala, 1995), Chapter Eight (“Germs and Eggs”); ER 5:36-7 s.v. Egg by Venetia Newall; idem, An Egg at Easter: A Folklore Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971) Chapter One; Anna-Britta Hellbom, “The Creation Egg,” Ethnos 1 (1963): 63-105; H.J. Sheppard, “Egg Symbolism in Alchemy,” Ambix 6 (August, 1958): 140-148; Philip Freund, Myths of Creation (New York: Washington Square Press, Inc, 1965), Chapter Five; Martti Haavio, Väinämöinen: Eternal Sage (Helsinki, 1952) 45-63; On the cosmic egg as prima materia see also C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (2nd ed.; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968) 202. On the golden cosmogonic egg and the primordial atom see Freund, Myths of Creation, Chapter 15.

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dark, aquatic matter. This initial, luminous, self-emergent stage of the

deity’s evolution is personified in the god Khepri, represented

symbolically/hieroglyphically as a scarab beetle. The scarab beetle’s

apparently spontaneous emergence out of a ball of dung symbolized

the creator-god’s self-creation out of the primordial matter – that is, the

self-formation of his own luminous anthropomorphic body.26 With this

luminous human form in all its irradiant glory the creator-god is called

Ra. The ‘Ra stage’ in this divine evolution is represented by the midday

sun at its greatest strength.

Atum-Ra was a self-created Creator god - he created his own

form:

O [Atum-]Re who gave birth to righteousness, sovereign who created all this, who

built his limbs, who modeled his body, who created himself, who gave birth to

himself.27

I (Atum) created my body in my glory; I am he who made Myself; I formed Myself according to my will and according to my heart.28

As J. Zandee notes:

Atum is ‘complete’ as an androgynous god. He unites within himself masculinity and femininity. He possesses all conditions to bring forth the all out of him. He was a Monad and made himself millions of creatures which he contained potentially in himself. He was the one who came into being of himself (hpr ds.f), who was the creator of his own existence, the causa sui [cause of itself].29

It should be pointed out here that as the eternal, self-evolved deity Atum was unbegotten, in contrast to later generations of Gods (neteru) who were; and as an androgynous male being Atum also was understood to beget not. As William P. Brown notes: “Unlike the theogonic pairs in Mesopotamian creation, Atum is a single parent, like Israel’s God YHWH.”30 Atum did not beget the derivative deities by copulating with a goddess as will later become the norm with these deities. Rather, he spit out the first generation of gods.

26

George Hart, A Dictionary of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses (London, Boston and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986) 108-110 s.v. Khepri. See further J. Zandee, “The Birth-Giving Creator-God in Ancient Egypt,” in Alan B. Lloyd (ed.), Studies in Pharaonic Religion and Society, in Honour of J. Gwyn Griffiths London: The Egypt Exploration Society, 1992: 168-185; Dunand and Zivie-Coche, Gods and Men in Egypt, 47-49. 27

From Theb. Tomb 157. 28

From Hieratic Coffin Text 714. 29

Zandee, “Birth-Giving Creator-God,” 49. 30

William P. Brown,The Seven Pillars of Creation (2010).

Ra, Midday “Sun” God

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O Atum-Kheprer, you became high on the height, you rose up as the bnbn-stone in the Mansion of the bn-bird in On, you SPAT OUT (ishish) Shu, you SPIT OUT (tfnt) Tefnut, and you set your arms about them as the arms of a ka-symbol, that your essence might be in them...31

Lam yalid wa-lam yulad

He begets not, nor is He begotten Ra is then said to have ‘entered back into’ the primordial waters (which are now

personified as the cow goddess Nut/Hathor/Meheturet32) and he assumed from them a black body: he is now the black, anthropomorphic god Atum (again).33 Atum of the triad is Ra himself, incarnate in a black body made from the primordial waters. When Ra enters the dark, aquatic Duat or Underworld, he is actually assuming the dark form of Atum who is therefore called Auf-Ra, ‘the flesh of Ra’. 34 In later myth this black aquatic body of Atum-Ra is personified in the black deity Osiris, whose black body itself is represented by the black bull Apis, the personification of the primordial waters. The myth of Ra joining Osiris in the Duat or Underworld is actually a picturesque way of presenting Ra’s incarnation in the black body, personified in Osiris, ruler of the Duat. The Duat represents the primordial waters and is explicitly identified with the black body of Osiris.35 Moustafa Gadalla is correct: “Ra is the living neter who descends into death to become Ausar – the neter of the dead.”36 But Ausar/Osiris is only the black body assumed by Ra in the Duat. As Professors John Coleman Darnell and Colleen Manassa inform us:

31

Utterance 600 of the Pyramid Texts as translated by R.O. Faulkner. 32

On Hathor/ Meheturet as ‘universal cow-goddess’ and primordial ocean see Hart, Dictionary, 76 s.v. Hathor. Vernus, Gods of Ancient Egypt, 79. 33

On Ra re-entering the primordial waters and becoming Atum (again) see Dunand and Zivie-Coche, Gods and Men in Egypt, 27, 45-46; Vernus, Gods of Ancient Egypt, 45. On Ra darkening and transforming into Atum see See Ringgren, “Light and Darkness,” 150; Karl W.Luckert, Egyptian Light and Hebrew Fire. Theological and Philosophical Roots of Christendom in Evolutionary Perspective (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991) 73. On Atum as a black god see Jules Taylor, “The Black Image in Egyptian Art,” Journal of African Civilization 1 (April, 1979) 29-38. 34

See Quirke, Cult of Ra, 48; Ions, Egyptian Mythology, 42-43; Alexandre Piankoff, and N. Rambova. The Tomb of Ramesses VI: Texts. (Bollingen Series XL; New York: Pantheon Books, 1954) 36-37. 35

See: Allen, “Cosmology,” 21; Hans-Peter Hasenfratz, “Patterns of Creation in Ancient Egypt,” in Henning Graf Reventlow and Yair Hoffman (edd.), Creation in Jewish and Christian Tradition (JSOTSup 319; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002) 176; Jan Assmann, The Search for God in Ancient Egypt, translated from the German by David Lorton (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 2001) 41; idem, Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt, translated from the German by David Lorton (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005) 188; Clark, Myth and Symbol, 158; Martin Lev and Carol Ring, “Journey of the Night Sun,” Parabola 8 (1983): 14-18; Terence DuQuesne, “Re’ in the Darkness,” Discussions in Egyptology 26 (1993): 96-105; Albert Churchwar d, Signs & Symbols of Primordial Man: The Evolution of Religious Doctrines from the Eschatology of the Ancient Egyptians (Brooklyn: A&B Publishers Group, 1994, reprint ) 63-66, 274-6, 322. 36

Moustafa Gadalla, Egyptian Cosmology: The Animated Universe (Greensboro, N.C.: Tehuti Research Foundation, 2001) 42.

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According to the Book of Amduat, in the fifth hour of the night, the sun god plunged into the primordial waters, out of which creation originally arose37…the sun god absorbed the chaotic power of the primordial waters, which engulfed the remnants-‘flesh’-of the once virile solar god.38

And as Albert Churchward had already saw:

Osiris is a figure of inanimate nature, personalized as the mummy with a human form and face, whilst being also an image of matter as the physical body of the god.39

The black bull (k’ km) of Osiris, Apis, personified the

waters of the Nile which was regarded as a type of Nun, the

dark, primeval watery mass out of which creation sprang.40

The Egyptian Atum-Ra is thus a duality, the Coniunctio

oppositorum: in the

Pyramid Texts he is

both Wbn-wrr, “the

Great One who shines forth,” as well as “Father Atum

who is in Darkness”.41 This duality is illustrated

further by the hieroglyph for ‘flood’: it is a heron bird

perched on a stick, an allusion to the common sight

during the summer high Nile of birds clinging to

wood. The heron is the sign of the Benu bird, the

primeval bird of Atum-Ra.42 The Benu embodies the

radiance emanating from the sun.43 This hieroglyph is

consistent with other Egyptian sources which affirm

that the Benu bird presides over the flood. We thus

have symbolized in this hieroglyph the conjunction of

the solar element and the aquatic element.44 Atum is the

conjunction between the solar (Ra) and the aquatic

37

Erik Hornung, Das Amduat, die Schrift des verborgenen Raumes, Teil II: Übersetzung und kommentar (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1963) 104-108. 38

John Coleman Darnell and Colleen Manassa, Tutankhamun’s Armies: Battle and Conquest during Ancient Egypt’s Late 18th Dynasty (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2007) 22-23. 39

Albert Churchward, The Origin and Evolution of Religion (1924; Bensenville, Il: Lushena Books, Inc., 2003) 57. 40

See Émile Chassinat, “La Mise a Mort Rituelle D’Apis,” Recueil de travaux relatifs a la philology et a l’archeologie egyptiennes et assyriennes 38 [1916] 33-60; E.A. Wallis Budge, The Egyptian Book of the Dead (The Papyrus of Ani). Egyptian Text Transliterated and Translated [New York: Dover Publications, Inc. 1967] cxxiii. 41 Ringgren, “Light and Darkness,” 142. 42

Hart, Dictionary, 57-58 s.v. Benu. 43

Quirke, Cult of Ra, 28. 44

Quirke, Cult of Ra, 29-30.

Lady Taperet praying to Atum. Dynasty

21-25. Louvre E 52-N3663

13

(primordial waters/Osiris). This conjunction of the solar luminosity (Ra) and the black, aquatic

element (Osiris) produced the distinctive blue color of the great Gods.

IV. Atum in the Hebrew Bible

In his commentary on the Book of Genesis, Claus Westermann called our attention to an important fact, the recognition of which is critical to a proper understanding of the Genesis creation account and, indeed, the theology behind it.

The first chapter of Genesis had its origin in the course of a history of tradition of which the written text of P (i.e. the Priestly author of Genesis) is the last stage, and which stretches back beyond and outside Israel in a long and many-branched oral pre-history.45

The origin of the Genesis 1 creation narrative does indeed lie outside of Israel, and there

can be no doubt as to its general provenance: “That some form or other of the ancient Near-Eastern myth of creation lies behind the Priestly account cannot be denied.”46 The specific provenance, however, has been debated. Since the publication of the Babylonian creation account, Enūma elīš, in 1876 by George Smith the similarities between the Babylonian and Hebrew narratives have been often noted.47 The Babylonian Exile (587-538 BCE), during which large numbers of Jewish priests and others were exiled in Babylon, is surely a proper context in which to understand these similarities. But Israel also, earlier and for a longer period of time, were in Egypt. Moses was an Egyptian (Exod. 2:19) “learned in all the wisdom of Egypt (Act 7:22).” Indeed, while Babylonian influence is discernable in the structure of Genesis 1, some of the vocabulary and some of their theological content, scholars have pointed out that this creation account that was edited during the Exile itself originally derives from the much older Hebrew contact with Egyptian cosmogonic tradition.48

When the template of ancient Egyptian creation traditions is held up against the Genesis I creation account there is a quite remarkable correspondence. The conclusion is stark and compelling: ancient Egypt provided the foundation tradition which was shaped and handed down by successive priestly generations…Ancient Egypt proves to be the single, coherent and rich source of the priestly creation tradition. The Nile civilization provides not simply a possible context for odd verses, but again and again accounts for the details of the Genesis I creation narrative and is the key to its common thread. 49

45

Westermann, Genesis 1-11, 83. 46

Islwyn Blythin, “A Note on Genesis 12,” VT 12 (1962): 120 [art.=120-121]. See also Whitley, “Patterns of Creation,” 36; Arvid S. Kapelrud, “The Mythological Features in Genesis Chapter 1 and the Author’s Intention,” VT 24 (1974): 179. Susan Niditch (Chaos to Cosmos: Studies in Biblical Patterns of Creation [SPSH 6; Chico, California: Scholars Press, 1985] 18) noted also that “There is no doubt a shared Near Eastern notion of the way the cosmos’ order unfolded,” and Gen. 1 reflects that shared notion. 47

See e.g. A. Heidel, The Babylonian Genesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942). 48

Rikki E. Watts (“On the Edge of the Millennium: Making Sense of Genesis 1,” in Hans Boersma [ed.]. Living in the LambLight: Christianity and Contemporary Challenges to the Gospel [Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 2001] 138-9 [art.=129-51]) argues that in the light of the time Israel spent in Egypt, the “dominant background against which Genesis 1 is read and heard” should be the Egyptian creation accounts. 49

James E. Atwell, “An Egyptian Source for Genesis I,” JTS 51 (2000): 466-7 [art.=441-77].

14

The first chapter of Genesis is in fact a Hebrew adaptation of an ancient Egyptian cosmogony with heavy Babylonian influence.50 As such, the Egyptian original casts an illuminating light on Genesis 1. As Abraham Yahuda noted:

the Egyptian background…throws full light on the most important and conspicuous points of creation (in Genesis), and explains many features which have always puzzled the interpreters and theologians. In some instances it gives us the key to the solution of problems which were considered insoluble.51

Therefore, in order to make since of the enigmatic priestly creation account, we must avail ourselves to not only the biblical priestly materials in the Torah and the Hebrew Bible generally, but also to the Egyptian and Babylonian originals.52

IV.1. Adam: The Black Body of God

The creation of Adam on Day Six of the Genesis creation narrative (cosmogony) was the

crown of God’s creative activity. And God said: Let us make Adam/man as our image (צלם ßelem), according to our likeness (דמות dĕmūt)(Gen. 1:26)53

Adam was thus made to be the image of God, אלהים צלם, ßelem ’ĕlōhîm. The Hebrew צלם ßelem means primarily “statue”54 and ßelem ’ĕlōhîm is a cognate of the Akkadian ßalam ili/ilāni, the common Mesopotamian term for god-statues.55 Scholars have now seen that this terminological congruence contains conceptual congruence as well: the ßelem (image) of Genesis is the

50

Herman Gunkel (“Influence of Babylonian,” 44) wrote that Gen. 1 “is merely the Judaic reworking of much older traditional material that originally must have been considerably more mythological in nature,” and according to W.F. Albright (“Contributions,” 365) P “effaced the original outlines” of the Egypto-Phoenician cosmogonic narrative that he received. 51

Abraham Shalom Yahuda, The Accuracy of the Bible (London: William Heineman Ltd., 1934), 136. 52

This is not to deny the new and idiosyncratic ways in which Israel may have received, interpreted and utilized these ancient traditions. It is to say, however, that any attempt to interpret this text must consider all available source materials that bear on the text, the Egyptian materials included. 53

The beth in בצלמנו bĕßalmēnû, usually translated “in our image” is to be read as beth essentiae, “as our image (ßelem). See TLOT 3:1082 s.v. צלם, by Wildberger; TDOT 12:394 s.v. “צלם” by Stendebach; D.J.A. Clines, “The Image of God in Man,” TynBul 19 (1968): 76-80. On beth essentiae see J.H. Charlesworth, “The Beth Essentiae And the Permissive Meaning of the Hiphil (Aphel),” in H.W. Attridge, J.J. Collins and T.H. Tobin (edd.), Of Scribes and Scrolls: Studies on the Hebrew Bible, Intertestamental Judaism, and Christian Origins, Presented to John Strugnell on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday (Lanham: University Press of America, 1990) 67-78; Cyrus H. Gordon, “ ‘In’ of Predication or Equivalence,” JBL 100 (1981) 612-613; Lawrence N. Manross, “Bêth Essentiae,” JBL 73 (1954): 238-9. On the other hand, we understand the ּכ in כדמותנו kidĕmûthēnû as kaph of the norm (according to our likeness). See now W. Randall Garr, In His Own Image and Likeness: Humanity, Divinity, and Monotheism (Leiden: Brill, 2003) Chapter Six. 54

Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (hereafter HALOT) (5vols.; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994-) 3:1028-29, s.v. צלם. 55

The Assyrian Dictionary (hereafter CAD; Chicago: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 1962) 16: 78b-80a, 84b-85a, s.v. ‘almu; E. Douglas Van Buren, “The ßalmê in Mesopotamian Art and Religion,” Orientalia 5 (1936): 65-92.

15

Mesopotamian ßalmu (cult-image), thus Adam was created to be the living statue of the deity, the deity’s very presence on earth.56

Gen 1:26…can only be understood against the background of an ancient Yahweh statue…Here the terms ßlm and dmwt are used as synonyms denoting ‘statue’. Humans are thus created to be the living statues of the deity. The ritual of vivifying the cult statue was transferred to man in Genesis 2. There was no further need of a divine image because…humans represented Yahweh, as a statue would have done…57

The Mesopotamian ßalmu, like the Egyptian and ancient Near Eastern cult-image

generally, was distinguished by its ambivalent “god…not god” identity: while the statue is distinguished from the god whom it represents, it is also identified with and treated as the god itself.58 The reason is that the ancient Near Eastern cult statue was not only a representative replica of the god; it was also the dwelling place of that god’s essence/spirit (ba).59 As Zainab Bahrani puts it: “(The statue) was not considered to resemble an original reality that was present elsewhere but to contain that reality in itself.”60 It “signified,” according to Johannes 56

See above; HALOT 3:1028-1029; DDD s.v. “Image,” by A. Livingstone, 448-450; Samuel E. Loewenstamm, “‘Beloved is Man in that he was created in the Image’,” in idem, Comparative Studies in Biblical and Ancient Oriental Literatures (AOAT, 204; Kevelaer: Butzon & Bercker; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1980) 48-50. 57

Herbert Niehr, “In Search of Yahweh’s Cult Statute in the First Temple,” in The Image and the Book, 93-94. See also S. Dean McBride Jr., “Divine Protocol: Genesis 1:1-2:3 as Prologue to the Pentateuch,” in W.P. Brown and S.Dean McBride (edd.), God Who Creates: Essays in Honor of W. Sibley Towner (Grand Rapids, Michigan: W.B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2000) 16: Adamic beings are animate icons…The peculiar purpose for their creation is ‘theophanic’: to represent or mediate the sovereign presence of deity within the central nave of the cosmic temple, just as cult-images were supposed to do in conventional sanctuaries”; Andreas Schüle, “Made in the >Image of God<: The Concepts of Divine Images in Gen 1-3,” ZAW 117 (2005): 1-20; Ulrich Mauser, “God in Human Form,” Ex Auditu 16 (2000): 81-100 (90-93; Crispin H.T. Fletcher-Louis, “The Worship of Divine Humanity as God’s Image and the Worship of Jesus,” in Jewish Roots of Christological Monotheism, 113-128, esp. 120-128;; John Kutsko, Between Heaven and Earth: Divine Presence and Absence in the Book of Ezekiel (Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 2000), 53-60. See also idem, “Will the Real ‘elem ’Ĕlōhîm Please Stand Up? The Image of God in the Book of Ezekiel,” SBL 1998 Seminar Papers, 55-85; idem, “Ezekiel’s Anthropology and its Ethical Implications,” in Odell and Strong, Book of Ezekiel, 119-141; Theological Lexicon of the Old Testament, eds. Ernst Jenni and Claus Westermann, trs. Mark E. Biddle (3vols.; Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers, Inc, 1997; hereafter TLOT) 3:1080-82 s.v. צלם, by H. Wilderger; Garrett Green, Imagining God: Theology and the Religious Imagination (San Francisco, etc.: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1989) 91-97; Edward Mason Curtis, “Man as the Image of God in Genesis in the Light of Ancient Near Eastern Parallels” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1984); idem, “Image of God (OT),” in ABD 3:289-91. 58

On this ‘god…not god’ identity of the idol see especially T. Jacobsen, “The Graven Image,” in P.D. Miller Jr., P.D. Hanson and S.D. McBride (edd.), Ancient Israelite Religion: Essays in Honor of Frank Moore Cross (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987) 15-32, esp. 16-20; Michael B. Dick, “The Relationship between the Cult Image and the Deity in Mesopotamia,” in Jiří Prosecký (ed.), Intellectual Life of the ancient Near East: Papers Presented at the 43rd Rencontre assyriologique international, Prague, July 1-5, 1996 (Prague: Oriental Institute, 1998) 11-16. On the treatment of idols see Irene J. Winter, “ ‘Idols of the King’: Royal Images as Recipients of Ritual Action in Ancient Mesopotamia,” Journal of Ritual Studies 6 (Winter 1992):13-42; Curtis, “Man as the Image of God,” 103-106. On the ANE cult of divine images see further Neal H. Walls (ed.) Cult Image and Divine Representation in the Ancient Near East (American Schools of Oriental Research Books Series 10; Boston: American Schools of Oriental Research, 2005); Zainab Bahrani, The Graven Image: Representation in Babylonia and Assyria (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Michael B. Dick (ed.), Born in Heaven, Made on Earth: The Making of the Cult Image in the Ancient Near East (Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 1999). 59

K.H. Bernhardt, Gott und Bild. Ein Beitrag zur Begründung und Deutung des Bildererbotes im Alten Testament (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1956) 17-68; David Lorton, “The Theology of Cult Statues in Ancient Egypt,” in Born in Heaven, 123-210, esp. 179-184; Curtis, “Man as the Image of God,” 97-102. 60

Bahrani, Graven Image, 127.

16

Hehn, “the living incarnation of the represented person,”61 i.e. the deity. The ßalmu or cult statue was the very body of the god on earth, in which his/her divine spirit/essence ‘incarnated.’ Stendebach: “The cult statue of a god is the actual body in which that deity dwells.”62 According to Thorkild Jacobs, the statue was the deity’s “outer form, the external habitation”63 and Assmann notes that the “basic Egyptian concept” is “The statue is not the image of the body, but the body itself (emphasis original).”64 Andreas Schüle puts it succinctly:

It is through an image that a god/goddess is present in the created world and executes his/her powers in history and nature…The cultic image is in fact the medium of manifest divine presence and action in the world and as such part of the divine person. It is, to put it pointedly, >god on earth<…The image was…that side of the god’s person through which he entered the sphere of created life…the bodily appearance of a god, the very medium…through which he can be addressed by prayer, worship and sacrifice.65

In the ancient Near Eastern cult of images the statue was incarnated by the essence or spirit (Ba) of the deity only after the successful completion of a series of rituals performed on/with the cult image. These are the so-called pit pî (“Opening-of-the-mouth”) and mīs pî (“Washing-of-the-mouth”) rituals whose objective was to transform the lifeless statue into the living god (or king).66 It is now widely recognized that the idea behind these rituals underlie the imagery of Gen. 2:7b: “then the LORD GOD formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being (New Oxford Annotated Bible).”67 As Abraham Shalom Yahuda saw:

61

Johannes Hehn, “Zum Terminus ‘Bild Gottes’,” in G. Weil (ed.), Festschrift Eduard Sachau (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1915) 36. 62

Stendebach, TDOT 12:389 sv. צלם. 63

Thorkild Jacobs, The Treasures of Darkness (New Haven: Yake University Press, 1967) 14. 64

Assmann, The Search for God, 46. See also Hornung, Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt, 135: “These images may be the ‘bodies’ of the gods into which they ‘enter’.” 65

Schüle, “Made in the >Image of God<,” 5-6, 12. 66

See Victor Avigdor Hurowitz, “The Mesopotamian God Image, From Womb to Tomb,” JAOS 123 (2003): 147-157; Christopher Walker and Michael B. Dick, “The Induction of the Cult Image in Ancient Mesopotamia: The Mesopotamian mīs pî Ritual,” in Born in Heaven, 55-121. On the Egyptian ritual v. Lorton, “The Theology of Cult Statues in Ancient Egypt,”153-158. 67

Schüle, “Made in the >Image of God<,” 11-14; Edward L. Greenstein, “God’s Golem: The Creation of the Human in Genesis 2,” in Henning Graf Reventlow and Yair Hoffman (edd.), Creation in Jewish and Christian Tradition (JSOT Supplement Series 319; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002) 219-239 (224-229); James K. Hoffmeier, “Some Thoughts on Genesis 1 & 2 and Egyptian Cosmogony,” JANES 15 (1983): 46-48; ABD 3:390 s.v. “Image of God (OT)” by Curtis; Walter Wifall, “The Breath of His Nostrils: Gen 2:7b,” CBQ 36 (1974): 237-240; Cyrus Gordon, “Khnum and El,” in Sarah Israelit-Groll (ed.), Egyptological Studies (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1982): 202-214 (204-5); Abraham Shalom Yahuda, The Accuracy of the Bible (London: William Heineman Ltd., 1934) 152. S.G.F. Brandon, “ ‘In the beginning’: The Hebrew Story of the Creation in its Contemporary Setting,” History Today 11 (1961): 380-387 (384). See also Gregory Yuri Glazov, The Bridling of the Tongue and the Opening of the Mouth in Biblical Prophecy

Ay performing the ‘Opening of the Mouth’ ritual on the mummified Tutankhamun

17

In Gen. 27 the process of animating the body of Adam is described by the words: ‘And the Lord…breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.’ This passage is in every detail in expression and substance typically Egyptian. To begin with, the expression ‘breath of life’ is the same as the Egyptian tau en ankh. The idea of giving a ‘breath of life into the nostrils’ is very common in Egyptian. The whole phrase, both in Egyptian and Hebrew, is literally and grammatically identical…Thus for instance it is said of the god Ptah that he it is ‘who gives the breath of life to every nose’.”68

It is important to remind our readers that, according to the Hebrew of Genesis 1:26,

Adam was not made in or according to the ßelem of God, but as the ßelem.69 This ßelem was made ‘according to the likeness (דמות dĕmūt)’of God’s own luminous form, called kābôd in Israel and Ra

in Kemet. This means that the ßelem or human statue had the shape of God’s own luminous form, but it was made from a different substance: ’adāmāh (‘earth’: Gen. 2:7), a term which suggests a dark reddish-brown inclining towards black.70 Jewish, Christian and Islamic tradition therefore describes the material of Adam’s body as a dark or black substance.71 The Hebrew ‘opening of the mouth’ ritual described in Gen. 2:7 indicates that the luminous form incarnated within the ßelem, viz., Adam, like the Ba incarnates within the Egyptian Ka-statue.72 In Egypt the deity Amun (Atum) is said to be “that breath which stays in all things and through which one lives.”73 In the Luxor Temple Amun is depicted holding the sign of life

(ankh) toward the pharaoh Amen-hotep saying, “My beloved son, receive my likeness in thy nose.”74 This indicates that the blowing of the breath of life into the nostrils signifies the incarnation of that deity’s ‘breath,’ also called his ‘likeness.’ And as Walter Wifall noted: “The

(JSOT Supplemental Series 311; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 2001). On reading Genesis I and 2 as parts of a (redacted) whole v. Sawyer, “Image of God,” 64-5. 68

Yahuda, The Accuracy of the Bible, 152. 69

See above. 70

Cf. the Akkadian cognates adamātu, “dark red earth” and adamatu B “black blood.” CAD 1.94; TDOT 1:75-77 s.v. אדם ’ādhām by Maass; ibid, 1:88-90 s.v. אדםה ’adhāmāh by J.G. Plöger; ABD 1.62 s.v. Adam by Howard N. Wallace. 71

Jewish: see e.g. the haggadic tradition according to which Adam was made from dust taken from all four corners of the earth, and this dust was respectively red, black, white and green-“red for the blood, black for the bowls, white for the bones and veins, and green for the pale skin.” Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, 1:55; cf. PRE 11 (Frielander trns., 77). The green here at times substitutes for tekhelet, the dark blue of the high priestly robe. See Gershom Scholem, “Colours and Their Symbolism in Jewish Tradition and Mysticism: Part I,” Diogenes 108 (1979): 94; Rabbi Alfred Cohen, “Introduction,” in idem (ed.) Tekhelet: The Renaissance of a Mitzvah (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1996), 3. See also Maimonides who describes the “substance of dust and darkness” from which Adam’s body was made. The Guide of the Perplexed, trns. M. Friedlander (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1947) 3.8. Christian: cf. St. Ephrem the Syrian’s description of the “dark mass [of dust] šÈymwt"”; see discussion by Tryggve Kronholm, Motifs from Genesis 1-11 in the Genuine Hymns of Ephrem the Syrian (Sweden: CWK Gleerup Lund ,1978) 53, 57; Edmund Beck, “Iblis und Mensch, Satan und Adam,” Mus 89 (1976): 214. Islam: Qur"§n 15:28 and parallels: “I am going to create man from sounding clay (ßalßāl), from fetid black mud (Èama’ maßnūn).” 72 See below page 73

H. Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965) 161. 74

Ibid.

18

Egyptian portrait appears to be an obvious parallel to the…description of God and ‘the man’ in Gen. 2.”75 R.J. Williams also pointed out that the concept of a god placing breath into the nostrils of man is an ‘Egyptianism.’76 Thus, the composite narrative of Genesis (Gen. 1-2)77 presents us with a picture strikingly reminiscent of ancient Near Eastern cult tradition: a ßelem (cult-statue) is made for/by the deity78 from mundane materials79 into which that deity (his breath/likeness, i.e. his luminous form) subsequently enters and dwells.80 This indwelling enlivens the ßelem, making it god and king.81 Adam, as the ßelem of God, is himself the very body of God in which the spirit (luminous form) of God incarnated.82 As Wildberger notes:

It cannot be stressed enough that Israel…by a daring adaptation of the image theology of the surrounding world, proclaims that a human being is the form in which God himself is present.83

As ßelem, Adam is not only the earthly body of God, but the black body of God. The Akkadian

ßalmu means both “image/statue” and “black,” the latter meaning deriving from its verbal form ßalāmu, “to become dark, to turn black.”84 This semantic duality is found also in the Hebrew root ßlm (ßlm I: “image/statue”; ßlm II: “dark, darkness,” from ßālam II: “to be dark”).85 In an exhaustive philological study in 1972 I.H. Eybers suggested taking the Hebrew ßelem as ßel (‘shadow,’ ‘dark image’) expanded by the enclitic mēm (the final ‘m’).86 Marshalling an impressive amount of comparative material Eybers concluded:

Taking all the data into consideration the meaning of ßèlèm in Gen. 1:26-27 could be that man is a ‘shadowy (and therefore weak) replica and creation’ of God.87

75

“The Breath of His Nostrils: Gen. 2:7b,” CBQ 36 (1974): 239 [art.=237-24]. 76

R.J. Williams, “Some Egyptianisms in the Old Testament,” Studies in Honor of John A. Wilson’s 70th Birthday (Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization 35; Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1969) 93-4. 77

As arranged by the final redactor. On reading Genesis I and 2 as parts of a (redacted) whole v. Sawyer, “Image of God,” 64-5. 78

On the ritual attribution of the creation of the cult statute to the deity v. Walker and Dick, “Induction”; Dick, “Relationship,” 113-116. 79

See Victor Hurowitz, “What Goes In Is What Comes Out – Materials for Creating Cult Statues” in G. Beckman and T.J. Lewish (edd.), Text and Artifact – Proceedings of the Colloquium of the Center for Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania, April 27-29, 1998, Brown Judaic Series, 2006 (in press). My thanks to professor Hurowitz for providing a manuscript copy of this work. 80

On the divine “entering the form” of the statue v. Winter, “ ‘Idols of the King’,” 23; Dick, “Relationship,” 113-114; Curtis, “Man as Image of God,” 97-99. 81

On “made from dust” in Gen. 2 as a biblical metaphor for enthronement v. Walter Brueggemann, “From Dust to Kingship,” ZAW 84 (1972): 1-18. I. Engell already read Gen 1:26-8 as a description of a divine, enthroned Adam: see “Knowledge and Life in the Creation Story,” in M. Noth and D. Winton Thomas (edd.), Wisdom in Israel and In The Ancient Near East Presented to Harold Henry Rowley (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1955) 112. 82

As McBride puts it (“Divine Protocol,” 18) Adam is “God’s own incarnated image”. 83

H. Wildberger, “Das Abbild Gottes, Gen 1:26-30,” ThZ 21 (1965): 245-59. 84

CAD 16:70,77-85. 85

HALOT, 3:1028-1029 s.v צלם ; TDOT 12:396 s.v. צלמות by Niehr. 86

I.H. Eybers, “The Root ‘-L in Hebrew Words,” JNSL 2 (1972): 23-36 (29-32). See also International Standard Bible Encyclopedia 4vols. (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 1979-; hereafter ISBE) 4:440 s.v. “Shade; Shadow,” by G. Chamberlain. 87

Eybers, “The Root ‘-L,” 32 n. 2.

19

Earlier, Pierre Bordreuil, also noting the etymological relationship between the Hebrew ßelem and Akkadian ßalmu,88 pointed out the conceptual link between Gen. 1:26-27 and the ancient Near Eastern characterization of the king as both image of a god and as residing in that god’s (protective) shadow.89 The philological data is now sufficient for Israeli biblical scholar Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg to note simply: “Image-tselem in Hebrew…At the heart of that word is the word ‘shadow’.”90 This too is an “Egyptianism”: the cult statue in Egypt was also at times described as shut, “shadow”.

88

The first to propose such as relation seems to have been the Assyrologist Friedrich Delitzsch who described íelem as a Babylonian loanword: Prolegomena eines neuen hebräisch-aramäischen Wörterbuchs (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1886) 141. On denials of such a relation v. below n. 154. 89

Pierre Bordreuil, “ ‘A L’Ombre D’Elohim:’ Le theme de l’ombre protectrice dans l’Ancien Orient et ses rapports avec ‘L’Imago Dei,’ ” RHPhR 46 (1996): 368-391. 90

In Bill Moyers, Genesis: A Living Conversation (New York: Doubleday, 1996) 19. The relation of ílm II and íel to each other and to Gen.1:26-27 has been disputed. Two relevant issues were actually debated: (1) whether ílm II “to be/become dark” ever existed in Hebrew or Northwest Semitic (NWS) at all and: (2) if so, whether it was in any way related to íelem. This discussion often focused on the much disputed term צלמות (Jer. 2:6; Pss. 44:20; 23:4; Job 16:16; 38:17; see discussion in D. Winton Thomas, “צלמות in the Old Testament,” JSS 7 [1962]: 191-200). After Friedrich Delitzsch’s initial suggestion in 1886 of a íelem/ßalmu (black) relation, he was disputed by his father, OT scholar Franz Delitzsch (New Commentary on Genesis [Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark, 1888-89] 1:91. The longest lasting rebuttal came from Theodor Nöldeke, first in a review of Friedrich Delitzsch’s Wörterbuchs (ZDMG 40 (1886): 733-34) and latter in an article devoted to the subject (“צלמות und צלם,” ZAW 17 [1897]: 183-187). Nöldeke doubted the existence of a Hebrew ßlm II “to be/become dark” and derived ßelem from an Arabic ílm meaning “to cut off” (on the denial of a NWS ílm II v. also J.F.A. Sawyer, Review of W.L. Holladay, A Concise Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament in JSS 17 [1972] 257; D.J.A. Clines, “The Etymology of Hebrew ‘elem,” JNSL 3 (1973):23-25; Walter L. Michel, “‘LMWT, ‘Deep Darkness’ or ‘Shadow of Death’?” BR 29 [1984]: 5-13). But the weakness of this Arabic derivation has now been adequately demonstrated (Bordreuil, “‘A L’Ombre D’Elohim,” 368-372; James Barr, “The Image of God in the Book of Genesis-A Study of Terminology,” BJRL 51 (1968): 18-22; idem, Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament [1st ed.; Oxford, 1968; repr. With additions and corrections: Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 1987] 375-380; Eybers, “The Root ‘-L,” 31-32; Clines, “Etymology,” 19-21) and the existence of a NWS ílm II “to be/become dark” has been affirmed and accepted (Paul Humbert, Etudes sur le recit du paradis et de la chute dans la Genesis (Mémoires de l’Université de Neuchatel 14, 1940) 156; Baruch Margalit, A Matter of "Life" and "Death": A Study of the Baal-Mot Epic (CTA 4-5-6) [Kevelaer: Butzon & Bercker; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1980] 72 n. 1; HALOT 3:1028 s.v. צלם; TDOT 12: 396 s.v. צלמות by Niehr; Chaim Cohen, “The Meaning of צלמות ‘Darkness’: A Study in Philological Method,” in Michael V. Fox et al (edd.), Texts, Temples, and Traditions: A Tribute to Menahem Haran [Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 1996] 287-309). James Barr (Comparative Philology, 375) noted in 1987 that by that time the derivation of צלמות from a Hebrew root ßlm “to be/become dark” had become “so completely accepted that some works have ceased to mention that the older tradition of meaning (viz. ‘shadow of death’) ever existed.” Cf. Michel, “‘LMWT,” 5.

A connection between ßlm II and ßel is probable (Pace Nöldeke, “צלמות und 581” ,צלם and Clines, “Etymology,” 21-22) ‘el is thought to derive from the basic form צלל “to be/become dark”; cf. Ar. íll IV, Eth. salala II, Akk. ßillānû. See TDOT 12:372-73 s.v.צל; B. Halper, “The Participial Formations of the Geminate Verbs,” ZAW 30 (1910): 216. On צלל v. further: The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon (1906; Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 1996; hereafter BDB) 853 s.v. III צלל; HALOT 3:1027 s.v. III צלל; Lexicon in Veteris Testamenti Libros, ed. Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1985) 804b s.v. III צלל. On the Ar. íll IV v. E.W. Lane, Arabic-English Lexicon (2 vols.; Cambridge, England : Islamic Texts Society, 1984) 2: 1914 s.v. ظل . On the Akk. ßillānû v. CAD 16: 188 s.v. ßillānû.

Comparative philological evidence supports the connection between ßelem and ßel: See e.g.: Akk. ßalmu “black::image/statue” and ßillu “shadow::likeness (in a transferred sense; v. CAD 16:190 s.v. ßillu); Old South Arabic ílm/ßlm “darkness/black::image/statue” (see A.F.L. Beeston et al, Sabaic Dictionary (Louvain-la-Neuve: Editions Peeters; Beyrouth: Librairie du Liban, 1982) 143, 172. Thus Sawyer, “The Image of God, The Wisdom of Serpents and

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Adam is therefore both the image and shadow of the Biblical god’s luminous form (kābôd), his “shadow picture,” as N.W. Porteous said it, 91 just as the Kemetic god Atum is the black image/form/body of the luminous solar god Ra. Adam, as ßelem, is thus God’s black body on earth in which God’s Spirit/Glory (kābôd=Ba) incarnates, the sanctuary in which he resides, and the place where he is encountered. We thus have a better appreciation for and understanding of Finch’s observation quoted above:

The root of ATM is TM (TEM/TUM) which has several meanings, among them ‘people’ and ‘completion’ (Adam represented the completion of God’s work on the 6th day). Atum is no less the COMPLETE OR PERFECT DIVINE MAN. A cognate root of TEM is DEM and this means ‘to name’ (Adam was the namer of all the animals). Thus, the most elementary and indisputable etymological analysis demonstrates that ALL THE ATTRIBUTES OF THE EGYPTIAN DEITY ATUM ARE EMBRACED IN THE HEBREW ADAM.92

V. Adam/Atum in the Qur’an

Through the use of vocabulary and

concepts deriving from the ancient Near Eastern cult of images, Gen 1:26-27 (and 2:7) presents Adam as the black body of God on earth. The cult statue ßelem/ßalmu is usually worshipped as the god. This latter point is not explicitly made in Genesis. It is, however, made in the Qur"§n. In this regard, Ida J. Glaser’s work is significant. Glaser has well argued that the Qur"§nic account of Adam’s creation should be read as a comment on and complement to the Bible’s account.93 When the Hebrew and Arabic accounts are read together, it becomes apparent that the Qur"§nic account

(1) fills in gaps in the Biblical account. E.g. who was God talking to in Gen. 1:26, “Let US

make man”? The Qur"§n answers: the Exalted Assembly or council of angels. (2) offers explanations to aspects of the Biblical account. E.g. what was the reason the

serpent tempted Adam and Eve? Qur’ān: Because on Adam’s account he (Iblīs) was cast out of Paradise.

the Knowledge of God and Evil,” 66; Eybers, “The Root ‘-L,” 29-32; Barr, “The Image of God,” 21. Pace most recently Wildberger, TLOT 3:1080, s.v. “צלם”; Stendebach, TDOT 12:388, s.v. “צלם.” 91

IDB II:683 s.v. “Image of God.” In his discussion of Poimandres in 1935 C. H. Dodd (The Bible and the Greeks [London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1935] 157-8, n. 1), observing that the Greek terms σκια and ειδος used with regard to the divine Anthropos corresponded with the biblical צלם and דמות used in the creation account of Adam (Gen. 1:26-7), noted: “…certainly there is an old exegetical tradition according to which דמות and צלם in Genesis mean ‘likeness’ and ‘shadow’ respectively, corresponding fairly well with the ειδος and σκια of Poimandres. Unfortunately, I cannot trace this tradition farther back than the Jesuit Cornelius a Lapide, who died in 1637. Is there any evidence that it was known at a date which would make it possible that the Hermetist was acquainted with this interpretation…?” We can now answer Dobb’s question in the affirmative. 92

Finch, Echoes, 144. 93

“Qur"§nic Challenges for Genesis,” JSOT 75 (1997): 3-19.

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(3) offers corrections to aspects of the Biblical account. E.g. while the Genesis account has Adam and Eve prevaricating after being discovered in the wrong, the Qur"§nic account has them repenting immediately.

When the Qur"§nic account is read as such commentary on the Biblical account an

unmistakable observation jumps out at us: the Qur"§n does not deny or correct the Genesis Adam-as-ßelem theology, but confirms it in a most blatant way. Where the Genesis account conspicuously lacks only a description of the cult-statue (Adam-as-ßelem) receiving the worship that cult-statues normally receive, THE QUR"$NIC ACCOUNT PROVIDES IT.

The creation of Adam is retold in some detail in only slightly varying (though non-contradictory) ways in five surahs in the Qur"§n (Al-Baqara 2:28-39; Al-A#r§f 7:10-25; Al-\ijr

15:26-48; Al-Kahf 18:51-59; •§h§ 20:115-123). As Marcia K. Hermansen underlined, each version presents the story of Adam’s creation in order to convey a distinct point (thus the slight differences in the retelling).94 We will begin with Al-\ijr 15:26-34:

26. Surely We created man of dry ringing clay (ßalߧl), Of black mud (Èama") wrought into shape (masnån) 27. And the Jinn We created previously of flaming fire. 28. And when your Lord said to the angels, ‘See I am creating a man of dry ringing clay, of black mud wrought into shape. 29. When I have shaped him, and breathed My spirit into him, then fall down in prostration before him (fa-qa#å

lahu sajidÊn) 30. So the angels prostrated (sajada), all of them 31. Save IblÊs; he refused to be among the prostrate. 32. (God) said: ‘O IblÊs! What ails thee, that you art not among the prostrate?’ 33. He answered: ‘I will not bow down (lā sujud) before a man whom You have created of dry ringing clay, of black mud wrought into shape.’

34. (God) said, ‘Then get out hence, for, surely thou art rejected.’

Adam is here described as being made from ßalߧl, that is “dried clay that produces a sound like pottery (cf. 55:14-15)” and Èama", fermented black mud (see Èamma ‘to blacken, become black’). From these materials Adam’s body was wrought into shape (masnån). This image of clay recalls the Egyptian motif of god Khnum creating humanity on his potter’s wheel (see below page 27). But this is not the only “Egyptianism” in the Islamic narrative. According to the Islamic commentaries, this black body called Adam remained inert and lifeless, hollow like a statue for forty days (or forty years) before Allah blew his spirit into it, enlivening it.

He (Adam) remained forty nights as an inert body, and IblÊs used to come to him and kick him, and he (Adam) gave a hollow ring like a clay pot…Then he (IblÊs) used to go in (Adam) through his mouth and come out through his rear, and go in through his rear and come out through his mouth; then (IblÊs) said: ‘You are nothing’-to the hollow ring…When God breathed into (Adam) of His spirit, breath came from the

94

“Pattern and meaning in the qur"§nic Adam narratives,” Studies in Religion 17 (1988): 45 [art.=40-52]. See also Torsten Löfstedt, “The creation and fall of Adam: A Comparison of the Qur’anic and Biblical accounts,” Swedish Missiological Themes 93 (2005): 453-477. On Adam’s creation in the Qur"§n se also: Angelika Neuwirth, “Qur"§n, Crisis and Memory: The Qur"§nic path towards canonization as reflected in the anthropogonic accounts,” in Angelika Neuwirth and Andreas Pflitsch (edd.), Crisis and Memory in Islamic Societies. Proceedings of the third Summer Academy of Working Group Modernity and Islam held at the Orient Institute of the German Oriental Society in Beirut (Beirut, 2001)113-52; Kenneth E. Nolin, “The Story of Adam,” MW 65 (1964): 4-13;

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front of his head, and everything which came to flow from it became flesh and blood. And when the

breathing had reached his navel, he looked and marveled at how beautiful was what he saw. 95

Behind this imagery is surely the ancient Near Eastern cult statute enlivened through the mīs pî and pit pî rituals.

When an ‘image’ (ßelem/ßalmu) represents a deity, the distinction between representation and referent disappear. A divine image may be completely transformed into its referent through the performance of ritual. Before the ritual, the ‘image’ is an inanimate object…In the course of the ritual, the ‘image’ becomes a god. Like magical figurines, the divine image assumes the identity of its referent. It too is a surrogate, representing the god incarnate…The transformation is effected by ritual…”Without this ritual, the statue was only the product of human artisans.” But with this ritual, the once-lifeless ‘image’ becomes an animate entity. Through a collaboration of divine and human creative forces, the ritual transubstantiates the material image and brings it to life. The ‘image’ is thereby ‘born’.96

The only difference here in the Qur’ān is that the two step process – fashion statue and then ritualistically enliven it – is a completely divine rather than a collaborative divine-human effort. The divine Breath/Spirit blown into Adam’s nostrils is the Egyptian Ba incarnating within the Ka-statue, Adam.97 As Wade Nobles explains in his African Psychology:

The BA was the second (of seven divisions) of the psychic nature. It represented the transmission of the breath of life. The ancients believed that there was only one power, which was symbolically represented as ‘THE BREATH,’ and that this power or breath was transmitted from the ancestors to the descendants. The ancients believed that this power or energy has always existed and will always exist. The Ba was the invisible source, like electricity, of all visible functions. The Ba was in effect the vital principle which represented the essence of all things.98

Just as Gen. 2.7 depicts the transmission of the Ba or divine essence to the statue – Adam –

through the ‘Breath of Life’ metaphor, so too does the Qur’ān. This background is confirmed by the fact that after this ‘enlivening’ of the Adam-statue the angels are ordered to make prostration before Adam. Sajada is what Muslims do when praying to God. It is worship of God: “And to Allah makes prostration every living creature that is in the heavens and the earth, and the angels too (16:49).” But here Adam is worshipped by the angels, on God’s own orders. IblÊs, which name derives from the Greek diabolus “Devil,” refused to worship

95

Al-•abarÊ reports in his commentary (ad Surah 2:30) from Ibn #Abb§s. Translation from J. Cooper in The

Commentary of the Qur"§n by Abå Ja#far MuÈammad b. JarÊr al-•abarÊ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) 1:212-13. 96 Carr, in His Own Image and Likeness, 142, 143. 97 On the Egyptian notion of Ba and Ka see below pages 27-28. 98

Wade Nobles, African Psychology (Oakland: Black Family Institutions, 1986) 36.

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this black Adam. Why? “I (IblÊs) am better than he; You (God) have created me from fire, him You have created of clay (7:12).” For IblÊs’s pride and disobedience he was cast out of heaven to become Shayã§n or Satan.99

Prof Gabriel Said Reynolds in his important new book, The Qur’ān and Its Biblical Subtext (2010) correctly points outs:

References to the prostration of the angels before Adam appear in no less than seven different Sūras, suggesting that this is an account of fundamental important to the Qur’ān.100

Indeed it is of fundamental importance, as it defines not only the nature of Adam but the nature of Allah as well. Reynolds correctly perceived the meaning of this recurrently Qur’ānic theme: “The Qur’ānic subtext suggests that…God was…in him (Adam).”101 Like the Hebrew narrative, the Qur’ānic story of Adam is an incarnational narrative, it narrates God’s (Allah’s) incarnation within the black statue, Adam. That this is a picture of Allah’s incarnation in the body of Adam was explicitly stated by some Muslims whom al-Baghdādi (d. 1037 AD) labeled ÈulålÊya, “incarnationists.” He reports from #Abd al-Q§hir:

I found one (of them) citing, in proof of the possibility of God’s incarnation in bodies, God’s word to the angels regarding Adam: “So that when I have made him complete and breathed into him of my spirit, fall down making obeisance to him”. (The incarnationist) held that God commanded the angels to bow down before Adam only because he embodied himself in Adam and really abode in him because he created him in the most beautiful form. Therefore, (God) said: “We have created man in the finest form (95:4).”102

Al-Baghdādi’s polemical tone notwithstanding, these so-called ÈulålÊya correctly

perceived the implications of the Qur"§nic narrative. In both Sunnī and Shī#ī tradition we also learn that before the creation of the world God brought forth an anthropomorphic light, usually identified with Når MuÈammadÊ (the Light of MuÈammad), from whose body the celestial/heavenly world is sometimes said to be derived. When Allah (God) breathed of his spirit into Adam, the Når MuÈammadÊ ‘incarnated’ in the molded body of Adam.103

In surah 2:30, this black Adam whom the angels of God are ordered to worship is described as God’s khalīfa.104 The basic meaning of the root kh-l-f, as Wad§d al-Q§∙Ê has demonstrated,105 is “to succeed and replace or substitute for another.” As the cult statue

99

On IblÊs in Muslim tradition see Peter J. Awn, Satan’s Tragedy and Redemption: IblÊs in Sufi Psychology (SHR 44; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1983). 100

Gabriel Said Reynolds, The Qur’ān and Its Biblical Subtext (Routledge, 2010) 39. 101

Reynolds, Qur’ān and Its Biblical Subtext, 46-7. 102

Abu Manßår #Abd al-Q§hir b. •§hir al-Baghd§di, al-Farq Bayn al-Firaq, translated by Abraham S. Halkin, Moselm Schisms and Sects (Al-FarÎ Bain al-FiraÎ), Veing the History of the Various Philosophical Systems Developed in Islam (Tel Aviv, 1935) 79. 103

U. Rubin, “Pre-existence and Light: Aspects of the concept of Når MuÈammadÊ,” Israel Oriental Studies 5 (1975):62-119; John MacDonald, “Islamic Eschatology-1: The Creation of Man and the Angels in the Eschatological Literature,” Islamic Studies 3 (1964): 285-308. 104

“While some commentators have speculated whether man was made a successor to another species which held the title of khalīfah before him, we can safely accept the majority opinion that man was made the caliph of God.” Mustanir Mir, “Adam in the Qur"§n,” Islamic Culture 62 (1988): 4 [art.=1-11]. 105

“The Term ‘Khalīfa’ in Early Exegetical Literature,” Die Welt des Islams 28 (1988): 392-411. See also Lane, Lexicon, 1:792-98 s.v. خلف .

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substituted for the god on earth; as the Hebrew Adam as ßelem substituted for God on earth; so too does the Qur"§nic Adam as khalīfa substitute for God on earth (‘I am going to place a khalīfa in the earth [fi ‘l-ar∙i]’ 2:30). The Hebrew ßelem and Arabic khalīfa are cognate concepts.106 Similar to the Hebrew Adam-as-ßelem, the Qur"§nic Adam-as-khalīfa has been identified as the likeness (mithl) or form (ßåra) of God. The important and oft-repeated Qur’ānic verse Al-Shår§ 42:11: Laysa kamithlihi shay", “There is none like Him,” really reads “There is nothing like (ka) His likeness (mithlihi).”107 And as Ibn al-JawzÊ (d. 1201) noted, “taken literally (í§hir) these words indicate that God has a mithl, likeness, which is like nothing and like which there is nothing.”108 The root m-th-l means “to be like, compare,” mithl “similar, image,” tamthÊl “assimilation, likening.” The mithl or divine likeness of 42:11 was understood in some circles as a reference to God’s form, ßåra, which term is a synonym of mith§l.109 His mithl, ‘likeness,’ IS Adam, the Perfect Man (al-Insān al-Kāmil), according to the Sufi Sheikh al-Akbar Ibn al-‘Arabi (d. 1240).110

Surat al-Shår§ 42:11 is thus read as, “There is nothing like His Likeness (Adam).” According to a hadith of Prophet Muhammad, “God created Adam according to His form (ßåratihi).”111 God Himself has an aÈsan ßåra, “most beautiful form,’112 which was equated with Adam’s aÈsan

taqwÊm, “most beautiful stature” (95:4).113 God’s and Adam’s forms are therefore alike, and Adam is the very Likeness, mithl, of Allah.

The mithl or Divine Likeness (Adam) has no equal. We find the same declaration made in Egyptian literature about Atum/Amun, King of the Gods. In the Leiden Hymn to Amun Re it affirms:

All gods are three: Amun, Re, Ptah, they have no equal. His name is hidden as Amun, he is Re in the face, and his body is Ptah.

Wa-lam yakun lahu kufu’an āhad And none is equal to Him

The Black Adam of the Qur’ān thus is the divine statue or earthly body of Allah in which the Ba or essence of Allah indwells.

106

On the relatedness of the two concepts see Abraham I. Katsh, Judaism in Islām: Biblical and Talmudic Backgrounds of the Koran and its Commentaries (New York: Bloch Publishing Company, 1954) 26 n. 2. 107

See True Islam, The Truth of God: The Bible, The Qur’an and the Secret of the Black God (Atlanta: A-Team Publishing, 2007) 78-85. 108

Ibid. 109

Lane, Arabic Lexicon, s.v. ßåra. 110

On Ibn al-‘Arabī’s ‘al-Insān al-Kāmil’ see John T. Little, “Al-Insān Al-Kāmil: The Perfect Man According to Ibn al-‘Arabī,” Muslim World 77 (1987): 43-54. 111

Bukh§rÊ, ‘aÈÊÈ, isti"dh§n,1. 112

Tirmidhi, Jami’ al-Sahih, #3288; Ibn Hanbal, Musnad, 5:243. 113

Ahmad b. Hanbal, Kitab al-Sunna (Mecca, 1349 H) 159.

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TThhee KKaa’’bbaa aanndd tthhee BBllaacckk GGoodd ooff KKeemmeett

I. Cognate Religions

Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop had already pointed out some of the parallels between Kemetic

and Islamic traditions.114 These were primarily ritual parallels: the Muslim ablution, the ritual prayers, the 30-day fast, the abstention from pork, all find precedent in ancient Egypt.115 To this list may be added the seven-fold circumambulation around the sacred temple.116

But the theologies implied behind these rituals were equally similar. Diop hints at this fact:

It is remarkable that many Arabic religious terms can be obtained by a simple combination of the three Egyptian ontological notions, Ba, Ra, Ka. As examples we can cite: KABAR (a) = The action of raising the arms in prayer RAKA = The action of placing the forehead on the ground KAABA = The holy place of Mecca117

114

Cheikh Anta Diop, Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology (New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1991); The African Origin of Civilization (Westport: Lawrence Hill & Company, 1967); The Cultural Unity of Black Africa (1963/1989). 115

See also Emily Teeter, Religion and Ritual in Ancient Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Serǵe Sauneron, The Priests of Ancient Egypt, New Edition (1957; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). 116

See Heinrich Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der alten Aegypter (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrich’sche Buchhandlung, 1891) 346; Hugo Greßmann, “Tod und Auferstehung des Osiris nach seiner Festbräuchen und Umzügen,” Der Alt Orient 23 (1923): 23. 117

Diop, Cultural Unity of Black Africa, 89.

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Our focus here will be on the last point: Islam’s most sacred “house of God,” Bayt Allah, and also its central religious symbol (i.e. the Black Stone or Al-Hajar Al-Aswad) housed therein are both called Ka’ba. In order to fully understand and appreciate this verbal assonance between Kemetic ontological notions and Islamic religious terminology and sacred architecture – and

thus appreciate Diop’s insight - we must have a clear understanding of the relevant Kemetic concepts.

I.1. Ancient Egyptian Ontology

Kemetic ontology recognized different aspects or modes (upwards of nine) of divine and human “being-ness,” usually identified by such terms as: khat, ab, ren, ka, ba, shut, akh, sahu. However, regarding the gods the emphasis was clearly on but three of these: “Your ba is in the sky Your body (khat) is in the netherworld Your statue (=ka) is in the temple”

This recurrent tripartite theme has been elucidated by Egyptologist Jan Assmann.118 The

ba, the ka, and the khat of the gods were often the focus of the theologians of Kemet. The Khat was the mortal body of the god, liable to decay and thus becoming a corpse and a mummy (sahu). The ka, on the other hand, was the immortal body of the god. It is a perfect replica of the khat or mortal body, without the mortality of it. In a famous depiction, the god Khnum who created humans on his potter’s wheel is shown creating the khat and its twin ka simultaneously. Contrary to popular Western notions, the ka was not the immaterial “soul” or “spirit” of man/gods. It was as much a spiritual-material mode of being as the khat was, but it was a more transcendent mode of being. It is identified with the cult statue of the god in the temple, which itself was 118

The Search for God in Ancient Egypt (Cornell University Press, 2001).

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understood to be the divine body of the god on earth. The ba, often described as the “soul,” is better described as the Kemetic notion of vital force or the essence of the gods. According to Eberhard Otto, in humans the ba represented the embodiment of his/her vital forces and in the gods the embodiment of divine powers.119 It was this vital force/power that was ritualistically called down by the Egyptian priests to inhabit (!) and thus enliven the cult statute. As Prof Emily Teeter of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago explains:

The divine statue was provided as a physical form (ka) in which the ba could reside so that human beings could communicate with it…Once filled with and enlivened by the ba of the god, the cult statue became the ka, or physical form of the god.120

How does this relate to the Islamic Ka’ba (=Ka + Ba)? The Black Stone in pre-Islamic

Arabia served the same purpose as the cult statue did in Kemet:

A principal sacred object in Arabian religion was the stone. . . . Such stones were thought to be the residence of a god hence the term applied to them by Byzantine Christian writers of the fifth and sixth centuries: 'baetyl', from bet'el, 'the house of god'. Like the ka-statue of the Kemetic deities a baetyl or bayt illah (Arabic “house of god”) was regarded as “the container of the god.”121 And as Warwick Ball points out, this characteristically Arabian/Semitic tradition of the cultic stone finds its great expression today in the Ka’ba of Mecca: Abstract representations of deity in the form of a square or cube was common throughout the (Pre-Hellenic) Semitic Near East…This was the baetyl, or stone cult object, the focal point of so many temples not subject to Classicising influences…Indeed, the ancient Semitic idea of the sacred cube reaches culmination in the center of Semitic worship today: the Ka’ba…at Mecca.122

Tremendous light was shed on the Arabian/Islamic Ka’ba and thus on its similarities

with the Kemetic ka-statue by Prof Hildegard Lewy (d. 1969), Romanian Jew from Klausenburg and Semitics scholar and Assyriologist from Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati. In her exceptionally important article “Origin And Significance of the Magen Dawid: A Comparative Study in the Ancient Religions of Jerusalem and Mecca,”123 Lewy documented an ancient

119

E. Otto, “Die Anschauung vom B3 nach Coffin Texts Sp. 99-104,” Miscellanea Gregoriana (1941), 151-60. For more recent discussions see Louis Vico Zabkar, A Study of the Ba Concept in Ancient Egyptian Texts (University of Chicago Press, 1968); R.B. Finnestad, “On transposing Soul and Body into a monistic conception of Being. An example from Ancient Egypt”, Religion 16 (1986): 359-373. 120

Teeter, Religion and Ritual, 44. 121

Healey, Religion of the Nabataeans, 157. 122

Warwick Ball, Rome in the East: the transformation of an empire (Routledge, 2000) 379-380. 123

Hildegard Lewy, “Origin And Significance of the Magen Dawid: A Comparative Study in the Ancient Religions of Jerusalem and Mecca,” ArOr 18 (1950): 330-365.

Cult Statue (ka) of Osiris

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Semitic tradition – out of which the cults of Jerusalem and Mecca evolved – centered on a black stone that was considered to be both an embodiment of the primordial waters and a piece of the body of a deity, the divine body being made from those dark waters. Lewy noted:

the Black Stone…was thought to be…a part of the body of a great god…(I)n the form of a black meteorite a piece of the deity’s astral body was visible to the congregation at all times…124

This stone, through which the deity was worshipped, was

anciently housed in a cubed temple or shrine covered in black curtains. The ‘blackness’ of this pre-Islamic Arabian/Semitic deity and his cult inspired associations with the astral deity Saturn, the ‘Black Planet,”125 whose temple was also made of black stone, draped with black curtains, and featured a black stone representing the deity or an anthropomorphic statue of the deity made from black stone. Both al-Masudi (d. 956) and al-Dimasqi (d. 1327)578 report identifications of the Meccan Ka’ba with the cult of the black deity Saturn, as did the Dabistān –i Mazāhib.

The black stone of the Meccan Ka’ba, Lewy has well argued, must be understood against the backdrop of the broader Semitic cult of stones. While the shrine or temple itself was feminized and therefore identified with a goddess, the stone inside the shrine is identified with the male god, Allāh. This point is explicitly made in a Muslim tradition according to which al-Z ubayr b. al-‘Awwām (d. 656), famous companion of the Prophet Muhammad, was digging in al-Hijr while rebuilding the Ka’ba and found a stone on which was written: innānī Allāh Dhū Bakka, “I am Allāh, Lord of Bekka (=Mecca).”126

We have every reason to believe that the cult of the Ka’ba had the same significance for the prophet Muhammad that it did for the ancient Arabians: it was the cult center of the Black God, Allāh. As Lewy well argues in her study of the cult of the Black God in Mecca and Jerusalem:

the Black Stone…was thought to be…a part of the body of a great god…(I)n the form of a black meteorite a piece of the deity’s astral body was visible to the congregation at all times…It was…no break with the ancient religion of Mecca when Mohammed…set up the Hajar al-aswad (Black Stone) in a place where it was accessible to the eyes and the lips of the worshipers…It is…pertinent to recall that, before designating…the Ka’ba as the qibla… Mohammed ordered his followers to turn their faces in prayer toward the sacred rock in Jerusalem. The significance of this command becomes apparent if it is kept in mind that the qibla is an outgrowth of the belief…that man can address his prayers only to a being visible

124

Lewy, “Origin and Significance,” 345. 348, 349. 125

The Babylonians called Saturn Mi “The Black”. See Robert Brown, The Great Dionysiak Myth (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1878) 329. According to the Dabistān –i Mazāhib or “Schools of Religions” Saturn’s temple was constructed out of black stone as was his statue that stood there. In addition, Saturn’s officiating ministers were all black complexioned persons, Ethiopians, etc. The Dabistán or School of Manners, trans. David Shea and Anthony Troyer (New York and London: M. Walter Dunne, 1901) 22. 126

Al-Azraqi, Kitab Akhbar Makka, apud Die Chroniken der Stadt Mecca, ed. Ferdinand Wüstenfeld (Leipzig, 1858-61) 42-3; Tabari, Tafsir (Cairo ed.) III:61.

Black Stone of Aphrodite

Paphos, Cyprus

30

to the eyes127…when praying…the worshipper turned his eyes either to the heavenly body itself or, in it absence, to the stone or statue representing it on earth. If, however, he was not present in the town where a sacred stone, assumed to be a part of the deity’s astral body, was visible to the congregation, he still turned his eyes in the direction of this sanctuary, it being supposed that, having visited and inspected the deity’s body on the occasion of the annual pilgrimage, he could visualize it and thus address his prayer to it even from a distant point or locality.

While Muhammad, upon conquering Mecca, destroyed most of the 360 pre-Islamic idols

that had been housed in the Ka’ba, he not only kept this pre-Islamic idol, i.e. the Black Stone, but he made it the center of Islamic ritual. Muhammad’s reported interaction with Al-Hajar al-Aswad or the Black Stone is equally suggestive. He is known to have circumambulated the Ka’ba on camelback while pointing to the Black Stone with a staff exclaiming, Allāhu Akbar (Allāh is the greatest).128 He was observed touching the stone with a stick and then kissing the stick. According to ‘Abd Allah b. ‘Umar, son of the second caliph, Muhammad would touch the Black Stone, kiss it, and weep for a long time. He reportedly said to ‘Umar: “O ‘Umar, this is the place where one should shed tears.” It is not made clear why interacting with the Black Stone was a source of such sadness, but that the Prophet made some intimate, deeply emotional association between the stone and Allāh is quite evident from these reports. In this regard, a famous hadith of the Prophet is relevant:

The Ka’ba (stone) is the Right Hand of Allāh and with it He shakes the hands of His servants as a man shakes the hand of His friend.129

“Right Hand” here seems to be synecdoche (a part of something standing for the whole). In the history of religious symbolism the Hand symbolized a transmitter of spiritual and physical energy.130 This is an apt description of the black body that the creator-god made for himself in order to be able to transmit his divine luminosity to earth without scorching it. As the Indian Islamic scholar Muhammad Hamidullah summed up the meaning of the Black Stone: “The right hand of the invisible God must be visible symbolically. And that is the al-Hajar al-Aswad, the Black Stone in the Ka'bah.” Diop’s insight is thus well-founded: Islam’s Ka’ba is the Kemetic ka and ba, the ka or divine body/cult statue in which resides the ba or divine essence of the god, Allah.

127

We are here reminded of the famous “Hadīth of Jibrīl” in which Muhammad defines ihsan as “to worship God as though you see Him, and if you cannot see Him, then indeed He sees you." 128

Bukharī, Sahih, II, 697. 129

Ibn Qutayba, Ta' wil Mukhtalif al-Hadith (1972) 215 (=1995 ed; p. 198, 262); Al-Qurtubi, al-Asna fi Sharh Asma' Allah al-Husna, II:90-91. 130

Jack Tressidder, Symbols and Their Meanings (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2006) 22.

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32

‘‘HHiiss TThhrroonnee iiss EEvveerr oonn TThhee WWaatteerr’’

I. The Throne of Allah

And He it is Who created the heavens and the earth in six Days - and His Throne was upon the water - that He might try you, which of you is best in conduct. ... -- Sura 11:7

The above passage from the Qur’ān is famous, but very enigmatic. I suggest that a

proper understanding is possible if we read it in the light of Egyptian Sacred Science. First, it must be pointed out that the whole theme of a “god enthroned” has very specific connotations. In the History of Religions the divine throne is the signature of a very specific type of deity: the anthropomorphic (human-like) deity. Throughout the Ancient Near East and India the anthropomorphic gods of the highest order were depicted sitting on their throne. As the gods were material beings, the thrones were material objects.

Mesopotamian God Ur-Nammu enthroned

Ancient Indic ‘Proto-Shiva’ god enthroned

Canaanite/Israelite God Ala (El) from Ugarit ,1300

BCE.

Israelite God Yahweh enthroned on a 4th cent. BCE Gaza coin.

33

In Islamic tradition the divine throne is equally material. The Throne of Allah has a very significant and exalted place in the Qur’ān.131 It is called the Throne of Grace (23:117), the Mighty Throne of Power (23:86), and the Glorious Throne of Power (83:15). The Arabic word ‘arsh literally means “a thing constructed for shade” or “anything roofed.” The court or sitting place of the king is called ‘arsh. The most famous of these Throne passages in the Qur’ān describe Allah anthropomorphically sitting Himself on the ‘arsh. In Sura 57:4 it reads, "He it is who created the heavens and the earth in six days, then He mounted the Throne (thumma ‘stawa ‘ala l-‘arsh)." Sura 20:5 reads: Ar-Rahman 'ala-'l-'arsh istawa, meaning "The Beneficent One has sat down firmly on the Throne." Allah's angels are said to encircle the Throne (39:75) and hold it up, “Those who bear the Throne of Power and those around it” (Sura 40:7).

According to the early Muslims (Salaf or Pious Ancestors) the Throne is a material object, separate from the rest of creation and not to be understood as an allegorical expression for the creation of heaven and earth.132 As Allah sits firmly on the Throne of Power, His feet are said to rest on the Kursi or stool that accompanies the Throne. Though Kursi can signify ‘seat’ in a very general sense, it usually meant a seat with no back or armrests, a stool.133 Kursi is mentioned only twice in the Qur"§n, but several times in the sayings of the Prophet. The latter reportedly made it clear that the throne – and its divine occupant – were material. According to a tradition on the authority of Jubayr b. Mutim and found in Abu Dawud, Ibn Khuzayma, at-Tabarani and others, God sits on the Throne like a man sitting on a leather saddle and makes it creak.

[Jubayr b. Mut'im] narrates: A Bedouin came to find the Messenger of God and said to him: "O Messenger of God, the men are all in, the women and the children perish, the resources are growing thin, the beasts are dying. Pray then to God in our favor so it rains! We ask of you to intercede for us alongside God, and we ask of God to intercede for us alongside of you." "Unfortunate one!" answered the Messenger of God, "do you know what you're saying?" Then he started to say subhana llah, and did not stop repeating it so long as he didn't see his Companions doing as much. Then he said [to the Bedouin]: "Unfortunate one! One does not ask God to intercede alongside any one of His creatures! God is very much above this! Unfortunate one! Do you know who God is? (God is on His Throne, which is above His heavens, and heavens are above His earth,) like this"—and the Messenger of God put his fingers in the shape of a tent—and it creaks under Him like the creaking of the saddle under the rider.”134

The Prophet compares Allah sitting on the Throne and making it creak to a man sitting on a saddled horse and making the saddle creak. The anthropomorphism is blatant. The Prophet’s physical gesturing hardly allows us to see in this report anything other than a physical description of God’s “establishment” on a physical Throne.

131

Cf. Thomas J. O’Shaughnessy, “God’s Throne and Biblical Symbolism in the Qur’an,” Numen 20 (1973), 202-221. 132

For a look at the early traditionalist interpretation of the ‘arsh narratives cf. Gosta Vitestan, “’Arsh and Kursi: An Essay on the Throne Traditions in Islam,” in Living Waters Scandinavian Orientalistic Studies ed. by Egon Keck, Svend Sondergaad, and Ellen Wulff (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1990), 372. 133

"Kursi," EI2, 509. 134

Abu Dawud, as-Sunan, 18 §4726; Ibn Khuzayma, Kit§b al- TawÈÊd 103: 6ff.

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II. God’s Throne on the Waters

Image courtesy Akbar Shareef Muhammad

The above image depicts Osiris sitting on his throne which itself sits on a slab of water. This too is a very common Ancient Near Eastern theme. See for example the Mesopotamian Sun-God Shamash sitting enthroned above a slab of frozen water, and the Israelite god Yahweh depicted on a 7th cent. BCE Hebrew seal from Judah enthroned in a boat in water. In this Ancient Near Eastern context, and in the Egyptian context in particular, this divine throne above water has specific metaphorical as well as physical significance.

Sumerian Sun Shammah enthroned above

water

Israelite god Yahweh enthroned above

water

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II.1. God’s Aquatic Body

The religious texts of the ancient East, i.e. the hieroglyphic writings of ancient Kemet (Egypt), the cuneiform writings of ancient Sumer (Chaldea/Mesopotamia), and the Sanskrit writings of ancient India, record the history of God the Creator of the cosmos as a divine Black man. According to these texts, the Creator God was originally a luminous, formless essence hidden within a primordial substantive darkness called ‘waters’. At some point, this divine luminosity concentrated itself within this aquatic darkness and produced the atom or first particle of distinct matter, the ‘golden egg’ of ancient myth. From this first atom there emerged many atoms, which the God used to build up his own luminous body. This body was anthropomorphic (man-like) and thus this God was the first man in existence, a self-created man. This was a brilliantly luminous man, represented by the so-called ‘sun-gods’ of ancient myth like Ra of Egypt and Shammash of Mesopotamia.

At a certain point the God decided to veil his luminosity with a body made from that same primordial aquatic dark substance from which he initially emerged. In Mesopotamian tradition this aquatic blackness from which the divine black body was formed was called apsu; in Indic tradition tamas; in Kemet, nun; in the Bible, ’adāmāh; in the Qur’ān, Èama", This divine black body refracted the divine light as it passed through the hair pores covering the body. This black body is therefore referred to in later literature as God’s ‘shadow’ as it shades creation from the scorching heat of the ‘sun’ or luminous body of God. As the light passed through the hair pores of this divine black body it produced a dark-blue iridescence or glow. The ancients symbolized this visual effect by the semiprecious stone sapphire also known as lapis lazuli, which was a dark blue stone with golden speckles throughout. The God’s body was thus depicted dark blue and said to be made of sapphire/lapis lazuli. 135

The Eternal God, Amun (Atum), in Black and Blue

135

For documentation of this ancient ‘Myth of the Black God’ see Islam, Truth of God, Chapter V.

36

In antiquity various aspects of the gods were represented zoomorphically. That is to say, different animals were used to symbolize distinct characteristics or attributes of a deity,136 who was otherwise anthropomorphic. The paramount ‘attribute animal’ of the black creator-god was the black bovine, usually a bull. The bull represented potency, fecundity, and primordial materiality, all essential characteristics of the creator-god.137 The color of the bull was not arbitrary. As René L. Vos pointed out, “Color reflected the nature of a god” and thus the skin color “constituted the vehicle of the divine nature of a sacred animal.”138 Over against the golden lion or falcon, which symbolized morning/midday

sunlight, the black bovine symbolized night and materiality.139 The black bovine was associated with the black primordial waters from which the creator-god emerged. As Asko Parpola notes regarding the Indic tradition: “the dark buffalo bathing in muddy water was conceived as the personification of the cosmic waters of chaos”.140 The black bull thus came to symbolize the black material body that the creator-god will form for himself, the black skin of the bovine signaling the black skin of the deity. See for example the black skin of the Egyptian deity Min, the

136

On the ‘attribute animal’ of ancient Near Eastern religion see Erik Hornung, Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: the One and the Many (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982)109-25; P. Amiet, Corpus des cylinders de Ras Shamra-Ougarit II: Sceaux-cylinres en hematite et pierres diverses (Ras Shamra-Ougarit IX; Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1992) 68; “Attribute Animal” in idem, Art of the Ancient Near East, trans. J. Shepley and C. Choquet (New York: Abrams, 1980) 440 n. 787. 137

On the symbolism of the bull see Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, translated by Rosemary Sheed (1958; Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1996) 82-93; Karel van der Toorn, Bob Becking and Pieter W. van der Horst (edd.), Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, 2nd Edition (Leiden and Grand Rapids, MI.: Brill and Eerdmans, 1999) s.v. “Calf,” by N. Wyatt, 180-182; ERE 2:887-889 s.v. Bull, by C.J. Caskell. See also René L. Vos, “Varius Coloribus Apis: Some Remarks of the Colours of Apis and Other Sacred Animals,” in Willy Clarysse, Antoon Schoors and Harco Willems (edd.), Egyptian Religion: The Last Thousand Years, Part 1. Studies Dedicated to the Memory of Jan Quaegebeur (Leuven: Uitgeverij Peeters en Departement Oosterse Studies, 1998) 715, who notes that the bulls of Egypt “materialize upon the earth the creative forces of the hidden demiurge (creator-god).” 138

“Varius Coloribus Apis,” 711. 139

Asko Parpola, “New correspondences between Harappan and Near Eastern glyptic art,” South Asian Archaeology 1981, 178 notes: “Indeed, the golden-skinned hairy lion is an archetypal symbol for the golden-rayed sun, the lord of the day…Night…is equally well represented by the bull, whose horns connect it with the crescent of the moon.” On the bull and the moon-god in ancient Near Eastern mythology see also Tallay Ornan, “The Bull and its Two Masters: Moon and Storm Deities in Relation to the Bull in Ancient Near Eastern Art,” Israel Exploration Journal 51 (2001) 1-26; Dominique Collon, “The Near Eastern Moon God,” in Diederik J.W. Meijer (ed.), Natural Phenomena: Their Meaning, Depiction and Description in the Ancient Near East (North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1992) 19-37. On the falcon as symbol of the sun-god see J. Assmann, Liturgische Lieder an den Sonnengott. Untersuchungen zur ägyptischen Hymnik I (MÄS 19; Berlin, 1969) 170-1. 140

Parpola, “New correspondences,” 181. See also W.F. Albright who noted that “the conception of the river as mighty bull is common”: “The Mouth of the Rivers,” AJSL 35 (1991): 167 n.3 [art.=161-195]. In the Œg Veda the cosmic waters are cows (e.g. 4.3.11; 3.31.3; 4.1.11) and in PañcaviÒśa-Brāmana 21.3.7 the spotted cow Śabalā is addressed: “Thou art the [primeval ocean].” On water and cows in Indic tradition see further Anne Feldhaus, Water and Womanhood. Religious Meanings of Rivers in Maharashtra (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) 46-47.

Cult Statue of

Creator-god Min

of Kemet

Mnevis Bull

37

‘creator god par excellence,” and his black bull Mnevis.141 The Sumerian creator-god Enki was called am-gig-abzu, ‘black bull of the Apsû (primordial waters),”142 and he possessed a black body made from those primordial waters.143

Ancient Indic tradition, which is a Kushite (African) tradition at root, clearly expresses this motif. After his initial creation of the celestial

cosmos the luminous, anthropomorphic Indic creator-deity Prajāpati-Brahmā is said to have wrapped himself in the primordial waters which were personified in his daughter/wife Vāk/Virāj.144 He then became haritah śyāvah, dark brown like night (śyāvah, Œg Veda 6.48.6.) with a ting of yellow (a yellow glow, haritah).145 Prajāpati-Brahmā’s copulation with Vāk is a metaphor for the reuniting of fire (breath) with water.146 Prajāpati-Brahmā’s (re-)uniting with Vāk (primordial water/primordial cow) produced the idaÒ sarvam or “phenomenal, material world,” beginning with Manu, the first

earthly human, which is only Prajāpati-Brahmā himself reborn in the phenomenal, material world.147 According to the Trimūrti or Triad tradition of the Purānas VißÖu is the name of the creator-god Prajāpati-Brahmā with his luminous body cloaked within an aquatic body made from the primordial waters. Therefore, as VißÖu, (Prajāpati-)Brahmā is called “he who dwells in the [causal] waters, Nārāyana.” By assuming this form (Prajāpati-)Brahmā showed mercy on creation. Thus, in his

141

Robert A. Armour, Gods and Myths of Ancient Egypt (Cairo and New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 1986, 2001) 157; Veronica Ions, Egyptian Mythology Middlesex: The Hamlyn Publishing Group Ltd., 1968) 110. While Min was associated with a white bull in New Kingdom Panopolis and Coptos at an earlier period in Heliopolis he was associated with the black bull Mnevis. See G.D. Hornblower, “Min and His Functions,” Man 46 (1946): 116 [art.=113-121). On Min and black bovines see also H. Gauthier, Les personnel du dieu Min (Le Caire, 1931; IFAO. Recherches d’Archéologie 2) 55-57. On the mythological significance of the black bovine skin see especially Vos, “Varius Coloribus Apis.” 142

See See W.F. Albright, “The Mouth of the Rivers,” AJSL 35 (1991): 161-195, esp. 167. The Babylonian Tiamat (primordial salt-waters) seems also to have been presented as a bovine in the Enūma Elish: see B. Landsberger and J.V. Kinnier Wilson, “The Fifth Tablet of Enuma Elis,” JNES 20 (1961): 175 [art.=154-179]. On the black bull and the black waters of creation see also Vos, “Varius Coloribus Apis,” 715, 718. 143

See Wesley Muhammad, Black Arabia and the African Origin of Islam (Atlanta: A-Team Publishing, 2009) 91-97. 144

See G.H. Godbole, “Later Vedic and Brahmanical Accounts,” in Dange, Myths of Creation, 13). On Vāk as primordial matter see Nagar, Image of Brāhma, viii; Joshi, “Prajāpati,” 113. 145

See Taittirīya BrāhmaÖa 2.3.5.1; Śatapatha-BrāhmaÖa 6.2.2.2. On Vāk and the primordial waters see ibid., 6.1.1.9; PaÕcaaveÒśa-BrāhmaÖa 20.14.2; Œg Veda 10.125.3; Jaiminīya-BrāhmaÖa 2.252 (Vāk as primordial cow); Bosch, Golden Germ, 52-53. 146

See Mishra, Brahmā-Worship. 11. On the fiery breath (Agni) and the waters see further Kuiper, “Golden Germ,” 27-30; Bosch, Golden Germ, 57-62. 147

Śatapatha-BrāhmaÖa 6.6.1.19; 9.4.1.12; J. Gonda, “All, Universe and Totality in the Śatapatha-BrāhmaÖa,” Journal of the Oriental Institute 32 (1982): 1-17; Joshi, “Prajāpati in Vedic Mythology and Ritual.”

Prajāpati-Brahmā

VißÖu statue, Madhava Moorti

VißÖu

38

‘VißÖu’ form he is called auspicious.148 VißÖu is depicted both with a pitch-black body, alluding to the dark aquatic matter from which it was formed, and a dark blue body, alluding to the interaction of the light of Prajāpati-Brahmā with this black matter.

The black bull (k" km) of Egypt, Apis, likewise personified the waters of the Nile which was regarded as a type of Nun, the dark, primeval watery mass out of which creation sprang, and he (Apis) was associated with the Black God Osiris, who himself was identified with the aquatic element.149 Plutarch (d. 120 CE) thus notes:

Not only the Nile, but every form of moisture (the Egyptians) call simply the effusion of Osiris; and in their holy rites the water jar in honor of the god heads the procession.150

Above we noted that the myth of Ra joining Osiris in the Duat or Underworld is actually

a picturesque way of presenting Ra’s incarnation in the black, aquatic body personified in Osiris, ruler of the Duat. The Duat represents the primordial waters and is explicitly identified with the black body of Osiris;151 “the sun god plunged into the primordial waters, out of which creation originally arose…the sun god absorbed the chaotic power of the primordial waters, which engulfed the remnants-‘flesh’-of the once virile solar god.”152 Osiris, or Atum, is thus called Auf-Ra, ‘the flesh of Ra’.

148

On VißÖu see Daniélou, Myths and Gods of India, Chapters Eleven through Fourteen; Arvind Sharma, “The Significance of VißÖu Reclining on the Serpent,” Religion 16 (1986): 101-114; Nanditha Krishna, The Art and Iconography of Vishnu-Narayana (Bombay, 1980); Kalpana S. Desai, Iconography of VißÖu (In Northern India, Upto the Mediaeval Period) (New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1973);F.B.J Kuiper, “The Three Strides of VißÖu,” in idem, Ancient Indian Cosmogony, 41-55; Bhattachari, Indian Theogony, Chapter Fourteen; Martin, Gods of India, Chapter Three; J. Gonda, Aspects of Early VißÖuism (Utrecht; N.V.A. Oosthoek’s Uitgevers Mij, 1954). See also Wendy Doniger O’flaherty, “The Submarine Mare in the Mythology of Śiva,” JRAS 1971 9-27 149

See Émile Chassinat, “La Mise a Mort Rituelle D’Apis,” Recueil de travaux relatifs a la philology et a l’archeologie egyptiennes et assyriennes 38 [1916] 33-60; E.A. Wallis Budge, The Egyptian Book of the Dead (The Papyrus of Ani). Egyptian Text Transliterated and Translated [New York: Dover Publications, Inc. 1967] cxxiii. 150

Isis and Osiris, 36, 365B. 151

See above note 38. 152

Darnell and Manassa, Tutankhamun’s Armies, 22-23.

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That the throne and the watery dais upon which it sits have somatic significance, viz. they signify aspects of the body of the deity, can be demonstrated. First, it is known that the whole of the Ancient Near Eastern and Indian sacred temple reflected the bod(ies) of the god to whom it is dedicated and that the throne-room was a

miniature temple itself. The temple was considered an architectonic icon: an image in stone of the god. In particular, the temple architecture

symbolically reflects the anthropomorphic body of the god and ‘houses’ the story of how this divine body emerged out of the primordial waters.153 Thus, the seven levels of the Mesopotamian ziggurat or stepped-pyramid represented the seven stages of the divine descent from the highest heaven into material enmeshment (incarnation).154 The temple is thus the link between heaven and earth, dur-an-ki, its top portion touching heaven, its bottom reaching deep into the Abzu or primordial waters.155 The lowest level of the ziggurat and the exterior walls of the temple represent the external body of the god, which is associated with the primordial waters: thus the undulating course of the bricks on the external walls of the Egyptian temple are designed to imitate the waves of Nun, the primordial waters in Egyptian cosmogonic thought.156

153

Mark S. Smith, “Like Deities, Like Temples (Like People),” in John Day (ed.), Temple and Worship Biblical Israel

(London/New York: Clark, 2005) 21; Andrzej Wierciński, “Pyramids and Ziggurats as the Architectonic Representations of the

Archetype of the Cosmic Mountain,” Occasional Publications in. Classical Studies 1 (1978): 69-110; I.W. Mabbett, “The Symbolism of Mount Meru,” History of Religions 23 (1983) 64-83; Mohiy wl-Din Ibrahim, “The God of the Great Temple of

Edfu,” in John Ruffle, G.A. Gaballa and Kenneth A. Kitchen (edd.), Orbis Aegyptiorum Speculum: Glimpses of Ancient Egypt. Studies in Honour of H.W. Fairman (Warminster, 1979) 170-171; Ragnhild Bjerre Finnestad, Image of the World

and Symbol of the Creator: On the Cosmological and Iconological Values of the Temple of Edfu (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1985); Stella Kramrish, “The Temple as Purusa,” in Pramod Chandra (ed) Studies in Indian Temple

Architecture (American Institute of Indian Studies, 1975) 40-46. Erik Hornung, Idea into Image: Essays on Ancient Egyptian Thought (Timken Publishers, 1992) Chapter 6. 154

Mabbett, “Symbolism of Mount Meru,” 64i; Amar Annus, “The Soul’s Ascent and Tauroctony: On Babylonian Sediment in

the Syncretic Religious Doctrines of Late Antiquity,” in Thomas Richard Kämmerer (ed.), Studies on Ritual and Society in the Ancient Near East. Tartuer Symposien 1998-2004 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2007) 1-53; Pirjo

Lapinkivi, The Sumerian Sacred Marriage in the Light of Comparative Evidence (Helsinki: The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2004) 146. 155

D.O. Edzard, “Deep-Rooted Skyscrapers and Bricks: Ancient Mesopotamian Architecture and its Imagery,” in M. Mindlin,

M.J. Geller and J.E. Wansbrough (edd.), Figurative Language in the Ancient Near East (London: University of London,

1987) 13-24. 156

A.J. Spenser, “The Brick Foundation of Late-Period Temples and their Mythological Origin,” in John Ruffle, G.A. Gaballa

and Kenneth A. Kitchen (edd.), Orbis Aegyptiorum Speculum: Glimpses of Ancient Egypt. Studies in Honour of H.W. Fairman (Warminster, 1979) 133; Dunand and Zivie-Coche, Gods and Men in Egypt, 88; Hornung, Idea into

Image, 119. On the cosmic/cosmogonic symbolism of the Egyptian temple see also John Baines, “Temple Symbolism,” RAIN 15 (1976): 10-15.

The Seven-step ziggurat of Mesopotamia and the Seven-stage descent of luminous Spirit into Black Matter

40

A. The Luxor Temple of Kemet B. The Prasada Temple of Hindu

India C. Layout of the Temple of Solomon

reflecting the body of the High Priest, the Divine Man (Yahweh)

41

As the exterior temple walls with their wave-like bricks symbolize the earthly body of the god and the interior of the temple – the Holy of Holies – signifies the god’s internal essence/glory, so too is this pattern reflected in the arrangement of the cult-statue inside the temple. The bottom wave-like dais is the equivalent of the temple walls with its undulating bricks; the box-like throne represents the material body of the god, but one of a higher nature than the ‘bottom’ or most external body; and the god sitting on top is the ka, the immortal body. The correctness of this insight is

indicated by the significance of the so-called cube-statues that became prevalent during Kemet’s Middle Kingdom (2040 BCE – 1783 BCE). This is a box like structure with a human figure emerging out of it. As Moustafa Gadalla explains, the box-like structure in general in Egyptian thought is “the model of the earth and the material world.” Thus,

In these cube statues, there is the powerful sense of the subject emerging from the prison of the cube. Its symbolic significance is that the spiritual principle is emerging from the material world.157

This is also the significance of the box-like thrones upon which the Egyptian deities and kings sit. Gadalla notes: “The Divine person is shown sitting squarely on a cube, i.e. mind over matter.”158 The ‘mind over matter’ explanation is cliché: this arrangement signifies in actuality the predominance of the divine person/body (the ka) over the mortal body (the khat). Like the temple itself, these throne-room accessories tell us something about the bodies of the gods.

157

Gadalla, Egyptian Cosmology, 53. 158

Gadalla, Egyptian Cosmology, 53.

Khepri form and Asar (Osiris) form of Atum, enthroned on cubed throne

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II.2. Yahweh-Elohim (Allah): The Aquatic Body in Biblical Tradition

Because of the noted relationship between Ancient Near Eastern (especially Egyptian) tradition and Biblical tradition, we are not surprised to find that the god of the Bible is described in many Jewish sources as possessing this same aquatic body that the Ancient Near Eastern deities possessed. The esoteric tradition of the priests of the Jerusalem Temple identified the long dark blue robe (me’îl) of the high priest with the earthly body of Yahweh.159 This esoteric priestly tradition was inherited by the later rabbis, according to whom the dark blue ritual tassel (ẓiẓit) worn on the prayer shawl (tallit) of observant Jews symbolized the sapphiric body of God.160 Sapphire/lapis lazuli is a semiprecious stone which possessed great mythological significance in the Ancient Near East, being considered the “ultimate Divine substance.”161 In its natural state sapphire/lapis lazuli is deep blue with fine golden spangles and was associated both with the starry night heavens and the primordial waters.162 The divine sapphiric body was thus an aquatic body. Jewish sources from the first century CE and beyond document the belief that Yahweh acquired his aquatic body in much the same way that Atum did. The later

Jewish mystical tradition, Kaballah, therefore understandably identified Yahweh with Adam (Kadmon).163

Gnosticism was a religious/philosophical movement of the 1st - 4th centuries CE. Though this movement was made up of various groups,164 the earliest no doubt formed around a group of renegade Jewish priests from the Jerusalem Temple who,165 amazingly, developed a

159

Muhammad, Truth of God, 224-229. 160

See Wesley Muhammad, “Sapphiric God: Esoteric Speculation on the Divine Body in Post-Biblical Jewish Tradition,” @ http://drwesleywilliams.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/docs/Sapphire_RabbisHTRNo_KabbalahRevised2.18223042.pdf. 161

F. Daumas, “Lapis-lazuli et Régénération,” in Sydney Aufrère, L’Univers minéral dans la pensée Égyptienne, 2 vols. (Le Caire: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale du Caire, 1991) 2:463-488; John Irwin, “The L§ã Bhairo at Benares (V§r§ÖasÊ): Another Pre-Aśokan Monument?” ZDMG 133 (1983): 327-43 [art.=320-352]. 162

Daumas notes: “Le lapis-lazuli paraît avoir été associé à deux principaux aspects de la nature : la nuit…et l’eau primordiale”. “Lapis-Lazuli rt Régénération,” 465 and passim. 163

On Adam Kadmon v Schwartz, Tree of Souls, 15-16; Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, I:295-298; C.J.M. Hopking, The Practical Kabbalah Guidebook (New York: Sterling Publishing, 2001), 34f.; Leo Schaya, The Universal Meaning of the Kabbalah, trns from the French by Nancy Pearson (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1971), 116-119; Gershom Sholem, “Adam Kadmon,” Encyclopedia Judaica 2:248-49; Green, Guide to the Zohar, 46. 164

L. King, What is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, Mass. And London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003); Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996). 165

John D. Turner, Sethian Gnosticism and the Platonic Tradition (Québec, Paris: Les Presses de l’Université Laval and Éditions Peeters, 2001) 257ff; idem, “Sethian Gnosticism: A Literary History,” in in Charles W. Hedrick and Robert Hodgson, Jr. (edd.), Nag Hammadi, Gnosticism, & Early Christianity (Peabody, MASS: Hendrickson Publishers, 1986) 55-86. On Jewish Gnosticism see also Gils Quispel, “Gnosticism and the New Testament,” in J.

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disgust for the God of Israel. Gnostic texts such the Apocraphon of John, the Hypostasis of the Archons, and On the Origin of the World leave no doubt as to why166: it was the material blackness of this God, or his body, that this group of priests revolted against. They had come under the spell of Greek philosophy. Particularly influential on their thinking was the Pythagorean Table

of Opposites. According to Pythagoras, that which is characterized by light, spirit, and maleness was good, and that characterized by darkness, materiality, and femininity was bad: the two groups were antithetical. The Gnostics thus ‘split’ the God of Israel in two. They worshiped as the supreme God the luminous anthropos of Day One of Genesis with his brilliant light-body, usually called phÙs, which name is Greek and means both ‘light’ and ‘man.’ The Gnostics separated this luminous man (phÙs) from his black material ‘veil.’ The latter was exclusively identified with the God of the Bible,167 whom they demonized and rejected because of his creation of a material (and thus evil) world. With his black material body, the God of the Bible (Yahweh-Elohim) was seen as

evil and even equated with the devil at times.168 Because materiality was associated with femininity according to the Pythagorean Table of Opposites, these early Gnostics represented Yahweh-Elohim’s black material body as a black goddess, Sophia-Achamoth.

Philip Hyatt (ed.), The Bible in Modern Scholarship. Papers read at the 100th Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, December 28-30, 1964 (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press); idem, “Judaism, Judaic Christianity and Gnosis,” in A.H.B. Logan and A.J.M. Wedderburn (edd.), The New Testament and Gnosis (Edinburgh: T&T Clark Limited, 1983), 46-68; R. McL. Wilson, The Gnostic Problem: A Study of the Relations between Hellenistic Judaism and the Gnostic Heresy (London: A.R. Mowbray & Co. LTD, 1958, 19642); Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis, the Nature and History of an Ancient Religion, trns. Robert McLachlan Wilson (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1983); Birger Pearson, Gnosticism, Judaism, and Egyptian Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 19990). 166

For English translations of these texts see Willis Barnstone and Marvin Meyer, The Gnostic Bible (New Seeds, 2006). 167

On the Gnostic demiurge and biblical deity see Simon Pétrement, A Separate God. The Christian Origins of Gnosticism tns. Carol Harrison (New York: HaperCollins Publishing, 1990) Chap. I; Anne Ingvild Sælid Gilhus, “The Gnostic Demiurge - an Agnostic Trickster,” Religion. 14 (1984): 301-11; E. Aydeet Fischer-Mueller, “Yaldaboath: The Gnostic Female Principle in its Fallenness,” NovTes (1990): 79-95; Ioan P. Couliano, The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (New York: HarperCollins Publishing, 1992) Chapt. 4; Stevan L. Davies, “The Lion-Headed Yaldabaoth,” Journal of Religious History 11 (1981): 495-500; Jarl Fossum, “The Origin of the Gnostic Demiurge,” Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 61 (1985): 142-52; Nils A. Dahl, “The Arrogant Archon and the Lewd Sophia: Jewish Traditions in Gnostic Revolt,” in Bentley Layton (ed.), The Rediscovery of Gnosticism: Proceedings of the International Conference on Gnosticism at Yale New Haven, Connecticut, March 28-31, 1978 2 vols. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1981) 2:689-712; Foerster Werner. Gnosis: A Selection of Texts [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974] 1: 11; Michael Allen Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996) 63-79; idem, “The demonizing of the demiurge: The innovation of Gnostic myth,” in Innovation in Religious Traditions: Essays in the Interpretation of Religious Change (Religion and Society Series 31; Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992) 73-107; idem, “The Old Testament God in Early Gnosticism,” MA thesis, Miami University, Ohio, 1970; Howard M. Jackson, The Lion Becomes Man: The Gnostic Leontomorphic Creator and the Platonic Tradition (SBLDS 81; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1985. 168

The Hypostasis of the Archons (NHC II, 4, 94.25-26); The Apocryphon of John (II 11, 17-18). See also Joseph Dan, “Samael and the Problem of Jewish Gnosticism,” in Perspectives on Jewish Thought and Mysticism (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998) 257-276.

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These (Jewish) Gnostic sources evidence an awareness of the God of Israel’s aquatic body. A magical invocation to the Jewish God found on a Greek-Hebrew amulet169 and in a Greek magical papyrus170 reads: “Thou (whose) form is like heaven, like the sea, like darkness/cloud, the All-shaped.”171 Plotinus’s Gnostics (Enn. II, 9.10.3) describe the Demiurge or Biblical creator-god as a dark image (eidolon) in matter of the (S)oul’s reflection. Similarly, for the Docetists of Hippolytus (Ref. VIII 9.4-10.1) the creator god of Genesis is an impression in dark matter of a higher light Aeon.172 The Mandean Demiurge Ptahil is a reflection in black water of his father Abathur, an uthra (divine light-being).173 These two figures show some relation to the biblical El (Abathur) and Yahweh (Ptahil).174

The characteristically ‘Gnostic’ myth of the ‘sunken god’ explains the origin of the

Biblical god’s aquatic body: the deity (or his eidolon, image) who, having glanced at and/or

descend to the waters below, became engulfed by them and embodied within them.175 Now

169

See Josef Keil, “Ein rätselhaftes Amulett,” Wiener Jahreshefte 32 (1940): 79-84, esp. 80 and Scholem’s discussion, Mystical Shape, 28. 170

PGM IV. 3065. 171

My translation. I have departed from standard translations in order to bring out what I believe is the true sense of this passage. The amulet reads: ουρανοειδη, {θ}σxοτοειδη θαλασσοειδη xαι παντόμορφε which Keil translates “du Himmelsgestaltiger, Meeresgestaltiger, Dunkelgestaltiger, du Allgestaltiger” (80). PGM IV. 3065 reads: ουρανοειδη, θαλασσειδη, νεφελοειδη, which is translated in Betz (The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, Including the Demotic Spells, ed. Hans Dieter Betz [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press] 97) as, “[the] skylike, sealike, cloudlike”. See also Adolf Deissmann, Light From the Ancient East. The New Testament Illustrated by Recently Discovered Texts of the Graeco-roman World (trns. Lionel R. M. Strachan; Grand Rapids, Mich.; Baker Book House, 1965) 262. The Betz translation of PGM IV 3065 obscures the obvious morphic focus of the passage. Keil seems right in his translation because the amulet, by adding παντόμορφε, seems to parallel eidos and morphos. 172

Regarding the Docetic demiurge Couliano notes: “He is the image in Darkness of an aeon whose transcendence has been forever separated from the lower world by the firmament. His substance is Darkness…” Ioan P. Couliano, The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (New York: HarperCollins Publishing, 1992) 95. 173

Right Ginza V 1, 168, 6. 174

See especially the discussion by Nathaniel Deutsch, Guardians of the Gate, 94-5; idem, “Abathur: A New Etymology,” in John J. Collins and Michael Fishbane (edd.), Death, Ecstasy, and Other Worldly Journeys (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1995) 171-79. On Mandaeaism and Jewish tradition see Deutsch, Gnostic Imagination; Jarl Fossum, “The New Religionsgeschichtliche Schule: The Quest for Jewish Christology,” SBL Seminar Papers 30 (1991): 638-646; Dan Cohn-Sherbok, “The Mandaeans and Heterodox Judaism,” HUCA 54 (1983): 147-51; idem, “The Alphabet in Mandaean and Jewish Gnosticism,” Rel 11 (1981): 227-234; Gilles Quispel, “Jewish Gnosis and Mandaen Gnosticism: Some Reflections on the Writing Bronté,” in Jacques-é Ménard (ed.), Les Textes de Nag Hammadi. Colloque du Centre d’Histoire des Religions (Strasbourg, 23-25 octobre 1974) (NHS 7; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1975) 82-122. 175

See e.g. the Mandean demiurge Ptahil (Right Ginza III, 98-100); the divine anthropos of the Naassens (Hippolytus, Ref. V 6, 3-11); and the divine anthropos of Poimandres (Corp. Herm. I 1-32). On the Gnostic myth of the sunken deity see Maria Grazia Lancellotti, The Naassenes: A Gnostic Identity Among Judaism, Christianity, Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Traditions (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2000) 87-120, esp. 110-11; Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, the Message of the Alien God & the Beginnings of Christianity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 62-65, 116-29, 156-65; idem, “Response to G. Quispel’s ‘Gnosticism and the New Testament’,” in J. Philip Hyatt (ed.), The Bible in Modern Scholarship. Papers read at the 100th Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, December 28-30, 1964 (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1965) 279-93; Gils Quispel, “The Demiurge in the Apocryphon of John,” in Nag Hammadi and Gnosis. Papers read at the First International Congress of Coptology (Cairo, December 1976) (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1978) 7-9 [art.=1-33].

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possessing an ‘aquatic body,’ this deity becomes the Demiurge,

routinely identified with the biblical creator god. Hans Jonas

describes this mythic motif:

(The motif) implies the mythic idea of the substantiality of an image, reflection, or shadow as representing a real part of the original entity from which it has become detached…By its nature the Light shines into the Darkness below. This partial illumination of the Darkness…, if it issued from an individual divine figure such as Sophia or Man, is in the nature of a form projected into the dark medium and appearing there as an image or reflection of the divine…though no real descent or fall of the divine original has taken place, something of itself has become immersed in the lower world…in this way the divine form…becomes embodied in the matter of Darkness…176

The point of this myth is well summarized by Werner

Foerster who suggests that “the totality of Gnosis can be comprehended in a single image. This is the image of ‘gold in mud,’”177 i.e. the divine luminosity enmeshed in the dark aqueous matter. According to this myth, the Biblical creator-god is somatically associated with both the blue waters and the blue firmament. According to Irenaeus’ Ophites (Against the Heretics I.30) the luminous Heavenly Sophia (versus here black material counterpart Sophia Achamoth) descended and was entrapped by the waters below, from which she acquired a watery-body. After garnering enough strength (“power from the moisture of light”), she was able to escape from the waters and re-ascend upwards. She then spread herself out as a covering, her (blue) watery-body serving as the visible heaven.178 She finally abandoned this blue celestial, aquatic body, which then became Yaldabaoth, the God of Israel.179

176

Gnostic Religion, 162-3. 177

Gnosis. A Selection of Gnostic Texts, 2 vols. trans and ed. R. McL. Wilson (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1972) 1: 2. 178

A.J. Welburn reads this myth as a commentary on the Ophite Diagram described in Origen’s contra Celsum VI, 24-38. In his reconstruction of the diagram (“Reconstructing the Ophite Diagram,” NovT 23 (1981): 262-87, esp. 280-87) Welburn associates the blue circle (see contra Celsum VI, 38) with Sophia’s ‘watery-body’ of the above myth. 179

Turner, Sethian Gnosticism, 203: “her abandoned body fathers the Archon Yaldabaoth”; Tuomas Rasimus, “Ophite Gnosticism, Sethianism and the Nag Hammadi Library,” VC 59 (2005): 237 [art.=235-63]: “The remains of her body fathered the demiurge Ialdabaoth” On various scholarly derivations of the name ‘Yaldabaoth’ see Joseph Dan, “Yaldabaoth and the Language of the Gnostics,” in Peter Schäfer (ed.), Geschichte, Tradition, Reflexion: Festschrift für Martin Hengel zum 70. Geburtstag (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1996) 557-64 Howard M. Jackson, “The Origin in Ancient Incantatory Voces Magicae of Some Names in the Sethian Gnostic System,” VC 43 (1989): 69-79; Matthew Black, “An Aramaic Etymology for Jaldabaoth?” in A.H.B. Logan and A.J.M. Wedderburn (edd.), The New Testament and Gnosis: Essays in honour of Robert McL. Wilson (Edinburgh: T&T Clark Limited, 1983), 69-72; Gershom Scholem, “Jaldabaoth Reconsidered,” in Mélanges d’Histoire des Religions offertes à Henri-Charles Puech (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974) 405-421; Robert M. Grant, “The Name Ialdabaoth,” VC 11 (1957): 148-49.

Eliphas Levi’s (d. 1875 ) depiction of the ‘luminous’ and ‘sunken’ aspects of the biblical God.

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Reflexes of this myth are found in non-Gnostic Jewish sources as well, as pointed out by David Halperin.180 One such reflex, according to Alexander Altmann,181 is in the tale of King David digging pits (shîttîn) into the earth to build the foundations for the Temple. In the Bavli (Babylonian Talmud) version, as David is digging he reaches the subterranean chaos waters (tehom), which arise and threaten to submerge the earth again. After some deliberation with Achitophel, David inscribes the divine name on a sherd and casts it into the deep, thereby staying and sealing Tehom once again. Adducing a number of comparative materials, Altmann argued that the likely history-of-religions background to this haggadah (Jewish tale) is the myth of the primordial man/deity/soul (i.e., the divine name inscribed on the sherd) that fell into the primordial waters. He cites the Naassene Hymn in which the Primordial Man, Adamas, who as the “foundation-stone of Zion (Isa. 28:16)” and the “corner-stone which has become the head of the corner (Ps. 118:22)” fell into the watery cosmic matter: “This (the talmudic motif) echoes the conception of the Gnostic God who sinks into the depth.”

Another case was made by Halperin.182 One of the several relevant texts he cites is Re"uyot YeÈezkel (‘Visions of Ezekiel’), a possibly fifth century merkabah (“chariot-throne”) or Jewish mystical text.183 Here Ezekiel’s vision of God at the river Chebar (Ez. 1-3) is expanded and interpreted. The relevant portion reads:

…God opened to Ezekiel the seven subterranean chambers, and Ezekiel looked into them and saw all the celestial entities… R. Isaac said: God showed Ezekiel the primordial waters that are bound up in the great sea and in layers; as it is written, Have you come to the layers of the sea [Job 38:16]. He showed him a mountain underneath the river, by means of which the temple vessels will return. While Ezekiel was watching, God opened to him seven firmaments and he saw the Geburah (“Power,” an epithet for God). They coined a parable: to what may the matter be likened? A man went to a barber-shop, got a haircut, and was given a mirror to look into. While he was looking into the mirror, the king passed by. He saw the king and his forces through the doorway. The barber turned and said to him, ‘Turn around and see the king.’ He said, ‘I have already seen the mirror.’184 So Ezekiel stood by the river Chebar and looked into the water, and the firmaments were opened to him and he saw God’s glory (kabod), and the Èayyot, angels, troops, seraphim, and sparkling-winged ones joined to the merkabah. They passed by in the

heavens and Ezekiel saw them in the water. So it is written: At the river Chebar [Ez. 1:1].185 Ezekiel sees in the primordial waters the image/reflection of the divine anthropos enthroned

along with his host. As Halperin has seen and as the parable leaves no room to doubt, behind this tale is clearly the myth of the sunken image of the deity. The cited parable distinguishes between the king and the king’s image seen in the mirror. The customer’s declaration, “I have already seen the mirror (mar’ah),” is a play on mar’eh, “vision/appearance.” For him, seeing the image in the mirror is tantamount to seeing the king himself. This word-play also implies some

180

David Halperin, The Faces of the Chariot: Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1988), 211-249. 181

Alexander Altmann, “Gnostic Themes in Rabbinic Cosmology,” in I. Epstein, E. Levine and C. Roth (edd.), Essays In honour of the Very Rev. Dr. J.H. Hertz: Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew congregations of the British Empire: on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, September 25, 1942 (5703) (London: Edward Goldston, 1944) 19-32. 182

Faces, 211-249. 183

On which see also Gruenwald, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism, 134-141. 184

Mar’ah, a play on ma’reh, “vision.” 185

Trans. in Halperin, Faces, 230.

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sense of identity between the image of the king and the medium (i.e. the mirror). This identity is explicitly articulated in later mystical and esoteric tradition. In zoharic Kabbalah the Shekhinah or God’s visible, blue-black body (Malkhut) is the “mirror in which another image (i.e. His luminous image, Tiferet) is seen, and all the upper images (the sefirot) are seen in it”186; she is also the Sea (yamah), the waters in which and through which the divine image can be seen.187 As the Sea, the zoharic Shekhinah is symbolized by blue, which color denotes the luminous presence of the divine image (Tiferet) within the dark waters.188 Thus, returning to the Visions of Ezekiel, Halperin reasons:

When the merkabah (=throne) appears in the waters, the upper realms are merged into the lower. Ezekiel…looks into ‘the subterranean chambers’ and sees in them what ought to be in heaven…The paradox of the merkabah in the waters…brings the upper world into the nether world; it makes the distinction between above and below insignificant; it turns the merkabah, like any reflection in water, into part of the fluid and shapeless chaos that God once had to defeat…

God had indeed, as the old traditions claimed, suppressed the chaos-waters. But chaos had its revenge. The water, by virtue of its power of reflection, ensnared its enemy’s image, assimilated the merkabah to itself, and thus infected God with its own formlessness…But Ezekiel saw something else beneath God’s throne: a firmament the color of terrible ice (Ezekiel 1:22). To the early Jewish expositors, I suggest, this meant that God had frozen solid the terrible waters against which he fought, and thus defeated them. By its fluidity and formlessness, chaos is the enemy of order and structure…the hardening of water into glass symbolizes God’s triumph over chaos.189

Halperin’s words are very significant. Firstly, they indicate that what occurred to the Biblical creator-god’s (Yahweh-Elohim’s) divine body is what had occurred to the Egyptian creator-god’s (Atum’s) divine body:

According to the Book of Amduat, in the fifth hour of the night, the sun god plunged into the primordial waters, out of which creation originally arose…the sun god absorbed the chaotic power of the primordial waters, which engulfed the remnants-‘flesh’-of the once virile solar god.190

186 Zohar I:149b; MS New York-JTSA mic 1727, fols. 18a-b (quoted in Wolfson, Through a Speculum, 273-4. See also ibid., 310-11). On Shekhina/Malkhut as the visible body of see Zohar III, 152a; Isaiah Tishby in The Wisdom of the Zohar: an anthology of texts, systematically arranged and rendered into Hebrew, 3 vols. by Fischel Lachower and Isaiah Tishby, trns. David Goldstein (London; Washington: The Littman Library of Jewish civilization, 1991), III:1127 n. 30; Moshe Hallamish, An Introduction to the Kabbalah, trans. Ruth Bar-Ilan and Ora Wiskind-Elper (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999) 137. On Malkhut and the material body v. also Hopking, Practical Kabbalah Guidebook, 25; Hallamish, Introduction, 137. On the blue-black color see Zohar I, 50b-51b; Tishby, The Wisdom of the Zohar III: 1183; Aryeh Kaplan, The Bahir. Translation, Introduction and Commentary (York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, Inc., 1989), 153-55; Bokser, “The Thread of Blue,” 19-21; Tishby, The Wisdom of the Zohar III: 1183; Gershom Scholem, “Colours and their Symbolism in Jewish Tradition and Mysticism (Part II),” Diogenes 109 (1980): 67 [art.=64-76]. On the sefirot v. Arthur Green, A Guide to the Zohar (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 28-59; Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, I:269-307; Elliot K. Ginsburg, “The Image of the Divine and Person in Zoharic Kabbalah,” in Larry D. Shinn (ed.), In Search of the Divine: Some Unexpected Consequences of Interfaith Dialogue (New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1987) 61-87. 187

Zohar 1:85b-86a. See Tishby, The Wisdom of the Zohar, 1:351; Wolfson, Through a Speculum, 239-43. 188

“Malkhut is symbolized by the color blue, because it is the color of the sea into which the rivers (i.e. the Siferot) are emptied.” Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, 1:291. 189

Halperin, Faces, 237-8 190

Darnell and Manassa, Tutankhamun’s Armies, 22-23.

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Secondly, this engulfing of the deity’s body with the primordial aqueous matter is symbolized by the throne’s (merkabah’s) presence in the waters. This is because in Jewish mysticism and esotericism (referred to as ma#aśeh merkabah or the “Work of the Divine Chariot-Throne”) the ‘throne’ is a metonymic reference to the divine body established thereon, just as in Kemet.191 It is thus no surprise at all that the human body is 70% water.

“His Throne is ever on the water.”

191

C.R.A. Morray-Jones notes: “the central mystery of the merkabah tradition: the body of the Glory on the throne.” “The Body of Glory: The Shi‘ur Qomah in Judaism, Gnosticism and the Epistle to the Ephesians,” forthcoming in Christopher Rowland and C.R.A. Morray-Jones, The Mystery of God: Jewish Mystical Traditions in the New Testament CRINT 3; Assen and Minneapolis: Van Gorcum/Fortress) 99. My thanks to Morray-Jones for providing the author with a manuscript copy. See also Maria E. Subtelny, “The Tale of the Four Sages who Entered the Pardes: A Talmudic Enigma from a Persian Perspective,” JSQ 11 (2004): 3-58. This point was already made by Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (New York: Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., 1974) 16: “the main purpose of the ascent to the Merkabah is the vision of the One Who sits on the Throne, ‘a likeness as the appearance of a man upon it above’ (Ezekiel 1:26). The appearance of the Glory in the form of supernal man is the content of the most recondite part of this mysticism, called Shiur Komah.” On Scholem’s appeal to Shi#ur Qomah to interpret the Heikhalot/Merkabah texts see the comments by Ira Chernus, “Visions of God in Merkabah Mysticism,” JSJ 13 (1982): 142-3.

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III. The Qur’an and its Ancient Near Eastern Context/Subtext

“to understand the Qur"§n outside of the Biblical tradition...would seem in the end to place the researcher in a rather ridiculous position.”192

So said, correctly, Prof Andrew Rippin. Islam is, among other things for sure, clearly a formulation/articulation of ancient Near Eastern mythological tradition and Rippin rightly insists that the Qur"§n in particular be studied in the context of the overall Near Eastern religious milieu which preceded Islam’s emergence in the 7th century.193 As Aaron Hughes remarks: “The Qur’ân is not only a genizah of various trajectories of biblical and near eastern aggadot (folklore), but also a kaleidoscope which gives these trajectories a new vision.”194 Umar F. Abd-All§h confessed as well: “Accurate understanding of the pre-Islamic background within which Isl§m arose is essential to the full understanding of the Isl§mic religion.”195 Ilse Lichtenstadter put it best:

It is no deprecation of MuÈammad’s religious fervour to show his deep roots in ancient Near Eastern tradition; it is on the contrary, a tribute to his genius which enabled him to pour new wine into old skins. Neither need we assume direct borrowing from contemporary sources. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as Gnosticism and Mandean thought drew their inspiration from the same reservoir of ancient beliefs, each filling them with new meanings through their own peculiar genius.196

192

A. Rippin, “The Qur"§n as Literature: Perils, Pitfalls and Prospects,” BBSMES 10 (1983): 45 [art.=38-47]. 193

Rippin, “The Qur"§n as Literature,” 45. See also idem, “God,” in Andrew Rippin (ed.), Blackwell Companion to the Qur"§n (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2006) 225. See also Mondher Sfar, Le Coran, la Bible et l’Orient ancient (Paris: Cassini, 1997). Though ancient Arabia is sometimes thought of as religiously isolated from the ANE, archeological and epigraphic evidence for North and South Arabia indicates otherwise. As relatively scant as this evidence is, nevertheless it clearly shows pre-Islamic Arabia to have been within the ‘mythological orbit’ of the Near East, particularly in terms of motifs of the gods. For example, motifs associated with the cult of baetyls; the motif of the deity and his three hypostatic daughters; the motif of the winged-disk and its tauroform compliment; the divine triad; and of the anthropomorphic god surrounded by his divine assembly, all characteristic of the ANE mythic tradition, were also part of the Arabian mythic tradition as well. See e.g. Werner Daum, Ursemitische Religion (Stuttgart; Berlin; Köln; Mainz: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1985); Hildegard Lewy, “Origin and Significance of the Mâgên Dâwîd: A Comparative Study of the Ancient Religions of Jerusalem and Mecca,” Archiv Orientalni 18 (1950) 330-365; Ult Oldenburg, “Above the Stars of El: El in Ancient South Arabic Religion” ZAW 82 (1970): 187-208; Javier Teixidor, The Pagan God: Popular Religion in the Greco-Roman Near East (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1977); Cyrus H. Gordon, “The Daughters of Baal and Allah,” MW 33 (1943): 50-51; Stephanie Dalley, “The God Salmu and the Winged Disk,” Iraq 48 (1986): 85-101. 194

Aaron Hughes, “The stranger at the sea: Mythopoesis in the Qur’ân and early tafsîr,” SR 32 (2003): 266 [art.=61-279]. 195

“The Perceptible and the Unseen: The Qur’anic Conception of Man’s Relationship to God and Realities Beyond Human Perception,” in Spencer J. Palmer (ed.), Mormons & Muslims: Spiritual Foundations and Modern Manifestations (Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center, 2002) 161 [art.=153-204]. 196

Ilse Lichtenstadter, “Origin and Interpretation of Some Qur"§nic Symbols,” Studi Orientalistic in Onore di Giorgio Levi Della Vida 2 (1956): 79-80 [art.=58-80]. On Islam and ancient Near Eastern mythological tradition see also idem, “Origin and Interpretation of Some Koranic Symbols,” in George Makdisi (ed.), Arabic and Islamic Studies in Honor of Hamilton A.R. Gibb (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965) 426-36; Geo Widengren, Muhammad, the Apostle of God, and His Ascension (King and Savor Vol. 5) (Uppsala: A.-B. Lundequistska Bokhandeln, and Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1955); Cesar E. Dubler, “Survivances de l’ancien Orient dans l’Islam (Considerations Generales),” SI 7 (1957): 47-75. See also Jonathan P. Berkey, The Formation of Islam: Religion and Society in the Near East, 600-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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Regarding the Biblical tradition in particular, Roberto Tottoli has emphasized the fact that a number of Qur"§nic verses (e.g. 4:163; 42:13; 3:84) present MuÈammad as “the legitimate continuator of the Biblical tradition and…the sole heir of the progeny of the Israelite prophets”.197 As John C. Reeves notes the Qur"§n “places itself within the biblical world of discourse”198 and Daniel A. Madigan observes: “What is often overlooked in discussing the relationship of Islam to earlier religious traditions is that the Qur"§n in effect chooses to define itself in their terms.”199

But how exactly are we to define the Qur"§n’s relation to biblical and Ancient Near Eastern tradition? We encounter within the Qur"§n so many biblical characters, themes and parallel narratives that it indeed seems at first sight that Islam’s scripture “could not possibly exist without its scriptural predecessors as subtext.”200 The Qur"§n’s “extremely referential nature” can be seen as an acknowledgement of this biblical subtext. That is to say, instead of reproducing biblical narratives the Qur"§n often gives a ‘truncated’ version or makes an obscure allusion to a narrative in such a way as to presume on the part of its audience knowledge of the fuller narrative and details.201 But the parallels are not usually exact or the allusions ‘accurate’ from the perspective of the Biblical text.202 Nineteenth and early twentieth century Orientalists accounted for these divergent parallels by assuming MuÈammad’s reliance on Jewish or Christian tutors whose lessons MuÈammad received poorly. A newer critical approach, however, suggests something very different: that these ‘biblical materials’ in the Qur"§n are indebted not to the biblical text but to local oral, intertextual traditions203 and that the Bible and Qur"§n both “share and exploit a common layer of discourse”.204

Underlying such an approach is the insight from the literary-critical study of the Hebrew Bible that the textus receptus (MT) is but one ‘crystallization’ of ancient oral tradition, other ‘crystallizations’ found in the Versions205 as well as extracanonical, exegetical, and apocryphal Biblically affiliated literatures (so-called ‘re-written’

197

Robert Tottoli, Biblical Prophets in the Qur"§n and Muslim Literature (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2002) 7. 198

“Preface,” in John C. Reeves [ed.], Bible and Qur’ān: Essays in Scriptural Intertextuality [Leiden: Brill, 2004] ix. 199

The Qur"§n’s Self –Image: Writing and Authority in Islam’s Scripture (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001) 193. 200

Reuven Firestone, “The Qur"§n and the Bible: Some Modern Studies of Their Relationship,” in Reeves, Bible and Qur"§n, 2-3. See also Thomas J. O’Shaughnessy S.J., “God’s Throne and the Biblical Symbolism of the Qur"§n,” Numen 20 (1973): 202-221; Dwight Baker, “Islam and the Judaeo-Christian Tradition: The Significance of Qur’anic and Biblical Parelles (sic),” Bangalore Theological Forum 14 (1982): 44-68. 201

Sidney H. Griffith, “The Gospel, the Qur"§n, and the Presentation of Jesus in al-Ya‘qūbī’s Ta’rīkh,” in Reeves, Bible and Qur"§n,134; Firestone, “The Qur"§n and the Bible,” 3; idem, Journeys in Holy Lands: The Evolution of the Abraham-Ishmael Legends in Islamic Exegesis (Albany: SUNY, 1990) 6; Andrew Rippin, “Interpreting the Bible through the Qur"§n,” in G.

Hawting and A. Shareef (edd.), Approaches to the Qur"§n (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) 250-51 [art.=249-59]. 202

For an illustrative case study see Muhib O. Opeloye, “Confluence and Conflict in the Qur"§nic and Biblical Accounts of the Life of Prophet Mås§,” Islamochristiana 16 (1990): 25-41. 203

On the overwhelmingly oral culture of the pre-Islamic Hijaz see Michael Swettler, The Oral Tradition of Classical Arabic Poetry (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978). 204

Vernon K. Robbins and Gordon D. Newby, “The Relation of the Qur"§n and the Bible,” in Reeves, Bible and Qur"§n, 42; Reuven Firestone, “Abraham’s Journey to Mecca in Islamic Exegesis: A Form-Critical Study of a Tradition,” SI 76 (1992): 5-24; Marilyn R. Waldman, “New Approaches to ‘Biblical’ Materials in the Qur"§n,” MW 75 (1985): 1-16. 205

On the ancient Versions of the Bible see ABD 6:787-813 sv. Versions, Ancient.

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Bibles).206 These critical studies of the Hebrew Bible encourage us to understand ‘Biblical tradition’ as much broader than the canonical Bible and include within it the latter as well as the extracanonical literatures. All of these crystallizations, including the textus receptus itself (i.e. the Bible), represent authentic, independent articulations of a common lore. On this reading, both the Bible and the Qur"§n, as well as extracanonical Biblically affiliated literatures, are distinct reifications or articulations of traditional lore that circulated within a shared discourse environment.207 The Qur"§n therefore did not ‘borrow’ from the Bible or biblical literature, rather they both “tap and channel a rich reservoir of traditional lore.”208 As linguist and Africanist Prof Bernard Leeman points out:

Commentators have linked Muhammad’s extraordinary career to Christian and Jewish influences, although it is clear that the formative years of his frenetic career was spent largely in interaction with young idealistic Arabs from the merchant class. When Islam first galvanized Byzantine attention after A.D. 632, it was interpreted as Christian heresy but, despite references to Christ and the Virgin Mary, Islam is far removed from Christianity…many of the allusions to the Old and New Testaments do not follow the versions recorded in those books…It seems that Muhammad was not so much drawing on strong local Jewish traditions but on an ancient common Semitic folk culture…The overall impression gained from the Qur’an is of a shared Semitic historical and theological experience.209

Specialists now see that Judaism, Christianity and Islam (which really should be

Judaisms, Christianities, and Islams) are not three distinct traditions with a linear relationship of dependence, one to the other. They are three distinct, polyvalent articulations of a common Ancient Near Eastern Semitic tradition. There are commonalities among them, not because they ‘borrowed’ from each other – so throwback this is – but because they all tapped and exploited a shared tradition of religious discourse. As specialists know and emphasize, the differences even among the so-called commonalities are far more revealing and defining for these traditions than is their commonalities. To be surprised at these commonalities and to suggest ‘borrowing’ or any similar concept as the reason for these commonalities is like emphasizing the similarities in the contents in the hands of three people who grabbed a handful of candy from the same bag with different candies in it. In such a case one would expect both variance and commonality, and no one would suggest that the latter is due to one person ‘borrowing’ candy from another.

206

S. Talmon “Textual Criticism: The Ancient Versions,” in A.D.H. Mayes (ed.), Text in Context: Essays by Members of the Society for Old Testament Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 157; Eugene Ulrich, “The Text of the Hebrew Scriptures at the Time of Hillel and Jesus,” in A. Lemaire (ed.), Congress Volume Basel 2001 (Leiden: Brill, 2002) 86-108;idem, “The Bible in the Making: The Scriptures Found at Qumran,” in Peter W. Flint (ed.), The Bible at Qumran: Text, Shape, and Interpretation (Grand Rapids Michigan and Cambidge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2001) 51-66; idem, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company and Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 1999). See also Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress Press and Assen/Maastricht: Van Gorcum, 1992); idem, “Textual Criticism (OT),” ABD 6:393-412. 207

On the Qur"§n as such a ‘crystalization’ see John C. Reeves, “Toward a Rapprochement between Bible and Qur"§n,” Religious Studies News-SBL Edition 2.9 (December 2001) at http://www.sbl-site.org/Newsletter/12_2001/ReevesFull.htm. 208

John C. Reeves, “Some Explorations of Intertwining of Bible and Qur"§n,” in idem, Bible and Qur"§n, 43; Tryggve Kronholm, “Dependence and Prophetic Originality in the Koran,” Orientalia Suecana 31-32 (1982-1983): 47-70. 209

Queen of Sheba and Biblical Scholarship (Queensland, Australia: Queensland Academic Press, 2005) 134.

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Judaisms (Plural!!), Christianites (Plural!!) and Islams (Plural!!) are three distinct, polyvalent traditions that are ‘handfuls’ that drew from the same ‘bag’ of religious discourse. Kemetic Ma’at is no different in this regard. It is such that if one weren’t careful or up-to-date in our conceptions, and if one wanted to (again) invoke throwback categories and ideas, one could say that Ma’at was a hodge-podge of various traditions. Over its several millennia, the religious tradition of the Nile Valley, especially Kemet’s portion (from the Mediterranean to the First Cataract), was “informed” by several distinct traditions, some indigenous to the Valley – e.g. Afroasiatic and Nilo-Saharan – and some from Near Eastern immigrants.210 Kemetic religion or spirituality was as much a ‘synthesis’ or ‘gumbo’ of distinct religious currents as some want to make Islam out to be. But in making this observation about Kemet, an important point raised by Dr. Mario Beatty must be kept in mind. In discussing the historical conflicts between Egypt and Nubia, Dr. Beatty states:

The most pernicious error that is being made (by scholars discussing Egypt and Nubia) is the consistent disrespect for periodization.

That is to say, people should not conflate the state of things in, say, pre-dynastic Kemet with those of Middle Kingdom Kemet, or conflate the Old Kingdom status quo with the New Kingdom status quo. Things changed over the several millennia and these periodic changes must be respected and accounted for. The same applies with Islam.

The point is: Islam in general and the Qur’ān in particular are part of the Ancient Near Eastern and “Biblical” traditions. Egyptian tradition was important to both (i.e. ANE and Biblical traditions). We should then expect the Qur’ān and Islam to show remarkable parallels with Ancient Near Eastern and, specifically, Egyptian tradition. I have demonstrated that Islam and Ma’at are two fruits from the same African Tree of Spirituality: they are distinct articulations of a common African religious heritage. They can thus both shed light on each other. And as Hava Lazarus-Yafeh keenly observed:

it is impossible to understand (Islamic) literature properly without paying serious attention to its various predecessors…One should not think in terms of influences or cultural borrowing only, however. It has been said that the Near East resembles a palimpsest, layer upon layer, tradition upon tradition, intertwined to the extent that one cannot really grasp one without the other, certainly not the later without the earlier, but often also not the earlier without considering the shapes it took later.211

210 Christopher Ehret, The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002); Andrew B. Smith, “The Near Eastern connection II: cultural contacts with the Nile Delta and the Sahara,” in Lech Krzyżaniak, Karla Kroeper and Michał Kobusiewicz (edd.), Interregional Contacts in the Later Prehistory of Northeastern Africa (Poznań, 1996) 29-35; David Wengrow, The Archaeology of Early Egypt: Social Transformations in North-East Africa, 10,000 to 2650 BC (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 35; Toby Wilkinson, “Reality versus Ideology: The Evidence for ‘Asiatics’ in Predynastic and Early Dynastic Egypt,” in Edwin C.M. van den Brink and Thomas E. Lewy, Egypt and the Levant: Interrelations From the 4th through the Early 3rd Millennium BCE (London: Leicester University Press, 2002) 514-520 211 Hava Lazarus-Yahfeh; idem, Intertwined Worlds: Medieval Islam and Bible Criticism (Princeton, New Jersey:

Princeton University Press, 1992) 4.

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