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[First posted in 2012.
The source is one of the most valuable on our list of Resources, virtually a study bible which we have featured almost from page to page; not only a MUST READ but a MUST OWN for any serious student of the TORAH: Pentateuch & Haftorahs, ed. Dr. J. H. Hertz, published by The Soncino Press. Please buy a copy; it is available at amazon.com. These are excerpts from: EXODUS—ADDITIONAL NOTES; reformatting and highlights added—Admin1.]
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Israel and Egypt represent—
- two world-conceptions,
- two ways of looking on God and Man
- that are not merely in conflict,
- but mutually exclusive.
For ages Egypt was the Land of Wonder, and men spoke in awe of the wisdom of the Egyptians. We know now that they were indeed a wonderful people; but it is only in the arts and crafts, and especially in their colossal and titanic architecture, that they attained truly astonishing results.
The real tests of a nation’s civilization, however, are far other than these.
The supreme test is its vision of God.
Now what were the objects of Egyptian worship?
Stocks and stones, and, above all else, the beast. While there are traces, albeit faint traces, that the men of the Nile Valley were capable of learning both in religion and conduct, they seem to have been quite incapable of forgetting. Egypt never discarded the low animism and savage fetishism of its prehistoric days, and remained always ‘zoomorphic’ in its conception of God: bulls, crocodiles, beetles, apes, cats, and goats–these were its gods.
There were, it is true, stammerings of something nobler; glimpses of higher religious truth; but these remained only glimpses–like flashes of light for one brief moment in the night-time, leaving greater darkness, Egyptian darkness, behind.
Once only was an attempt made by that remarkable man, Amenophis IV, to reform the barbarism of Egyptian worship and to put a kind of monotheism in its place. The sun was to be worshipped as the single deity under the name of Aton; and he changed his own name to Ikhnaton, ‘Glory to the Sun.’ But the reformation was a failure. He died amid the curses of his subjects, and the old confused polytheism returned stronger than ever.
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‘We have no grounds for holding the opinion,’ says Prof. R. H. Hall, ‘that the educated Egyptian priest, far less the man in the street, normally accepted any pious theories of a latent monotheism, underlying his blatant polytheism. Ikhnaton was branded as a criminal; and after his failure, we go back to the old spells and mumbo-jumbo again . . . till the death of the Egyptian religion in the days of Justinian. In religious matters, the Egyptians at all periods (except the educated at the end of the 18th Dynasty) were in the mental condition of the blacks of the Gold Coast and Niger delta. They had “mysteries”, of course like the Ashantis or Ibos. It is a mistake, however, to think that these mysteries enshrined truth, and that there was an occult ‘faith’ behind them. There is no more proof of it than in the case of the Ashantis or Ibos’ (Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 1929).
Now where there is no vision of God
there can be no vision of man.
Hence the insignificance of man in the Egyptian world-conception.
- They bent the knee to the beast, but man throughout Egyptian history was in bondage.
- Human life had absolutely no value.
- The lives of vast multitudes of men were sacrificed in connection with the frenzied building schemes.
Herodotus tells us that in the time of Pharaoh Necho II (609-588 B.C.E.), 120,000 labourers were worked to death in the construction of a canal connecting the Nile and the Red Sea. The pyramids, erected by the tyrant’s unlimited command of human forces, remain everlasting deification of reckless and irresponsible power.
In eternal contrast to Egypt,
the whole story of Israel
is one long protest against
idolatry and inhumanity.
A single incident in the life of a Jewish ruler will illustrate the world-wide difference between Israel and Egypt.
King Jehoiakim, a contemporary of Pharaoh Necho II, tried to emulate his example, and built himself palaces by means of forced labour. In Egypt, such a thing was taken as a matter of course, as the unquestioned prerogative of the king. In Israel, that enterprise was deemed an outrage against reason and human decency.
Jeremiah the Prophet arose and came to the door of Jeoiakim’s palace, crying:
Woe unto him that buildeth his house by unrighteousness,
and his chambers by injustice;
that useth his neighbour’s service without wages,
and giveth him not his hire . . .
Thine eyes and thy heart are not but for thy covetousness,
and for shedding innocent blood,
and for oppression, and for violence, to do it.
Therefore thus saith the LORD concerning Jehoiakim,
the son of Josiah, king of Judah:
They shall not lament for him . . .
He shall be buried with the burial of an ass,
drawn and cast forth beyond the gates of Jerusalem
(Jer. XXII,13,17-19).
These words of Jeremiah are but a Prophetic echo of the Israelite’s cry for freedom that pierced the heavens in the days of Moses; they are but the translation of the trumpet sounds of the Exodus and the Sinaitic Covenant, with their Divine and everlasting proclamation of the rights of man.
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Another characteristic element in the religious life of Egypt was Worship of the dead.
[From: Max Muller’s article in the Encyclopedia Biblica.]
The huge pyramids alone, says Prof. Muller, would be sufficient to testify that the Egyptians devoted greater zeal than any nation on earth to the abodes of their dead, and to the sustenance of their souls by sacrifices.
The Bible of the Egyptians is the so-called ‘Book of the Dead’. It contains magic formula for the guidance of man after death, warning him of the dangers he might expect to meet, and providing him with powerful spells–previously placed on the coffins for this purpose–to guarantee his safety. When the dead man reached the great Judgment Hall of the god Osiris, his moral life was tested. In the course of that judgment, the deceased denied that he had ever committed any of the 42 cardinal sins.
(H.R. Hall rightly says: ‘The Egyptian was never a humble person, either genuinely or hypocritically. When he confessed he did not say, ‘I am guilty’; he said, ‘I am not guilty’; his confession was negative, and the onus probandi lay on his judges.)
Simultaneously with the doctrine just stated, there existed the conflicting belief that the departed souls lived in darkness and misery in the nether world, persecuted by evil spirits, so that it was best for the dead person to become, by witchcraft, one of these evil monsters himself.
No wonder that the influence of the Egyptian religion on the lives of men was not very profound. In every aspect the morality of the Egyptians seems to have been lax. One example will suffice. The tombs were almost invariably broken into soon after burial, and no military protection could prevent even the royal tombs from being plundered.
When we compare the Egyptian attitude towards death with that of the Pentateuchs, we see in the latter what appears to be a deliberate aim to wean the Israelites from Egyptian superstition.
In this way alone can we explain the silence of Israel’s Torah
in regard to the Life after Death.
On the one hand, there is not a word concerning immortality, or concerning reward and punishment in the Hereafter; and on the other hand, there is rigorous proscription of all magic and sorcery, of sacrificing to the dead, as well as every form of alleged intercourse with the world of the spirits.
Israel’s Faith is a religion of life, not of death;
a religion that declares man’s humanity to man
as the most acceptable form of adoration of the One God,
the Creator of heaven and earth,
Who is from everlasting to everlasting.
Israel while in Egypt was yet but a child, and was not strong enough to withstand Egypt in Egypt.
Only out of Egypt could it grow, uncontaminated by noxious influences of a decadent civilization.
Only when liberated from the contagion of a nation of mere childish stammerers in the things of the Spirit, could it flourish, and fill the earth with the glad tidings of a God of holiness and pity, and the message of Righteousness to men and nations.
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