Oddly enough, I was just talking to someone about Akhenaten and the monotheistic religion he preached in Egypt. Now I find an article linking to a book suggesting Moses and Akhenaten were the same person. That means Moses was a pharoah. I want to do some reading on this topic, so if anyone has heard about other research, pro and con, I would appreciate it if you could send it my way.
For a nice fictionalized account of Akhenaten, see Naguib Mahfouz. For a good, basic introduction, see Akhenaten and the Religion of Light.
Salams,
This is Adnan from Adnan.org. I’m helping a friend with her
dissertation on Islam in Cyberspace and I was wondering if you would
be kind enough to spare a few minutes online so i can ask you some
questions. What do you say? Would it be possible to do so today?
Thanks
Adnan
Jewish tradition teaches that Moses was reared in Pharaoh’s household (adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter when his own mother put him in a basket among the bulrushes, since the Hebrew slaves were forbidden from having male offspring for fear of an uprising). I like thinking that Moses’ eventual leading of the Israelites to freedom is especially remarkable given that he was reared as a son of privilege.
But to say that Moses was a Pharaoh? That seems pretty strange to me. 🙂 So I’ll be curious to see what links people provide for you…
Salaam Adnan. Email me at islamoyankee at islamicate dot com.
Dear Rachel,
The Islamic[ate] story of Moses is the same as the Jewish tradition. Part of it due to the fact the Muslim tradition does recognize the Torah, Psalms, and the Gospels as part of the same revelatory experience as the Qur’an. Also, many Jews who became Muslim in the early period brought their knowledge of the midrash with them, so that stories of the Prophets (qissas al-anbiya) are also called the israiliyyat.
Moses, of course, was favored to become the pharaoh before he discovered his true calling. This theory would seem to suggest that he was in fact a pharaoh. I’m really curious if anyone does know more about this. I will be definitely be reading the book over the summer.
I didn’t realize that midrash had entered Islam via Jewish converts. That explains so much…
In Freud’s “Moses and Monotheism” he (without a whole lot of evidence) suggests that when the religious establishment fought back against Akhnaton’s reforms, there were still some followers of his left around afterwards.
So he suggests that Moses was a priest of Akhnaton and Egyptian who left, along with a group of foreigners and became the Jewish nation.
There is a also book called “Moses the Egyptian” which is interesting in that it looks at extra-Biblical sources of information about what happened, especially from the Egyptian side.
This is all rubbish people. Im a Christian so I follow the Biblical teachings. It is absurd to think that Moses was a Pharaoh. He went to the Pharaoh to have his people freed, if he was himself a Pharaoh, what would be the point of doing that! He would simply ask himself! It is true as someone mentioned previously, Moses did live in the court, but he was not a Pharaoh.
Look up Jim Marrs book, “Rule By Secrecy”. You ahve to remember, the bible was written by man, for man, and of man, whether or not it is divinely inspired. Things may have easily been changed due to time, place, and circumstance. What is really interesting is what the name Moses (( actually an Egyptian title )) means, his history compared to Amenhaten’s (( which MIRRORS his life )) and the fact that any later or present ruler or govenrment person would love to cover this up in any shape or form and let the people ((and history to follow)) what ””really”’ happened.