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Ma’at

Passover and Pharaoh Smites the Enemy

February 19, 2022
by Peter Feinman
Narmer's Palette

To understand historical Passover it must be placed in the context of Egyptian violence. Egyptologists who avoid the Exodus like the plague do not do this. Biblical scholars who know that there was no historical Passover do not do this either. They confine themselves to literary and/or ritual studies. However to understand historical Yahweh smites the Pharaoh’s men, one must understand the ideology and action of Pharaoh smites the enemy which Passover turns topsy turvy.

THE VIOLENCE OF A MA’AT-BASED WORLD

In her new book The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World (Washington D.C., National Geographic, 2021), Egyptologist Kara Cooney refers to herself as a recovering Egyptologist from an abusive relationship. She does so in her opening chapter entitled “We Are all Pharaoh’s Groupies.” She states, “I work in a field of apologists who believe in an Egypt of truth, beauty, and power—and in many ways, I am still an adherent to my chosen faith.”

Now her eyes have been opened to the truth of ancient Egypt… or so she claims. One example she cites is the treatment of ma’at. Generally, Egyptologists understand this term positively. By this perception, Cooney is referring to the traditional view that posits ma’at as an expression of the best of Egyptian culture. It reflects understanding of the harmonious and ordered universe in contrast to the ever-present chaos which threatens it. After all, who wouldn’t favor the ordered sense of well-being of a society governed by the rules of ma’at to the disorganized world of chaos?

Cooney’s concern is for the always-overlooked flip side of ma’at in the real world. For Pharaoh, ma’at a tool of control. It is an authoritarian political ideology that justifies the power to oppress. In other words, it provides the ruler with carte blanche to act against those who disrupt ma’at as the forces of chaos. Specifically, smiting the enemy is “a necessary cruelty against those who harm the king’s people.” She sees Narmer’s Palette as celebrating the horrific subject matter while the moment of carnage itself is not displayed by the artisans. Cooney concludes that “ancient Egypt seemed better at hiding how cruel they could be, masking the viciousness with a morality that communicated a necessity for pain in search of what was right.”

Cooney focuses on the practical application of the doctrine of ma’at by a ruling king. She observes that in “ancient Egypt the most violent rhetoric occurred in textual form and not in visual imagery.” She refers to the laudatory hymns and dramatic reenactments of battles. In my book, The Exodus: An Egyptian Story, I present the skull of Seqenenre as a striking example of the physical reality of “Pharaoh strikes the enemy.” The (racist) failure to recognize the skull as such derives from the refusal of Egyptologists to accept the kings of the 15th Dynasty as real Pharaohs.

Pharaoh himself does not of course do the smiting in Egypt. He has people to do the dirty deed. Cooney claims “the elites were the ones actually tasked with creating the blood and gore.” Without intending to, Cooney has identified the people who died in the historical Passover. The very people tasked by Pharaoh with the responsibility for smiting Moses and his supporters were the ones who were smited first instead.

Cooney concludes, “I, myself, have been co-opted, unable to recognize the propaganda that the ancient Egyptians were creating.” And all this is just chapter one. The rest of the book describes the violence perpetrated by leading royal figures—Khufu, Senwosret III, Akhnaton, Ramses II, and Piankhy. Her observations about Ramses II are particularly relevant to understanding the historical Exodus but outside the scope of this blog.

After this review of the savage brutal, and violent reigns of these kings, Cooney closes with some devastating comments about her field and her complicity in it.

           We Egyptologists are members of the ancient Egyptian law-and-order party.

            We Egyptologists often become apologists for a return to good kingship as the only thing that can save people from themselves.

            In effect, the ancient Egyptians have hoodwinked us into believing that those periods of monarchical centralization were exactly the times when most ancient Egyptians themselves would have preferred to live … [because] the ideology of authoritarianism is seductive.

            The Book of Gates incantation connects the patriarch’s [Pharaoh] use of violence to maintain a cosmic purpose.

She tells her grad students that Egyptology is dead. She herself is a “recovering Egyptologist. She acknowledges how the clever ideology of Egyptian Pharaohs worked on her mind and now recognizes how Egyptologists acquiesce to these ancient spin doctors. “[A]lmost all our scholarship is uncritically supportive of authoritarian policies. Unfortunately her book was published the same month as mine and I was unable to incorporate her comments especially on Ramses and the use of the term “Intermediate” by Egyptologists into it. Fortunately she was willing to write an endorsement of the book (see below).

STOCKHOLM SYNDROME

The very question of the existence of sanctioned murder in ancient Egyptian is a contentious one. Egyptologists who have studied this aspect of Egyptian life have expressed obstacles against this recognition that Egyptians ceremonially killed other Egyptians in public. The very idea touches a raw nerve – the sacrifice of humans is abhorrent so how could the civilized ancient Egyptians have done it?

… the more a topic touches on the scholars’ religious and political viewpoints, the less they are able or willing to evaluate the evidence as objectively as possible. The same is true of topics that touch on subjects to which we have strong emotional reactions (Kerry Muhlestein, Violence in the service of order: The religious framework for sanctioned killing in ancient Egypt, British Archaeological Reports International Series 2299, Oxford: Archaeopress, 2011).

Muhlestein is referring here not to the Exodus but to the perception among scholars that they, the cultured educated intellectuals of Western Civilization view themselves as the “cultural inheritors of Egypt.” They therefore put on “intellectual blinders” so as not to see their cultural ancestors engaged in such repellent behavior. The challenge then, according to Muhlestein, is to confront the historical reality that ancient Egypt engaged in public human sacrifice and to understand it in the Egyptian context. Laurel Bestock cautions that one should resist the temptation to interpret Egyptian imagery of violence as a direct report of actual events. The imagery is part of a larger ideologically driven narrative and not true to history (Violence and Power in Ancient Egypt: Images and Ideology before the New Kingdom (Routledge: New York, 2018).

However, even as Bestock cautions us she lays the groundwork for royal violence. The king is the figure of power. She declares that everyone else is, at least potentially, violently subject to him. The Egyptian values of kingship require a king to be violently physically dominant. The very right to smash heads was an exclusive power of the king. She wonders if smiting scenes were part of a royal ceremony, a drama that included named characters with set roles. Still, this definition of kingship certainly is suggestive that such violence occurred in the physical world and not just metaphorically or theatrically.

The smiting scenes demand careful scrutiny. Related to these scenes of sanctioned murder are the scenes of brutality and pain preceding the act. Mark Janzen refers to these scenes as the “iconography of humiliation.” The king communicated his dominance over foreign captives often through degrading imagery. The victims are shown in tortuous poses of humiliating helplessness (The Iconography of Humiliation: The Depiction and Treatment of Bound Foreigners in New Kingdom Egypt, The University of Memphis, PhD Thesis, 2013). Janzen has collected examples of these bound foreigners. We know that horror movies still draw today. The famous smiting scene from “Psycho” has become part of American mythology. But for the ancient Egyptian such images of cruel pain and horrible death were sanctioned … and by the king!

Instruction to Merikare (Middle Kingdom)

The hothead is an inciter of citizens,
He creates factions among the young;
If you find that citizens adhere to him,

Denounce him before the councilors,
Suppress [him], he is a rebel,
The talker is a troublemaker for the city,
Curb the multitude, suppress its heat,
… (Miriam Lichtheim, Egyptian Literature, Volume I: The Old and Middle Kingdoms, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1975).

These instructions to a king warn of the danger of the hotheaded rebel who can rouse the multitude. One presumes the warning to the king was offered because such situations had arisen in Egypt. Those occurrences are not likely to have been part of the official records of the king.

The focus then shifts to the punishment of disrupters of ma’at. After the text specifies what the king must do maintain ma’at, the Instructions states:

Thus will the land be well-ordered;
Except for the rebel whose plans are found out,
For god knows the treason plotters,
God smites the rebels in blood.
 He who is silent toward violence diminishes the offerings.
God will attack the rebel for the sake of the temple,
He will be overcome for what he has done

One hardly needs to be an Egyptologist to recognize that in this world it is the king who is called upon in these Instructions to the king to be the one to implement the punishment against the rebels. To rebel against the king is to pay for it with your life.

I speculate that within the Egyptian context, Moses was the heated man. He was the hothead. He was the rebel. He was an inciter of citizens. He created factions. He violated ma’at. Therefore, one should expect Pharaoh to seek to respond to this heated man in accordance with Egyptian rules.

I speculate that Ramses correctly regarded Moses as an Apophis, a disrupter of ma’at. Therefore he decided to treat the hot headed rebel in accordance with Egyptian customs.

I speculate that Ramses intended to act at dawn of New Year against Moses and his followers when Sekhmet/Mut, the goddess of plagues and disease, acted as the destroyer of humanity. Moses knew this and did not wait to die before the face of Pharaoh (sunrise) would appear again.

Historical Passover where Yahweh smites Pharaoh’s tasked killers should be understood within this context of Pharaoh smites the enemy who disrupts ma’at.

2020: The End of the 20th Century and the Beginning of the 21st

June 1, 2020
by Peter Feinman
This Is the Dawning of the Age of the 2ist Century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hair)

Will 2020 be remembered by historians as the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st?

We humans like to organize time. Sometimes it is comparatively easy. We are consciously aware of the movements of the sun and the moon. That awareness leads to having days, months, and years as part of our calendars (but not weeks).

When we enter the political and social realm, the organization of time becomes more problematical. For example, the ancient Egyptians like to start the new reign of the king on the Egyptian New Year. The obvious problem was that the previous king had a tendency instead to die during the middle of the year. So when do you start the first year of the new king?

John Kennedy was assassinated in November, 1963. Lyndon Johnson immediately became President. Is 1963 the third year of Kennedy’s administration or the first year of Johnson’s administration or both? Should Johnson’s first year have begun in January, 1964? Should it have begun in January 1965 when he was first elected? At that point he would have been President for 14 months and over 3 calendar years.

The Egyptians had these issues too. It mattered less or them than it does for Egyptologists. They are trying to reconstruct history. It doesn’t matter what the Egyptians decided to do as long as the Egyptologists can figure out what they did and hopefully that over the millennia, they were consistent.

Did the 18th century end with the arbitrary year 1800 or at Waterloo?

Did the 19th century end with the arbitrary year 1900 or in World War I?

Did the 20th century end with the arbitrary year 2000 or on 9/11?

Historians make these decisions about how to organize time. They write books based on those decisions. They teach college classes based on the flow of history and not the arbitrarily rounded-dates which are derived from a base 10 numerical system and an error in the calculation of the birth of Jesus probably by four years.

I suggest for your consideration that 2020 will come to be regarded as the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st. The time from the Iron Curtain collapse to the Covid-19 pandemic will be regarded as a transition period. It was the time when the old order died and the new order, still in the process of being formed, was born.

The old older clearly is dead. For America, it was a time of three world wars: against Germany, against Germany and Japan, and against the Soviet Union. We were on the winning side of all three. It was a time of international organizations especially after World War II. Now probably to the surprise of many, it is the United States that has taken the lead in shredding these institutions. Instead we are left with a world where it is every country for itself. We live in a world of transactional relationships where the United States is not a leader but alone.

In mythical terms, this situation is referred to as a time of chaos and not cosmos or order. The created world, the world the United States took the lead in creating, is undone. It was a created world of firmament, of substance, of structure. Now that has been washed away and the world is returning to its primordial chaos.

Assyrians used the deluge to represent this change metaphorically. In effect, a tsunami washes away the existing order. That creates a blank slate for a new order to be built. The metaphor was for the Assyrian army, the Assyrian king, and the destruction of conquered cities. The message was that the Assyrian king had destroyed the old order. The new order would be built with the Assyrian capital as the cosmic center and the Assyrian king as the deity’s representative on earth. The Assyrians were extremely successful in delivering this message in the ancient Near East because at that time they did rule the ancient Near East from Elam in Iran to Ethiopia.

2020 has the potential to be just such a watershed in human history. Let’s considered some of the events that have or will happen in 2020 from an American perspective.

An impeachment of a President starts the year.

A Corvid-19 pandemic sweeps the world. While parts of the world have it under control America continues to flounder for all the world to see and pretends otherwise. We still are on track for over 2,000,000 fatalities before herd immunity is reached.

The economy is depressed if not yet in a technical depression. Unemployment skyrockets, businesses collapse. The 1% are immune.

America’s Third Civil War heats up. As previously written, I had expected the Presidential election in November to be the catalyst for the more violent phase of the war but trigger may have been fired earlier.

So we began the year with an impeachment and we will end the year with a constitutional crises, public outrage, or both.

Meanwhile climate change continues to wreak damage on the world.

America has been exposed as a Third World Country. Joe Biden declared LaGuardia Airport to be a Third World Airport. That problem has been relatively straightforward to repair. I am reminded of that every time I fly out of that airport which is why I avoided it even before the Corvid-19 crisis. But that virus has exposed that for much of the country, we have a Third World health care system for people with Third World infant mortality rates, Third World health, and Third World life spans. For much of the country we have Third World education, housing, infrastructure, and opportunity. What little there was of a social safety net has been ripped to shreds. Our shortcomings are visible for all the world to see, a world which watches not Fox but CNN. China which blocks CNN is more than happy to broadcast scenes of riots across America from other sources.

Speaking of China, the Middle Kingdom is exploiting the opportunity of the coronavirus crisis. Since the United States is so willing to abandon its position as world leader, China is eager and willing (but not necessarily able) to become the world leader instead. Even before the current crisis, China saw itself as the wave of the future. From their perspective, it was only a matter of time before the fading giant passed the torch of world leadership to the wolf warriors eager to seize it. They think that time is now.

Returning to Egypt, the Egyptians had a concept of ma’at.  Ma’at was their concept of cosmic harmony, of all being right with the world, of order. It began in the beginning when the world was created. It continued to exist when the gods ruled Egypt, meaning the world, and then when human kings did so as well. Although Egypt had no Fall, it did have disruptions. There were times when kings had to do more than pledge to maintain ma’at, they had to pledge to restore it. They had to act to end the chaos that had engulfed the land and return to it to the order expressed by ma’at.

The United States lives in just such a time right now. We live in a time of chaos where the social fabric is unraveling and America’s position in the world is dwindling. Ending this time of troubles does not mean a return to the past; it does not mean restoring the world as it was in the beforetime. It means redefining the new world order so that it fixes what was wrong and can provide us with a sense of security and peace of mind for the future. A call to bring back the 50s will not solve the problems of the 21st century.

Right now America has no such visionary to lead us to a better tomorrow. In fact, no one at the national level is even trying. For the sake of the country and the world, we need a vision to define what the 21st century will be…or at least a vision We the People want to try to fulfill. Until such time we will continue to flounder and chaos will prevail here and around the world.