Akhenaten

Some scholars and Freud link Israelite monotheism to him; the chapter notes that exclusive Yahweh worship may have arisen much later.

Some scholars attribute Yahweh's rise to influence from Akhenaten, the iconoclastic fourteenth-century BCE Egyptian ruler who promoted an early monotheistic form centered on Aten, the sun god. Because Israelites may have been in Egypt then, some writers infer an effect on Israel's concept of God. Sigmund Freud popularized this proposal in Moses and Monotheism.1 How did monotheism arise, the belief in Yahweh not just as supreme god but as the only god? Some trace it to Akhenaten, but exclusive worship of Yahweh may have emerged later, in the period of Assyrian and Babylonian conquest. The Bible has many passages praising God as the most powerful or unique, but these do not rule out other gods, and truly monotheistic statements are surprisingly rare, found only in texts from the Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian period, such as Isaiah 44:6 to 8.2