Most people simply are not aware of the debt that Judaism owes to the Egyptian religion.
So many terms and texts are direct copies of much older stories from Egypt. Egypt was a world leader in many things including theology. Given the Bible itself starts with the real history of the Jews in Egypt it becomes more obvious that they must have copied and learnt a lot when there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hymn_to_Aten
In his book Reflections on the Psalms, C.S. Lewis compared the Hymn to the Psalms of the Judaeo-Christian canon.
[edit] See also
Citation for comparison to Psalm 104, see Pritchard, James B. "The Ancient Near East, An anthology of Texts and Pictures", Princeton University Press, 1958, page 227.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01407b.htm
Finally, we may note that the word Amen occurs not infrequently in early Christian inscriptions , and that it was often introduced into anathemas and gnostic spells. Moreover, as the Greek letters which form Amen according to their numerical values total 99 ( alpha =1, mu =40, epsilon =8, nu =50), this number often appears in inscriptions , especially of Egyptian origin, and a sort of magical efficacy seems to have been attributed to its symbol . It should also be mentioned that the word Amen is still employed in the ritual both of Jews and Mohammedans .
Strange how Xians chant the name of the Egyptian Sun god after a prayer. Could it be they are copying an Egyptian custom, and their word amen came from Egypt?
It has been discovered that the 10 commandments are based on chapter 125 in the Egyptian book of the dead (Although Exodus 34 contains ten imperative statements, the passages in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 contain more than ten, totaling fourteen or fifteen in all.)......
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http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread344155/pg1
Archaeology experts have found absolutely no evidence what so ever that Hebrew Jews lived as slaves in Egypt or of their exodus from Egypt...... The plain truth is that Moses didn’t lead Hebrew slaves out of Egypt anymore then Chilton Heston did..... There is not one shred of archeological evidence for the existence of Moses or of any of the bible’s main cast of Hebrew characters – from Abraham to Jacob to King David to King Solomon...... There is however plenty of evidence for the existence of Egyptian pharaohs who these biblical characters are based on.....
Evidence shows that the ancestral patriarch of the Hebrew Jews is Amenemhet the first and that his biblical name is Abraham. Since pharaoh Amenemhet worshipped the god Amen, are Amen and the biblical god the same god?
Since Yakubher is the Aramean name for Jacob, Egyptology experts interpret this as factual evidence that the biblical Jacob and the hyksos king Yakubher were one of the same,
Moses closely matches Thutmosis the third, even the names Moses and Thutmosis are almost identical.
King David reigned for 50 years, Egyptian history reveals that pharaoh Psusennes also ruled Canaan for 50 years at the same time as the biblical king David – both battled the same enemy called the sea people or philistines.
Pharaoh Siamun and King Solomon reigned at exactly the same time and fought the same enemies in Canaan called the Matani, the Hittites and the Philistines.
MP
Im not saying to believe, but the more research you do, you will find more and more direct copies of Egypt in the Bible. Nagturally the Jews changed the names but the stories are the same.
