We all know the Bible was not written on a blank slate. It records for us the life and times of ancient individuals who were embedded in a singular historical and cultural context, which was influenced largely by its geography.
Outside the Promised Land, one in every of the places of best importance for the Israelites was Egypt. Not only did God’s people live there for some 400 years but Abraham and the prophet Jeremiah each traveled there. Even Jesus spent his adolescence in Egypt, taken there by his parents once they fled from Herod.
Over the past 4 years, while writing a commentary on the Book of Exodus, I’ve read loads about Egypt and realized just how much the traditional Egyptians can teach us about tips on how to read and understand the Bible in its proper context. This was underscored by the study tour I took last month with Dr. James Hoffmeier, a renowned Egyptologist. Getting to go to pyramids, temples, museums, and tombs in person made so many familiar passages come to life.
The Book of Exodus is stuffed with references to the Israelites’ life in Egypt—including borrowed words from Egyptian and particular motifs that resonated in that context.
During their lengthy stay in Egypt, generations of Israelites would have been exposed to certain motifs time and again—and lots of of those pictorial representations informed the Bible’s own imagery. After all, the biblical authors selected conventional means to speak everlasting truths about Yahweh. These visual concepts would have made sense to their audience—and now, having seen a few of them with my very own eyes, they make more sense to me too.
Below are six examples which I discovered especially insightful.
The Garden Temple
I’ve read before that folks of the traditional Near East styled their temples after gardens, but I used to be capable of witness this phenomenon with my very own eyes.
Many of the temples we visited featured pillars shaped like papyrus plants. The famous Hypostyle Hall of the nice Temple of Amun-Re at Karnack had a whopping 134 papyrus-shaped pillars of an infinite size—seven people could barely reach their arms around a single pillar. On one end of the hall, the papyrus buds were closed, but on the opposite end, the plant’s petals were open wide in full bloom. Each pillar was decorated with brightly coloured reliefs (carvings within the stone) with dyes constructed from plant powders.
Temple ceilings, where preserved, invariably featured paintings of a deep blue sky with yellow stars. And though the temples were made wholly of stone, they gave the look of luxuriant gardens—with depictions of trees and plants like papyrus and lotus common throughout.
It’s no wonder Israel’s own temple had a deep blue ceiling held together by gold fastenings to twinkle in the sunshine of the lampstand (Ex. 26:1–2, 6, 31–32). It’s no wonder that the lampstand contained in the temple was styled as a tree with branches and buds—and that pomegranates dangled from the robe of Israel’s high priest (Ex. 25:31–40; 28:31–33). A garden temple recognizes God as Creator and acknowledges God’s role within the flourishing of the natural world.
The Wings of Protection
In Egypt’s temples, we saw winged creatures in all places we looked—sometimes seraphim and sometimes other deities with wings outstretched, offering protection to the Pharoah. The sacred barque (or boat) carrying the divine image was invariably flanked with winged protectors.
These images jogged my memory of the cherubim embroidered on the curtains of Israel’s tabernacle and temple (Ex. 26:31) and the gold cherubim with wings outstretched over the ark of the covenant within the Holy of Holies (Ex. 37:9, 1 Kings 6:27). I even have a clearer sense of why Boaz would have described Ruth as in search of protection under the wings of Yahweh (Ruth 2:12) and why the psalmist referred to people taking refuge under God’s wings (Ps. 17:8; 36:7; 91:4).
The Giving of the Spirit
Image: Courtesy of Carmen Imes
Giving of life to Pharaoh Rameses II
Perhaps you’ve noticed that the majority ancient Egyptian statues are missing their noses. While this will be explained partially because the nose being essentially the most vulnerable a part of a statue if it suggestions over, it’s also true that the fastest solution to decommission a statue—and indicate that a Pharoah now not has the correct to rule—is to interrupt its nose.
The Egyptians believed that souls entered and exited through the nose. A dead Pharaoh with no nose could be doubly dead—not only physically, but spiritually—with no hope of resuscitation. The Pharaohs went to great lengths to guard their bodies in order that they might be intact and subsequently viable within the afterlife. A mummy was housed in a coffin inside a coffin inside a coffin, like Russian nesting dolls.
In lots of the tombs and funerary temples we visited, we saw scenes carved in stone during which a deity offered the ankh, or symbol of life, to the Pharaoh by holding it as much as his (or her) nose. By receiving life from the deity after his death, the Pharaoh could be spiritually animated to perform the desire of the gods.
These “giving of life” scenes remind me of Genesis 2, where God breathed life into the primary human being. Hoffmeier also identified that when David prayed in Psalm 51:11, “Take not your Holy Spirit from me” (ESV), he was probably not nervous about losing his salvation but moderately about losing divine legitimacy for his rule. Recall that God had taken his Spirit from Saul to remove him from kingship (1 Sam. 15:23; 16:14); David didn’t want the identical to occur to him.
The Strong Arm of Pharaoh
For 1000’s of years, Egyptian artifacts depicted Pharaohs of their favorite so-called “smiting pose” to point their military might. You can see an excellent example of it on the famous Narmer Palette, from 3100 B.C. In it, Pharaoh stands with one hand stretched out behind his head, grasping a mace, and one other stretched out in front, grasping the hair of his defeated enemy.
Image: Courtesy of Carmen Imes
Narmer Palette
What I didn’t realize is how ubiquitous this visual was. We saw it in every temple, sometimes dozens of times. In the temple of Rameses III, the primary pylon (entryway wall) and each pillar in the primary chamber shows the Pharaoh on this pose, each depicting a distinct defeated foe in his grasp. In essence, the hall functions as a visible resumé of Rameses’ military successes.
The depiction just isn’t just pictorial but textual. On one in every of the skin partitions is an inscription above the scene that reads “the one with a powerful arm,” indicating one in every of Pharaoh’s preferred titles: “Strong-armed.”
Does this sound familiar? Throughout the Old Testament, Yahweh refers to himself as one with “a mighty hand and an outstretched arm”—often utilized in reference to God’s actions throughout the Exodus. In fact, the phrase referring to God’s “outstretched arm” is reserved almost exclusively for Egyptian contexts (Ex. 6:6; Deut. 4:34; 5:15; 2 Kings 17:36; Jer. 32:21).
In other words, Yahweh posed a direct challenge to Pharaoh and Pharaoh’s worshipers—as if to say, “You think you will have a powerful arm? Just watch what I can do!”
Daily Life in Ancient Egypt
Aside from how such figurative imagery illuminates the biblical text, I learned much from the artwork concerning the each day life, work, and gender roles of men and girls in ancient Egypt.
In the tombs of the nobles and workmen in addition to within the museums that held the artifacts present in these tombs, I saw statues, paintings, and sculptures depicting bread making, beer making, brick making, sculpting and writing, planting and harvesting, tanning leather, scenes depicting childbirth, and more. I saw combs, makeup palettes, and jewellery, tools for spinning and dying wool and flax, and models of ancient looms. I saw carpenter’s tools and flint knives, hoes and grinding stones, a handsewn tent, beds, and chairs.
Ancient Egyptians believed that an individual would wish all the pieces within the afterlife that they needed on this life. They expected to work within the fields of the god Osiris, in order that they stocked their tombs with quite a lot of practical implements similar to plows and shovels, plus a bed, chair, and clothing. In contrast, the Hebrews at the moment mostly concerned themselves with how their “name” or popularity could be remembered after they died and said almost nothing about life after death—that’s, until the most recent Old Testament periods.
Looking back, the Egyptians had the correct impulse concerning the continuation of human vocation within the afterlife—similar in some respects to how we now conceive of the New Jerusalem—nevertheless it could be many a whole lot of years before God revealed any particulars to the Jewish people.
These are insights we miss out on every time we ignore the geographical context of the Old Testament. And yet, because of the dry and sandy climate in Egypt, we’ve the privilege of traveling greater than 3,000 years back in time to catch well-preserved glimpses of a culture that profoundly shaped the Israelites—and all of the people of God who got here afterward.
Carmen Joy Imes is associate professor of Old Testament at Biola. She’s the writer of several books, including Bearing God’s Name: Why Sinai Still Matters, and she or he is currently writing a commentary on Exodus for Baker Academic.
