Wenamun and the Hebrew Bible: New Implications for Ancient Near Eastern Prophecy and Religion

One reason biblical rhetoric often sounds so similar to Amun rhetoric is that most of the Hebrew Bible is not much more monotheistic than Wenamun. Rather, it is monolatrous or henotheistic; it advocates a more or less permanent adherence to Yahweh, without denying the existence of other gods.

See also Wenamun’s Prophetic Mission: Theocratic Rhetoric in Egypt and the Hebrew Bible (Eisenbrauns, 2025).

By Christopher B. Hays
D. Wilson Moore Professor of Old Testament and ANE Studies
School of Theology, Fuller Theological Seminary
April 2025

            In recent decades, the comparative study of ancient prophecy has taken flight as the sources from sites like Nineveh and Mari have become more accessible. These have provided important material for the cultural matrix of Hebrew prophecy (Nissinen 2019). However, they still present a limited set of data, so that many questions remain, including about the status of prophecy in Egypt (Schneider 2017). These conversations are expanded and enriched by a deeper engagement with the Egyptian tale of Wenamun. 
          Wenamun is an Egyptian travelogue from the turn of the first millennium BCE that is enlivened by visits to exotic ports of call, piracy, intrigue at foreign courts, verbal sparring, and attempted murder. Life had perhaps not always been so dramatic for Egypt’s emissaries, but it was an era of upheaval in the ancient Near East; boundaries and powers were renegotiated in the wake of the collapse of the Late Bronze Age’s “Club of Great Powers.” Egypt survived this transitional period, and the attacks of the “Sea Peoples” who played a role in it—but it did not survive unscathed. The Ramesside 20th Dynasty came to an end in 1069 BCE, and historians mark the beginning of the Third Intermediate Period.
          Wenamun has been in and out of favor as an historical source over time; more recently its literary characteristics have come to the fore in scholarship—including its humorous and ironic elements. (The graphic-novel adaptation entitled “The Misadventures of Wenamun” is one of the funnier things on the Internet.) 
          Within the field of Hebrew Bible, Wenamun is known almost exclusively for its episode in Byblos, in which an ecstatic prophet pipes up to support the eponymous Egyptian official with an oracle from Amun. This is one of the few narrative accounts of ecstatic prophecy from the ancient Near East, apart from the Bible, and the only one from Egypt. 
          My new book, Wenamun’s Prophetic Mission: Theocratic Amun Rhetoric and the Hebrew Bible (Hays 2025), points out that there is much more in the story for scholars of the Hebrew Bible to pay attention to. It identifies numerous similarities between the theological rhetoric of Wenamun and that of the Hebrew Bible, especially the prophetic literature. Broadly speaking, Wenamun makes numerous sweeping theocratic claims for Amun’s supremacy over the whole land in a way that is strikingly reminiscent of the Hebrew Bible’s claims on behalf of Yahweh.
          Within the historical context of Mediterranean shipping and international trade in the 10th century BCE, Wenamun’s totalizing claims about Amun’s absolute lordship over everything stand out as not merely aggressive but somewhat fantastical, for a nation whose power and international reach were reduced—again, a bit like the claims of little Israel and Judah against the empires of their era. 
          There are ample signs in the story of cultural interchange with Levantine culture. Existing scholarship has identified many Semitic loan words and other linguistic features that seem to have been part of a literary effort to portray the foreign flavor of the Levant for an Egyptian audience. 
          As the Egyptian story unfolds, Wenamun’s claims lead to a theological confrontation between him and Zakarbaal, the ruler of Byblos, over which nation’s god is really most powerful and has authority over the Lebanon. The Byblian ruler answers that Amun is not really so powerful without Seth/Baal at his side: it is the Levantine storm god who really thunders in the heavens. This dispute between Amun and Baal is analogous to the prophetic contests over the powers of Baal and Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible, and just as the representatives of Amun and Baal seem to share a certain amount of theological language, there are numerous examples of Yahwistic authors in conversation with Baalistic rhetoric. Amun thus plays a similar role in Wenamun to the role of Yahweh in the biblical prophets. 
          In a crucial exchange at the end of Zakarbaal’s longest speech, he mocks Wenamun for being on a “foolish mission” (mšʿ śwgꜢ). The Egyptian term śwgꜢ is related to a group of Hebrew and Akkadian roots that are also used to mock prophets deemed crazy or drunken. In sum, Zakarbaal impugns Wenamun’s claims by suggesting that he is a fool or a madman who is speaking falsely of the gods.
          In response, Wenamun re-asserts that Amun is sovereign over the Lebanon and its timber, and will fight like a lion for his property. This too is phraseology with close cognates in the Hebrew Bible, as well as other Egyptian texts; the Bible asserts Yahweh’s ownership of the Lebanon, and even the Nile, as well as his divine kingship and leonine qualities. Furthermore, glyptic evidence shows that leonine imagery for deities was common to Egypt and the Levant in the Iron I-IIA. 
          According to Wenamun, Amun’s sovereignty leads to suzerainty: the right to dictate treaty terms to supposedly lesser powers. Using language that is very reminiscent of Hittite treaties and biblical covenants, Wenamun enjoins Zakarbaal and Byblos to submit to Amun’s demands as previous generations had, so as to be good “servants of Amun.” Comparison with the similar efforts of Solomon to get help from the Phoenicians for his temple-building project brings into sharper focus the impolitic aspects of Wenamun’s approach. Since Egypt no longer dominated the Phoenician seacoast in this period, Wenamun’s efforts would have appeared out of touch or even comic. Nevertheless, like the authors of biblical covenants, Wenamun grandiosely promises that Zakarbaal and his people will flourish in the land if they are faithful to his deity, and he invokes oath language that is also familiar from biblical literature. This casting of Amun as the divine suzerain in a diplomatic context has not been adequately recognized in scholarship on biblical covenants, and has the potential to shift our understanding of their influences and origins.
          In the story, Wenamun is also portrayed as a messenger of Amun. This is an unusually direct theological relationship for Egyptian texts, which more typically portray such officials instead as messengers of the pharaoh. However, it is directly analogous to biblical prophetic literature, which regularly characterizes prophets as messengers of Yahweh. This invites comparison with Egyptian letters concerning Amun temple officials from the period of the story, who speak similarly to Wenamun, albeit in a less extreme and literary manner. This may also shift the discussion about the origins of the prophetic “messenger metaphor” away from the typical Mesopotamian and Persian sources towards a consideration of Egyptian messengers as well. 
          In light of all this, should Wenamun be considered “among the prophets”? Priests and other temple officials in Egypt played important roles in divination and were called “prophets” by the Greeks. Egyptian texts both before and after Wenamun describe predictive speeches, but these are usually vaticinium ex eventu for the purpose of royal propaganda. There is also evidence in Egypt that the consultation of older texts was seen as an ongoing source of revelation, much like scribal prophecy in the Hebrew Bible, and Wenamun shows evidence of this intertextual quality. The fact that the proclamations of priests and other officials about Amun have such significant and diverse similarities with those of Yahweh ought to invite further discussion. 
          Wenamun’s speeches proclaiming the will and status of the gods are set in a narrative context; it has this in common with various Hebrew prophetic books as well. More specifically still, Wenamun’s maritime journey to an exotic location, his misfortunes along the way, his extreme theological claims, and his sometimes comically foolish behavior all bear a close similarity to aspects of the book of Jonah. Both stories seem to sincerely assert the supremacy of a deity while undermining certain of the deity’s representatives, for reasons plausibly related to crises of religious authority in changing socio-historical contexts. 

Channels of transmission

          These numerous points of comparison between Wenamun and the Hebrew prophets invite fresh reflection on the cultural and religious relationships among Egypt, Phoenicia, and Israel/Judah. 
          Focusing on the period of Wenamun’s composition in the early first millennium BCE, there is ample evidence for the closeness of the connections between Egypt and the Levant. There are at least two ways to think of ongoing Egyptian influence in Israel and Judah throughout the Iron I-IIA. (Not counting the Bible’s repeated claims that Solomon married a daughter of pharaoh [1 Kg 3:1; 78; 9:24; 11:1], for which there is no extrabiblical attestation.) 
          The first vector of Egyptian influence, which the story of Wenamun particularly invites reflection on, was via mediation through the coastal trading powers, especially the Phoenicians, who had extensive contact with both Egypt and the mostly inland Levantine nations. The role of the Phoenician cities such as Byblos as a conduit of indirect Egyptian influence on Israel and Judah should not be underestimated (Monroe 2018: 268). Provocative similarities between Phoenician and biblical religion are already well recognized in that they share aniconic tendencies (Doak 2015), but the comparative conversation could be expanded.
          It is apparent in the Amarna correspondence of the Late Bronze Age that claims about Amun were already being transmitted by New Kingdom Egyptians, and absorbed by Levantine royal courts. A king of Tyre quoted Egyptian hymnic language to the pharaoh, in Akkadian (Albright 1937). A king of Ugarit wrote to the pharaoh: “I am [your servant] who begs [for life to] the Sun, the great king, my lord. Then do I not pray for the life of his soul before Baʿal Saphon my lord, and length of days for my lord before Amun and before the gods of Egypt who protect the soul of the Sun, the Great King, my lord?” (KTU3 2.23=RS 16.078+.15-24). The sensitivity of Levantine rulers to Egyptian theology is also demonstrated by their ceasing to refer to Amun during the Amarna period, when his worship was suppressed in favor of Aten (Galan 1992; Rainey 2015: 23), and this same sensitivity would have allowed later Levantine rulers and their scribes to absorb the sort of theocratic language about Amun that Wenamun spoke, and that later found its way into the Bible.
          The second probable vector of influence is the apparent perseverance of Egyptian culture in the southern Levant after the recession of its imperial rule in the Third Intermediate Period. The direct Egyptian presence decreased, but Levantine culture in the Iron I-II continued to be a composite made up of all the cultures that had influenced the region over millennia, including Egypt’s. Iconographic analysis shows that “during the formative Middle Bronze Age both Egyptian and Syrian/Anatolian traditions flowed together into the pool of Canaanite motifs” (Schroer 2021: 482–502). Furthermore, a wide array of Egyptian officials remained in Canaan at the end of the Late Bronze Age. Even as the imperial support apparatus collapsed, a number of them stayed behind, transmitting knowledge about everything from “the material to the ideological, from tools to routines, stories, training, and symbols” (Burke 2020: 60). 
          The temple to Amun in Gaza focalizes this lingering influence. It was built or rebuilt as late as the reign of Ramses III (r. 1184–1153), just a few decades before the end of Egyptian rule there (Wimmer 1990: 1086–1087). It has been hypothesized for some time that the worship of Amun continued in the southern Levant, and even that the Gaza temple continued to serve as a workshop for Amun paraphernalia (Uehlinger 1988: 11–15; Koch 2021: 124). Amun and Amun-Re stamp seals formed the second most popular of gods on seals during the Iron I, reflecting the ongoing footprint of Egyptian religion within the southern Levant (Ben-Marzouk 2023: 292–301). Amun was not forgotten in his former imperial territory. 
          It is surely not an either-or question. Rather, we see Egyptian influence from various directions. There is ample evidence of the influence of the existing Amun theology on the Semitic cultures that formed the backdrop for early Yahwistic theologies. 

Egypt and Semitic prophecy

            Thus the Levant absorbed Amun theologies from Egypt, but is it also possible to speak of an Egyptian appropriation of Levantine prophetic ideas? Is Wenamun a record of Egyptian prophetic proclamation? Were the Egyptians impressed by the potential of this bombastic theological rhetoric that took the claims of temple hymns and proclaimed it aloud in practical and political situations? Or was Wenamun merely a skillful portrait (and perhaps even a send-up) of prophetic practices and ideologies? 
          Past scholarship has generally concluded that what we see in Wenamun is an Egyptian reaction to the foreign phenomenon of making prophetic speeches in public, political contexts. And indeed, it must be granted that, as far as we can tell, Wenamun was not part of a native Egyptian genre of prophetic texts. Other similar texts are scarce in Egypt, and a number of Wenamun’s terms and phrases for prophets and their messages were borrowed from secular usage or from Semitic languages.
          And yet—we can safely assume that the Egyptians were not encountering prophecy for the first time in the Third Intermediate Period. Prophecy was incorporated into political discourse centuries earlier at Mari; and so Egypt, which was deeply involved in Bronze Age Syria, will have known of it. 
          It would appear that what is foreign to Egypt about prophecy is more the performance than the rhetoric: It does not seem to have been common for an Egyptian official to issue ambitious monologues about Amun’s greatness to unsympathetic audiences. That would have been inconsistent with the classic Egyptian ideal of the wise courtier as a “silent one.” And real power, of the sort that Egypt consistently had during the New Kingdom, doesn’t need to announce itself with blustery verbiage. Yet in case after case, the claims that Wenamun makes echo those of Egyptian religious hymns or the missives of temple officials. We know that this is true of the Hebrew prophets as well, that they (and the scribes who recorded or invented their words) creatively used existing literary and cultural forms, tropes, and motifs to suit their rhetorical purposes. That is perhaps why Wenamun’s “prophetic rhetoric” sounds so much like theirs—it is theological rhetoric in extremis, proclaimed under the pressure of adverse historical circumstances. 
          The author of Wenamun recognizes in the classic tropes and metaphors of prophetic speech a kinship between the two cultures that he exploits: By shouting at nearly every ruler he meets, Wenamun makes a fool of himself, by Egyptian standards. Yet he is shouting the same claims that Egyptian theologians had made for Amun for generations—and in the strange, foreign world of the Levant, this uncouth and abrasive technique seems to meet with a certain kind of success. Thus the author is able to bring across what he regarded as true claims about Amun’s authority while simultaneously undermining the unreliable main character and poking fun at the relatively uncivilized Wild West Asia (as Egyptians would have seen it). 
          The socio-rhetorical conditions of Wenamun’s proclamations of Amun and the Bible’s proclamations of Yahweh were strikingly analogous: Both were produced by theocratic representatives of cultures that had more ambition than actual power. Much like Egypt in the Third Intermediate Period, Israel and Judah had limited capacities to impose their will on other nations; even in their periods of flourishing, they were not imperial powers. And even before the theological rhetoric of the Mesopotamian empires of the era made their impression on Israel and Judah, one sees an exchange of universalizing rhetoric between Egypt and the Levant. 
          This has implications for the history of Israelite religion, especially for the image of Yahweh as king. Within biblical studies, the idea that theocracy was only advanced by priests after the end of the Davidic dynasty is a cherished axiom that manifests itself in various ways. It is now commonly argued that theocratic biblical covenants would only have sprung up after the end of the Davidic monarchy and the imposition of Persian rule that forbade the re-establishment of native, human monarchy. 

Theocracy and monotheism

          Finally, the comparison of biblical literature with Wenamun also adds another data point in our outline of the development of monotheism. 
          One reason biblical rhetoric often sounds so similar to Amun rhetoric is that most of the Hebrew Bible is not much more monotheistic than Wenamun. Rather, it is monolatrous or henotheistic; it advocates a more or less permanent adherence to Yahweh, without denying the existence of other gods. As Nathan MacDonald has observed in his analysis of the modern origins of the idea of monotheism, “a yawning gap exists between ‘monotheism’ and the Old Testament” (MacDonald 2012: 52). Much of what is popularly considered monotheistic rhetoric does not require the ontological rejection of other gods—for example, the idea of a sovereign and all-encompassing deity who knows the hearts of humankind and requires ethical conduct. Amun was such a deity: a “transcendent world-god and helper of the needy” (Assmann 2001: 221–244).   
          Even those biblical expressions of monotheism that are regarded as the “purest,” those of Second Isaiah, are part of larger compositions that actually reflect polytheistic assumptions in certain ways. That is to say, however much they press towards monotheism, they do so out of worldview in which polytheism is taken for granted. So Yahweh is God, “and there is no other” (Isa 45:22), partly because “Bel bows down” and “Nebo stoops” (Isa 46:1). Although biblical anti-idol polemics pursue the logic of the point farther, the overall picture in Second Isaiah is not far from Ps 82, in which Elohim sentences the other gods of the divine council to death. Is that a monotheistic text? Not exactly, but it is a monotheizing one: a text that presses against the prevalent polytheism. Texts like these are elucidated and brought into better focus by Egyptian models of summodeism (Smoot 2024). 
          Much work remains to be done on the religious connections between Egypt, Phoenicia, and Israel/Judah, but it is not hard to see how the results of the analysis will one day be incorporated into histories of Israelite religion. The origins of biblical monotheism are often traced to the Atenism of the Amarna period, and there is a significant kernel of truth in this; but given the later period of the Hebrew Bible’s formation, it is more accurate to say that the biblical authors were influenced by Atenism’s descendant, the theocratic and universalizing Amun theology of the Third Intermediate Period. In this way, one can cogently incorporate Aten and Amun into the conversation about Yahweh’s origins, along with El and Baal, Aššur and Marduk. The story of Wenamun offers rare detailed vignettes from this ongoing ancient exchange of ideas.

Bibliography

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