Amenemope

92:5.113. The post-Mel­chiz­e­dek era. Though Amen­emope and Ikh­na­ton both taught in this pe­riod, the out­stand­ing re­li­gious ge­nius of the post-Mel­chiz­e­dek era was the leader of a group of Lev­an­tine Bed­ou­ins and the founder of the He­brew re­li­gion—Moses. Moses taught mono­the­ism. Said he: “Hear, O Is­rael, the Lord our God is one God.” “The Lord he is God. There is none be­side him.” He per­sis­tently sought to up­root the rem­nants of the ghost cult among his peo­ple, even pre­scrib­ing the death penalty for its prac­ti­tion­ers. The mono­the­ism of Moses was adul­ter­ated by his suc­ces­sors, but in later times they did re­turn to many of his teach­ings. The great­ness of Moses lies in his wis­dom and sagac­ity. Other men have had greater con­cepts of God, but no one man was ever so suc­cess­ful in in­duc­ing large num­bers of peo­ple to adopt such ad­vanced be­liefs.

95:3.5Egypt was in­tel­lec­tual and moral but not overly spir­i­tual. In six thou­sand years only four great proph­ets arose among the Egyp­tians. Amen­emope they fol­lowed for a sea­son; Okhban they mur­dered; Ikh­na­ton they ac­cepted but half­heart­edly for one short gen­er­a­tion; Moses they re­jected. Again was it po­lit­i­cal rather than re­li­gious cir­cum­stances that made it easy for Abra­ham and, later on, for Joseph to ex­ert great in­flu­ence through­out Egypt in be­half of the Salem teach­ings of one God. But when the Salem mis­sion­ar­ies first en­tered Egypt, they en­coun­tered this highly eth­i­cal cul­ture of evo­lu­tion blended with the mod­i­fied moral stan­dards of Mes­o­po­ta­mian im­mi­grants. These early Nile val­ley teach­ers were the first to pro­claim con­science as the man­date of God, the voice of De­ity.

96:1.53. El Shad­dai. It is dif­fi­cult to ex­plain what El Shad­dai stood for. This idea of God was a com­pos­ite de­rived from the teach­ings of Amen­emope’s Book of Wis­dom mod­i­fied by Ikh­na­ton’s doc­trine of Aton and fur­ther in­flu­enced by Mel­chiz­e­dek’s teach­ings em­bod­ied in the con­cept of El Elyon. But as the con­cept of El Shad­dai per­me­ated the He­brew mind, it be­came thor­oughly col­ored with the Yah­weh be­liefs of the desert.

95:4.4Amen­emope func­tioned to con­serve the ethics of evo­lu­tion and the morals of rev­e­la­tion and in his writ­ings passed them on both to the He­brews and to the Greeks. He was not the great­est of the re­li­gious teach­ers of this age, but he was the most in­flu­en­tial in that he col­ored the sub­se­quent thought of two vi­tal links in the growth of Oc­ci­den­tal civ­i­liza­tion—the He­brews, among whom evolved the acme of Oc­ci­den­tal re­li­gious faith, and the Greeks, who de­vel­oped pure philo­sophic thought to its great­est Eu­ro­pean heights.

95:4.1In due time there grew up in Egypt a teacher called by many the “son of man” and by oth­ers Amen­emope. This seer ex­alted con­science to its high­est pin­na­cle of ar­bitra­ment be­tween right and wrong, taught pun­ish­ment for sin, and pro­claimed sal­va­tion through call­ing upon the so­lar de­ity.

95:1.11Much of the Mes­o­po­ta­mian re­li­gious cul­ture found its way into He­brew lit­er­a­ture and liturgy by way of Egypt through the work of Amen­emope and Ikh­na­ton. The Egyp­tians re­mark­ably pre­served the teach­ings of so­cial obli­ga­tion de­rived from the ear­lier And­ite Mes­o­po­ta­mi­ans and so largely lost by the later Baby­lo­ni­ans who oc­cu­pied the Eu­phrates val­ley.

95:4.2Amen­emope taught that riches and for­tune were the gift of God, and this con­cept thor­oughly col­ored the later ap­pear­ing He­brew phi­los­o­phy. This no­ble teacher be­lieved that God-con­scious­ness was the de­ter­min­ing fac­tor in all con­duct; that ev­ery mo­ment should be lived in the re­al­iza­tion of the pres­ence of, and re­spon­si­bil­ity to, God. The teach­ings of this sage were sub­se­quently trans­lated into He­brew and be­came the sa­cred book of that peo­ple long be­fore the Old Tes­ta­ment was re­duced to writ­ing. The chief preach­ment of this good man had to do with in­struct­ing his son in up­right­ness and hon­esty in gov­ern­men­tal po­si­tions of trust, and these no­ble sen­ti­ments of long ago would do honor to any mod­ern states­man.

95:4.3This wise man of the Nile taught that “riches take them­selves wings and fly away”—that all things earthly are evanes­cent. His great prayer was to be “saved from fear.” He ex­horted all to turn away from “the words of men” to “the acts of God.” In sub­stance he taught: Man pro­poses but God dis­poses. His teach­ings, trans­lated into He­brew, de­ter­mined the phi­los­o­phy of the Old Tes­ta­ment Book of Proverbs. Trans­lated into Greek, they gave color to all sub­se­quent Hel­lenic re­li­gious phi­los­o­phy. The later Alexan­drian philoso­pher, Philo, pos­sessed a copy of the Book of Wis­dom.

95:4.5In the Book of He­brew Proverbs, chap­ters fif­teen, sev­en­teen, twenty, and chap­ter twenty-two, verse sev­en­teen, to chap­ter twenty-four, verse twenty-two, are taken al­most ver­ba­tim from Amen­emope’s Book of Wis­dom. The first psalm of the He­brew Book of Psalms was writ­ten by Amen­emope and is the heart of the teach­ings of Ikh­na­ton.