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Re

RE רע

I.       Re (Rʿw, Akk. Riʿa, Heb Raʿ) occurs as a theophoric element in Potiphera (פוטיפרע = PʒdjpʒRʿw, name of the father of Asenath Gen 41:45), a short form of Potiphar (פוטיפר) the name of Joseph’s Egyptian employer, Gen 37:36; 39:1) and Hophra (חפרע), Jer 44:30 (ḥʿʿjbRʿw, Gk Apries, name of Pharao WʒḥjbRʿw).

Re is the Egyptian god of creation, the sun and the state, for he symbolizes the cosmogonic energies and qualities that rule the universe and that find their terrestrial incarnation in Pharaoh. Re is the chief of the gods and the father of the king. →Amun achieves this same position only via syncretistic identification with Re. The traditional centre of Re-worship is Jwnw, Heb און (Ezek 30:17) אן (Gen 41:45), the Greek Heliopolis.

II.     The Egyptians divided the day into three periods which correspond to three phases of the solar journey, the apparent course of the sun around the earth, which the Egyptians depicted as a journey in two boats, one for the day (Mʿnḏt) and one for the night (Msktt). These periods are morning, midday and evening, or sunrise, crossing and sunset. The night usually belongs to the third phase. The three phases of the solar circuit are expressed in a triad of gods: Chepre (morning), Re (midday) and →Atum (evening and night). But these three gods can also be seen as mere aspects of one single god who is called either Re or Re-Harakhte. Later theological speculation develops a doctrine of 12 or 24 forms of Re, one for every hour. The ‘litany of Re’, a text belonging to the ‘books of the netherworld’, praises Re in 75 different forms (Hornung 1975). Each of the three major forms of Re has a special religious significance. Chepre symbolizes the cosmogonic energies; he is the god who “emerged by himself” (ḫpr ḏs.f, Gk autogenēs.) Re symbolizes the rulership of the creator, his justice, executive power and omniscience; Atum symbolizes the virtuality of preexistence into which the creator relapses during the night in order to start creation again the following morning (Assmann 1969).  p 690 

The traditional cult of Re addresses not only the god but rather the ‘solar circuit’, which is considered the central life process of the universe and a drama in which virtually the whole pantheon cooperates. The cult supports this drama by incessant ritual performances, mostly in the form of hourly recitations of hymns (‘hourly ritual’, Assmann 1975^a:1–12), but also fumigations, libations, offerings and the like. The popular sun hymns reflect the 3-phase structure of the solar circuit: they usually contain three stanzas, each of them devoted to a specific phase of the journey. The topic of these hymns is not the theology of the sun god, but the drama of the solar journey (Assmann 1969; 1983 chap. 2).

The Heliopolitan concept of cosmogony does not know of any closure of the creative process but conceives of creation as the ‘first time’ (zp tpj) of an endless cycle of decay and regeneration (E. Hornung, Verfall und Regeneration der Schöpfung, Eranos 46 [1977] 411–449). But unlike the ‘first time’ when light and life were disclosed without meeting any resistance, the daily circuit has continuously to combat a cosmic enemy, the personification of chaos, darkness, dissolution and evil who in the form of a huge →serpent threatens to swallow up the celestial ocean and to bring the solar course to a standstill. This enemy has constantly to be overthrown, he can never be definitely annihilated but remains omnipresent as a kind of gravitation towards →chaos or ‘virtual apocalypse’ which must be averted by incessant effort in order to keep the world going. The cult is the terrestrial part of this effort of cosmic maintenance. It is the task of the king whom Re “has installed on the earth of the living for ever and ever, judging men and satisfying gods, realising Maʿat (truth/justice/order) and annihilating Isfet (disorder)” (Text ed. Assmann 1971; cf. Assmann 1990:205–212). There exists a close parallelism between the dominance of the creator which he exerts in the sky in order to maintain creation against the rebellious resistance of chaos, and the governance of Pharaoh on earth and his struggle against political enemies, a parallelism which reveals much of the “solar language” that can be found in Biblical texts (M. Smith, The Early History of God [San Francisco 1990] 115–144; B. Janowski, Rettungsgewißheit und Epiphanie des Heils. Das Motiv der Hilfe Gottes «am Morgen» im Alten Orient und im Alten Testament. Band I: Alter Orient [WMANT 59; Neukirchen-Vluyn 1989])

But the solar journey reflects or imparts not only the political conceptions about justice, rulership and political welfare, but also the anthropological conceptions about death, rebirth and immortality. The individual hopes to enter the cosmic cycle after death and to be reborn in the hereafter to join the retinue of the solar boat (the “bark of millions”). The nocturnal phase of the solar journey is depicted in the form of a descensus ad inferos (Hornung 1984). The god who himself undergoes death and resurrection/rebirth during this journey, visits the corpses in the depth of the earth and reanimates them temporarily by his radiance and his life-giving words. At midnight, in the extreme depth of the netherworld, the sun god unites with →Osiris, the ‘Ba’-soul with his corpse. This union links ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’, ‘Neheh’-time in form of endless repetition and ‘Djet’-time in form of inalterable duration, father (Osiris) and son (Re = →Horus) and thus produces continuity. Between one cycle and another, there is the mystery of renewal which for a moment dives into the outworldly depths of preexistence. A late text describes this union as a most dangerous secret: “Whoever gives this away will die of a violent death, for this is a very great secret. It is Re and it is Osiris” (Pap. Salt 825, xviii.1–2; P. Derchain, Le Papyrus Salt 825 (B.M. 10051), rituel pour la conservation de la vie en Égypte [Brussels 1965]). This same mysterious union forms the basis also for the individual’s hope for renewal and immortality. The cosmic drama is interpreted, by ‘analogical imagination’, in a way that reflects the fundamentals of human life: social justice and harmony, political order and authority,   p 691  and individual hopes for health, prosperity and—above all—life after death. It is this relationship of mutual illumination of cosmic, sociopolitical and individual essentials that conveys to this world-view and interpretation of reality the character of truth and of natural evidence.

During the New Kingdom, a new concept of the solar journey arises according to which the sun god performs his course in complete solitude. The traditional imagery of the living god—reliving and rejuvenating his daily life within the constellations of the divine world—is now transformed into the concept of the life-giving god who is not included and embedded in divine interaction but confronts the world from high above and sends from there his life-giving rays into the world (For the vertical division of the world into upper and lower, heaven and earth see Assmann 1969:302–306). The transformation can be described as one from constellational intransitivity to confrontational transitivity. Instead of a reciprocal relationship between heavenly and earthly, cosmic and political action, we have the direct transitive subject-object relation between god and earth. God and world, creator and creation, are confronted in a huge distance to each other. The world, however, still includes the traditional deities and is still divine. But the monotheistic revolution of Akhenaten does away even with this last remnant of traditional polytheism. But this is a radicalization which did not affect the new world view. After Amarna, the development resumed. The great discovery of Akhenaten which lay behind his monotheistic revolution consisted in the observation that the sun not only generated the →light but also time, time in the double sense of divine cosmic energy and individual lifetime. Cosmic time and the lifetime of all living creatures are created by the motion of the sun as the light is created by its radiation.

After Amarna, this concept of the constant divine creation or ‘emission’ of lifetime develops into a concept of divine will and human fate. Re not only generates time but also its content, i.e. fate and destiny, history and biography, life with all its vicissitudes on the individual, social and political planes emanate from the will of Re who creates time (Assmann 1975^b). The rule of Re over time implies a concept of omniscience. In two hymns this idea is expressed in terms strongly reminiscent of Ps 90:4: “eternity is in your eyes as yesterday when it has passed” (Assmann 1975^a:Nr.127B, 82; Nr.144A, 27). But this concept of time and fate as emanations of divine planning remains not restricted to solar theology but develops into a general ‘theology of will’ that changes the structure and essence of Egyptian religion.

In hymns of the Ramesside and later periods, the ‘non-constellative’ view of the solar journey as the action of a solitary god animating, ruling and preserving his creation strangely coexists with the ‘constellative’ one that views the same journey as a drama where many gods cooperate and where the sun god plays not only the active roles of ruler, judge and saviour, but also the passive ones of a child that is born and raised, a king who is crowned and adored, an old man who is guided and helped, a dead man who is ‘transfigured’, rejuvenated and reborn.

In the Late Period, Re and Osiris, who according to the traditional conception ‘unite’ during midnight, fuse into a syncretistic deity.

III.    Potiphera, the Egyptian name of the father of Asenath (Gen 41:45), means ‘the one given by Re’ (KAI 2, p 280; cf. Potiphar in Gen 37:36; 39:1). The noun in the name of the Egyptian king Hophra (Jer 44:30; cf. 37:5) means ‘Happy-hearted is Re’ (D. B. Redford, Hophra, ABD 3 [1992] 286). The suggestion according to which the Hebrew expression rʿh rāʿâ / bĕrāʿ in Exod 5:19; 10:10 etc. contains a reference to Re should be rejected as fanciful and unfounded (pace Rendsburg 1988).

IV.    Bibliography

J. Assmann, Liturgische Lieder an den Sonnengott. Untersuchungen zur altägyptischen Hymnik I (Berlin 1969);   p 692  J. Assmann, Der König als Sonnenpriester. Ein kosmographischer Begleittext zur kultischen Sonnenhymnik in thebanischen Tempeln und Gräbern (Glückstadt 1970); Assmann, Ägyptische Hymnen und Gebete (Zürich 1975a); Assmann, Zeit und Ewigkeit im alten Ägypten. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Ewigkeit. (Heidelberg 1975b); Assmann, Re und Amun. Die Krise des polytheistischen Weltbilds im Ägypten der 18.-20. Dynastie (OBO 51; Fribourg/Göttingen 1983a); Assmann, Sonnenhymnen in thebanischen Gräbern (Theben I) (Mainz 1983b); Assmann, Ägypten—Theologie und Frömmigkeit einer frühen Hochkultur (Stuttgart 1984); Assmann, Maʿat. Gerechtigkeit und Unsterblichkeit im alten Ägypten (München 1990); E. Hornung, Das Amduat. Die Schrift des Verborgenen Raumes, 3 vols. (Wiesbaden 1963/67); Hornung, Das Buch der Anbetung des Re im Westen (Sonnenlitanei), 2 vols. (Geneva 1975); Hornung, Ägyptische Unterweltsbücher (Zürich 21984); G. A. Rendsburg, The Egyptian Sun-God Ra in the Pentateuch, Henoch 10 (1988) 3–15.

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^{<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]-->} Assmann, J. (1999). Re. In K. van der Toorn, B. Becking & P. W. van der Horst (Eds.), Dictionary of deities and demons in the Bible (K. van der Toorn, B. Becking & P. W. van der Horst, Ed.) (2nd extensively rev. ed.) (689–692). Leiden; Boston; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brill; Eerdmans.