The Vedic origins of Judaism
And the Forgotten Kingdom of Mitanni
The fingerprints of contemporaneous near eastern cultures are all over Judaism, and in the middle of it all, existed the little-remembered Kingdom of Mitanni.
Located between the Hittites, Babylonians, Egyptians, and Assyrians, the antecedents of Judaism can be seen in the alliances, wars, and religions of Mitanni and it’s contemporaries.
The religion of the Hittites to the northwest was Proto-Indo-European and shared much with the Hurrian populace of Mitanni. Their mythologies told of a sky god who battled a great serpent.
The Mitanni ruling class were Indo-Aryan and worshiped Vedic Gods. Their mythologies told of a god of the dead, who was once a man, and decided who would go to heaven or hell.
The Mitanni vassal of Assyria in the west and the Babylonians to the southwest shared the Akkadian pantheon. Their mythologies told of a great flood that drowned the world.
Lastly, Egypt in the southeast introduced the first monotheism of Aten during its alliance with the Mitanni.
The Mitanni came to power between 1600–1500 BC and ruled as a trade and military powerhouse until around 1300 BC.
The Mitanni’s prominence led them to ally with the Egyptians against the Hittites, and the Mitanni intermarried with the pharaohs for near a century.
The Pharaoh Akhenaten himself married the Mitanni princess Tadukhipa, which is significant, because Akhenaten created the first monotheistic religion.
The Egyptian Hymn to Aten and Psalm 104 are so similar that the former is thought to have inspired the latter.
That either means Atenism directly influenced Judaism, or each was inspired by the Regvedic (Vedic) hymns 1.50, 4.13, 10.37.
Which would be a testament to the influence of the Mitanni on both Atenism and Judaism.
All three hymns can be found here, starting on page 643(9) for comparison.
The Torah is thought to have been written roughly a hundred years after the fall of the Mitanni. Though it would be continuously added to for centuries.
And it placed the Biblical Abraham in the Mitanni city of Harran, before he left to preach Judaism in the promised land of Canaan.
That means Abraham was also a contemporary of the Mitanni and may have seen the kingdom fall.
If so he could have been among the “uprooted men” who were deported from Mitanni by their new Assyrian overlords.
Or he could have been driven out by the Hittites when they sacked the city of Harran.
Abraham and his family traveled to Harran from Ur Kaśdim, generally recognized as Ur of the Chaldeans in Babylon.
However, the identity of Ur Kaśdim is not certain, and could instead have been Urkesh. Urkesh was also a Mitanni ruled city, and is even known to have hosted a Mitanni Vedic temple.
Traveling east to west from Urkesh to Canaan, would lead them right to Harran. Whereas traveling from Ur to Canaan, would not lead them anywhere near Harran.
The Biblical story of the great flood is directly inspired by the Epic of Gilgamesh from Babylon.
In the city of Harran, Abraham’s father worshiped the local gods. Abraham disapproved of this, and after his father died he continued with his family west to Canaan — which would later be known as Israel and Judea.
Incidentally, the city of Harran was known for its worship of the Akkadian moon god Sin, as was the Babylonian city of Ur.
The Vedic gods that the Mitanni worshiped would later form the Hindu pantheon, which lends credence to Aristotle’s assertion that,
“Jews are derived from the Indian philosophers; they are named by the Indians Calami, and by the Syrians Judaei, and took their name from the country they inhabit, which is called Judea.”
This may have been due to the Mitanni Vedic influence on Abraham. Whose name I would point out bears a resemblance to Brahman, the title for a Vedic priest.
The opposite, Abrahman is the Vedic version of an Atheist. A fitting epitaph for a monotheist in the eyes of a polytheist.
Atheist like to tell monotheists that they are both Atheist, only they, believe in one less god.
The narrative of Abraham’s life also shares similarities to the story of the Vedic god Brahma.
Even YHWH would seem to have Vedic origins, owed to linguistic and substantive similarities to the god of the dead, Yama.
YHVH was used as an epitaph for Agni, the Vedic god of fire in the Regvedic hymns. Agni is the friend and priest to Yama the Lord of the Dead.
Agni means fire which acts as a messenger to the gods, symbolized with burnt scarifies. Burnt offerings are a frequent feature of the Old Testament.
Yama is also the Vedic god of justice, who sits in judgment of all who die, to determine who goes to heaven and who goes to hell. He is even known as the lawgiver.
The Torah frequently uses the plural tense when referencing gods, leading to the idea that early adherents worshiped multiple gods. Modern theists translate the names of different gods as titles for the one God, rather than identifying them by name.
It is possible that when Abraham went to Canaan he co-opted the native religious beliefs of the Canaanites to insert his imported god, YHWH.
The chief god of the Canaanites was EL. To them, he was the father of the gods. Each divine son of EL was said to rule over a particular nation, and YHWH became the son of EL who was supposed to rule Canaan. Originally YHWH was just given dominion over Jacobs people, because they had not nation, as refugees. Baʿal Hadad, who slayed the sea monster leviathan, was the Lord of Canaan. So perhaps through syncretization, the Israelites used the existing mythology of the Canaanites to legitimize their own god, and eventual rule.
Then once established they recast EL and YHWH and Baal as a single deity.
Deuteronomy 32:8 is often pointed to as a clear example of this plurality.
“When EL gave the nations as an inheritance,
when he divided mankind,
he fixed the borders of the peoples
according to the number of [the sons of God].But YHWH’s portion is his people,
Jacob his allotted inheritance.”
It also has been posited by multiple scholars that the story of Moses was born of the Mitanni and Egyptian alliance possibly as a pseudonym for Akhenaten himself.
Sigmund Freud, oddly enough, wrote a number of essays to that effect.
Another hypothesis is that Moses was the son of Akhenaten’s Mitanni wife who died in childbirth, and was raised by one of his royal sisters.
Moses Son of Akhenaten? A study of Archaeology and textual perspectives
The similarities between Judaism and its neighbors could fill a textbook and is a deeply fascinating tour of comparative mythology.
The Mitanni may be little known outside academic circles, but scholars at least, have recognized the potential of the Mitanni to fill in the gaps in the story.
We can fully expect future archeological discoveries related to the Mitanni to provide new… revelations.
