Chapter 43 (part 68)

O tell it unto me, and the poison shall depart; for he shall live whose name shall be revealed." Now the poison burned like fire, and it was fiercer than the flame and the furnace, and the majesty of the god said, "I consent that Isis shall search into me, and that my name shall pass from me into her." Then the god hid himself from the gods, and his place in the boat of millions of years was empty. And when the time arrived for the heart of Ra to come forth, Isis spake unto her son Horus, saying, "The god hath bound himself by an oath to deliver up his two eyes" ( i.e. , the sun and moon). Thus was the name of the great god taken from him, and Isis, the lady of enchantments, said, "Depart, poison, go forth from Ra. O eye of Horus, go forth from the god, and shine outside his mouth. It is I who work, it is I who make to fall down upon the earth the vanquished poison; for the name of the great god hath been taken away from him. May Ra live! and may the poison die, may the poison die, and may Ra live!" These are the words of Isis, the great goddess, the queen of the gods, who knew Ra by his own name. Thus we see that even to the great god Ra were attributed all the weakness and frailty of mortal man; and that "gods" and "goddesses" were classed with beasts and reptiles, which could die and perish. As a result, it seems that the word "God" should be reserved to express the name of the Creator of the Universe, and that neteru , usually rendered "gods," should be translated by some other word, but what that word should be it is almost impossible to say. The belief in One God. From the attributes of God set forth in Egyptian texts of all periods, Dr. Brugsch, de Rougé, and other eminent Egyptologists have come to the opinion that the dwellers in the Nile valley, from the earliest times, knew and worshipped one God, nameless, incomprehensible, and eternal. In 1860 de Rougé wrote:--"The [1. The hieratic text of this story was published by Pleyte and Rossi, Le Papyrus de Turin , 1869-1876, pll. 31-77, and 131-138; a French translation of it was published by M. Lefébure, who first recognized the true character of the composition, in Aeg. Zeitschrift , 1883, p. 27 ff; and a German translation by Wiedemann is in his collection of "Sonnensagen," Religion der alten Aegypter , Münster, 1890, p. 29 ff. 2 A similar difficulty also exists in Hebrew, for elomhim means both God and "gods"; compare Psalm lxxxii., i.]