In the collection of funerary spells from the Egyptian Middle Kingdom (2050–1750 bce) known as the Coffin Texts, and more precisely in the Book of the Two Ways, a topography of the Neth-erworld to be used by the deceased in his quest for rebirth, the creator god speaks the following words:
Come in peace, that I may relate to you the four good deeds (nt
¯r ) that my own heart did for me within the Coiled Being,1in order that evil (jzf.t ) be silenced. I did four good deeds within the portal of the horizon. I made the four winds, so that everyone may breathe in his time: this was my deed. I made the great flood, so that poor and rich be strong: this was my deed. I made everyone equal to his fellow and I ordered them not to commit evil (jzf.t ), but their hearts disobeyed what I had said: this was my deed. I caused their hearts to cease forgetting the West, but rather make divine offerings to the local gods: this was my deed. I created the gods from my sweat and people from the tears of my eye.2
The end of the text explains the functional setting of the creator’s monologue:
As for anyone who knows (rh
˘) this spell, he will be as Re in the east of heaven and as Osiris in the Netherworld, and will go down to the circle of fire: there will never be a flame against him forever.3
By assimilating the dead to the creator god, this spell evokes the latter’s most important deeds and suggests that the origin of evil, the prime concern of ‘theodicy’ from Boethius to Leibniz and
1The ‘Coiled Being’ is Mehen, the serpent that surrounded the primordial ocean Nun, out of which the creator god emerged through self-creation (nt.r
˘hpr d
¯s=f, lit. ‘the god who occurred by himself’).
2AECT, Spell 1130: A. de Buck, The Ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts, vol.
7, Chicago 1961, 462a-465a.
3AECT, vol. 7, 471c-f.
28 A. Loprieno
Kant,4is to be sought in man’s autonomous decision to transgress a divine order.
At approximately the same time, a period which corresponds to the Middle Bronze Age in Syria and Palestine, the lament of the pseudepigraphic sage Ipuwer, who is later mentioned as an ‘overseer of singers’ in a Ramesside list of past intellectuals,5 seems to question that man’s choice is truly free and to claim, on the contrary, that evil is allowed to prevail by the creator’s negligence:
Look, why does He try to shape<mankind> if the fearful is not distinguished from the aggressive and He does not bring coolness upon the heat? One says: ‘He is the shep-herd of all: there is no evil (bjn) in His heart’, and yet His herd is small (‘nd
¯).6Although He spends the day tending them, fire is in their hearts. Had he realized their character in the first generation, He would have smitten harm (sd
¯b), stretched His arm against it, and destroyed their flock and their heirs! But since they keep reproducing themselves, heartbreak has come and misery is everywhere. Such is the situation and it will not pass by, although the gods are in the midst of all this. But seed comes forth from real women: it is not found on the street! Aggressive people prevail, and He who should dispel evil (jw ) is the very one who creates them! There is no pilot in their hour. Where is He today? Is He asleep? Look, there is no sign of His power around.7
Does this mean that the creator god is powerless in front of the evil that man brings about? Another literary text of the Middle Kingdom, the fictional autobiography of Sinuhe, written during the first part of Dyn. XII (1950–1750 bce), does not share this point of view and argues instead that the transgression of the protagonist, who feared that the new king might be ill-disposed
4For a general introduction, cf. the entry ‘Theodizee’, in G. M¨uller (ed.), TRE, Bd. 32, Berlin 2002, 210-37.
5The so-called ‘Daressy fragment’: cf. D. Wildung, Imhotep und Amen-hotep (M ¨ASt, 36), M¨unchen 1977, 28-9.
6This statement means that although god is supposed to be the shepherd of all mankind, his actual flock, i.e. the people who follow his commands, is quantitatively small.
7Admonitions of Ipuwer, 11,12–12,6: A.H. Gardiner, The Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage, Leipzig 1909, 78; R.B. Parkinson, The Tale of Sinuhe and Other Ancient Egyptian Poems 1940–1640 bce, Oxford 1997, 166-99.
toward him and chose to leave Egypt for a life among Beduins, was not the result of his own, but rather of god’s decision:
Now god (nt
¯r ) has acted so as to show mercy to the one at whom he had been angry and whom he had led astray to a foreign country: but today his heart is washed. A fugitive fled his surrounding, but now I am famed at home; a bum lagged from hunger, but now I give bread to my neighbour;
a refugee left his land naked, but now I have bright clothes and white linen; a runner ran for lack of someone to send, but now I have plenty of servants. My house is good (nfr ), my dwelling place is spacious, and the memory of me is in the palace. Whichever god decreed this flight, have mercy and bring me home! Let me see the place where my heart dwells!8
Finally, the author of a wisdom text putatively addressed to king Merikare of the First Intermediate Period (2150—2050 bce), but actually written during the Middle Kingdom, implicitly disagrees both with Ipuwer and Sinuhe and believes that god’s stewardship of mankind as his ‘flock’ works perfectly since the time he reduced their size, when man foolishly decided to rebel against him:
Well-tended is mankind, god’s flock: he made heaven and earth for their sake, after he subdued the water’s greed (snk ), and he made the breath of life for their noses to live.
They are his images who came forth from his body, and he shines in heaven for their sake. He made for them plants and cattle, birds and fish to feed them. He slew his enemies and damaged (h. d¯j ) his own children, for they thought of rebelling (jrj sbj.t ). He makes daylight for their sake, and he sails by to see them. He built his shrine around them:
when they cry, he hears. He has made for them rulers in the egg, leaders to raise the back of the weak. He made for them magic (h. k,’) as weapons to ward off the blow of events, watching over them day and night. He slew the traitors among them as a man beats his son for his brother’s sake:
God knows (rh
˘) every name.9
8Sinuhe, B 147-158: R. Koch, Die Erz¨ahlung des Sinuhe (BAeg, 17), Bruxelles 1990; Parkinson, The Tale of Sinuhe, 21-53.
9Instruction for Merikare, E 130-138: J.F. Quack, Studien zur Lehre f¨ur Merikare (GOF, 4/23), Wiesbaden 1992, 78-81; Parkinson, The Tale of Sinuhe, 212-34.
30 A. Loprieno
These four texts present a spectrum of rather different theodicean positions, albeit articulated in comparable contextual frames:
four monologues, each of them recited in front of a different fict-ive audience. In the first case, the creator god, the ‘Lord of All’, asserts that he bears no responsibility for the existence of evil, which is solely to be attributed to man’s failure. In his lament-ation, the sage Ipuwer agrees implicitly with this theory, but nonetheless accuses ‘god’ of neglecting his duties as mankind’s steward, ostensibly allowing evil to prevail unpunished, while the
‘gods’ themselves partake in this situation. Sinuhe, the literary hero of a flight abroad which in contemporary Egyptian world views tantamounted to a crime, makes god’s inscrutable plan re-sponsible for a mischief of which he sees himself, in a way, as a predetermined victim. Finally, king Merikare’s putative father (and instructor) defends an optimistic view of the relationship between god and his creatures and claims not only that evil – whatever its origin may be – is consistently punished, but also that man was given ‘magic’ (h. k,’) to ward off its dangerous mani-festations,10at least implying, therefore, that man has at his dis-posal all the elements he needs to remove the disorder brought about by the intervention of evil in the world.
These are the theodicean positions most frequently verbalised in Egyptian texts throughout the development of a written cul-ture that stretches over three millennia. They document a very intense intellectual debate about the origin and the scope of evil.
While Egyptian texts may appear to provide surprisingly differ-ent solutions to a common problem, an adequate comprehension of Egyptian theodicean discourse needs to take into account two most important variables: the variety of textual genres in which this discourse is articulated, and the spectrum of historical con-texts in which it operates. In this article, I shall try to take these two variables into account while still trying to provide a global assessment of the Egyptian contribution to the universal debate on theodicy.11
10Cf. Th. Schneider, ‘Die Waffe der Analogie: Alt¨agyptische Magie als Sys-tem’, in: K. Gloy, M. Bachmann (eds), Das Analogiedenken: Vorst¨oße in ein neues Gebiet der Rationalit¨atstheorie, Fribourg 2000, 37-85.
11Cf. E. Hornung, Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many, Ithaca 1982, 197-216; J. Assmann, ¨Agypten: Theologie und Fr¨ ommig-keit einer fr¨uhen Hochkultur, M¨unchen 1984, 198-208; Idem, ¨Agypten: Eine Sinngeschichte, M¨unchen 1996, 217-22; R.B. Parkinson, Poetry and Culture