Akhnaton’s Chief Minister an Israelite?

by Damien F. Mackey Na’aman was also, I believe, the Syrian military captain, Hazael (he being both biblically and historically attested), who succeeded Ben-hadad I as king. Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky had brilliantly identified Hazael as the Aziru of the El Amarna correspondence (in Ages in Chaos, I, 1952). And I thought it must logically follow on that Hazael-Aziru would also be the Syrian Arsa (Irsu), or Aziru, of the Great Harris Papyrus (GHP): Akhnaton was Aziru https://www.academia.edu/48877759/Akhnaton_was_Aziru This Syrian invader, Aziru, is said in GHP to have done in Egypt precisely what Akhnaton would do there: close the temples and treat the Egyptian gods with contempt. Akhnaton’s brand new city of Akhetaton, we found, was an armed military camp, his chief officers being Asiatics (one could read Syrians), and not native Egyptians. This all smacks of an invasive force! Now I learn from reading Graham Phillips excellent book, Act of God (1998), that Akhnaton may have even had an Israelite as his Chief Minister: Pp. 280-281: “[Aper-El] was one of the most important figures in Akhenaten’s government. He was both the vizier of Memphis - the governor of northern Egypt - and an important religious figure, as he bore the title ‘Father of the God’. This made him of equal status to Akhenaten’s chief minister Ay. Aper-El’s son had been an important figure: the general in charge of all the chariotry of Lower Egypt, and the ‘Scribe of Recruits’, making him responsible for all army recruitment in the area. … ‘… a possible co-regency of the two kings’. This was nothing, however, compared to the apparent identification of Aper-El himself. The remarkable thing was that Aper-El was not a native Egyptian but an Asiatic – which in itself would be unusual enough, as no other pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty is known to have appointed an Asiatic to such high office. More specifically, however, he seems to have been an Israelite. His name, Aper-El, Alain Zivie realized with surprise, appeared to have been a title, an Egyptian form of Abed or Oved-El, meaning ‘The Servitor of [the god] El’. El is an abbreviated form of the Hebrew word Elohim, meaning Lord, which is the form in which God is usually addressed in the original Hebrew of the Old Testament …. Mackey’s comment: The name Oved-El can also be rendered as the more familiar ‘Obadiah. The holy man, Tobit, would have been called ‘Obadiah or ‘Abdiel (‘Abdullah in Arabic) – Tobit being a Grecised version of that Hebrew name. P. 282: The depictions of the Aten in [Aper-El’s] tomb, together with other Amarna-style illustrations, make it blatantly apparent that Aper-El was also an Atenist. Alain Zivie even suggests that Aper-El was a prophet of the Aten in Memphis. The title ‘Father of the God’ would certainly imply this. Here we not only have evidence of a shared link between the Hebrew religion and Atenism, but a corporeal example of someone who seems to have been a prophet of both [sic] religions and saw nothing contradictory about it.