The Ancient History Encyclopedia does not describe Seth as if he is God or Jehovah, but rather one of the lesser gods whose name means Destroyer/Confusion-Creator:archaeologists found remains of sacrificed donkeys in Israel/Canaan/Palestine dating to 6,000-8,000 BC, as I recall. This is certainly far older than Egyptian literature, or for that matter the time of the Israelite Torah's writing, but it can show an association possibly between the Canaanites and Seth.
The Encyclopedia Britannica notes:https://brewminate.com/the-religion-of-the-ancient-canaanites/
The University of Pennsylvania website notes:The ancient Israelites who lived when they passed down the Torah's early stories (c. 1300 BC or earlier) included an early human forefather, Seth, in their Genesis account. It seems that there is probably some relation between the the Seth of Genesis and the Seth of Egyptian mythology, althgough of course in ancient Judaism there is a careful distinction between important early humans like Seth and mythological gods like those of the Egyptians. The Gnostics of the 1st century AD seem to have associated the Egyptian God Seth with the Israelite figure, but those Gnostics were living over a thousand years after the Torah's time, so their interpretations don't prove what the Israelites' beliefs were.
One theory goes that the 10 Plagues of Egypt in the Exodus story each corresponded to different Egyptian deities, with the implication that God was sending these plagues in accordance with their polytheism to show that He (God) was stronger than the Egyptian gods. One illustration of this principle is in Numbers 33, which says::
“They marched out boldly in full view of the Egyptians … for Yahweh had brought judgment on their gods...” Certainly, if the story of Exodus was condemning Seth implicitly in the plague story, it would imply a hostile relationship to the Egyptian Seth.
The Zondervan website notes the theory that the plagues of Gnats and Hail could relate to "Set, god of the desert storms." On the other hand, the Zondervan website notes:https://owlcation.com/humanities/Ten-Plagues-For-Ten-Gods
Alexander Seinfeld, whose educational background involves studying rabbinic texts, theorizes that there could be a relationship between the Egyptian god Seth and the Seth in Genesis:
Grant Hayes on the other hand thinks that the Egyptian Seth and the Genesis story Seth are false cognates. He writes:
Hayes continues:https://www.quora.com/Was-Seth-the-Egyptian-the-same-as-Seth-the-son-of-Adam-or-are-the-names-false-cognates
Although I find such linguistic arguments to be pretty strong, it's not as easy for me to dismiss connections between the Biblical forefather Seth and the Egyptian god Seth, such as:
(A) The Egyptians also considered the god Seth to be venerated by the Hyksos collection of peoples of the Near East, which included the Canaanites and precursors of the Israelites. Joan Lansberry discussed this in her article "Sethian Gnosticism" (www.joanlansberry.com/setfind/sethgnos.pdf)
(B) In Judaism, the Biblical Seth was important as the second forefather after Adam of a line of many human descendants, including the Israelites.
(C) According to Plutarch, Typhon, a Greek name for the Egyptian god Seth, was the forefather of the Jews.
(D) Christianity considers Christ both divine - an attribute of the Egyptian god Seth, and the "Son of Man" - a title that could be applied to the Biblical Seth, the son of Adam, whose name (Adam) means "man" in Hebrew.
Richard Wunsch, a scholar on Gnosticism, noted associations between the two figures, writing:
Set, also known as Seth and Suetekh, was the Egyptian god of war, chaos and storms, brother of Osiris, Isis, and Horus the Elder, uncle to Horus the Younger, and brother-husband to Nephthys. ... He is one of the first five gods created by the union of Geb (earth) and Nut (sky) after the creation of the world. His name is usually translated as "instigator of confusion" and "destroyer" and he was associated with disorder, foreign lands and people, and the color red.Wikipedia summarizes Seth this way:
...
His epithets include "Lord of the Desert" and "Ruler of the South" as he was originally a god of Upper Egypt (the south) and the barren lands beyond Egypt's borders.
In the Early Dynastic Period of Egypt (c. 3150 - c. 2613 BCE) he was an important - and benevolent - god of Upper Egypt whose name was invoked for love spells and inscribed on amulets which served as love charms. He was also the deity who saved the sun god Ra from the serpent Apophis, an evil creature who tried to stop the sun god's journey through the night sky toward dawn.
Set /sɛAt one point in ancient Egypt, Seth was associated with donkeys, among one of several other animals, andt/ (Egyptological: Sutekh - swtẖ ~ stẖ or (Greek: Seth /sɛ θ /) is a god of deserts, storms, disorder, violence, and foreigners in ancient Egyptian religion. In Ancient Greek, the god's name is given as Sē th (Σ ή θ . Set had a positive role where he accompanies Ra on his barque to repel Apep, the serpent of Chaos. Set had a vital role as a reconciled combatant. He was lord of the red (desert) land, where he was the balance to Horus' role as lord of the black (soil) land.
The Encyclopedia Britannica notes:
During the rule of the Hyksos invaders (c. 1630–1521 BCE), Seth was worshipped at their capital, Avaris, in the northeastern Nile River delta, andThe article "The Religion of the Ancient Canaanites" notes:was identified with the Canaanite storm god Baal.
Canaanite religion was influenced by its peripheral position, intermediary between Egypt and Mesopotamia, whose religions had a growing impact upon Canaanite religion. For example, during the Hyksos period, when chariot-mounted maryannu ruled in Egypt, at their capital city of Avaris, Baal became associated with the Egyptian god Set, and was considered identical – particularly with Set in his form as Sutekh.
The University of Pennsylvania website notes:
On the international scene, Canaanite gods and goddesses were equated with their counterparts in Egypt and Mesopotamia. For example, Ba'al is equated with the Egyptian god Seth, since they are both storm gods
One theory goes that the 10 Plagues of Egypt in the Exodus story each corresponded to different Egyptian deities, with the implication that God was sending these plagues in accordance with their polytheism to show that He (God) was stronger than the Egyptian gods. One illustration of this principle is in Numbers 33, which says::
The Zondervan website notes the theory that the plagues of Gnats and Hail could relate to "Set, god of the desert storms." On the other hand, the Zondervan website notes:
The fact that God defeated the gods of the Egyptians in general, however, does not give interpreters license to read into the narrative a specific blow-by-blow list of the supposed deities whom Yahweh defeated. There are historical problems with correlating each plague with a particular ancient Egyptian deity. Many of the gods and goddesses had multiple functions or responsibilities, making it difficult to know which deity was being attacked by a given sign.The Owlocation Blog theorizes that the Exodus plague of locusts against Egypt corresponded to the god Set:
Moses and Aaron approached Pharaoh with the same request, "Let my people go so that they may serve me", and pronounced the judgment of locusts if not heeded. This is the second wave of destruction to follow the hail, and whatever crops were left in tact after that display, were now completely consumed by the swarms of locusts that were unleashed from the sky.
Alexander Seinfeld, whose educational background involves studying rabbinic texts, theorizes that there could be a relationship between the Egyptian god Seth and the Seth in Genesis:
According to Wikipedia,Seinfeld concludes that this dating is circumstantial evidence for a relationship between the Egyptian Seth and the one in Genesis.The earliest representations of what may be the Set animal comes from a tomb dating to the Naqada I phase of the Predynastic Period (3790 BC–3500 BC), though this identification is uncertain. If these are ruled out, then the earliest Set-animal appears on a mace head of the King Scorpion, a protodynastic ruler. The head and the forked tail of the Set animal are clearly present.
According to Jewish tradition, Adam's son Seth was born in 3631 BCE.
Grant Hayes on the other hand thinks that the Egyptian Seth and the Genesis story Seth are false cognates. He writes:
It’s a false cognate, arising from the identical rendering of the names in English, following ancient Greek rather than the original Hebrew and Egyptian.In other words, Hayes theorizes that originally the Egyptian Seth was in the form of Stsh or Stkh and the pronounciation evolved, so that only later the Greeks heard it as Set/Seth. An important factor in evaluating the relationship between the Egyptian Seth and the Israelite one would be whether the Egyptians were pronouncing the name as Seth at the same time as the Israelites were writing the Genesis story of Seth. Even if the Egyptians were pronouncing it as "Sutash" in 3000 BC, you would want to consider whether Egyptians were pronouncing it as Set/Seth in c.1300 BC when the Israelites wrote the story of the Biblical Seth.
The Hebrew name we spell as Seth ( שִ ׁ י ת ) is actually closer to sheeth or sheyth in sound, and was derived from a verb with a wide semantic range, encompassing actions like put, place, set down, lay hands on, apply, i.e. to position something manually. In Greek the Hebrew name was rendered as Σ ή θ .
As for the god Seth, the consonantal framework of his name in Egyptian hieroglyphs - which did not typically represent vowels - was originally s-t-sh or s-t-kh . This name was heard and recorded as šutaḫby ancient Babylonians who were in contact with Egypt; together these lines of evidence suggest a reconstruction of Sutash / Sutakh. Over time, the posttonic syllable would wear away to an open /a/, thus making the name Suta and ultimately Sut. The /u/ evolved into the /e/ the Greeks heard, nearly two millennia after the earliest writings of the name in hieroglyphs. So, by a lengthy route, we end up with Greek Σ ή θ for the Egyptian god, homophonous (in Greek) with the Hebraic ancestor figure, but with a different origin.
Hayes continues:
The original meaning of the god Seth’s name (as with several others) in Egyptian cannot be recovered straightforwardly. Already in ancient times it was the subject of pseudo-etymologies devised by the Egyptians themselves. One of these etymologies came down to the Greek author Plutarch of Chaeronea (1st and 2nd centuries AD), who - in his De Iside et Osiride - claimed that Seth meant ‘overpowering’. Egyptian punning as far back as the Coffin Texts (c.2000 BC) played on the similarity of Seth’s name to a word for ‘cutting in pieces’. Indeed, in the Coffin Texts Seth’s name can be replaced by a hieroglyphic sign representing a cutting or digging tool meaning ‘to separate’ (Gardiner Aa21). Elsewhere, Seth was associated by another pun with a verb meaning ‘to be drunk’. Both Plutarch’s and the older etymologies served to depict the essence of Seth’s character as it developed in dynastic Egypt: an overwhelming, turbulent, disorienting force; a divine transgressor who dismembered the archetypal good king Osiris.
Seth was associated by the Egyptians with the foreign and the uncanny, and with the violent power of storms. The Egyptians’ interaction with West Semitic / Canaanite cultures, particularly from the Middle Kingdom onward, led to the equating of Seth with the storm god Baal venerated in those cultures, and he was paired with ‘wild’ foreign goddesses like Anat and Astarte. By contrast, the Hebraic ancestor Seth is associated with the orderly, pastoral line of Adamic descendants; an emblem of legitimacy and restitution after the primordial murder of the pious Abel. In that regard, Hebraic Seth resembles the Egyptian god Horus, who represents the continuity of legitimate succession after the murder of Osiris. Hebraic Seth assumes Abel’s role as the counter-type to the transgressive Cain, who, as a fratricide, is closer to the Egyptian Seth in character.
So, the associations of the Hebraic Seth and the Egyptian Seth are actually quite at odds, in addition to the different origins of their names.
Although I find such linguistic arguments to be pretty strong, it's not as easy for me to dismiss connections between the Biblical forefather Seth and the Egyptian god Seth, such as:
(A) The Egyptians also considered the god Seth to be venerated by the Hyksos collection of peoples of the Near East, which included the Canaanites and precursors of the Israelites. Joan Lansberry discussed this in her article "Sethian Gnosticism" (
(B) In Judaism, the Biblical Seth was important as the second forefather after Adam of a line of many human descendants, including the Israelites.
(C) According to Plutarch, Typhon, a Greek name for the Egyptian god Seth, was the forefather of the Jews.
(D) Christianity considers Christ both divine - an attribute of the Egyptian god Seth, and the "Son of Man" - a title that could be applied to the Biblical Seth, the son of Adam, whose name (Adam) means "man" in Hebrew.
Richard Wunsch, a scholar on Gnosticism, noted associations between the two figures, writing:
"Now we have already seen that the Sethians were friends of the Jews, and the conjecture is plausible that the blasphemy of the Gnostics was aimed at this sect, and accordingly that the ass-headed Typhon-Seth was still known in their worship and as a hypostasis of the Jewish god."
"When the first elements of the Sethian Gnostics were crystallising and Egyptian and Jewish features were uniting, the faithful found for the god of the Nile land a kinship with an Israelitish hero in the person of Seth, the son of Adam. Now this Seth was, after Adam, the real founder of the human race, since Abel was slain in youth and the seed of Cain had disappeared: and thus may have originated the legend that Typhon-Seth was the ancestor of mankind, and directly of the Jewish people, a legend which is transmitted to us in Hellenistic garb by Plutarch."
"...it was the phrase 'the son of man,' used of himself by Christ, that determined the conception of him formed by these Gnostics: Adam means 'man,' and the son who was called to found a new and pure humanity, is Seth."
Richard Wunsch, cited in Paul Carus, The Open Court (Vol.15), books.google.com/books?id=mPIaAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA93
[This message has been edited by rakovsky (edited 02-20-2021 @ 11:53 PM).]