My vote?
I agree with
@stratamaster78, It's a phonetic similarity. But you're not the only one who has ideas like this. Some associate Is
RAel, with Ra in a like manner. But, it doesn't really matter. All words are symbols, what they mean, and how they connect to anyone and anything both within the mind and beyond it depends on how it is understood. But the vocalization, in many ways is arbitrary. My favorite example in the hebrew language is: In hebrew, a dog... is a fish! Literally. Dog, pronounced Dawg, Dalet-Gimmel, means "fish".
So, the matching of the two words in two different languages is rarely significant. But, if a person attaches the name Amun-Ra with the word Amein in their mind while they are saying it, yes, it is attaching to that concept. So, it's "dealer's-choice", for lack of better words. If you want it to be a form of worship to Amun-Ra, nothing's stopping you or anyone from doing precisely that. Or if one chooses to go with the standard meaning, that works too. It all depends on what it means to that individual in that moment.
Traditionally though, like many words in hebrew, amein, aleph-mem-nun, is an acronym. it stands for:
Ail
Melech
Ne'emahn. It means: "[The] Divine King [is] Faithful". It's an oath. Traditionally, when a person says, "amein", they are testifying that what was just heard or spoken is so true, so very-very true, that it carries the full faith and credit of the divine monarch, the most high god.
Sometimes, it's repeated. Amein, Amein. When this is uttered, the speaker is testifying to all the heavens and the all earth. It's a very strong oath. In theory. This is in the hebrew bible at the conclusion of the sotah ritual in Numbers 5. Also it's all over the book of john, but, Amein, Amein is spelled in greek, ἀμήν, ἀμήν, which is translated as "Truly, Truly" or "Verily, Verily" -
Nice Catch! The hebrew bible is a polemic against the egyptian reigion where pharaoh was considered a human-priest-king-god hybrid.
The four source documentary hypothesis has lost its academic concensus, fyi. It's much more common to identify 2 and only 2 sources, priestly and non-priestly. The DH is still very much favored in the Reform Movement in Judaism. They teach it in their seminaries, preach it from the pulpit, and indoctrinate the children with it in their sunday schools. They don't want any of their children becoming a religious zealot like me. ~wink-wink~ But they also want to eat pork and drive on the sabbath, etc. So they have their motives for chopping down the "tree-of-life".
It's been known since its inception among the orthodox and ultra-orthodox that the DH was a very weak theory that is adopted by choice certainly not by necessity as its adherents claim. But the nail in the coffin arrived in 2011 when non-biased AI software was developed to seek traces of multiple authors in the text and count them. It only found two styles of writing which have been identified as priestly and non-priestly. -
( You can read the full journal article for free with a google account. If you have trouble logging in, please let me know. )
There is a scholar from the Reform community, Yale professor Dr. Joel Baden, who wrote a book trying to revitalize and breathe life back into the DH. I have it on kindle. I found its justification for
needing the DH to be complete rubbish. Naturally as a religious person I have a bias in favor of the Torah as a divine unity. When I learned that the DH had essentially collapsed, I was very very happy. I felt vindicated, having seen the writing on the wall long before. But even those without my bias in the academic community have formed a concensus that the Torah is a literary unit. See links below.
The general trend in recent scholarship is to recognize the final form of the Torah as a literary and ideological unity, based on earlier sources, likely completed during the Persian period (539-333 BCE).
Correct! That's the entire point. It looks plural, but it's not. The verb forms determine if it's plural or not. In Genesis 1, all the verbs are singular. It's singular. It's a singular god. The idea of a henotheism that was dropped is popular, and the idea that YHVH was a midianite god who rose to power is popular, but none of that is actually supported in what is written. It's just a fun "what-if" theory to play with. Most point to Psalms 82 as evidence, and that's all they have, but it doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
It seems like you are implying there is some sort of secret polytheism in the Torah because YHVH is described using different names? It's true people don't realize the different names used in the hebrew text, but, the notion that these are different gods just because different names are used is a common misconception.
I don't expect any to believe me. I fully expect to be the extreme minorty, perhaps the only one here defending the monotheism in the hebrew bible. I don't intend to argue my position. But I felt I would reply, make my position known, fully expecting to recieve eye-rolls and even a few snickers. It's totally fine. It happens.
If you are referring to akkadian and ugarite texts, I've researched this myself, and found these claims to be popular but without merit.
