Alexander Seinfeld writes:
- Adam's son Seth and the Egyptian god Seth as possible cognates and inversions of the same Cain-Abel-Seth / Seth-Osiris-Abel story.According to Wikipedia,
According to Jewish tradition, Adam's son Seth was born in 3631 BCE.
- 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.[9]
Therefore, at first glance, the dates support your hypothesis.
https://www.quora.com/Was-Seth-the-Egyp ... e-cognates
On Quora, Grant Hayes notes:
So originally (when, 3000 BC or 2000 BC?), the Egyptian Seth was probably Sutash/Sutakh, and then it became "Set" (when, 1500 BC? 1 BC?). And the Greeks heard "Set" 2000 years later (when, 1000 or 1 BC?).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 šutaḫ by 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 Σήθ for the Egyptian god...
https://www.quora.com/Was-Seth-the-Egyp ... e-cognates
Hayes writes:
There is only one letter "t" (Tau) in Hebrew, so why is the Hebrew name Seth pronounced Sheyth, instead of Sheyth? Since there is also only one S in Hebrew (the letter Ш / Sh), couldn't a word pronounced as "Set" in 1300 BC by Egyptians become written and pronounced Shet or Sheth by Hebrews?The Hebrew name we spell as Seth ( שִׁית ) 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 Σήθ .
Hayes concludes based on this information that the Greek "Set" is "homophonous (in Greek) with the Hebraic ancestor figure, but with a different origin." However, my hypothesis is that the Egyptian Sutash could have become pronounced as Set around the time that the Israelites wrote about Adam's son "Seth" in their Torah, and the Israelites could have Hebraicized Set into Sheth/Shayth.
- The Hebrew story of Cain, Abel, and Seth as being a version of the Egyptian story of Seth, Osiris, and Horus, wherein the Hebrew Cain stands in for the Egyptian Seth and the Hebrew Seth stands in for the Egyptian Horus:
Grant Hayes writes:
It makes sense that in this paradigm, the Hebrew Seth resembles Horus in the Egyptian story, rather than the Egyptian Seth. However, this does not prove that the Hebrew Seth is not related to the Egyptian one, because sometimes religions to make inversions of figures as they cross over from other religions or hold parts of them in common. The Devas and Ashuras of Persian/Iranian religion had the opposite moral role of the Devas and ashuras of Hinduism. Sometimes in the Tanakh it's said that the "gods" of other religions are "demons." In the Lord of Spirits podcast that I heard online, it's said that the giant "great men" and Nephilim of other ancient religions are cast as negative figures in the Hebrews' Tanakh. The Egyptians could theoretically see "Seth" as bad and belonging to wild tumult and foreigners in the time of the Semitic Hyksos invasion, whereas foreign Semites like the Hyksos might see the same god as positive.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.
- The Israelites could have imagined Jehovah using attributes of the Egyptian god Seth, who had been combined with the Canaanite Baal:
Izaak J. de Hulster writes:
- Horus and Seth could be Jehovah and Behemoth who fight in Job 40.Historians of religion... find abundant evidence that Yahweh was commonly imagined using attributes of other ancient Near Eastern gods, especially weather and solar deities. In the tradition of the exodus, for example, Yahweh is depicted as both a storm god and a warrior (see Exod 15)—features that are also present in the Egyptian Baal-Seth.
https://www.bibleodyssey.org/en/passage ... -look-like
K. Van Der Toorn writes in the Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible:
- The Egyptian god Set becoming mixed with the Semitic Hyksos' god Baal, and Balaam's prophecy of Israel's "scepter" breaking the sons of Sheth/Seth/turmoil:A number of authors have suggested that the confrontation between Yahweh and Behemoth in Job 40:15-24 is patterned upon the battle of Horus (Yahweh) against Seth (Behemoth). The description of Behemoth, then, would reflect aspects of Seth. The basis for the alleged parallelism is the fact that in some Egyptian texts the red hippopotamus symbolizes Seth. Other facets would corroborate the hypothesis. Thus the bones "like iron bars" which Behemoth is said to possess (Job 40:18) are reminiscent of the "bones of Seth" mentioned in the Pyramid texts and by Manetho. The tentative parallel between Behemoth and Seth has proved productive for the interpretation of the relevant passage, but remains hypothetical. In its defence... in the poetic description of Behemoth there are a significant nymber of traits that cannot very well apply to a mere animal: Behemoth does have supernatural dimensions...
In his article "Seth, Sheth or Set the Egyptian 'god of chaos'?," Derek Gilbert notes Balaam's prophecy in Numbers 24:17, (ESV)
He notes that one interpretation is that the passage refers to Israel's possibly Messianic "scepter" breaking the sons of "Seth", the Egyptian god. Two other common interpretations are:a star shall come out of Jacob,
and a scepter shall rise out of Israel;
it shall crush the forehead of Moab
and break down all the sons of Sheth.
(Hebrew for the last line: וְקַרְקַ֖ר כָּל־ בְּנֵי־ שֵֽׁת׃ )
(A) Sheth" here refers to Adam's son "Seth," (Hebrew: שֵׁת )which was Augustine's interpretation. The letter Ш here there has slightly different vowel pointing in the Masoretic, although I don't know how much difference that makes. Biblehub says that they are both pronounced "Shayth," as in Genesis 4:25's reference to Adam's son Seth.
(B) Sheth here might mean "tumult" instead of being a proper noun, so that "sons of Seth" could refer to the "sons of tumult." Sheth doesn't seem to mean "tumult" elsewhere in the Bible, although it could have that etymological meaning.
Going along with the theory that Balaam is referring to the sons of the Egyptian god Seth, Gilbert writes:
Grant Hayes notes:First, consider the possibility that the sons of Sheth are followers of a pagan god. Seth and Sheth are alternate transliterations of the name of Egyptian chaos-god, Set (also spelled Sutekh, Setekh, and Setesh). During Egypt’s Second Intermediate Period, Lower Egypt (that is, northern Egypt) was ruled by a Semitic-speaking people called the Hyksos, who were almost certainly Amorites. The most important god in their pantheon was Baal, who was merged by the Hyksos with Set.
The timing of the end of the Hyksos era in Egypt is fuzzy, but most scholars place it about a hundred years or so before the Exodus. They were driven out after a series of wars led by native Egyptian rulers based at Thebes. While it would be convenient to think that the Hyksos were utterly destroyed by the Egyptians or simply disappeared from history, that’s unlikely. It’s more probable that they were driven out of Egypt into Arabia or the Transjordan, absorbed into the native Egyptian population, or a bit of both. Since the worship of Baal-Set continued in Egypt for at least two hundred years after the Exodus, long after the fall of the Hyksos kingdom, that may be closest to what happened.
Is it possible that the prophecy refers to David’s defeat of Set-worshiping desert nomads southeast of the Dead Sea? Maybe.
https://allpropastors.org/seth-sheth-or ... -of-chaos/
This reminds me of the breaking down of the Sons of Sheth in Numbers 24, since the Hebrew word for breaking down here also means digging, according to BibleHub. That would go along with an idea that Numbers 24 could be making a play on words with the Egyptian meaning of the name of Sheth. Hayes also writes: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).
https://www.quora.com/Was-Seth-the-Egyp ... e-cognates
This goes along with the Hebrew meaning of tumult for the Hebrew word Sheth in Hebrew.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.
- The Egyptians Seth's association with donkeys and Egyptian portrayals - apparently negative - of Israelite worship as associated with donkeys, and the Hyksos invaders' dedication to Seth:
In his essay "The contrast between Jew and Zhou People(周人)," Bohai Xu writes:
The Egyptians like Manetho portrayed the Israelites as worshiping donkeys or having a donkey head in their temple. These typically have been preserved in ancient polemics against Judaism. Josephus argued against these portrayals in his work "Against Apion."In art, Set is usually depicted as an enigmatic creature referred to by Egyptologists as the Set animal, a beast resembling no known
creature, although it could be seen as a composite of an aardvark, a donkey, a jackal, or a fennec fox. ... The Egyptians themselves, however, made a distinction between the giraffe and the Set animal. During the Late Period, Set is depicted as a donkey or as having a donkey's head(te Velde 1967, pp. 13–15).
Still, there could be some special associations between the Israelites and donkeys in a religious context. In the Torah, Balaam rides a donkey/ass, and strike it, and it miraculously talks, asking Balaam why he did that. The story reminds me a bit of pagan religions' associations between specific deities and their animals, like Shiva riding a bull. Zechariah 9:9 has a prophecy about Judah's king riding a donkey and Christianity sees this prophecy as fulfilled with Jesus' entrance on a donkey in to Jerusalem.
Bohai Xu also writes:
During the Second Intermediate Period (1650–1550 BCE), a group of Near Eastern peoples, known as the Hyksos (literally, "rulers of foreign lands") gained control of Lower Egypt, and ruled the Nile Delta, from Avaris. They chose Set, originally Upper Egypt's chief god, the god of foreigners and the god they found most similar to their own chief god, Hadad, as their patron. Set then became worshiped as the chief god once again. The Hyksos King Apophis is recorded as worshiping Set exclusively, as described in the following passage: [He] chose for his Lord the god Seth. He did not worship any other deity in the whole land except Seth.