A sleight of hand by some who believe in Monotheism or Monolatry  is to substitute "a god" (the most common translation of netjer - “noute” in Coptic, equivalent to Greek "theos" as evidenced on bi-lingual translations) for their term "divine force". The term netjer did have a single unique sense as "god" from late Ptolemaic and Coptic times, but for the true AE periods predating the Greek era, the signs for ntr had a diversity of meanings, not a single sense.

 

The best analysis I have come across is "Gods and Men in Egypt, 3000 BC to 395 AD", by F. Dunand & C. Zivie-Coche, transl. David Lorton, 2004. I broadly follow their analysis with extracts from pages 6 to 36: "The ideogram appeared at the very beginning of AE history, even in the prehistoric period. Mis-observation of certain early forms of the sign "once led scholars to think that it was an axe, a sign of power." Wallis Budge makes this erroneous association in his Egyptian Religion and elsewhere.

 

"This interpretation was quickly abandoned in favour of that which prevails today. The sign is a pole wrapped in a bandage that ends in a banner perpendicular to the pole. It has been compared to the masts that stood in front of the primitive sanctuary of  goddess Neith, which always retained its archaic characteristics.

 

A fragmentary papyrus Roman period from Tanis gives a list of hieroglyphic signs accompanied with a brief but evocative description. "Netjer: that which is buried." In other words it is undoubtedly something, rather than some one, that is mummified and wrapped in bandages like a deceased person.

 

From the earliest periods on however, in a parallel development, a falcon perched on a standard served regularly as a determinative of the word netjer, especially in the cursive hieratic script.

 

Finally, a seated person with a beard would frequently be one of the determinatives of the word, from the end of the Old Kingdom onwards. As for the feminine form of the word, designating goddesses, it was written with the same sign  accompanied by the feminine gender ending." (An egg or a cobra, and from Middle Kingdom onwards, sometimes the sign of the goddesses Kerehet).

 

There is a homophony with ntr meaning "natron", used in ritual purification, which led some to think ntr might mean "he who remains pure." But little supports this in the texts.

 

In Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt Eric Hornung has collected personal names containing the word netjer and analyzing them according to the various constructions in use in the Egyptian onomasticon , and establishing parallels with anthroponyms that included the personal names of gods and others that included the names of goddesses, he has been able to show that there is no question of recognizing them in the presence of a single deity bearing the name "God."

 

Moreover, throughout Egyptian history, the word was always used in both the masculine and the feminine, in the singular, and in the plural, and in dual cases in cases of pairs of deities.

 

John Baines in treating fecundity figures and the system of personification, concluded that the categories of netjer and remetj, meaning "man", do not correspond to what we today classify as "god" and "man."

 

In a relatively recent study on "The Notion of God", Dmitri Meeks has sought to go further by systematizing his research on the root netjer with the basic premise that all words belonging to this range of application have a common denominator. The latter is the divine and the funerary cults, and the rituals they entail. Every being, object and process denoted by the root netjer was necessarily implicated as a

cultic act. Thus the King became netjer, as his titulary assures us, when he experienced the rites of coronation.

 

Just as in archaic personal names, we also find texts where the term netjer appears alone, not seeming, on first reading, to refer to a particular deity. The opportunity was too good, and a whole current of Egyptology, including Etienne Drioton, made use of these texts to affirm that monotheism, founded on the existence of a single, omnipotent god [or creator god], had existed in Egypt. These mentions are scattered in autobiographical texts and especially in wisdom texts, whose existence we can trace from the Old Kingdom to the Late Period. In autobiographical inscriptions, persons justify themselves to their peers and to the gods, stating they led a life that conformed to Maat, so that they deserved the enjoyment of the status of "akh" in the afterlife and, after the Old Kingdom, the status of an Osiris.

 

These texts are marked by a strong social and local context, and the god, though invoked in a way that seems abstract to us, is nevertheless the one who is otherwise called "the god of the city," that is, the local god. It is always this particular deity, with whom the individual had a privileged relationship, and whom he had no need to name for lack of ambiguity, who is invoked.

 

[On Wisdom Texts and Instructions] - There remain the others, sources of a monotheistic interpretation that readily opposes [the earlier Budge/ Drioton view prevalent in Egyptology and in Western esoteric circles] the oneness of the god of the [AE] sages to the plurality of the gods of the people.

 

Following Hornung's analysis - It suffices to note that "god" is the most frequent word in these didactic texts, but we also find it in plural, and especially that some gods appear bearing their personal names, such as Horus, Re, Thoth, and Sia. That, I believe, suffices to annul the validity of a monotheistic theory, for, so far as we know, a monotheism would not tolerate the presence of other gods, eveninvoking the "multiplicity of approaches" as some scholars have done.

 

The anonymous god is an indeterminate god who responds to what one expects of a deity, but not God, unique and absolute."

 

It strikes me also that this also annuls a theory of monolatry - where only one god is deemed worthy of worship, though the possibility of existence of others is tolerated. Whether anonymous "god", or anonymous "divine force" .. the evidence how the word netjer was actually used does not seem to bear out the monolatry interpretation - but is closer to natural polytheism or cosmotheism.                 STEVE NICHOLS, 2007