Last week i was watching Andrew Marr's History of the world , I remember the episode when he mentioned that Judaism should be credited for the idea of monotheism. I didn't suspect what he was saying at the time. However today I came upon a passage by Yuval Noah and he wrote that it might not be the case. Apparently the first clear evidence was from the "religious revolution" of Pharaoh Akhenaten around 1350 BC. and documents such as the " Mesha Stele " show that the religion of biblical Israel was not that much different from neighbouring kingdoms such as Moab.
I would love to read more about this but i barely know any of the civilizations around that time period and the geography of the neighbouring kingdoms is confusing , so if someone can give me some pointers on what to read and in what order and answer 2 questions briefly, i will be very thankful.
Q1 : what was the religious revolution that Pharaoh Akhenaten came with?
Q2 : If there are documents which prove that neighbouring kingdoms to biblical Israel had similar religions, to who then should we credit the idea of monotheism? Or is there even another group which deserves the credit?
This is a great but really massive question! I'll provide some context for some of the things you mention in your comment, and then answer your specific questions.
The ancient Near East is one of the most complex areas in world history. A very important reason for this is the early rise of complex societies in the region, with urbanised settlements like Jericho going back around 10,000 years. Along with this complexity we find the independent invention of writing in two different parts of the ancient Near East: Sumer (in modern day Iraq) and Egypt. With writing comes a literal departure from prehistory: not only can we reconstruct these societies from their archaeological remains, we actually have expressions of their culture and society in their own words. The archaeologist's and ancient historian's task is figuring out how these sources of information - the written sources, the density of archaeological remains, population genetics, historical geography, and so on - can be used. The usual caveats of historiography apply: can we trust the authors of these ancient texts to accurately reflect the politics, religion, and society of their times? How do we reconcile conflicting accounts? How do we fill in the blanks?
But we have an additional problem, which will become important in a bit: the written record of the ancient Near East does not survive evenly. That is to say: the survival of texts is strongly dependent on the medium on which they were written, so the people writing on clay (i.e. cuneiform users) left behind a giant pile of writing simply because clay tablets preserve relatively well in the Near Eastern climate. Papyrus survives less well, though of course for Egypt we have massive amounts of monumental inscriptions in stone to work with. The societies we don't really know much about are the smaller ones - most city states on the eastern Mediterranean coast (with the important exception of Ugarit) used papyrus for record keeping, following the Egyptian model. The result of this is that, for the second millennium BCE, we know relatively much about Mesopotamia and Egypt, quite a bit about Anatolia (because the Hittites adopted cuneiform for their own language), and (again with the exception of Ugarit) very little about the smaller polities in their own words. We have some indication of what goes on in international politics because of the Amarna letters - dating back to Akhenaten's time - which were written in Akkadian cuneiform, which was the lingua franca at the time. However, these are all letters to and from the Amarna court, so because they're only writing about other people, they only give us glimpses into the internal politics of smaller states (and basically nothing about their religions). Inscriptions like the Mesha Stele are extremely valuable in this context, because they offer us these rare examples of indigenous monumental inscriptions. However, the Mesha Stele does little to help us understand the reality of religious beliefs in 9th-century BCE Israel: yes, it confirms that there was a sanctuary to Yahweh (which is useful information in itself!), but it doesn't tell us about a potential broader Israelite pantheon or how Israelite religion really functioned in this time.
Enter the Hebrew Bible, which is a unique collection of texts precisely because it's effectively the only surviving library from one of these smaller political entities (yes, Ugarit too - we'll get to that) that actually does address religious practice. A caveat, though: our earliest HB manuscripts only date to the 3rd century BCE or thereabouts - as the Dead Sea Scrolls - which don't contain all books of the Hebrew Bible, only fragments of some, and at times disagree textually quite significantly with some parts of the Masoretic tradition.^1 So we're using at best a 3rd-century BCE manuscript (in the case of the book of Isaiah, which happens to be a key text for this question) to figure out what 6th-century BCE religious beliefs looked like.
Wait, 6th century BCE? Yeah, I'm getting slightly ahead of myself - let's have a look at your first question first, which takes us to the Amarna period and the 18th dynasty of Egypt.
Q1 : what was the religious revolution that Pharaoh Akhenaten came with?
Akhenaten was an odd one. I'm going to condense what should be at least a book chapter into a couple paragraphs here,^2 but in short: Egyptian religion in the mid-2nd millennium BCE was a system (or group of systems) that had evolved over the centuries into an extremely sophisticated theological patchwork. We have some highly complex religious texts, like the Heliopolitan and Memphite theologies, that deal with transcendental deities and gods being aspects of other gods. Akhenaten - according to some commentators (like Hoffmeier, cited below) out of genuine religious zeal, according to others (e.g. Silverman 1991) it may have had a political motivation. Either way, in practice Akhenaten's reforms deemphasised the existing Egyptian pantheon in favour of a new cult - that of Aten, the sole god - whose cultic centre was at the newly-founded capital of Akhet-aten (the 'horizon of Aten'). Along with this physical move away from Thebes, Akhenaten's reign was characterised by a rather unusual art style. It's worth pointing out that Aten as a deity isn't a wholly new concept at this time - the 12th-dynasty Story of Sinuhe already describes the aten, the 'sun disc' as an aspect of Ra, the sun god. Although religious practice continued at the existing temples to major deities elsewhere in Egypt, Akhenaten's theological outlook appears to have been a monotheistic one; i.e. one that rejected the existence of other gods.^3 Certainly, no temples to other deities existed in Akhet-aten, and the few remaining cultic inscriptions (surviving in the tombs of Akhet-aten) strongly indicate that Aten truly was the only god for Akhenaten.^4 After his death, his son Tutankhamun reversed the formal reforms, and Akhenaten was erased from the Egyptian historical record, his face wiped off the pre-reform monuments that bore it and Akhet-aten abandoned again.
Okay, brief excursus to a short bit of theory. Monotheism and polytheism, much like human sexuality, aren't a binary. There are loads of intermediate ways to engage with deities that don't fit the classical definitions of monotheism ("there exists only one god") and polytheism ("there is more than one god"). The key ones for our discussion are henotheism ("there are more gods than one, but only one is worthy of worship") and monolatry ("multiple gods exist and may be worthy of worship, but we choose to worship only one"). This feeds into this question - what the hell is going on with Israel?
First, a couple of important points:
The historical reliability of the Hebrew Bible is terrible until we get to roughly the 8th century BCE. The Exodus never happened, Canaan wasn't conquered, and there's no evidence for a united monarchy of Israel and Judah under David or Solomon (~1000-950BCE according to the Bible). Jerusalem is an insigificant town until at least 800 BCE. Even after 800ish BCE, we frequently either don't know if we can trust the historicity of the text, or we know that we cannot trust the historicity of the text.
There is no direct connection between Akhenaten and biblical monotheism^5, particularly in light of the damnatio memoriae after his death, since the Hebrew Bible only really starts being written around the 8th century (with fragments perhaps going back some centuries earlier). This is exacerbated by what's known as the Bronze Age Collapse in the 12th century BCE, which destroyed a massive amount of cultural and textual continuity between pre-collapse and post-collapse civilisations.^6 Although some scholars (chiefly John Day in several publications) hold to a direct connection given some remarkable similarities between Psalm 104 in the Bible and Akhenaten's Great Hymn, it simply seems impossible that a sealed tomb text survived, verbatim, five centuries in a polytheistic context.
[cont'd in next comment]
^1 - The Masoretic Text (MT) of the Hebrew Bible is usually considered the authoritative version of the text, and is broadly assumed to have remained stable from composition to oldest surviving manuscript - which dates to the 10th century AD. The DSS disagree in some places with the MT, and instead follow the Septuagint (LXX), the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, so it's not quite certain that the MT remained quite as stable as is usually assumed.
^2 - For a full discussion of the nature of Akhenaten's religious reforms, see Hoffmeier (2015), Akhenaten and the Origins of Monotheism. Silverman's 1991 paper is: David Silverman, “Divinities and Deities in Ancient Egypt,” in Religion in Ancient Egypt: Gods, Myths, and Personal Practice (ed. Byron Shafer; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 4–75.
^3 - Hoffmeier again, who points out that, among other textual evidence, Aten's name wasn't indicated by the usual determinative hieroglyph for 'god', but by a newly-invented one that presumably indicated his special status.
^4 - E.g. "Yet you are alone / rising in your manifestation as the Living Aten" from the Great Hymn (see Lichtheim 1994, Ancient Egyptian Literature).
^5 - In light of the archaeological evidence against the Exodus, some biblical scholars propose that it was a movement of elites only, who brought monotheism with them from Egypt. This frankly raises more questions than it solves.
^6 - Eric Cline's book on it is fantastic and well worth a read, even if you're not an academic - 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed.