RA rä (Egyp.; better, Rē', sun). The principal sun god of ancient Egypt, shown as a man with falcon’s head, wearing the sun’s disc.

In very early times, Ra was identified with the creator god Atum of Heliopolis (q.v.) and became chief deity there. He is commonly referred to as Rē-Harakhte, “Ra-Horus of the Horizon,” as the morning sun in the E.

Ra first had royal patronage in the second dynasty, and reached greatest prominence with the pyramid builders of the fourth and fifth dynasties (c. 2600-2400 b.c.), when the kings first called themselves “Son of Ra”; thereafter, the funerary god Osiris grew in prominence. The universal claims of Ra and influence of Heliopolitan theology led to combinations with other deities: Amen-Ra, Sobk-Ra, etc. In the eighteenth dynasty, Akhenaten made the sun god, manifest in the solar disc as Aten, sole god of Egypt, but thereafter (nineteenth and twentieth dynasties) Amun of Thebes, Ra, and Ptah of Memphis formed a trio and could be conceived of as three aspects of a single deity. Ra appears in the OT only in the name of Joseph’s father-in-law, Potiphera the priest of On (Heliopolis).