Endnote 5 – Moses’ Egyptian Name

Since the ancient Egyptian language, like the original pre-Masoretic Hebrew, wrote only the consonantal structure of words without any intervening vowels, the pronunciation of the word transliterated as Mose is just an educated guess based on the rendering of certain Egyptian names in Greek and the vocalization of the underlying verbal stem in Coptic sources. The Coptic language is a late dialect of ancient Egyptian spoken by the native Egyptian Christians that employed the Greek alphabet and preserved vowels missing in the classical hieroglyphic forms of the language. In Coptic the verb in question appears in the forms mise “to bear, give birth to”/mose “to be born”; by itself mise can be a noun meaning “child, offspring.”