Endnote 6 – Moses’ Egyptian Name

See G.A. Gaballa, The Memphite Tomb Chapel of Mose (Warminster, UK: Aris & Phillips, 1977).

There is a reasonable phonological objection that could be raised against interpreting the name Moses as some form of an Egyptian name ending in –mose. The second consonant in the Hebrew Moshe is a V or shin, whereas the Egyptian seems to use a letter or , which normally would be rendered in Hebrew as s (samek), as seems to be the case with many toponyms. See Hoffmeier, Israel in Egypt, pp. 110–122; and Griffiths, “Egyptian Derivation,” pp. 228–231. This does not present a major obstacle, however. There are no hard-and-fast rules for predicting how sibilants will be rendered as they move between the languages of the ancient Near East. This is attested in the Amarna letters and the Hittite-Egyptian correspondence; see E. Edel, Die Ägyptisch-hethitische Korrespondenz aus Boghazköi in babylonische und Hethitische Sprache, 2 vols., Abhandlungen der Rheinisch-WestfÄlischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 77 (Opladen: Westfalischer Verlag, 1994) passim.