Between Egypt and Midian: A Reassessment of the Meaning of the Name ‘Moses’

Among the few motifs of the Moses story that are widely seen as irreducible elements of a historically old layer, the name ‘Moses’ (mošæ) itself is the most prominent. Most scholars agree that this name has an Egyptian origin and goes back to a form of the root mśy, “to be born”. It would thus represent an essential piece of historical information and implicitly also link Moses to the Exodus tradition. In the words of Rudolf Smend: “Later invention is probably to be excluded; how should Israel have given the very man whom it considered its founder, a name in the language of those from whose hand he had liberated the people?” The consensus among Biblical scholars has reached such a degree that Thomas Römer goes as far as to say that the Egyptian explanation of the name is “indiscutable”. However, doubts about the Egyptian origin of the name have often been raised. But as Erhard Blum has concluded, the wide-spread acceptance of the derivation of the name from the root mśy is due to the simple fact that no convincing alternative has ever been proposed. This paper will discuss the phonology of the traditional interpretation of the name and demonstrate that this Egyptian derivation must be abandoned. It will instead explore new avenues for Egyptian and Semitic analyses of the name and point to the consequences this would imply for the historical place of Moses, favoring either the ‘Exodus’ or the ‘Midianite’ hypothesis.