Exodus 2:1-10 CRF - The Name of Moses

What’s in a Name?

Part of the genius of the narrator of Exodus 2 is deliberately leaving out the names of the main characters (on the cutting room floor?). We never hear the name of Moses’s mother or sister or the name of Pharaoh’s daughter. The former two we get more information about later in Exodus, but never the princess (it’s unfortunate, because that might’ve helped solve another Cutting Room Floor a few weeks ago!). This is part of the narrator’s strategy in focusing on the name of Moses in verse 10.

Our discussion this week focuses on the etymology of Moses’s name. Etymology is a study of where words come from. The discussion will be slightly technical, but will hopefully still be fruitful for those who don’t know Hebrew (which I would assume is nearly all of my reading audience!).

There, the text reads: She named him Moses, “Because,” she said, “I drew him out of the water” (ESV). The Hebrew word “Moses” (מֹשֶׁה – mosheh) and the verb “to draw out” (מָשָׁה – mashah) are related in some way. The name “Moses” would be an active participle: “the one who draws out” or something like that (Hamilton, Exodus, 146), but Pharaoh’s daughter explains it passively: she drew him out of the water (Noth, Exodus, 26). A passive participle would’ve required a bit of a different spelling. Instead of Moses, we’d have something like Mashua (Sarna, Exodus, 10).

This leaves us with a number of different questions: 1) Why is “Moses” active whereas the explanation of his name is passive? 2) Did Pharaoh’s daughter know Hebrew well enough to make this pun? 3) If verse 10 happens “When the child grew older,” does that mean Moses was nameless until he was weaned and brought into Pharaoh’s court? I’m willing to guess that these are questions you didn’t realize you had until now!

One of the ways scholars have attempted to come to a solution to some of these problems is to explain the name “Moses” as an Egyptian name, not of Hebrew origin. Some think his name might be based on a common Egyptian name meaning “son” or “to give birth to a son” (Stuart, Exodus, 93; Enns, Exodus, 63). Even in English we can see similar elements in Pharaonic names, especially in the New Kingdom (see the PCRF for Exodus 1:1-7): Ahmose, Thutmose, Ramses, Ptahmose, Harmose (Hoffmeier, Israel in Egypt, 140; Durham, Exodus, 17; Enns 64). So the idea here is that Pharaoh’s daughter gave him a fairly common title for an Egyptian royal family member.

However intriguing this may be, there are still difficulties. Although the name “Moses” would certainly have fit well into an Egyptian household (whether from Hebrew or Egyptian origin, it doesn’t matter), it still doesn’t resolve why the princess would (incorrectly) connect the name with a Hebrew participle. More importantly, why would the author of Exodus (Moses) assume that his audience (the second generation of Israelites in the wilderness, and whoever was left alive of the dying first generation) knew the Egyptian etymology of his name well enough to make the connection with the princess’s pun (Enns 64)? Commentator Brevard Childs makes the point that the author of Exodus 2:10 was unaware of the Egyptian origin; otherwise he would’ve made use of the fact more explicitly (Childs, Exodus, 12).

I think that we don’t give Pharaoh’s daughter enough credit, though. Hebrews lived among the Egyptians to the degree that the Egyptians were getting bothered by it (Ex 1:8ff). There is good reason to believe that Semitic dialects were widely understood in ancient Egypt (Cole, Exodus, 59). After all, Moses’s sister knew enough to converse easily with the princess (Ex 2:7-9; Stuart 92). Either the princess knew Hebrew, or Miriam (Moses’s unnamed sister) knew Egyptian. Either way, it solves our problem. (I find it unnecessary to assume an interpreter’s role in this story; the text doesn’t mention one, and the language of the text clearly implies they were speaking directly to one another). The view that the princess could’ve spoken Hebrew was argued as early as Calvin, who pointed to passages like Gen 42:23 and Ps 81:5 for support (ref. in Enns, 63), as well as Ibn Ezra, a Jewish rabbi and scholar (Houtman, Exodus I, 289). So the possibility that both the Jews and the Egyptians were bi-lingual is by no means a stretch of our imaginations.

There are a few other possibilities that float around out there, none of which I take too seriously. Dutch commentator Houtman mentions two more: that the princess might’ve purposefully given Moses a Hebrew name to keep him from thinking he was really her son and as a reminder of his good fortune, or that the author of Exodus just makes her talk Hebrew, though she didn’t really speak it (289). This is inventive, but breeds more problems than it solves. Scholar Kenneth Kitchen argues that Moses was given his Hebrew name by his real mother (he says the she in “she named him Moses” is referring not to the princess, but to Moses’s actual mom), but this does not fit either, since Moses’s mother was not the one to draw him out of the water (ref. in Garrett, Exodus, 170). Garrett proposes an equally fanciful possibility: that the princess frequently chatted with Moses’s birth mother, which would explain the language being used (ibid.).

Considering the evidence above, I don’t find it a stretch to think that Pharaoh’s daughter knew enough Hebrew to make a pun with her adopted child’s name. She selected wisely enough to use a name that worked two ways: it had Hebrew roots, punning with the verb “to draw out” which linked to his “origin story,” and it sounded royally Egyptian. Clever girl indeed.

Why use an active proper name (“Moses”) with a passive explanation of origin (“I drew him out”)? There is no need to force the two to be perfectly linked together. It is enough that the same verb is used to see the connection. But Pharaoh’s daughter speaks more than she knows (not unlike her father in 1:9-10, who uses the covenantal, creational language of 1:7 to speak of the population problem of Israelites). Moses will be the one to draw Israel out from their slavery. The name Moses is itself a subtle prophecy of things to come, spoken unwittingly by an Egyptian princess. (Houtman suggests the name sounds like a promise coming from the mouth of Pharaoh’s daughter; 267. This is close to what I am suggesting.)

So then… what was Moses named in the interim, before he was taken to Pharaoh’s court? Babies typically breastfed up to three years in that society. So it would be safe to assume that Moses was 2-3 years old before he “returned” to his adopted mother. What did his real mother call him before he was named Moses?

Early rabbis had their guesses (they had their guesses with just about every silent gap in Scripture!). One rabbi suggested “Tobiah” was his original Hebrew name, based on the Hebrew word for “good” – tov (2:2; Sarna, Exodus, 9; Houtman 289). But reality is, we don’t know. Perhaps 2:10b is meant to be understood dischronologically, which is not at all uncommon in Hebrew narrative. (If there are any Hebrew readers following this, I tend to think that this theory would be better supported by a disjunctive clause rather than the vayiqtol we see here). But there is enough evidence to realize that the naming of Moses fits perfectly well into the culture of the day and his name is meant to remind us of God’s deliverance every time we hear it.