From here onwards, we will be looking at historical gems in
the Qur’an’s telling of the Exodus story.
In the Qur’an and the Bible, the story of Moses begins with
his mother hiding him as a baby, in order to protect him from the Pharaoh’s
systematic infanticide of the Hebrew newborn males. When Moses’ mother fears she can no longer
keep him, she places him in a chest in the Nile river. The Qur’an indicates that she did this
according to divine inspiration (28:7).
A female member of the royal family—Pharaoh’s daughter in the Bible, his
wife in the Qur’an—takes pity on the baby Moses. The Qur’an reports that she felt special
affection for him:
And the wife of Pharaoh said, “A
comfort for the eye for me and for you!
Do not kill him. Perhaps he may
benefit us, or we can adopt him as a son/child (walad)” (28:9)
There are two things about this āya that are interesting from a historical perspective. First, it is widely agreed that the name
Moses is of Egyptian origin, meaning “son” or “child.” This word frequently appeared in theophoric
Egyptian names during the New Kingdom period (c. 1540-1170 BCE), such as
Thutmose (“son of Thoth”), Ptahmose (“son of Ptah”), and Ramesses (“son of
Ra”), but also occurred as a name by itself.
The word walad used in this āya is a precise translation of the
Egyptian word “Moses.”[1] This contrasts with the folk etymology of the
name Moses in the Hebrew Bible, which says Pharaoh’s daughter named him Moses “
‘because’, she said, ‘I drew him out of the water’” (Exod. 2:10). The Hebrew word Moses (Mōsheh) is not in the passive (“drawn out”) but the active (“draws
out”).
Secondly, the wife of Pharaoh in fact suggested two possibilities to him: “perhaps he may benefit us, or we can adopt him as a child.” By suggesting “perhaps he may benefit us,”
she also seems to have had in mind making Moses an attendant of the royal
court. Only in this way could he both
serve them and be a coolness of the eye for them. The upbringing of a foreign boy in the
service of the Egyptian court might seem improbable, but it is actually a well-attested phenomenon during the New Kingdom period. Kitchen writes,
Exod. 2:10 notes the full adoption of the boy [Moses] by his princess
patron; that implies his becoming a member of the ruling body of courtiers,
officials, and attendants that served the pharaoh as his government leaders
under the viziers, treasury chiefs, etc.
Such a youth would need to be fully fluent in Egyptian (not just his own
West Semitic tongue); so he would be subjected to the Egyptian educational
system, learning the hieratic and hieroglyphic scripts. This is typical enough during the New
Kingdom, especially in the Nineteenth (Ramesside) Dynasty of the thirteenth
century. One may cite a papyrus from the
Fayum Harim (under Sethos II, grandson of Ramesses II), in which a leading lady
writes to the king: “Useful is my Lord’s action in sending me people to be
taught and trained to perform this important task…For those here are grown-up
children, people like those my Lord sent, able to act, able to receive by
training. They are foreigners like those brought to us under Ramesses II your
good [fore]father, and they would say, ‘We were quite a number in the
households of the notables,’ and could be trained to do all they were told to
do.”
In the Fayum, these youths
may have been set to weaving rather than school; but the attitude expressed
applies across the board—and its outcome is the considerable number of
foreigners (especially Semites and Hurrians) who served at court and beyond. These included the personal cupbearers of
Pharaoh (who became his right-hand men, in conducting royal enterprises like
temple building, stone quarrying, gem mining, etc.), directors, and scribes of
the royal seal bearer, court herald, high steward of the chief royal memorial
temples, generals, and so on. A Moses
would be simply one among many.[2]
Therefore, the adoption and upbringing of even a Hebrew boy
as a member of the royal Egyptian court fits in remarkably well with the
evidence from New Kingdom Egyptian records.
[1] Kitchen objects that the Hebrew Mōshe does not derive from ancient Egyptian because the sibilant s in Egyptian toponyms (as Msi) does not change into to sh when they enter Hebrew (as Mōshe).
However other scholars have noted that personal names exhibit greater
fluidity once they enter the new language, and Griffiths records examples in
which the Egyptian sibilant s changed
into Hebrew sh. In any case, even Kitchen does grants that
the naming of Moses involved some wordplay with the Egyptian Msi.
See Hoffmeier, 140-142.
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