Monday, April 6, 2015

The Exodus in the Qur'an, the Bible, and History (Part 5): The Adoption of Moses

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.
[2] Kitchen, 297. 

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