Back in the late nineties, my sister Mara went down to Egypt with a few friends to visit the pyramids. There she found out that her first name was a curse word in the local dialect. Distraught, she looked it up in Hebrew and found out it also wasn’t that great, meaning “she is bitter.” So, she switched to her middle name Shoshanah, meaning Rose, only to find out that a popular song in Israel made fun of the name for being outdated. The only thing that made this story a little better, was the Aramaic version of her first name, which means “Lady.”
I thought of that story as I read about Moses’ birth story in this week’s Torah portion. Moses, as we know, was rescued from out of his basket on the Nile by Pharaoh’s daughter who gave him his name, which she says means “I drew him out of the water” (Exodus 2:10). There are a few problems with this story from the outset. First the typical word in Hebrew used to mean “draw out of the water” is “sha’ab”. Second, the story assumes Pharaoh’s daughter speaks Hebrew, an unlikely scenario in that highly stratified society. Lastly, Moshe, or Mose, is a word in ancient Egyptian, meaning “was born” and is often attached to the names of Pharaohs, such as Thutmose, meaning Thut was born, and Ramose, better known as Ramses, meaning begotten by Re. There is, in fact, speculation among scholars that Moses’ name originally had an Egyptian God attached to it, that was only erased in the retelling in the Torah.
For me, this story about the meaning of Moses’ name is personal. Moses or Moshe is my Hebrew name, so the story is not only about our Biblical hero, but about me as well. What does it mean if my name is Egyptian and not Hebrew? Does that change anything about my Jewish identity? The answer for both my sister and I is not really. As to whether knowing the origin of the historical figure Moses’ name changes anything, that is up to you. Perhaps it adds to the story by tying him directly to the Pharaohs. Perhaps it is just an interesting anecdote that deepens our connection with the man whose life we will spend the next four books of the Torah delving into. In the end, it is not the original meaning of any of our names that really matters, it is what we do with them when they are ours.
Happy first Shabbat of 2024,
Rabbi Alex
Last Updated on 01/04/2024 by wpadm