Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Tory Thorpe <torythrp AT yahoo.com>]

Karl:

I think XIIth Egyptian dynasty is much too early for a biblical Moses. You misunderstood me. What I meant is that a man fitting the description of a literate and educated Moses born in Egypt in the 16th-15th century, and raised in the royal Egyptian family, would have known the story of Sinuhe and others as part of his literary training, i.e. he knew hieratic. The story itself was extremely popular in Egypt down into the New Kingdom. Frankly it is somewhat inconceivable that literate "Hebrews" in Egypt and Canaan did not know and enjoy it, apparently required reading in that part of the world.

You ask: "Why would he write in hieratic, when he wrote in Hebrew, not Egyptian? It makes no sense." But it does make sense and should probably be given much more attention. One remark made by William M. Schniedewind in his review of K. Van der Toorn's "Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible" (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007) caught my eye: "The Egyptian background probably merits more discussion especially since Egyptian supplies several significant loanwords to Hebrew for the scribal toolbox (including words for “ink,” “seal,” “papyrus,” and “palette”) as well as scribal terms for accounting and hieratic numerals."

Lastly, where is the statement made in the Torah that Moses wrote in Hebrew?

Tory Thorpe
Tel Aviv, Israel