Abstract: After about 1500 years of slumber, ancient Egyptian was brought back to life in the early 19th century, when scholars deciphered hieroglyphs. This revolutionary success opened the door to a reevaluation of history from the viewpoint of ancient Egypt. In the wake of this new knowledge, the first scholar posited the idea in 1849 that the name of Moses stemmed from the Egyptian word for child. Subsequently, this idea was refined, and currently the majority of scholars believe Moses’s name comes from the Egyptian verb “to beget,” which is also the root for the Egyptian word for child, or in the case of a male child, a “son.” Before this discovery and certainly before a scholarly consensus formed on the Egyptian etymology of the name of Moses, Joseph Smith restored a prophecy from the patriarch Joseph that played upon the name of Moses and its yet to be discovered Egyptian meaning of “son.” This article explores the implications of this overt Egyptian pun and its role as a key thematic element in the restored narratives in the Book of Moses.

In 1849, shortly after the decryption of hieroglyphs, Richard Lepsius published the first known theory that the name of Moses, the famed Hebrew deliverer, might have originated from the Egyptian word for child.1 This theory is now the prevailing theory for the etymology of the name Moses. Even before the academic community posited this idea, however, a pun on this Egyptian etymology for Moses appeared in Joseph Smith’s restored translation of Genesis 50. In 1832, Smith dictated a prophecy about Moses from the patriarch Joseph that [Page 188]contained a wordplay on Moses’s name and its Egyptian etymology. Smith also restored an extra-biblical account of Moses’s life that further plays on this hypothesized Egyptian etymology for Moses’s name. Taken together, these plays on Moses’s Egyptian name, which predate the academic community’s discovery of this possibility, provide circumstantial evidence of the authenticity of the texts Joseph restored.

This paper reviews the account of Moses’s naming in Exodus chapter 2 from a literary perspective informed by the Egyptian etymology of child or son for the name Moses, before discussing Smith’s restored Moses-related texts in the context of the rediscovery of Moses’s Egyptian etiology. Finally, this paper presents a discussion of this etiology as a key element to the restored dialogue between God and Moses and Moses’s confrontation with Satan, which presents Moses as a type of Christ by virtue of his being a son of God.

Naming Moses

The Bible seems intended by its mostly anonymous authors to reward a close reading with a complex array of literary devices, which evinces the artistry of its narrative.2 The Bible’s palette of poetics includes puns upon the names of its personae dramatis. These puns are not merely ornamental but are designed to contribute to the substance of the dramatic ta...