What does the name Moses mean?

What Exodus says

The name comes with its own explanation. A Hebrew mother hides her baby from Pharaoh’s order, sets him afloat in a basket, and Pharaoh’s own daughter finds him in the reeds; the whole rescue is told in why baby Moses was put in a basket. When the boy is weaned, his mother hands him over to the princess.

The child grew, and she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. She named him Moses, and said, “Because I drew him out of the water.”

In Hebrew the name is Mosheh, and the verb is mashah, “to draw out.” It is a rare verb. The Hebrew Bible uses it only twice more, both times in the same song of David: “He drew me out of many waters” (2 Samuel 22:17; Psalm 18:16).

A name that looks ahead

Read the grammar closely and there is a twist. Mosheh is an active form. It means “one who draws out,” not “one who was drawn out,” which in Hebrew would sound different. The princess explains the past, but the name points to the future. The baby pulled from the Nile will grow up to pull a whole people out of Egypt and through the sea. Readers have long enjoyed a second irony: the man who will break Pharaoh’s grip was named by Pharaoh’s own daughter, in Pharaoh’s own house.

Is Moses an Egyptian name?

Probably, at root. An Egyptian princess would give an Egyptian name, and Egyptian has a close match: mose, from the verb msi, “to give birth,” used in names to mean “born of” or “child.” Pharaohs carried it joined to a god: Thutmose, “born of Thoth,” and Ramesses, “born of Ra.” Many scholars think the name began as one of these and lost the god along the way, leaving simply “child” or “son.” On that view, the Hebrew writer took an Egyptian name and heard a Hebrew meaning in it. The two explanations don’t have to compete. A name can sound right in two languages at once, and Exodus loves wordplay.

Saved from the water

Jewish writers in Greek-speaking Egypt offered a third answer. Philo of Alexandria explains that the princess named him from the water, since the Egyptian word for water is mōu (Life of Moses 1.17). Josephus goes further. The Egyptians, he says, call water mō and those saved out of it usēs, so the name means “saved from the water” (Antiquities 2.228). Egyptian really does have a word for water close to mō; the second half looks like a guess. Still, it shows that ancient readers already heard an Egyptian name under the Hebrew one.

A name nobody else had

No one else in the Bible is called Moses. Later generations made up for it: the medieval philosopher Moses Maimonides, the German thinker Moses Mendelssohn, and millions of boys called Moshe, Moishe, Moïse or Musa. In Arabic he is Mūsā, the prophet the Quran names more often than any other. A Jewish saying about Maimonides plays on the name itself: “From Moses to Moses, there was none like Moses.”