What's in a name?

I am doing research for the new Sunday School unit we are about to embark on. Today I've been researching the author of the Torah - Moses. Now, in English, names mean very little to us. They are just titles, or labels we put on people so that we can identify them verbally. We could easily subsitute numbers for our names, and have the same purpose achieved. (Hi! I'm 528, who might you be? 674? Its great to meet you!) This is not the case in Hebraic literature. In the Tenach (Old Testament), especally the Torah and Historical books, the meaning of names is crucial from a literary perspective. What a character's name means is a huge descriptor for that character. The meaning of someone's name can tell an observing audience not only who they are, but what they are like, what they may look like, rank, etc. The meaning of the name can lend the story it needed irony and word play to draw us in and help us understand the setting and situation in which the characters find themselves.

Now, back to Moses. In Hebrew his names means "draw out." We find this in Exodus 2:10, "She named him draw-out [Moses], 'Because,' she said, 'I drew him out of the water.' (ESV)” In Egyptian, his name can come from either mw - 'water' or msw - 'son, offspring.' Now, the point I want to make is this: We miss so much of the text because we are unfamiliar with Hebrew. BUT I think we likely miss even more because we are unfamiliar with Egyptian. I wonder how many of the names in the Torah, when transliterated back into Egyptian lend further flavor and color to the story! God used Moses, who was educated in all the knowledge of the Egyptians, to write the Torah - I would not be surprised if there are more Egyptian puns in the text than we know! The original audience would have spoken Egyptian and Hebrew - and therefore would have caught Moses's word play. Just a thought for the day!