Did God write the Ten Commandments (with his finger on the stone tablets) in Egyptian or Hebrew? Was Moses multilingual? He certainly spoke Egyptian but after four centuries in Egypt, what was the vernacular language used by the Hebrews? Was it Hebrew or something else? Was their native (before the exile to Egypt) tongue Hebrew or was it something else?
Well this post presupposes quite a lot.
Scholarly opinion is that most of Exodus is probably mythological in nature. The majority reject the historicity of a Moses figure, and archaeology has disproven the Biblical Exodus numerous times over.
But to be more on point. If Moses existed, his name is actually incorrectly rendered in the Bible. The reality is that if he existed his name would have been Egyptian and he would have been Egyptian. Thus his name would more likely be: Tutmoses, or Ramoses or something similar. The Bible’s explanation and etymology of his name is incorrect (either the result of the scribe not knowing Egyptian, or purposefully trying to skew Moses’ actual ancestry) as they give his name a Hebrew folk etymology, even though the name is an Egyptian one.
If Moses existed, his life was roughly around the 14th-13th centuries BCE, and so the Hebrews themselves didn’t even yet exist (the earliest mention of a nation of Israel comes around in the late 13th century on the Egyptian Merneptah Stele).
By this time the Israelites probably spoke a more primitive version of Hebrew, and if they wrote anything at all (which they probably didn’t during Moses’ era) it would have been using the Paleo-Hebrew script, which is much more related to the Phoenician script and other Canaanite writing systems (except Ugaritic, which used an alphabetic Cuneiform).
The hard part we have here now is the fluency of the Hebrews in other languages. The reality is that only 2-3% of Israelites could read or write. Most of them were entirely illiterate. So we know that they didn’t read or write Egyptian. As far as speaking it, the most likely scenario is that in the 14-13th centuries BCE the lingua franca cross culture was Akkadian. So it makes it even less likely they would have known Egyptian to any great extent (except for the scholars at the time, who later wrote Proverbs, which have many Egyptian wisdom sayings).
Before Egypt, the Israelites most likely didn’t exist, and were probably speaking an older Canaanite tongue (in all likelihood it was probably a Proto-Semitic language, possibly still Proto-Canaanite).
While in Egypt, however, it would have been likely that the Hebrew slaves would have adopted Egyptian. In fact, it would be unlikely that they would have even kept Hebrew if they were there. Given the story revolves around persecution of the Israelites, in all reality the Hebrew language would have died out amongst those people, except maybe as a liturgical language. The reality of this can be seen when Aramaic became the lingua franca during the Babylonian exile in the 6th century.
So the Moses and the Israelites probably would have all spoken Egyptian or Akkadian, and if God wrote any Ten Commandments on tablets (probably didn’t, given the contradictory versions of it in Hebrew Bible, and the Samaritan Bible, of which in the former there are a few different variants of the commandments) in Egyptian or Akkadian.
One can probably rule out Akkadian, however, given that most Egyptians wouldn’t have spoken it (only scribes and traders). So the Israelites and Moses would have spoken Egyptian, and Hebrew would have been a dead language.
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The reality, though, is that the Exile and Exodus to and from Egypt probably never happened (if it did, it was only maybe a few hundred people at most, not the 600,000 that the Bible claims), and most scholars don’t think Moses existed.
But I hope I managed to answer the best I could.
If you’re going with the sceptical view of Moses, I’m surprised you’re not going with the sceptical view of the Hebrew enslavement too. I.e., a growing number of scholars doubt the “Hebrews” or ancient “Israel” ever was in Egypt. The earliest group calling itself “Israel,” it is increasingly argued, was actually made up of displaced Canaanites of the late Bronze and early Iron ages, who fled the lowlands for the highlands due to the various disasters that occurred at the cusp of those two ages.
BenZoma said
If you’re going with the sceptical view of Moses, I’m surprised you’re not going with the sceptical view of the Hebrew enslavement too. I.e., a growing number of scholars doubt the “Hebrews” or ancient “Israel” ever was in Egypt. The earliest group calling itself “Israel,” it is increasingly argued, was actually made up of displaced Canaanites of the late Bronze and early Iron ages, who fled the lowlands for the highlands due to the various disasters that occurred at the cusp of those two ages.
I said above that the Enslavement and Exodus probably never happened at all. That was literally my last statement in my above post.
I tend to favor that the early Israelites were leftovers of the Canaanite city state system (given cities like Jerusalem and such have existed long before Israel comes about, but also that Israel as a nation is mentioned in the Merneptah Stele in the late 13th century).
My proposition is that Hebrew (being so related to Phoenician and Ugaritic) likely came about from the results of the Bronze Age collapse. In the Levant the fall of the Canaanite city state system, and the removal of Egypt from having grand authority over the area (until rebuilding their crumbling empire in later centuries) left a quaking power vacuum, which our Proto-Israelite groups eventually took over. During this time they seem to have had literal conflicts with some of their neighbors (at least validating the Biblical rivalries that existed), such as with the Philistines, surviving Canaanite groups, and various smaller pagan societies.
The power vacuum left a very easy and open environment for the Israelites to then flourish, that is until being conquered by the Akkadians, being vassals of Egypt, and conquered again by Babylon.
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When it comes to Israelite religion, I find it likely that worship of Yahweh began around Arabia (I am a proponent of the Kenite hypothesis myself), likely coming around from the Midianite groups (if the Egyptian inscriptions are anything to go by).
The Egyptian inscriptions, foreign name YHWH, and then also the apparent cultural memory being present in Exodus (Moses learning of God while with the Midianites, like the high priest Jethro), I think lends complete credence to the idea that worship of YHWH may have originated in those areas, and then was subsequently brought to Israel where it slowly superseded their Canaanite beliefs (though also absorbing a lot of it as well in religious syncretism).
If I believed the Biblical story:
Abraham through the time Jacob and his family settled in Egypt would have spoken Akkadian.
While the “Israelites” were in Egypt, the Arameans swept up from the Peninsula so far that they displaced the Amorites in Syria. (The idea has been proposed that Benjamin may be Amorite for “south bank”, if memory serves.)
Given the Egyptian idea of keeping separated from foreigners like Semites and Libyans and Nubians, I suppose that those in Egypt for 400 years might have kept their own language. Languages do change over time. So the “Hebrew” would have been the 1400 BC variant of the old Akkadian, still closely related to Aramaic. The language would become closer to Aramaic over time.
Though I think a linguist would probably make the case that Hebrew was just an outgrowth of the Aramean languages spoken from Syria down to the peninsula.
duaneep said
Did God write the Ten Commandments (with his finger on the stone tablets) in Egyptian or Hebrew? Was Moses multilingual? He certainly spoke Egyptian but after four centuries in Egypt, what was the vernacular language used by the Hebrews? Was it Hebrew or something else? Was their native (before the exile to Egypt) tongue Hebrew or was it something else?
Wow, what followed was quite a lengthy explanation of the non-historicity of Moses and the Exodus. And, I would by no means set out to prove otherwise. But, a lot can often be learned by examining how others have historically viewed this.
Religious Jews will profess:
1. The TANAKH (10 Commandments and all) were written in lashon kodesh, the “holy tongue”.
2. G-d used the lashon kodesh to create the universe…it’s His language.
3. The Hebrews in Egypt spoke lashon kodesh
I had a history professor who was fond of saying, “The only good history is intellectual history; the history of the mind, what people believed to be true.”
dgorden said
Wow, what followed was quite a lengthy explanation of the non-historicity of Moses and the Exodus. And, I would by no means set out to prove otherwise. But, a lot can often be learned by examining how others have historically viewed this.
Religious Jews will profess:
1. The TANAKH (10 Commandments and all) were written in lashon kodesh, the “holy tongue”.
2. G-d used the lashon kodesh to create the universe…it’s His language.
3. The Hebrews in Egypt spoke lashon kodesh
I had a history professor who was fond of saying, “The only good history is intellectual history; the history of the mind, what people believed to be true.”
So, historically, when did Judeans come to believe these things about lashon kodesh? 
So, historically, when did Judeans come to believe these things about lashon kodesh?
That’s an excellent question, and one for which I do not have an answer. I suspect that if I posed the question to a Rav, I would be told it’s always been the case.
My own speculation is that it occurred very early, possibly with contemporary with the writings of Solomon. I have nothing to base that on other than my own gut instinct.
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