What are the origins of the name Moses and the Moses myth?

by dave_g17

A poster in /r/history asked a similar question, wondering if Moses was a Hebrew name or Egyptian name and someone replied that it was likely an Egyptian one at first with -moses on a name meaning "Son of", like with the Pharaohs Thutmose and Ramosis being the "Sons of" Thut and Ra, respectively. This poster then goes on to claim the the Biblical Moses would have been an Egyptian name

but with of course the advent of the one god religion the first part of the name (a 'false' Egyptian god) had to be dropped leaving just Moses.

Is there any truth to this?

Flubb

While it's certainly plausible, a number of problems arise, and it depends on how critical you wish to be of the texts, to wit:

  1. There is nothing to support the existence of Moses outside the biblical texts
  2. There is nothing to support many of the events that Moses was supposed to have engaged with, outside of the biblical texts.

Now, simply because we don't have external verification of someone, doesn't necessarily mean that they didn't exist, or that you should be suspicious of a text that does claim they exist, we don't have external verification for a lot of people. The problems come because there is an alternative theory, that says that the texts you read are not 'historical' but maybe historicised fiction (it's a bit more complicated than that but this will do). They might be simply stories made up to justify or explain how something comes about. People who follow this theory will point to the contradictions or anachronisms in the texts to show this, and because of this decide that it's more likely that they're a form of literature, rather than a historical account of what actually happened (again, simplified for quickness). So when you read about Moses you have two options:

  1. He might be a historical figure somewhere
  2. He might be a mythical figure

The explanation about the name being part-god is pretty normal (I'm not sure why s/he calls it her own, I just read it in a book a few days ago - Moshe Greenberg's commentary on Exodus published in 1969), so this is fairly normal scholarship. The dropping of the god-part of the name is speculation - a plausible possibility, but impossible to verify.