Free Moses and Akhenaten by Ahmed Osman Page A

that Joseph’s weeping was so loud that it was audible in the royal palace, but I interpret it as meaning that the queen, his daughter, heard the news of his brothers’ arrival.
    In this second example the word used is again b-y-t Phar’a. However, in the Book of Exodus, where we have the story of Pharaoh’s daughter going down to bathe, finding the Hebrew child in the rushes and later adopting him, the y is absent and we have simply b-t Phar’a. My suspicion was that during the ninth century BC, the early stages of written Hebrew when the Old Testament was given permanent form, all three words had been written in this way, referring in each instance to the ‘house of Pharaoh’, the reigning queen, and the y in the two Genesis references had been added later, as written Hebrew developed, because the scribe did not understand the special Egyptian usage of the word ‘house’. This, while not easy to establish, proved to be the case.
    The Hebrew Masoretic text we have now goes back only to around the tenth century AD and could not throw any light on the matter. Nor could sections of the Old Testament found in the caves of Qumran, near the Dead Sea, some of which belong to the second century BC. Confirmation was eventually provided by the Moabite Stone. This black basalt inscribed stone was left by Mesha, King of Moab, at Dhiban (biblical Dibon, to the east of the Dead Sea) to commemorate his revolt against Israel and his subsequent rebuilding of many important towns (II Kings, 3:4–5). The stone was found by the Revd F. Klein, a German missionary working with the Church Missionary Society, on 19 August 1868 and is now in the Louvre in Paris. The inscription refers to the triumph of ‘Mesha, ben Chemosh, King of Moab’, whose father reigned over Moab for thirty years. He tells how he (Mesha) threw off the yoke of Israel and honoured his god, Chemosh. 2
    According to the American archaeologist James B. Pritchard, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania: ‘The date of the Mesha Stone is fixed roughly by the reference to Mesha, King of Moab, in II Kings, 3:4, after 849 BC. However, since the contents of the stela point to a date toward the end of the king’s reign, it seems probable that it should be placed between 840 and 820, perhaps about 830 BC in round numbers.’ 3 The text reads: ‘I [am] Mesha, son of Chemosh … King of Moab … I said to all the people: “Let each of you make a cistern for himself in his house.”’
    The inscription, written in the Semitic language used for writing at the time by the Jews of Israel, confirms that the word for ‘house’ was then written simply b-t, without the insertion of ‘y’ and was the same as the word for daughter. This is also true of the way it was written in the Phoenician language. 4
    When ‘house’ and ‘daughter’ were written identically there was no cause to differentiate between them. The situation changed when development of the Hebrew language made it possible to alter the spelling slightly to give two different words. The scribes then found themselves in a dilemma, based on their ignorance of the fact the ‘house’ had the Egyptian meaning ‘wife’. It now becomes clear what happened. If the word simply meant ‘house’ or ‘household’, it made sense that Joseph approached the house of Pharaoh on the subject of his father’s funeral and that his weeping could be heard in the king’s house, but it made no sense at all to suggest that the whole of the king’s household had come ‘down to wash herself at the river’ (Exodus, 2:5) or had become the mother to the child. The scribe therefore decided in the Exodus reference to retain the alternative meaning of ‘daughter’ whereas it, too, should have been changed to ‘house’, signifying the wife of Pharaoh, his queen.
    There is a similar case of