When we imagine Moses coming down from Mount Sinai, stone tablets in hand, we picture a powerful moment: law delivered from on High, carved in stone. Let’s suppose we take this iconic image at face value and believe it really happened as described in the Book of Exodus. At this point, I always ask myself two questions: I) who could actually read what was written? And ii) even more puzzling, what language and what script would it have been written in?

To explore this, we have to enter the sociolinguistic world of the Late Bronze Age, around the 13th to 15th centuries BCE. This was a time when writing was power, but literacy was rare and multiple scripts lived side by side. Some were used for sacred purposes, some administrative and some informal. It was also a time of imperial cultures, fractured identities and oral societies coexisting uneasily with the rise of written tradition.

Moses: A Child of Two Worlds

According to biblical narrative, Moses was born into Hebrew slavery but raised in the household of the Pharoah. If we take this literally, Moses would have been educated in the elite scribal tradition of Egypt. This means he may have had access to the best intellectual training available in the ancient world at the time.

But Egyptian literacy was not open to all. It was layered, complex and heavily class-based:

·       Hieroglyphics, which is what remains in popular imagination, was used for monumental, religious and ceremonial purposes. Only priests and master scribes could write it and less than 1% of the population at the time could read it. The gods were the audience.

·       Hieratic was cursive, used in administration by professional scribes.

·       Demotic was a later development, used for everyday record-keeping by traders, tax officials, scribes.

In this system, Moses probably would have learned hieratic. He may have recognised hieroglyphs, but functional literacy was rare, even among the educated. Their use was symbolic, aesthetic, to provoke awe and wonder.

So, while Moses is often imagined as literate, we must remember that literacy in this context did not mean “I can read and write” as we know today. It meant training, years of practice and social access. It was a vocation, not a universal skill (and probably, for survival purposes, not even an essential one).

However, according to certain strands of Jewish tradition, Moses was not entirely separated from his Hebrew roots. Despite being raised in the Pharoah’s household, it is suggested that Moses maintained a clandestine connection to the oral tradition of his birth people, his wetnurse being his own birth mother. They transmitted their stories, their laws, ethics and beliefs, through voice and lineage. This would reframe Moses not simply as a prince educated in Egyptian scribal systems, but as a figure who stood with one foot in each world: the hierarchic literacies of Egypt and the fragile, secret, living orality of Hebrew culture. One was high prestige, the other an underclass.

This is what is so devastating and immediate about Moses’ demand to Pharoah in the iconic phrase ‘Let my people go’. It would have been delivered in the Egyptian tongue, by a native Egyptian speaker, to an Egyptian god-deity. Affront does not even come close. It was sacred defiance on the part of Moses, and the Pharoah would have received it as an insult on a cosmic level.

Yet to begin understanding the magnitude of Moses' role as mediator between worlds, we must also explore the shifting landscape of language, literacy, and identity among the Hebrew people themselves. This is explored in the next article.

Thank you for reading,

Mark Gibson, originally written in New York, USA, April 2024

Post scriptum: Tradition preserves this phrase ‘Let my people go’ as uttered in Hebrew שַׁלַּח אֶת־עַמִּי (Shallaḥ et-‘ammi). It probably would not have been. It would have been more like: Shedj iret en kheperu-I in Ancient Egyptian– at least according to an LLM, written as follows: