Let's study one of the languages of Moses 1500-1410 BCE.

Middle Egyptian is of importance to Bible readers, because it was the language that Moses learned in the Palace of Hatshepsut, the queen who found him in the Nile after his birth.

For anyone who wants to study Egyptian the first thing is to find a very good grammar.

A. Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar 3rd edition (Oxford: Griffith Institute, 1988) is mandatory.

The exercises and answers are from this grammar. For any scholar who wants to improve his Egyptian understanding, this book is a must.

Lesson I and II is given here with some key answers.

The copy was optained from Ralph Hendrix sometime in the 1990's at Andrews University. It is clear that Ralph in turn handwrote from a mastercopy of someone else, judging the ancient English forms he is using. His copy was not clear so this writer had to rewrite the words with a darker pen.

For the book of Job, this language is imperative. Ugaritic alone cannot give adequate answers to this book since Ugaritic post-date Moses by nearly 200 years. The main corpus of Ugaritic literary texts are dated by D. Pardee to be in 1280-1100 BCE. The upper date is already two centuries remote.

Egyptian is the key. Moses loaned words from Egyptian and transliterated them in Hebrew and that is how Egyptian loanwords slipped into the Hebrew language. Many difficutl phrases in Job makes more sense with the use of Middle Egyptian.
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