Notes on a difficult form by Moses

Koot van Wyk (DLitt et Phil; ThD)

Visiting Professor

Kyungpook National University

Sangju Campus

South Korea

Conjoint Lecturer of Avondale College

Australia

15 June 2011

Moses wrote Exodus as he wrote all his books, from lists, diaries, reports, sermons, reflections, poems, prayers, hymns, anecdotes . He then brought all this together in one book and sometimes he would cite one of these sources verbatim not to miss exactly what was said by God or as he recalled it, and sometimes God intended a ceremony or institution to go longer as the instruction day or hour of revelation, for example the passover celebration, and thus at the seams of the sources Moses used, he gives etiological information, namely that God intended them to celebrate it not only the night of the exodus but also permanently. For a Christian, permanently turned into Jesus as the Passover Lamb and the continuation goes further in Him. The book of Hebrews says that Christ and Moses knew each other, Hebrews 11:26, 27. So sometime between 1448-1411 BCE, Moses composed or constructed his book Exodus.

Moses as author of the book of Job as well, was well-versed in Babylonian, Hebrew from his mother until the age of 12 in 1518 BCE, and Middle Egyptian. When Moses describes the events in his books, he sometimes do so by using Egyptian grammatical peculiarities. In previous notes we have indicated how Egyptian loanwords were used with Hebrew phonics fused in the book of Job. Especially the difficult words and hapax legomena falls in this category.

In Exodus 12:6, Moses used a very strange expression for "in the evening", actually meaning "in the night". The context brings with it the thought that it is "during the night". But that is not what Moses wrote literally in the Hebrew. It puzzled many scholars. He wrote "between the evenings". Indeed strange. Logically, the question was posed by Eduard Mahler (1926) how the passover can be between the evenings, when during the same night they had to kill, barbeque, eat, and destroy the residue before the sun comes up the next day? Where do two or more evenings fit into this scenario? The text does not allow that time space.

Mahler presented his paper "Biblisch-chronologische Fragen" to the Oriental Studies Published in Commemoration of the Fortieth Anniversary (1883-1923) of Paul Haupt, director of the Oriental Seminary of the Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD., editors C. Adler and A. Ember (Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1926), 74-83. The problem of Exodus 12:6 is addressed 82-83.

The text is reading  בין הערבים and this is "between the evenings". complained that the translation cannot be "between both evenings" but "during the evenings".

Mahler wanted to solve the problem of the plural evenings the following way. By parallelism of Egyptian grammar and Hebrew grammar compared one can see that in Egyptian evening is sometimes presented as both evening and evenings, yet referring to the singular. The grammatical form is the dual. The same can be seen with the time for morning. It can be morning or mornings (dual form). The two vertical strokes at an angle is used at the end of the word to indicate the dual. Also darkness is singular or dual in Egyptian.

This is a good solution taken the fact that Moses grew up in the Egyptian palace during the time of Hatshepsut and Thutmosis III.

F. Böhl took a different turn on the expression. He suggested that the translation is actually: "between both settings" meaning the sunset at the start of the evening and the moon-setting at the end of the night just before the morning. Mahler rejects this translation or idea on the basis that it is impractical since there is not enough time to go through all the motions and he sees the expression as explained by Böhl as not precise.

The Egyptianism of Moses explanation is acceptable and the main point of Böhl is well taken, all events took place that night, in fact, the burying of the meat took place either on the way to the Sea or before they moved out shortly after Midnight. It will not take that long to bury the meat. The had time to ask and receive some silver and gold ware that they took with them, so starting to move at around 3h00 in the morning is not farfetched.

There is another explanation that I want to suggest also here. The Egyptian night is divided into stations with gates since the sun-god died at the evening and then goes through about 12 gates until he is reborn in the morning. One does not know whether each station in Egyptian ceremonies was called evening so that there were many evenings involved? Thus, a Hebrew expression will refer to the so-called "hours" as evenings. This is only an idea and needs more study to proof the fact of such an expression in Egyptian.