I think it very appropriate that this question was asked by Timothy. The ancient shin had a T-sound. SHoR = ox had been ToR as in TauRus. Compare SHeN = tooth with TaN = jackal and TaNiN = crocodile, both toothy animals some of whose teeth are visible even when their mouth is closed. This explains why the Rashi-script shin looks like a tet turned 90 degrees clockwise, and why the modern hand-written shin looks like a closed tet.
The ancient heh had a dalet+heh = DH- or TH-sound. This makes ToRaH cognate with TRuTH. Giving these sounds to the mem-shin-heh in MoSHeH produces MiToTH, a metathesis of TiMoTHy. If Moshe received his name from the Egyptian princess who found him, then it seems she was claiming that he was a gift to her MiToTH = from ThoTh. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoth For a synopsis of Moses' life, see http://www.jewfaq.org/moshe.htm MoSHe, like Joseph's son MenaSHe, grew up among the Egyptian aristocracy. When Joseph's brothers arrived in Egypt, Joseph pretended to not understand Hebrew and spoke with them through an interpreter, Hebrew haMa:LiTZ. According the oral tradition, the haMa:LiTZ = interpreter between Joseph and his brothers was Menashe, who had learned Egyptian from his mother and Hebrew from his father. This word occurs only once (hapex legomenon) in Tanakh, in this story at Gen 42:23. Egyptian was written with hieroglyphics/pictures. The Hebrew root for image (make a picture) is TZ-L-M. To translate from Egyptian to other languages is to un-picture, hence, the reversal to haMa:LiTZ. There is a lot of controversy about the year of the Exodus from Egypt. I've seen dates as early as 1600 BC to as late as 1250 BC. A Google search for < Exodus date > will give you an idea of the distribution of these dates. So, presumably, Moshe wrote Hebrew the way it was written shortly after the date of the Exodus. Ciao, Izzy
