Rabbi Who "Proved" God Wrote the Bible Says He Found Moses's Autograph ... Maybe

​A new paper claims that some 3,000-year-old inscriptions found in Sinai not only make reference to the Biblical character of Moses but may have been written by him. The claim comes from a draft thesis by retired rabbi Michael S. Bar-Ron, now studying biblical archaeology at Ariel University in Israel. Bar-Ron, who is no stranger to self-promotion, published his draft thesis on Academia.edu before it was submitted to his university, and he took to the Patterns of Evidence podcast to publicize his claims. The Daily Mail ​reported on the claim this week.

​The Serabit el-Khadim inscriptions, which have been known since Flinders Petrie discovered them in an ancient Egyptian turquoise mine in 1904, are written in Proto-Sinaitic, an early alphabet whose characters are notoriously hard to decipher. Bar-Ron says that the language of the inscriptions is Northwest Semitic, which is closely related to Biblical Hebrew, and the inscriptions make reference to the early Semitic god El as well as to an Egyptian goddess, whose name was defaced.
 
The Oxford Handbook of Egyptology writes that Proto-Sinaitic derived from the interaction of Egyptian military scribes with Semitic-speaking workers, who adapted hieratic characters to their Semitic language sometime before 1850 BCE, creating the predecessor of modern alphabets.
 
Using casts and high-resolution imagery, Bar-Ron claims to have found previously unseen characters which say “This is from Moses.”
 
Most of the discussion of the inscriptions has come from Biblical apologists, making it difficult to evaluate the accuracy of the claims. Dr. Thomas Schneider, an Egyptologist, has come out against Bar-Ron’s interpretation, telling the Daily Mail that it “completely unproven and misleading” and adding that the “arbitrary” identification of Proto-Sinaitic letters “can distort ancient history.”
 
I have absolutely no expertise in anything related to Proto-Sinaitic to have an opinion on the claim. But while it would be remarkable to find the name Moses inscribed, even if true, it wouldn’t necessarily imply that this is the same character as the Biblical figure, or that if it were, that this Moses was a real person and not an early Semitic folk hero.
 
It has long been assumed that the Biblical name “Moses” derives from an Egyptian term for “son of,” as in the well-known Egyptian names Thutmose or Ramesses, with the theophoric name (such as Thoth or Ra) dropped. (Some Hebrew scholars propose a Hebrew-language derivation instead from the word for water, but this is not as widely accepted.) It would therefore not be entirely surprising if, even at an early date, Semitic peoples living and working in Egypt had begun adapting Egyptian names into their own culture. Since we know that the Egyptians also used the name “Moses” (“Ms”), at least in the New Kingdom, and might therefore have had earlier, less formal use, it seems difficult to assign this “Moses” to the Bible hero.
 
Bar-Ron is an interesting figure. As a rabbi, he published a number of books taking a very literal, supernatural view of Judaism. His 2015 book Song of the Creator attempted to prove that the Pentateuch, which has long been understood to be an edited collection of texts by a number of hands, has in fact “but one Author, a Super-Intelligence far beyond that represented in any literary work, ancient or modern.” The book, which features a pyramid (!) on the cover, claims that “the Torah’s Author is the master of history, and the very Author of life itself.” According to Bar-Ron, the divine structure of the Torah, which rises from the text like the DNA double-helix, forms a “great pyramid,” which represents the divine, though he refrains from directly identifying this with the Great Pyramid of Giza—the implication notwithstanding.
 
This, of course, doesn’t negate Bar-Ron’s academic work on the inscriptions, but even Bar-Ron concedes in his draft thesis that his past work identifying God’s actual handiwork on the Earth is a potential source of bias in his interpretation of the material.