Mitsrayim

מצרים 

Genesis 10:6 names Mitsrayim as one of the three sons of Cham (חם). Chem, or Kemet, was one of the Egyptians' own names for their land, though today's Egyptians refer to it as Misr, which of course is Mitsrayim in the Arabic - in full, Junhuriyah Misr al-Arabiyah, the Arab Republic of Egypt. Kemet means "black" and is written hieroglyphically as shown in the illustration.

The name "Egypt" is the result of the Greek's inability to pronounce the ancient Egyptian language properly; they heard Hwt-ka-Ptah, which was the name of the land in their time, and meant "The Land of the Temple of Ptah", Ptah being the principal god of the city of Memphis, Memphis being the capital, and, in that epoch of city-states, therefore the name by which the land was known as well. So he became Aegyptos in the Greek, and by curious irony, because the Egyptians couldn't pronounce Greek any better than the Greeks could pronounce Egyptian, the word Aegyptos became transformed into Copt, which is why some native Egyptians to this day are known by that name.

The references to Mitsrayim in the Tanach are far too many to list. It is important to know that, through most of its history, the country was divided between Lower Egypt, which was the Mediterranean north and known as Matsor or Misr or Mitsrayim, and Upper Egypt in the south, known as Patros, though it was sometimes called Libya (not the same Libya as the one we know today); the two kingdoms together were generally known by the dual name Mitsrayim, though in some places the duality seems to be the Upper and Lower Niles rather than the land surrounding the river.

Genesis 15:18 specifically names the Nile as Nahar Mitsrayim (נהר מצרים).

The singular, in Yehudit anyway, is Matsor (מצור), but it is never used; it means "a rock" and is best known from Tyre (Tsur - צור in Yehudit), the Greek name of what is called in Aramaic Tura, a Phoenician city on the Lebanese coast famed for its merchant traders.

Matsor (מצור) is used for the means of besieging a city (Deuteronomy 20:20, 2 Chronicles 32:10) - possibly mounds of earth and stone, possibly barricades - from which it evolved into the "ramparts" of the city wall (Habakkuk 2:1, 2 Chronicles 8:5), and finally became the Yehudit word for "a citadel" or "a fortified city" (Psalm 60:11).

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