Ra-Meses (Rameses)

רעמסס


As per my note to Exodus 12:37, which names him as the Pharaoh of the Mosheh story, though there is a very big question mark that needs to be attached to that statement!

He is also named as the Pharaoh at the time that Ya'akov came down to Egypt, when Yoseph was Vizier (Genesis 47:11). Given that the Mosaic slavery begins when "there arose a new Pharaoh over Mitsrayim, who did not know Yoseph" (Exodus 1:8), it cannot have been the same Ra-Meses, though there were two Pharaohs named Rameses. Ra-Meses I reigned briefly in the 1290s BCE; Ra-Meses II came to the throne in 1279 BCE and died in 1213, so both Yoseph and Mosheh could have known a Pharaoh named Rameses, just not the same one.

But "could" remains a very big question-mark, and most scholars today regard Rameses II's father, Seti, he whose sarcophagus can be seen at the John Soane Museum in London, and it really is worth the visit, as the Pharaoh of the Mosaic age.

Numbers 33:3 names Ra-Meses as an Egyptian city, which is highly unlikely; it may have been an alternate or casual name for Avaris, the capital city of the district of Goshen where the Beney Yisra-El lived, and dedicated in the name of the Pharaoh in the same way that, for example, the city of Tiberias in Judea was dedicated to the Emperor Tiberius, and the states of Carolina and Virginia to English monarchs, though none were ever in those places in their lives; it was supposedly built by Beney Yisra-El slaves, though history mitigates against this. Its location in Goshen is significant, because the native Egyptian kings ruled out of the Upper Kingdom in the south of Egypt, from Thebes and Memphis and On (Heliopolis); it was the arrival of the Hyksos that established a new political centre in Goshen, Lower Egypt, centralised upon Avaris - and in all probability the Hyksos and the Jacobite tribes were the same people.

Yoseph, as we know from the tales in Genesis, was based in On, and it is a very odd coincidence that his tribal brother Bin-Yamin - the two of them being the sons of Rachel - was named Bin-Yamin by his father, but Ben-Oni by his mother (Genesis 35:18), a name which the Tanach claims means "son of my affliction", but which would also be the phrase used to describe a person born in On.

Determining the "correct" pronunciation of this name is difficult, because the Yehudit is not itself a correct phoneticisation of the name. In Mitsri (Egyptian) it was almost certainly Ra-Mousa, so it is unclear how there came to be a double-samech (סס) in the Yehudit. Masoretic pointing places a sheva under the Ayin (רַעְמְסֵס), which is a logical equivalent of the modern hyphen, and separates the Ra from the Mousa - a sheva under the second letter of a syllable is always silent, and indicates a syllable break. It then places a second sheva under the Mem, and that being the first letter of the syllable, the sheva is pronounced, making the name Ra'meses, which by the rules of my system of transliteration becomes Ra-Meses, with the first "e" soft, and the second as though it were French with a grave accent, and not Greek like Maimonides.

The spelling, with those two samechs, appears to run counter to any contention of a connection between Mosheh (Mousa) and Ra-Mousa (Rameses, Paramessu); however the presence of the double samech has no basis either in Yehudit or Mitsri, so it is entirely possible (indeed likely) that this was a deliberate mis-spelling, in order to conceal a very real connection, including the probability that the historical source of the Mosheh legends was an entirely different Pharaoh, Ach-Mousa, or Ahmose, or Amosis, the king who overthrew the Hyksos and re-established the ancient Egyptian pantheon. Several Pharaohs included the word Mousa in their names, amongst them the two Rameses, but both of these come somewhat later in history than the dates generally ascribed to the Mosaic legends.


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