A common misconception of the
Moses character is that the Exodus narrative portrays him as having had a
speech impediment. At the bush that did not burn up, Moses entered into a
conversation with YHWH that ended with him being sent to Egypt to lead God’s
people out of bondage. Moses pushed back on this assignment with obvious reluctance
in one final argument, which is recorded in Exod 4:10-13. He began this last
phase of reticence by saying, “O my Lord, I am not eloquent, neither before nor
since You have spoken to Your servant; but I am slow of speech and slow of
tongue” (NKJV).
However, Ezek 3:5-6 uses the same
phrase “slow of tongue” (כִבֽדֵי לָשׁוֹן) that Moses does to refer to foreign languages
that are unintelligible (cf. Isa 33:19). “Heavy” (כִבֽדֵי) usually refers to a
medical condition, but here the use is extended to refer to linguistic
difficulties. Carol Myers makes the connection to an Egyptian ritual of “opening
the mouth,” and surmises that there was no medical condition in mind in Exod 4.
In addition, this “slowness” was not associated with a suffering problem when this
story was recounted by Stephen, one of the Christian church’s first deacons, in
Acts 7:22. Stephen is recorded as saying that Moses, during is life growing up
as an Egyptian prince, “was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was
mighty in words and deeds” (NKJV). Being “mighty in words” obviously cannot
reflect a speech impediment. Thus, those who held to the authenticity of the
story by that late date seemed to understand Moses’s slowness of speech to be
something different than a problem with speaking.
Given the above, might the reason
Moses claimed to be “slow of speech and slow of tongue” have been because of the
growing complexities in the Egyptian language and in how the language was
pronounced; a language that, according to the story, he would have been
intimately familiar with some forty years earlier? We see the change in colloquial
speech between the first and second phrase of Egyptian language at or near the
beginning of the eighteenth dynasty in Egypt’s New Kingdom.
When God responds to Moses’s
complaint, he states that he will “teach/instruct” (ירה) him what to say, not
to correct a speech impediment (4:12). In addition, in the account just prior
to the Exodus event, when Moses later was joined by his brother Aaron (Exod
4:27) and they both returned to Egypt, it was Aaron who did the talking early
on (Exod 4:30). It is not until the end of the second plague that the text states
Moses spoke to Pharaoh (Exod 8:9). It seems conceivable that the rust could
have shaken off by that point that he would have been able to speak well
once more.
This understanding may provide
another explanation for the potential Hebrew language stages if, indeed, Exod
15 turns out to actually be an older language stage than Exod 14. In the end,
this does not prove that the Hebrew poetry of Exod 15 (or any other poem in the
Pentateuch) is or is not od a different language stage of Hebrew than the prose
around it. However, it does provide for another possibility for the indications
of different language stages in the text, which could also be compatible with
the content of the narrative of the story in Exodus (and Acts in the New
Testament). (L. S. Baker Jr. and A. Rahel Wells, “Egyptian Language Practice: A
Model for Hebrew Poetic Use?,” in Exploring the Composition of the
Pentateuch, ed. L. S. Baker Jr., Kenneth Bergland, Felipe A. Masotti, and
A. Rahel Wells [Bulletin for Biblical Research Supplement 27; University Park,
Pa.: Eisenbrauns, 2020], 63-64)