101 Myths of the Bible: how ancient scribes - Conscious Evolution TV

Myths of the Heroes 255
ents wouldn’t have know that name at that time. So, at the very least, the name Joshua,
as a Hebrew name, would have to have been either a change of name for Joshua after
the Exodus or a late invention of the biblical redactors. Consequently, a biblical editor
added the claim that Moses had changed Joshua’s name from the original Hoshea.
Since Joshua belonged to the tribe of Ephraim, a good case can be made that his
name had an Egyptian rather than Hebrew origin and that his character functioned
in a mythological role. Ephraim was the youngest son of Joseph and Asenath, his
Egyptian wife. His mother was the daughter of the chief priest of Heliopolis, a major
Egyptian cult center and the place where Moses, as a member of the royal household,
would have received his education. The full name“Joshua, Son of Nun” contains name
elements for two of the most important Heliopolitan Egyptian deities, Nun and Shu.
The god Nun represented the primeval flood at the beginning of Creation. He
stirred the floodwaters and caused the god Atum to come forth. Atum, in turn,
brought forth a son named Shu, who represented the space between heaven and
earth, and a daughter named Tefnut, who represented moisture. Shu and Tefnut were
the ancestors of all the other Egyptian deities, and some Egyptian texts say that Nun
brought them up out of the primeval abyss.
In Near Eastern tradition, grandchildren were considered the children of the
grandparents, and the Bible frequently identifies grandchildren as the sons of grandfathers.
In Egypt, then, Shu would also have been the son of Nun. This gives us a correspondence
with Joshua’s name “Jeho-Shua, son of Nun.” The only non-Egyptian
element in that name is “Jeho,” which we have seen could not have been part of his
original name.
Joshua’s name, therefore, signified a deity known as “Shu, son of Nun,” who was
worshipped by Israelites as a cult figure in the years following their departure from
Egypt. As Israel shed its Egyptian cultural trappings, and as Jeho came to play a more
intimate monotheistic role in Hebrew life, Joshua devolved from deity to human.
Eventually, the scribes added the Jeho portion of the name in order to hide Joshua’s
earlier cult image. Jeho-Shu, the Egyptian-Semitic name that he received, eventually
became confused with the similar Semitic word“Jehoshua,” meaning“God saves.”