The key to Amos, Amasyah, Amasah, Amasai and Amshasai's names?
At the end of ma'ariv on erev Simchat Torah, an idea popped into my mind: Was it possible that there was a connection between the name Amos and the Egyptian "mos" names? I vowed to bli neder check what names like Thutmose and Ahmose meant in Egyptian on motzei chag. Then I lucked out: A few pages into where I had left off in Werner Keller's The Bible As History, he wrote that the word Mos/Ms in Egyptian means son or teen. Then something hit me. I remembered Rabbi Dr. Izaak Rapaport zt"l's essay on the Hebrew word "Shem". In it he reached the conclusion that the word Shem originally meant "son" or "offspring". In other words, yes, as Rabbi Ahron Marcus put it multiple times in Barzilai, this is a word that the Egyptians borrowed from paleo-Hebrew and flipped it. Shem/SM became MS! That the Tribe of Yehudah in particular and Yisrael in general may have been influenced by Egyptian culture isn't such a big secret: Egyptian infl...