A question I received: In one of your books, you wrote that Moses (Moshe in Hebrew) comes from the word Moshech – to pull out. However, the word Moshe ends with the letter Hey, and the word Moshech ends with the letter Kaf. So from the linguistic point of view, the roots don’t quite match.
My Answer: His name was given to him by Batia, Pharaoh’s daughter, who found him in the Nile river and pulled him out of it. This is why she named him Moshe. It says so in the Bible. However, there are also other, additional meanings to the names. In essence, they refer to a person’s actions and predestination.
Baal HaSulam writes, “The mountain of olives (Har HaZeitim) may have been named by regular people, rather than Kabbalists, who saw that this mountain is good for cultivating a plantation of olive trees. But this name also corresponds to the inner, spiritual meaning of the place, and the reason for this is that all of nature is revealed in such a way that people speak and act without understanding what governs them.”
Related Material:
Kabbalah Today Article: What’s In a Name? [1]