Sunday, January 26, 2014

CORRECTION: The Number of Mentions of Moses in תנ''ך is 768; In Torah, 647

This is embarrassing! I erred in my counting of משה in Torah (here). 

I now count 649 - 2 = 647 times.

Even though this word, as such, appear 649 times in Torah 
and 770 times in Tanach, there happen to be two false positives:
One appears in Devarim 15:2, 
and the other in Shmot 12:4.
"משה" in both these verses does not refer to the name Moshe!


The total number of times Moshe is mentioned in Tanach is 768.
(In Nach itself it appears, therefore, 121 times.)

NOTE:  The Concordance of אברהם אבן שושן shows 770 iterations of משה, but I stand by my count nevertheless; More likely the Concordance made the mistake. (Not because of my genius in counting but because the Concordance authors probably arrived at their results in a more convoluted manner, no doubt, because back then search technology wasn't nearly as sophisticated as it is today.)

According to toraware.org, you can find these results, by searching for משה where it "Ends with these letters", and then subtracting the count wherein the word ends in חמשה. That's the way I got the counts for 649 and 770, in Torah and Tanch, respectively. As for the 2 false positives, that knowledge comes from my own experience in learning Torah.


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