mitsrayim

Egypt is the foreign nation the Hebrew Bible names most often, and this one word does work that English spreads across several. It can point to the territory, to the population, or to the government and its army, and only the sentence tells you which. So a translator who writes "Egypt" in one verse and "the Egyptians" in the next is making a choice the Hebrew never forces.

The shades the word carries are these:

• the land itself, where people go down when the harvest fails and come up again afterward
• the Egyptians as a body, who speak, fear, and flee as one
• the kingdom and its king (פַּרְעֹה), whose horses and grain drew Judah into alliances
• a byword for slavery, in the sentence Israel keeps repeating about being brought out
• the border, in the fixed names of the stream and the sea at the country's edge

Above all, Egypt is where Israel was a slave and where God's rescue happened. The words "out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slaves" recur so often that the name itself came to stand for the bondage behind Israel's freedom, and laws about treating outsiders kindly are grounded in the memory of having been outsiders there. That is also why the prophets can turn the name into a threat: going back to Egypt, or leaning on Egypt for help, undoes the very rescue the name commemorates. Hosea and Isaiah put Egypt and Assyria (אַשּׁוּר) side by side as the two powers Israel ran to instead of God, and Isaiah ends by promising a road between them on which both worship the LORD.

The word also fixes the map's southwestern corner. Israel's boundary is described as running to the Brook of Egypt, the promised land is measured from the River of Egypt, and a prophet speaks of the Sea of Egypt drying up. In those phrases the name marks an edge rather than a destination.

In the family lists that follow the flood, this same word appears as one of Ham's sons, standing between Cush (כּוּשׁ) and Put and Canaan. English Bibles keep it here as the name "Mizraim" so the reader can see that it sits in a family line, but in Hebrew it is simply the word for Egypt.

These lists work by naming a people through an ancestor. The "sons" credited to Mizraim in the next verses are peoples, not individual men, and the same is true up and down the list. So the genealogy is really a map drawn as a family tree, and Egypt takes its place in it among the southern nations, beside its upriver neighbor Cush.

That is why one Hebrew word can be both a country and a person's name without any strain: the name of the ancestor and the name of the land he stands for are the same word.