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How did the name "מֹשֶׁה" come to be transliterated with a [z] at the end?
The OED entry notes that "Moses" derives from Biblical Hebrew "Mōšeh" and that the earliest attestations with a strident coda on the second syllable are Hellenistic Greek "Μωσῆς", "Μωυσῆς" but fails to show how or when the former gave rise to the latter. Are there other examples of open syllables or final vowels having "ς" appended like this in Greek transliteration?
Moses is transliterated this way because of the way it is declined in Ancient Greek. While the root of the proper noun משה in Greek is indeed μωυση, which is roughly transliterated "moyse" or "moise", it can take the following forms based on its function in a sentence:
These declensions follow particular rules, such that any noun with a certain type of stem will be declined following a particular pattern; so it is not just Moses that has a sigma added to its root to form the nominative. Some other names in the Torah that are found declined in the Septuagint are Judah/יהודה/Iουδας/Iουδα/Iουδαν, Joshua/יהושע/Ἰησοῦς/Ἰησοῦ/Ἰησοῖ/Ἰησοῦν and Sarai/שרי/σαρας/σαρα/σαραν.
The nominative form, as opposed to the root or vocative, could be considered the "primary" way to refer to the person, since it's how you form sentences having them be the subject, or the main actor.
In Chumash Binas Miqra, by Rav Aryeh Leib Gordon (author of Siddur Otzar HaTefilos) he brings that he saw in old secular sources that in ancient Egyptian the word mo means "water" and the word yses means "was saved from", hence the Alexandrian translator always refers to Moshe as "Moyses".
Well, another example (lehavdil) is "oso ha'ish"'s Hebrew name, ישוע (a shortened form of יהושע found in a few places in Tanach), which ends up in Greek and English with a final S.
I can't recall the source for this now, but somewhere I read that this is because in classical Greek, names ending in a vowel were (or at least sounded) feminine or barbarian.
In the audio course on the History of Ancient Egypt, professor Bob Brier mentions the similarity between the name Moses and the names of Egyptian pharaohs like Ramses or Thutmose. In ancient Egyptian "mes" is the word for "son", and "mesu" means "to be born". So "Ramses" means "the son of Ra" or "Ra is born", and "Thutmose" means "the son of Thoth" or "Thoth is born". Bob Brier argues that since Moshe was born in Egypt and raised as a member of the Egyptian royal household, his name may well be Egyptian in origin.
