S3E2 Ancient Names – Naming practices at birth

Episode 2 of our podcast series on Ancient Names.

In this episode, Tony, George, and Caleb discuss naming practices from the Bible and the ancient world and compare them with practices today.

Please note: at 17:34 Tony Watkins says 'one of Aaron's children is Eliezer'. This is incorrect, Aaron has a son called Eleazar, and Moses has a son named Eliezer (see Exodus 18:1-4). 

Edited by Tyndale House 

Music – Acoustic Happy Background used with a standard license from Adobe Stock.

Transcript

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Welcome to episode 2 of this series of the Tyndale House podcast.

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So its great to have you with us and

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I’m joined again by Caleb and George, Caleb Howard and George Heath-Whyte

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who are members of our Old Testament team

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Caleb heads up the team

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and George is a research associate? G: Yep.

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T: And we're talking in this episode

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about the giving of names at birth in the Bible.

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We often think in our culture that our names are

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little more than labels.

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And yet when parents give their children names, they spend quite a bit of time

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thinking about it.

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They may decide on the basis of sound or whatever,

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but the meaning and the connotations, the associations of the names,

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are still important.

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We don't get many,

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if any, children called Adolf since the end of the Second World War.

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because the associations of a name like that, are pretty unwelcome in

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today's world.

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So, Caleb, how did you go about choosing the names of your children?

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I liked how they sounded.

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Yeah, that was the same for us as well.

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Yeah. Yeah.

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so my oldest daughter is named Alexis.

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We just liked how that sounded.

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We knew someone whose sister was named Alexis.

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my middle child is Mariah.

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People often think she's named after Mariah Carey, the singer.

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She is not.

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And, my youngest child is called Adele.

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People often think that she's named after the singer Adele.

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Even she kind of thinks that.

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But, she isn't.

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We chose that name slightly before Adele became very famous.

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But, yeah, we just liked the sound of them.

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 Yeah, it was the same for us.

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So, we have Charlie, Oliver,

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and, Philip, who we tend to call Pip.

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and Charlie and Oliver, I suddenly realised that we have both sides

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of the English Civil War covered.

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And then, when we had the youngest, Pip,

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we tend to call him Pip, because

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the landlord of a pub, Jane and I used to like visiting was known as Pip

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and we thought it was quite fun.

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I then realised we've got a bit of a Charles

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Dickens connection because we’ve got, you know, Oliver Twist,

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Pip from Great Expectations, and Dickens himself. All completely incidental.

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We didn't think about any of this,

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but of course, some people do put a lot of thought

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into the names of their children and what they mean.

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We had a vistor here at Tyndale House recently, Adeola,

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and we were talking to Adeola about

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the naming of children in her culture.

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She's from Yoruba background in Nigeria.

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It was quite fascinating, wasn't it?

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I can't remember how many names she said she had.

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I think it might have been five.

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So if I recall correctly, and from other things I've picked up,

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so there's, there's a name that's brought from heaven, which for Christian

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parents often reflects something to do with

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with their Christian convictions.

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but traditionally it was a name that was divined

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by the elders of the tribe.

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And then there's a name that relates to the family,

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and there's a name for praising the child,

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and there's a name for,

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that's more descriptive.

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And that happens in many cultures as well.

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I had a friend from Ghana called Kwadwo because he was born on Monday.

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If you're born on Monday, you get called Kwadwo.

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So, yeah, it was fascinating.

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It was a very different kind of way of thinking about names from what I'm used to.

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and then the idea of

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of a naming ceremony at seven days, I think it is,

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and other people don't even know what the name is to be.

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And then parents, grandparents, elders all contributing names at that point.

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It's quite fascinating.

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and it feels to us, westerners, modern westerners, that feels quite strange.

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But I imagine that's much closer to what was going on in the ancient world.

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How much do we know about how names were given

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in the ancient world and in the Bible in particular?

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I mean, we we probably all know the famous naming scenes

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you get, particularly in Genesis, but we get them in 1 Samuel,

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and the names of Hosea’s, well, the unfortunate names of Hosea's children.

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So we have a few scenes and then we get to the New Testament,

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obviously Jesus and John the Baptist.

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We have those few scenes, and what they all seem to have in common

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is this idea of a name being given sort of

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at or after the birth of the child,

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and often some sort of association of the name with the event that takes place.

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We don't have that many references to

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naming events that come from outside the Bible.

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We do have a few, I think, though, Caleb?

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Hmm. We have a few. Yes. 

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There are very few, I wish we had more. Right?

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And we have these stories in the Bible and the question that might arise

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in our minds is, do they fit with the kind of Near Eastern context?

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Do these sorts of things actually occur in extra-biblical texts?

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And the answer, I think, is similar to a lot of kind of

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everyday realities that ancient people sort of experienced, lived out.

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They didn't feel the need to write them down necessarily.

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They were just things they did.

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They knew what they were doing.

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Why would you write them down for posterity,

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so that we can read them and find out about them?

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And so these kinds of things

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are inferred by us from texts.

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Often, if you have enough textual sources, if you have thousands

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and thousands of documents from the ancient world,

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occasionally someone will sort of slip up

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and talk about a thing that everyone knows.

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and this does, in fact happen, in a way,

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in a letter from the first half of the second millennium BC.

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So from the 18th century BC.

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there's a king called Zimri-lim at a city called Mari, and his daughter

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writes him a letter, knowing that a child is to be born in the palace.

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And his daughter has had a dream about this daughter who’s to be born

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and what her name should be.

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And I will quote the letter because it's very interesting.

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She writes to her father, ‘and concerning the daughter of Tepa’um,’

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who is the mother of the child,

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‘In my dream, a man stood and said,

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“the girl, the daughter of Tepa’um, should be called Tagid-nawu.”

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He said this to me.

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Now, my Lord, [that is Zimri-lim the king], my lord, should have a diviner confirm this.

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And if the dream was indeed seen, my Lord should name the daughter Tagid-nawu.

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Thus she must be named.’

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So Tagid-nawu means ‘the steppe has been good’

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The steppe that is the countryside where you take your sheep.

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and the assumption is that these people were connected,

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We know that these people were quite connected to the pasturage.

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These people were often shepherds.

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And so claims about things around

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shepherding sheep and so on are not uncommon in names.

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And so it seems likely that this girl's name was connected

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to some reality that occurred perhaps in Zimri-lim's kingdom, or whatever.

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But here we have some insight

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into a child being born, and we can learn a number of things from this.

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One is that the name was being chosen, presumably before the child

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was to be born,

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or at least around the time of the child's

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birth, which is a fairly common theme.

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We also have another document

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where an infant is

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is talked about in a legal text.

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And I'll quote from that.

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It's from the same general period from Mesopotamia.

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the text reads, ‘In the month Abum, the eighth day, of the year,

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Samsu-ditana five,

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[That's a particular year, a particular month,

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a particular day in the Babylonian calendar.]

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Amat-esheshi,

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in a new house of the street Nanaya,

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Amat-Baba,

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her mother bore her.’

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So the idea is that Amat-esheshi is the child, the daughter and 

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Amat-Baba is her mother.

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It's telling us that she's been born on this day,

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the month of Abum, the eighth day, of the year Samsu-ditana five.

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And that matters as we read through the rest of the text.

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‘She, [that is, Amat-esheshi, the daughter—

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sorry—(Amat-Baba,) the mother,] is a female slave to Ruttiya,

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nun of Zababa, her mistress. With respect to Nanaya,

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she will meet her responsibility.

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The heart to Ruttiya, her lady,

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she will not provoke to anger.’

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Now, the likelihood is that Ruttiya,

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was a primary wife in a family, and she had been devoted to the deity

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Zababa. That's what's meant by her.

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‘she's a nun of Zababa’, and therefore presumably could not bear children.

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This woman, Amat-Baba, is probably a secondary wife,

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and she's brought forth Amat-esheshi to this man,

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and this has to be sort of worked out legally:

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how is this child supposed to be related to the family?

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And the text

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ends with a date, dating the function

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of the legal transaction going on here as month Abum, eighth day,

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year Samsu-ditana five, the same date as it says the child was born.

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And this shows us that the child was named

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on the day she was born, at least, if not beforehand.

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So there’s yet another, kind of, point of evidence,

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that children were being named on the day that they were born.

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In one sense, this seems sort of obvious to us, I suppose,

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as a kind of practical necessity of needing a name for a child.

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but it's worth

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just recognising how difficult it is to come by information like this.

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This is the sort of thing that people would have just known and done,

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and in this case it rises to the surface of our evidence and we can see it.

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Yeah.

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It's worth saying as well that we shouldn't, when we

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have these parallels, we have these few sources, we shouldn't necessarily infer

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well, this is definitely how it was being done

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in Israel or at every period of Israel's history as well.

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I mean, in the New Testament, John, people don't know his name

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until the eighth day when he's going to be given his name.

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So there is difference.

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There's different things going on in different times and places.

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And even there we don't know whether that was a normal thing,

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whether that was the standard expectation

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or whether there was something unusual about nobody knowing.

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Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

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I mean that would, that would certainly fit with, with what the Yoruba

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do by the sound of it, from what I'm understanding. That would be similar.

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But so it may well be, but we just...

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when there's little evidence, we have to be careful, don’t we,

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that we don’t infer too much from it. Yeah.

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So there's nothing that parallels that, those things that you've just read,

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there's nothing that parallels that in the Bible is there?

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Well, I mean, in terms of kids being named around the birth event,

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there is. I mean,

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it seems that this is normally the case that kids were named

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somehow in relation to either the

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the conception, gestation or birth of the child.

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This is suggested by evidence that I just read;

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We also have stories in the Bible

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which portray kids being named around that time and names being chosen—

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the case of John and Jesus.

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The names have been chosen before the name was given,

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And the actual conferring of the name

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was around a key event in the child's life, namely the circumcision

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on the eighth day.

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And that, presumably, is a kind of context-specific,

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culture-specific phenomenon.

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Not everyone was necessarily circumcised outside of Israel and so on.

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Right.

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But another evidence that

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names were often related to conception, gestation, birth of the child

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and around the birth event is there in the meanings of the names.

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So a very common

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semantic category of name

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occurs when a name is a sentence:

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a divine name—a god or a goddess— is the subject of a verb,

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and the verb is to do with creating or birthing or providing and so on.

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So ‘deity created’ or ‘deity provided,’ ‘deity nourished,’ and so on.

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T: Can you give us some examples of that?

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C: And it seems... T: No, finish what you were saying first.

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C: Well, it seems likely that, you know, this kind of, notion is, is kind of,

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yeah, related to the birth event.

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So, I don't know, a name

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like Ibni-ili, for example— ‘my God built’, ‘my God

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created’— is a fairly common kind of type of name

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in Akkadian, which is the language of Mesopotamia.

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But it's also kind of there all over the place in the Near East,

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this use of the verb ‘make for’ a verb for ‘make’ or ‘create’

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along with a name for a deity.

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There are sort of giving names:

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‘Marduk has given a brother’ or something like that.

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Okay.

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And have we got biblical examples of those?

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I mean, yes, I mean like,

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yeah, most names that we find are sort of short sentences.

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‘Yahweh has done this’

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or ‘Yahweh has given’ or that sort of thing.

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Yeah.

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So, you were saying in episode one that there's a,

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there's a shift in the pattern of names over time, so that,

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so that the divine name is brought in

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increasingly by the time we get to the

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to the later kings, it becomes a very standard thing, very common thing,

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and it's unusual early on.

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But is that same pattern of naming, but maybe without the divine name,

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is that same pattern seen earlier on, or is it a different pattern of

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of naming in the early part of the Old Testament?

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Yeah.

00:14:49:33 - 00:14:52:33
So a number of patterns are there throughout the entire

00:14:53:19 - 00:14:56:36
the entire Bible and throughout the entirety of extra-biblical—

00:14:57:26 - 00:15:00:17
within the whole scope of extra-biblical texts through time.

00:15:02:12 - 00:15:03:26
so a pattern of

00:15:03:26 - 00:15:07:47
name with a verb with a divine name is very common throughout

00:15:08:16 - 00:15:12:08
throughout the biblical history and also inside the Bible and outside the Bible.

00:15:13:41 - 00:15:16:23
What, there are ones that, that

00:15:16:23 - 00:15:19:42
come in and go out of use.

00:15:20:18 - 00:15:23:18
And they can correspond to the development of language,

00:15:23:36 - 00:15:27:11
but they can also correspond to kind of other features as well.

00:15:29:10 - 00:15:32:10
So I’m thinking of names that

00:15:33:11 - 00:15:36:08
that contain particular forms of verbs that mean

00:15:36:08 - 00:15:39:20
one thing in earlier periods, but a different thing in later periods.

00:15:39:37 - 00:15:45:08
And so in names, in an earlier period will have the earlier-period verb form,

00:15:45:20 - 00:15:48:02
and in a later period, will have a later-period verb form.

00:15:48:02 - 00:15:48:16
Okay.

00:15:48:16 - 00:15:51:16
That's a development in kind of how this,

00:15:51:47 - 00:15:54:32
how names reflect language through time.

00:15:54:32 - 00:15:58:13
T: So the same meaning, but just, just...yeah,

00:15:58:16 - 00:16:00:01
it shows the development of the language.

00:16:00:01 - 00:16:02:34
C: Yeah, yeah. T: Okay. Right. I was reading about,

00:16:03:34 - 00:16:06:40
Moses this morning and,

00:16:07:20 - 00:16:10:44
Moses and Aaron and their genealogy.

00:16:12:08 - 00:16:14:19
and one of

00:16:14:19 - 00:16:17:06
Aaron’s children is Eliezer.

00:16:17:06 - 00:16:19:12
‘God helps’

00:16:19:12 - 00:16:22:12
or ‘God is my helper’

00:16:23:02 - 00:16:26:04
and so that's an example of the kind of thing that you're,

00:16:26:06 - 00:16:30:16
you're talking about—the divine or a god and or—

00:16:30:35 - 00:16:33:01
yeah, a god and a verb?

00:16:33:01 - 00:16:33:41
C: Yeah, yeah.

00:16:33:41 - 00:16:35:33
I mean, that's not a verb.

00:16:35:33 - 00:16:36:08
it's a noun

00:16:36:08 - 00:16:38:04
T: Ah no, that's a noun. Yeah, yeah.

00:16:38:04 - 00:16:40:11
C: So Eliezer right

00:16:40:11 - 00:16:40:38
T: Thank you for correcting my grammar

00:16:40:38 - 00:16:41:30
C: No, that's all right.

00:16:41:30 - 00:16:44:30
It's my god is a help or something like that, a helper.

00:16:45:28 - 00:16:47:48
So, yeah, I mean, I think that's an interesting case

00:16:47:48 - 00:16:51:05
because Eli, ‘my God’, uses

00:16:51:05 - 00:16:54:19
the common Semitic root for deity,

00:16:54:44 - 00:16:57:44
but it's a term that can also

00:16:58:15 - 00:17:02:01
refer to a specific deity in the Levant, in kind of

00:17:03:11 - 00:17:05:34
Syria, Palestine.

00:17:05:34 - 00:17:08:15
It can...So there's a deity called El,

00:17:08:15 - 00:17:11:30
and he's kind of the head of the Canaanite, Levantine pantheon.

00:17:13:42 - 00:17:14:45
And so whenever you see

00:17:14:45 - 00:17:17:49
El in a name, it's difficult to know

00:17:17:49 - 00:17:21:47
whether a particular deity is in view or deity in general,

00:17:21:47 - 00:17:23:07
God in general.

00:17:23:07 - 00:17:24:43
In the case of Eliezer,

00:17:24:43 - 00:17:27:19
well, that's an interesting question, but

00:17:27:19 - 00:17:30:28
it's just worth recognising that there's a kind of ambiguity in that.

00:17:31:41 - 00:17:32:07
Yeah.

00:17:32:07 - 00:17:35:25
So often, often names contain a specific deity.

00:17:35:25 - 00:17:39:05
So Yahweh or Baal or Asherah or something like that,

00:17:39:23 - 00:17:41:18
where it's much more clear.

00:17:41:18 - 00:17:43:08
But this is, this is a debate actually

00:17:43:08 - 00:17:44:46
in kind of name studies, right?

00:17:44:46 - 00:17:49:03
When we have have the name El, do we have generic deity

00:17:49:18 - 00:17:52:00
and can that be interpreted as a particular deity

00:17:52:00 - 00:17:55:47
in the mind of the name bearer or the name user, name bestower,

00:17:56:13 - 00:18:00:23
or does it need to be specifically the deity El?

00:18:01:21 - 00:18:02:09
Is it–

00:18:02:09 - 00:18:05:15
presumably it is not possible to resolve a question like that.

00:18:05:15 - 00:18:10:29
We can speculate that Aaron may have

00:18:10:29 - 00:18:15:05
had a more generic sense of El rather than invoking this

00:18:16:18 - 00:18:20:24
Canaanite god, but— C: Well, yeah, we can speculate.

00:18:20:24 - 00:18:21:47
That's about all we can do.

00:18:21:47 - 00:18:22:14
Right?

00:18:22:14 - 00:18:27:25
So, I think it's worth just recognising that names and the meanings of names

00:18:27:25 - 00:18:30:49
sort of are there in the minds of, of people who use them,

00:18:31:23 - 00:18:34:15
and so it can be very difficult to access sort of what

00:18:34:15 - 00:18:37:44
people thought about it, what people think about the meanings of names.

00:18:38:12 - 00:18:41:16
We can sort of do our work and think about the etymologies of the names,

00:18:41:36 - 00:18:45:02
but it's another matter to ask, what did this name mean to that person?

00:18:46:02 - 00:18:46:20
Yeah.

00:18:46:20 - 00:18:50:16
And it's possible that through time, over time, names develop

00:18:50:16 - 00:18:54:08
in kind of how they meant, what they meant to people.

00:18:55:15 - 00:18:56:31
Yeah.

00:18:56:31 - 00:18:59:28
When, when we read the Old Testament

00:18:59:28 - 00:19:03:03
and we, we see somebody’s being given a name

00:19:03:19 - 00:19:06:27
because of all circumstances or—

00:19:08:06 - 00:19:10:06
I can't think of an example off the top of my head now

00:19:10:06 - 00:19:13:06
and we're talking about names and I should be able to think of lots of them—

00:19:14:07 - 00:19:16:15
but somebody gives a name

00:19:16:15 - 00:19:19:15
and then a reason is given, some of those reasons feel,

00:19:20:24 - 00:19:22:14
well, frankly, a bit spurious.

00:19:22:14 - 00:19:26:43
So...to an English reader. What's going on there?

00:19:26:43 - 00:19:32:00
Clearly there are deeper meanings for,

00:19:33:01 - 00:19:35:45
within the mind of a Hebrew speaker.

00:19:35:45 - 00:19:38:17
and maybe sometimes it's to do with the sound.

00:19:38:17 - 00:19:42:14
But why is it that some of these naming

00:19:42:14 - 00:19:45:08
things just feel a little bit random to us?

00:19:47:09 - 00:19:50:18
I think part of the reason is, like what we were saying last time,

00:19:50:18 - 00:19:54:43
that we don't get the translations of of the names in our English Bibles.

00:19:55:03 - 00:19:57:43
So if there is an obvious meaning, we're not given it.

00:19:57:43 - 00:20:01:11
And part of the reason is because, when we are given the explanation,

00:20:01:11 - 00:20:04:12
even if we were to have them translated, it doesn't actually always fit

00:20:04:12 - 00:20:05:42
exactly. I think that's what you mean when

00:20:05:42 - 00:20:09:16
say it’s spurious. There's...the connection between the explanation given

00:20:09:16 - 00:20:13:45
and the meaning of the Hebrew name is not always quite there.

00:20:14:48 - 00:20:16:11
It's not apparent.

00:20:16:11 - 00:20:18:11
I don't mean it is spurious. It just...

00:20:18:11 - 00:20:20:10
it just, it feels it.

00:20:20:10 - 00:20:21:40
Yeah. Yeah.

00:20:21:40 - 00:20:25:11
Yeah, maybe a way to think about this is that we need to be careful

00:20:25:11 - 00:20:28:35
about the expectations we carry with us when we read the Bible

00:20:29:04 - 00:20:31:33
and its claims about these name connections.

00:20:31:33 - 00:20:36:14
So we have very specific ideas about what we mean—

00:20:36:14 - 00:20:38:34
or maybe we don't, but often we do—

00:20:38:34 - 00:20:41:25
by what a name means. When we say, ‘What does this name mean?’

00:20:41:25 - 00:20:43:00
we usually mean sort of

00:20:43:00 - 00:20:47:01
what is its etymology, which is to say, if we kind of trace the meaning

00:20:47:01 - 00:20:51:22
of the word back to its original form or its original meaning, what was that?

00:20:53:36 - 00:20:54:43
And that's there

00:20:54:43 - 00:20:57:04
that does matter for the Bible.

00:20:57:04 - 00:21:01:12
Sometimes the Bible's naming scenes draw on that very clearly. So,

00:21:03:04 - 00:21:04:14
a good example of this

00:21:04:14 - 00:21:07:14
is the naming of Manasseh.

00:21:07:23 - 00:21:10:31
So Joseph, his father, names him Manasseh—

00:21:10:32 - 00:21:13:11
Manasseh,

00:21:13:11 - 00:21:14:39
which is a Piel participle.

00:21:14:39 - 00:21:17:22
It means ‘one who makes forget.’

00:21:17:22 - 00:21:20:19
And he explains that by saying,

00:21:20:19 - 00:21:25:06
‘Because God has made me forget all my trouble.’ And he uses a slightly

00:21:25:06 - 00:21:29:39
different form of the same verb to mean essentially the same thing, right?

00:21:29:39 - 00:21:32:39
So we have the same verb form, the same basic meaning,

00:21:33:05 - 00:21:36:23
and the name means ‘one who made forget’.

00:21:36:47 - 00:21:38:16
So it all sort of works.

00:21:38:16 - 00:21:40:21
It's very nice. It's simple.

00:21:40:21 - 00:21:43:02
And it is the sort of thing that we expect.

00:21:43:02 - 00:21:45:28
But there are other names for which it's

00:21:45:28 - 00:21:48:35
not so obvious that there's an etymological connection.

00:21:49:07 - 00:21:52:35
And so this becomes more difficult for us and more complicated.

00:21:53:39 - 00:21:56:42
but it seems that it wasn't necessarily more complicated for them.

00:21:56:42 - 00:21:58:32
They were fine with it.

00:21:58:32 - 00:22:03:19
And so I think, I think, you know, you yourself said that spurious is

00:22:03:19 - 00:22:07:23
maybe isn't the best way to put it, but I think that's a helpful corrective.

00:22:07:24 - 00:22:09:47
We need to all be careful

00:22:09:47 - 00:22:12:26
in assuming that we know how this should be,

00:22:12:26 - 00:22:15:29
and if the text doesn't do that, then it's doing it in the wrong way.

00:22:15:29 - 00:22:19:45
Probably we need to reverse that and assume the text is telling us something.

00:22:19:45 - 00:22:22:45
We should try to pick that up G:  To give a,

00:22:22:48 - 00:22:25:38
to give a, perhaps, well, and example:

00:22:25:38 - 00:22:30:07
this is not how my name was chosen, but you could imagine a situation today

00:22:30:07 - 00:22:33:23
where someone has a baby and says, ‘Oh, that baby's gorgeous;

00:22:33:23 - 00:22:35:18
I'll call him George.’

00:22:35:18 - 00:22:38:04
And like, well, you could say, well, what's the connection there?

00:22:38:04 - 00:22:39:17
George doesn't mean ‘gorgeous’.

00:22:39:17 - 00:22:41:30
George means ‘farmer’, but they sound sort of vaguely

00:22:41:30 - 00:22:44:30
similar. So, ‘Oh, I have a gorgeous child, George’.

00:22:44:45 - 00:22:47:36
And so there's a connection being drawn between ‘Oh, they’re gorgeous,

00:22:47:36 - 00:22:48:22
I'll call them George’

00:22:49:36 - 00:22:50:42
but there's no actual

00:22:50:42 - 00:22:54:49
etymological connection between the meaning of the name and why

00:22:54:49 - 00:22:58:38
they've given the name. That’s a random example that just popped in my mind.

00:22:58:45 - 00:23:00:11
Very nice.

00:23:00:11 - 00:23:03:20
Yeah, I think I mean, as I've looked over kind of the different

00:23:03:20 - 00:23:05:33
naming scenes in the Bible,

00:23:05:33 - 00:23:07:39
I think it's better to talk about the relationship

00:23:07:39 - 00:23:12:14
between the naming circumstances— so that I've said it's the,

00:23:13:21 - 00:23:15:28
conception, gestation or birth of the child, some

00:23:15:28 - 00:23:18:01
something around the circumstances of the child—

00:23:18:01 - 00:23:19:27
I think it's better to characterise

00:23:19:27 - 00:23:22:27
the relationship as a matter of correspondence between

00:23:23:03 - 00:23:26:03
the name and the circumstances.

00:23:26:39 - 00:23:28:39
And then within that, to sort of further define

00:23:28:39 - 00:23:31:38
what sort of correspondence is in view.

00:23:31:38 - 00:23:35:25
So Manasseh is a good example where the sound of the name,

00:23:35:37 - 00:23:37:41
the lexeme, the particular word used,

00:23:37:41 - 00:23:41:31
and also the meaning of the word are all nicely in correspondence.

00:23:41:42 - 00:23:43:11
across the board.

00:23:44:13 - 00:23:47:13
Maybe a good kind of example where—

00:23:48:13 - 00:23:50:34
which is slightly different, but is still sort of within the bounds

00:23:50:34 - 00:23:55:05
of what the Bible does, let's say— is the naming of Noah.

00:23:55:05 - 00:24:00:17
So, when Noah is named at the end of Genesis 5, Lamech,

00:24:00:17 - 00:24:04:36
his father, says that his name is Noah, because this one will bring,

00:24:06:07 - 00:24:09:07
will bring, bring us rest from the ground that the Lord has cursed.

00:24:09:35 - 00:24:11:31
Noah is

00:24:11:31 - 00:24:14:31
it's related to a root nuakh ‘to rest’

00:24:15:13 - 00:24:16:17
in Hebrew.

00:24:16:17 - 00:24:19:11
But the word nuakh isn't used in the explanation;

00:24:19:11 - 00:24:22:12
It's a different term for bringing rest: nakham.

00:24:22:12 - 00:24:25:32
But you can still hear similar sounds.

00:24:25:36 - 00:24:28:36
There's a still a semantic connection.

00:24:28:41 - 00:24:32:25
And if you read enough of these, you get the sense that they don’t feel

00:24:32:25 - 00:24:36:14
the need to have this kind of neat set of correspondences,

00:24:36:14 - 00:24:38:00
but one or two will do. T: Right..

00:24:38:00 - 00:24:41:22
C: In other cases, it's a matter of, maybe, sound connections as George has said.

00:24:41:45 - 00:24:45:26
So if we open our view of what sort of might be there,

00:24:46:27 - 00:24:47:30
in terms of the types of

00:24:47:30 - 00:24:53:05
correspondences, I think will be better suited to read the text well.

00:24:53:05 - 00:24:53:43
Yeah,

00:24:53:43 - 00:24:54:32
okay.

00:24:54:32 - 00:24:57:28
That's very helpful.

00:24:57:28 - 00:25:00:28
Can you give us some more concrete examples, talk us through

00:25:01:26 - 00:25:05:43
a few Old Testament names and show how these kinds of things are working out?

00:25:05:43 - 00:25:08:13
I think I introduced in the last episode,

00:25:08:13 - 00:25:10:08
we talked about the name Samuel.

00:25:10:08 - 00:25:13:08
So this is a good example of a number of things.

00:25:13:26 - 00:25:17:03
So I mentioned the fact, I think that the name Samuel, Shmuel,

00:25:18:22 - 00:25:20:24
means ‘name of God’.

00:25:20:24 - 00:25:23:16
So we can talk a bit more about that, and it would be worth it.

00:25:23:16 - 00:25:27:22
the thing I observed is that shmuel isn't related to the reason

00:25:27:22 - 00:25:32:22
given for the naming, which turns on the term sha’al ‘to ask’

00:25:32:22 - 00:25:35:13
in Hannah's explanation in 1 Samuel 1.

00:25:35:37 - 00:25:39:23
Sha’al ‘to ask’ is repeated five times in the context

00:25:40:00 - 00:25:42:49
as an explanation for the giving of the name.

00:25:42:49 - 00:25:43:38
And what we said is that

00:25:43:38 - 00:25:46:38
there are sound correspondences, not meaning correspondences.

00:25:47:07 - 00:25:51:01
But it's also an interesting name for for another reason, namely that,

00:25:52:06 - 00:25:55:32
the form of the name is actually quite old

00:25:55:32 - 00:26:01:08
from a grammatical point of view, shmu contains a case ending.

00:26:01:08 - 00:26:05:18
The ‘u’, shmu, ‘u’ is a nominative case ending.

00:26:06:04 - 00:26:08:43
So it contains this nominative case ending,

00:26:08:43 - 00:26:12:10
which was something that was used in Hebrew, in the kind of

00:26:13:06 - 00:26:15:48
family that Hebrew language is related to,

00:26:15:48 - 00:26:18:49
much earlier than the language that we have in the Bible.

00:26:18:49 - 00:26:22:03
So in the Bible we don't normally find nominative case

00:26:22:03 - 00:26:25:12
endings on nouns, and we don't have any case endings normally.

00:26:26:07 - 00:26:29:48
But the name has preserved this really old feature.

00:26:30:31 - 00:26:33:17
And so that's an example of how names can often preserve

00:26:33:17 - 00:26:36:17
stages of a language like a time capsule,

00:26:36:46 - 00:26:41:19
and features of a language that have, have sort of, worked themselves out.

00:26:42:47 - 00:26:43:45
I also drew attention to

00:26:43:45 - 00:26:46:45
the fact that, that the term

00:26:47:01 - 00:26:51:32
too for the sha’al for ‘ask,’ shaul is connected to the name of Saul,

00:26:51:32 - 00:26:56:42
‘the asked one’, which is very interesting because Saul is the asked one by Israel;

00:26:56:49 - 00:26:58:38
he's not the one asked for by God.

00:26:58:38 - 00:27:02:40
Samuel is the one asked for by God, which is a very interesting connection to make.

00:27:03:20 - 00:27:04:48
So what...

00:27:04:48 - 00:27:07:35
How do we understand

00:27:07:35 - 00:27:09:14
how these things come together then?

00:27:09:14 - 00:27:11:31
Because

00:27:11:31 - 00:27:14:19
when you read through

00:27:14:19 - 00:27:17:00
the Books of Samuel and you've got this

00:27:17:00 - 00:27:22:08
an irony there with Shaul, Saul, being the first king that the people

00:27:22:08 - 00:27:26:43
are asking for and, oh, this all fits together in a remarkable way.

00:27:26:45 - 00:27:29:43
What...

00:27:29:43 - 00:27:32:07
Is, is this

00:27:32:07 - 00:27:35:24
is this the writer of Samuel reading back

00:27:35:24 - 00:27:39:32
into the naming of Samuel to to make that connection with Saul

00:27:39:32 - 00:27:40:17
who's coming?

00:27:42:11 - 00:27:46:05
Or is it...What else is going on?

00:27:46:05 - 00:27:49:05
How, why do these things work this way?

00:27:49:05 - 00:27:50:43
Well,

00:27:50:43 - 00:27:53:43
I've served this up in a very interesting way.

00:27:54:17 - 00:27:58:17
The way you answer that question will depend very much on whether you think

00:27:58:17 - 00:28:02:31
there is a God and whether you think that he is involved in the universe.

00:28:02:31 - 00:28:03:37
It just might, mightn’t it?

00:28:03:37 - 00:28:05:15
And the biblical writers

00:28:05:15 - 00:28:08:27
think very, very much that God is involved in the universe.

00:28:09:22 - 00:28:12:20
and I think that because,

00:28:12:20 - 00:28:15:14
what we would call the providence of God, that is the active

00:28:15:14 - 00:28:20:25
involvement of God in history, is a fronted theme in the Bible.

00:28:20:25 - 00:28:23:25
It's a very central theme in the Bible.

00:28:23:39 - 00:28:26:39
So, for example, when in the Joseph story,

00:28:27:02 - 00:28:29:22
Joseph's brothers come to him and they're afraid that he's going

00:28:29:22 - 00:28:32:36
to turn against them after dad has died, Joseph says to them,

00:28:33:40 - 00:28:35:31
‘What you meant for evil, God meant for good.’

00:28:35:31 - 00:28:40:20
So there's this notion, very clearly in Joseph's mind, according to the story,

00:28:40:20 - 00:28:43:20
that the development of the story is according to plan.

00:28:44:15 - 00:28:47:24
And so I think that we can view names and naming

00:28:47:24 - 00:28:51:23
as part of the writer's view of how the world normally works,

00:28:52:11 - 00:28:55:45
that God is actually involved in the goings on of history

00:28:56:13 - 00:28:59:40
and that the naming of figures like Samuel or like Saul

00:28:59:40 - 00:29:04:17
and so on fit into that, and that what they are writing reflects that reality.

00:29:04:48 - 00:29:05:49
You may discount that.

00:29:05:49 - 00:29:06:41
You may say that that's

00:29:06:41 - 00:29:09:43
that's all nonsense, but the fact is, it's there in the text

00:29:09:47 - 00:29:13:05
T: Sure. C: for us to sort of observe. T: Yeah. Yeah.

00:29:13:20 - 00:29:17:07
And that explains why some people's names seem to fit them so well.

00:29:18:07 - 00:29:21:05
Joseph, since we've

00:29:21:05 - 00:29:24:25
mentioned his naming his son Manasseh,

00:29:24:25 - 00:29:27:08
but ‘he adds’:

00:29:27:08 - 00:29:30:10
Joseph does quite a bit of adding, as well as adding to

00:29:30:11 - 00:29:33:11
to his father's family at the beginning.

00:29:34:00 - 00:29:36:14
So, yeah, we'll come in the next episode

00:29:36:14 - 00:29:39:34
we'll talk about Jacob and his children and naming them.

00:29:39:43 - 00:29:40:33
Right. Yeah.

00:29:40:33 - 00:29:41:24
If I can just say there's a

00:29:41:24 - 00:29:44:39
there's a really nice example that I think pulls all of this together,

00:29:45:20 - 00:29:48:20
in the name of Nabal. Right?

00:29:48:29 - 00:29:51:29
The husband of Abigail.

00:29:52:20 - 00:29:54:40
You remember the story that

00:29:54:40 - 00:30:00:22
that David initiates a conversation with Nabal who owns lots of flocks,

00:30:00:22 - 00:30:02:22
he's a wealthy guy,

00:30:02:22 - 00:30:05:18
and Nabal turns against David,

00:30:05:18 - 00:30:08:25
and David gets really hacked off at him and wants to kill him.

00:30:09:34 - 00:30:12:19
And Nabal is

00:30:12:19 - 00:30:13:42
is, is well, in danger.

00:30:13:42 - 00:30:17:42
So Abigail, his wife, recognises this, and she comes out with gifts

00:30:17:42 - 00:30:20:42
and meets David and urges him not to do anything foolish.

00:30:21:01 - 00:30:24:14
Which is a very interesting thing, because Nabal means ‘foolish’.

00:30:25:12 - 00:30:28:48
And when, if you read the story of her explanation

00:30:28:48 - 00:30:33:11
for all of this, she points out that Nabal, her husband, is as his name.

00:30:33:11 - 00:30:34:12
He is foolish.

00:30:34:12 - 00:30:36:25
He is Nabal. He’s a foolish man.

00:30:36:25 - 00:30:39:33
Interestingly, David is potentially about to do something foolish.

00:30:39:33 - 00:30:42:37
She staves that off, she's a remarkable woman.

00:30:42:37 - 00:30:46:17
David recognises this, and eventually Nabal dies

00:30:46:44 - 00:30:50:22
separately from David’s agency, according to the text.

00:30:51:13 - 00:30:52:35
What's interesting is the question,

00:30:52:35 - 00:30:58:45
so was... were Nabal's family aware of the fact that this name

00:30:58:45 - 00:31:02:22
meant ‘foolish’ when they named him? And did they name him in light of that?

00:31:02:22 - 00:31:04:38
And does this sort of determine his character?

00:31:04:38 - 00:31:06:16
I don't think so.

00:31:06:16 - 00:31:11:12
Nabal, as a root in Semitic, not only has the sense ‘foolish’ in Hebrew,

00:31:11:12 - 00:31:15:17
but it also has the sense, in some quarters, ‘noble’.

00:31:16:14 - 00:31:19:00
So we have this we have this attested in other Semitic languages.

00:31:19:00 - 00:31:20:04
And it’s entirely possible.

00:31:20:04 - 00:31:26:20
—and scholars have suggested this— that the name, to the name bestowers, Nabal's

00:31:26:21 - 00:31:30:16
parents, meant something like ‘noble’ when it was named,

00:31:30:16 - 00:31:34:45
but it has this nice correspondence with the current name ‘foolish’ in

00:31:35:43 - 00:31:37:32
in Hebrew.

00:31:37:47 - 00:31:40:47
And what's interesting for your question about the kind of God's

00:31:40:47 - 00:31:44:36
role in all of this is what Abigail makes of it.

00:31:45:08 - 00:31:48:22
She draws this correspondence, but she observes this correspondence

00:31:48:35 - 00:31:52:33
and how this has all come together in this expression of Nabal's character

00:31:52:33 - 00:31:53:43
as foolish.

00:31:53:43 - 00:31:58:26
She pulls it together in her explanation to David, and she says ‘he is as his name’.

00:31:58:26 - 00:32:00:46
He is foolish.

00:32:00:46 - 00:32:04:08
So I think she's probably a well aware that the name can also mean ‘noble’

00:32:04:08 - 00:32:06:05
and has that kind of significance,

00:32:06:05 - 00:32:08:24
but she's also aware that there's this other connection

00:32:08:24 - 00:32:11:27
and she's happy to play with it, and I suspect others are as well.

00:32:11:48 - 00:32:13:39
Brilliant. Thank you so much, guys.