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).

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Edited by Tyndale House

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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?

00:14:49:20 – 00:14:49:33
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.

June 6, 2024

George Heath-Whyte

Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford