Tanach Thoughts

Recently I stumbled upon a site  that appears to have been some sort of high school Tanach project in Israel. In the site, the writers, apparently students, discussed the story of Achiyah Hashiloni anointing Yerov'am as though it was a criminal trial. They pointed fingers at Achiyah for plotting with Yerov'am to take over the United Israeli Kingdom and creating an Efraim-based government. I actually thought they made a fascinating point: From a secular perspective, it certainly seems as though Achiyah, from the old Israeli religious capital Shiloh, situated in Efraim's tribal territory, wanted to return the old glory of Efraim by seizing control of the kingdom through the anointing of Yerov'am to kingship. The Tanach provides us the religious/spiritual background, but now I wonder whether there were people in that generation who may have not been aware of all of the spiritual processes that took place and, as bystanders, may have thought that this is exactly what happen...

 For years now I've been acutely aware that though King David is a very impressive and inspiring person, the meaning of his name  still eludes me. So far, I've gathered a few options, but none of these are perfect. David is a short-form of Dodyahu. This is suggested by Da'at Mikra. A side problem with this is the question of why David's parents would prefer a short-form and not the full name. But I suppose that could be rectified if one would understand the name-choices of that era. A bigger problem would be that the letter Vav in David is a root-letter, making that actual Vah sound, rather than being a vowel letter, that are there simply to make the Oh or Oo sound, such as in Dodyahu. There are a few other such names in Tanach. The two that come to mind at the moment are Vafsi and Hodvayahu. Like David, I'm not entirely sure what their names mean. Hodvayahu is a bit easier, being clearly a mashup of Hod and Hashem's name. But the Vav in the middle is a mystery....

In a previous post  I discussed some possible Egyptian influences on the Tribe of Yehudah. One of the names mentioned was one Ashchur (אשחור) of the tribe. As it turns out, in some of the documents recovered from the Jewish military settlement in the Elephantine, a man named Aschur (אסחור) is mentioned! I saw this in the book "The Ten Tribes" by Alter Walner. He states there that the man was an Egyptian who eventually married one of the possibly more prominent Jewish women of the settlement (there were also non-Jews stationed there) and in later documents, his name was changed to "Natan", so perhaps he converted. I was a bit skeptical to his Egyptian status, though. True, his full name is Aschur ben Tzacha, not really a Jewish name, but the ending of the Alef in Tzacha made me think that perhaps Tzacha was the Aramaic shortening of Tzachyah, much like Ezra is the shortening of Azaryah. As to why he had two names, perhaps it was like other figures who had more than o...

 A couple of years ago I set out on an endeavor to write my first-ever serious Torani essay, with the guidance of a friend from yeshiva. The result was a well-received (by the yeshiva and family) essay examining the often taken-for-granted story of the battle between David and Goliath. I called it (in Hebrew): David and Goliath: The True Story. Yep, dramatic. I think it was a good essay. The first section dealt with understanding the basic pshat of the text, which I think was commonly misunderstood by most people for, I guess, centuries now. The second section dealt with the question on how the commentators saw the story. The third part came to reconcile the different views and create one coherent understanding of the story. In any case, a question popped up yesterday on the Judaism stackexchange site, Mi Yodeya which tied directly into the first part of the essay. As such, I essentially rewrote the first part in English, so I thought I'd post it here, too: Shmuel I 17:38-39 : וַיּ...

 At the end of ma'ariv on erev Simchat Torah, an idea popped into my mind: Was it possible that there was a connection between the name Amos and the Egyptian "mos" names? I vowed to bli neder check what names like Thutmose and Ahmose meant in Egyptian on motzei chag. Then I lucked out: A few pages into where I had left off in Werner Keller's The Bible As History, he wrote that the word Mos/Ms in Egyptian means son or teen. Then something hit me. I remembered Rabbi Dr. Izaak Rapaport zt"l's essay on the Hebrew word "Shem".  In it he reached the conclusion that the word Shem originally meant "son" or "offspring". In other words, yes, as Rabbi Ahron Marcus put it multiple times in Barzilai, this is a word that the Egyptians borrowed from paleo-Hebrew and flipped it. Shem/SM became MS! That the Tribe of Yehudah in particular and Yisrael in general may have been influenced by Egyptian culture isn't such a big secret: Egyptian infl...

 When filling out the Tribe of Yehudah section in my family tree project, one thing in particular caught my eye: the fairly significant number of people of the tribe who were named either after clothes, types of cloths or had names that were connected to the color white: Saraf, descendant of Shelah - possibly a reference to white-hot flames. Salma/Salmon (2) - a type of clothing. Nefeg? son of David - possibly from root pag, faded. Sheshan son of Yish'i - from Shesh, a type of Egyptian white cloth. Chur son of Kalev ben Chetzron - white, royalty. Shoval son of Kalev ben Chur - the piece of cloth that trails at the back of the clothing. Rekem of Chevron - possibly from Rikma, embroidery or lace. Charan? son of Kalev ben Chetzron - probably from the root char which means anger, in particular, raging white-hot. Related as such to Chur. Yair son of Seguv - he will light, from or, light. Ashchur son of Kalev ben Chur - possibly even named after Chur, in any case, clearly from the root o...

 After finishing Divrei Hayamim for the first time (and going through certain chapters several more times after that), I sat back and realized that of all of the tens and hundreds of thousands of people from the two and a half tribes from ever haYarden, we only have a handful of names. We have tribal leaders from the time of the desert, we have some later shoftim and assistants of David and Shlomo, we have a speculated king from Gad (Menachem) and we have some tribal leaders from other generations. That's about it. It comes down to maybe 100 names. Two and a half tribes cut down to about ten minyans. That's sad. After comparing the list to that of Judea - Yehudah, Levi and Binyamin - I thought, man, why don't we have a Chronicles version for the 10 Lost Tribes? But that's actually not true. We had  one, or at least commonly believed to have had one. But like the Lost Tribes, it got lost. It's only ever mentioned in the Tanach, not actually inserted into it. It was c...