The related names שָׂרַי SARAY and מִלְכָּה MILKAH

[Isaac Fried]

The ending -AY in the name of the wife of Abram seems to be an ancient plural form, possibly the doubling היא-היא, SARAY, thus, possibly meaning 'my (divine) lords', as is the meaning of אדוני ADON-AY. The name is later transmuted to the neutral שׂרה SARAH, with only one היא at the end, for the bearer of the name.

The name of the wife of his brother NAXOR, MILKAH מִלְכָּה, is possibly an adaptation to a girl's name of the dreadful מוֹלֶך MOLEK (see Jer. 32:35.)

Isaac Fried, Boston University

[Isaac Fried]

It appears to me further that the name מִלְכֹּם MILKOM in 1Kings 11:5, ends also in the plural: הם HEM, 'they'. The name מֹלֶכֶת MOLEKET, in 1Ch. 7:18, seems in honor of a heavenly queen, possibly the moon, the consort of MOLEK, the life giving monarch of the sky: the sun.

Isaac Fried, Boston University

[Jim Stinehart]

Isaac Fried:

1. You wrote: “The ending -AY in the name of the wife of Abram seems to be an ancient plural form, possibly the doubling היא-היא, SARAY, thus, possibly meaning 'my (divine) lords', as is the meaning of אדוני ADON-AY. The name is later transmuted to the neutral שׂרה SARAH, with only one היא at the end, for the bearer of the name.”

(a) The ending -AY is 100% impossible for a west Semitic woman’s name, as it is never attested a single time in the entirety of the non-biblical ancient world. Rather, the ending -AY for a west Semitic name or word is only attested (i) for deities, or
(ii) as an archaic feminine ending of common words at Ugarit.

$RY is a Hurrian name, being the expected Hebrew spelling of the following attested Hurrian name: $ar-ri-ia.

Both of Sarah’s birth parents were 100% Hurrians. Pursuant to a well-documented Hurrian custom, they gave up their daughter for adoption to Terakh (with Terakh’s wife not being a party to the transaction), who promised in writing that he would find a suitable husband for her and provide her a dowry, and verbally promised that his plan was that she would marry Terakh’s blood son Abram. That is why Sarah is referred to as Terakh’s “daughter-in-law”, rather than his “daughter”, at Genesis 11: 31, since Terakh always thought of his adopted daughter as being his daughter-in-law, not his daughter. Sarah was not related to Abram by blood, but rather was his half-sister by adoption only (with Abram’s mother not being a party to the adoption, per this Hurrian custom). So Abraham can truthfully say at Genesis 20: 12 that Sarah is his “sister”, but by a different mother, that is, a half-sister, and then only by adoption.

(b) It would not make sense if Sarah’s birth name were grander in meaning than her divinely-changed name. The Hurrian meaning of Sarah’s Hurrian birth name, $ar-ri-ia : $RY, is: “God Is King”.

The meaning of the name “Sarah” : SRH is much grander: “She [who will beget a line of] sons [who will be] kings by divine Will”. The first two Hebrew letters, SR, render the Egyptian phrase sA ra, which was well-known to everyone in Canaan as being every pharaoh’s grandest title. Its literal meaning was “son of God” or “son of the sun-god Ra”, but it usually was taken as effectively meaning: “king by divine Will”. The third Hebrew letter, -H, in the name “Sarah”/SRH is the standard west Semitic feminine suffix. Thus the meaning of SRH is: “She [-H] (who will beget a line of) sons [sA] (who will be) kings by divine Will [sA ra]”. Now compare what the author of the Patriarchal narratives tells us the name “Sarah” means:

“And God said unto Abraham: 'As for Sarai thy wife, thou shalt not call her name Sarai, but Sarah shall her name be. And I will bless her, and moreover I will give thee a son of her; yea, I will bless her, and she shall be a mother of nations; kings of peoples shall be of her.'” Genesis 17: 15-16

2. You wrote: “The name of the wife of his brother NAXOR, MILKAH מִלְכָּה, is possibly an adaptation to a girl's name of the dreadful מוֹלֶך MOLEK (see Jer. 32:35.)”

Not.

To analyze the names of Haran’s two daughters, “Milcah” and “Iscah”, we start with the fact that Haran’s wife must have been a Hurrian, because their son Lot’s name makes perfect sense in Hurrian. A slightly elongated version of that same Hurrian name is borne by one of Esau’s Hurrian in-laws at Genesis 36: 20, “Lotan”, who is expressly stated to be a Hurrian : XRY.

Based on the attested custom of when a Hurrian woman married a non-Hurrian man, we should expect that their children’s names will usually make sense both in Hurrian and in the husband’s native language as well, which here is Hebrew. The Hurrian analysis of the names “Milcah” and “Iscah” is as follows.

(a) “Milcah”: spelled in Hebrew as MLKH, rendering the following Semiticized Hurrian name: Mi-il-ku -H

Mi-il-ku-ia is an attested Hurrian name. Drop the optional theophoric suffix, -ia, and add the Semiticized ending, -H, in order to show that Milcah was born and raised in Canaan and had a Semitic father (Haran), and we have: Mi-il-ku -H. The expected Biblical Hebrew defective spelling of that Semiticized Hurrian name is exactly what we see in the received text: MLKH.

The attested Hurrian name element mi-il-ku, alternatively spelled mil-ki, is likely a Semitic loanword into Hurrian. As such, the likely Hurrian meaning of this name is: “[God Is] King”.

(b) “Iscah”: spelled in Hebrew as YsKH, rendering the following Semiticized Hurrian name: A-$a-ku -H

The name “Iscah” is like the name of Esau’s first Hurrian wife, “Judith”, in that it begins with an optional A- as its own separate syllable, which has no effect on meaning but merely makes the name grander. [Thus the following two Hurrian names, having the identical meaning, are attested at Nuzi: ḫu-ú-ti and A-ḫi-ú-ti.] In the Hebrew rendering of Biblical Hurrian names, Hebrew aleph/’ is always prosthetic, and so the true vowel A as its own separate syllable is instead rendered by the Hebrew letter yod/Y.

With that as background, we start with the attested Hurrian name $a-ku-ia. Drop the optional theophoric suffix, -ia, and add an optional initial A- as its own separate syllable, in order to make this a grander name, and we have: A-$a-ku. Then add the Semiticized ending, -H, in order to show that Iscah was born and raised in Canaan and had a Semitic father (Haran). The expected Hebrew rendering (using defective spelling) of A-$a-ku -H is exactly what we see in the received text (using samekh as the sibilant): YsKH.

$a-ka-e-e means “sprout, bud” in Hurrian. Accordingly, $a-ku probably means something like “to blossom”, and we know that it was considered an appropriate praise of a deity. So the likely Hurrian meaning of A-$a-ku -H is: “[God] Blossoms”.

* * *

The Hebrew meaning of “Milcah” : MLKH is conventionally viewed as being “Queen”, since the Hebrew common noun for “queen” has the identical spelling: MLKH. But Milcah is not a “queen”! More likely, the intended meaning of MLKH is MLK -H, which would be a woman’s name that means: “[God Is] King”. If so, then the Hebrew meaning of the name “Milcah” is identical to its Hurrian meaning.

Even though most non-biblical names in the ancient world glorified a pagan deity, that is n-e-v-e-r the case in the Patriarchal narratives, with the only exception being several references to the Egyptian god Ra. The pagan god Molek is not in the Patriarchal narratives.

Please note that religion is never a problem regarding the female descendants of Milcah and Nahor, who play such a major role in the Patriarchal narratives: Rebekah, Leah, Rachel. There’s no way that all three successor Matriarchs grew up worshipping the pagan deity Moloch. Not.

Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois

[Isaac Fried]

I know nothing of "Ugaritic" of "Hurrian" and of "Egyptian". It appears to me that יִסְכָּה YISKAH, Gen. 11:29 starts with אִישׁ IY$, as do the names ישמעאל, ישראל, שמעון, ישי and many many more. Notice that ישׁי YI$AY ends in -AY.

The name כמוֹש KMO$, 1Ki. 11:7, is possibly כמוֹ-אישׁ.

Isaac Fried, Boston University

[Jim Stinehart]

Isaac Fried:

1. You wrote: “I know nothing of "Ugaritic" of "Hurrian" and of "Egyptian".”

Then please comment on what I take to be the west Semitic/Hebrew meaning of the name “Milcah”:

The Hebrew meaning of “Milcah” : MLKH is conventionally viewed as being “Queen”, since the Hebrew common noun for “queen” has the identical spelling: MLKH. But Milcah is not a “queen”! More likely, the intended west Semitic/Hebrew meaning of MLKH is MLK -H, which would be a woman’s name that means: “[God Is] King” (where “King” means a male king and cannot include a queen). [-H of course is the standard west Semitic feminine ending of names of west Semitic-speaking human females, and MLK means “(male) king”.]

In the ancient world, for example in the personal names in the Amarna Letters, it was routine for a theophoric to be implied, rather than explicit. The vast majority of nobles’ names in the ancient world were in praise of a deity, so the deity could be either (i) expressly named, or (ii) implied via an express theophoric, or (iii) merely implied, without there being either the deity’s name or an express theophoric. It is unfortunate that analyses of Biblical names often seem not to understand that. Particularly when dealing with the name of a Biblical person who is not a Hebrew, one needs to understand that regardless of what the ultra-literal meaning of such non-Hebrew name may be, there will very likely be a reference to a deity, whether via the deity’s name or an express theophoric or an implied theophoric. Thus a woman can easily have a name that ultra-literally means “[male] King”, because the name is not asserting that the woman who bears that name is herself a “male king”, but rather is asserting, by necessary implication, that God or some pagan deity is a male king. [Per the personal names in the Amarna Letters, those considerations apply to personal names in the Late Bronze Age in all languages, including, but not limited to, west Semitic and Hurrian. That is to say, the above considerations were ubiquitous in the ancient world, and of course would have been known by the author(s) of the Patriarchal narratives.]

2. In your opinion, what is the west Semitic/Hebrew meaning of the name “Iscah”? I ask that, because (i) your post did not say what you view that name as meaning, and (ii) the conventional analyses of that name do not seem terribly convincing. (My own post said nothing as to what the west Semitic/Hebrew meaning of “Iscah” may be.)

3. You wrote: “Notice that ישׁי YI$AY ends in -AY.”

Y$Y is the man’s name Jesse. What is never attested non-biblically in the ancient world, by contrast, is -Y as an archaic feminine ending of a west Semitic name of a human female. $RY [“Sarai”] cannot be a west Semitic name of a human female, because no name of that general type is attested non-biblically in the ancient world for a west Semitic-speaking human female (as opposed to a deity or a common noun).

Why would you think that Sarai’s mother was a west Semitic-speaking Semite? There’s nothing in the Bible that requires that supposition, is there? If it be granted that Sarai’s mother likely as not was n-o-t a west Semitic-speaking Semite, then there’s no logical reason to think that the name $RY is necessarily a west Semitic name.

Indeed, the best way to determine the ethnicity of Sarai’s mother is on the basis that the name $RY cannot be a west Semitic name, but rather is the expected Biblical Hebrew defective spelling rendering of the attested Hurrian name $ar-ri-ia. [Where a foreign language has doubled consonants with no intervening vowel, as here, the Hebrew rendering consistently drops the first of such doubled consonants. So this Hurrian name would be viewed for Hebrew orthographic purposes as being: $a-ri-ia. Per Hebrew defective spelling, the vowel in a consonant-vowel syllable is never represented by any Hebrew letter, so the first two syllables here are clearly $R in Hebrew. The theophoric suffix -ia (alternatively spelled -ya or -a-a- or -a), which uniquely in the ancient world applied to west Semitic, Egyptian and Hurrian names alike (!), is rendered by Hebrew yod/Y.]

Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois

[Isaac Fried]

The name יִסְכָּה YISKAH, Gen. 11:29, is, indeed, enigmatic. But departing from the assumption that it contains a declaration of faith, I suspect that it starts with the divinity fraction אִישׁ IY$, as in the name אֵל שַׁדַּי EL $ADAY = איש-עד-היא-היא or עז-עד-היא-היא (notice, again the ending -AY), Gen. 17:1. What the fraction כה in the name YISKAH signifies is not entirely clear to me, perhaps just 'such'.

There is little doubt in my mind that the name ישׂשכר YISSAKAR is the combination איש-שכר, 'the reward of I$'; and that the name אנוֹשׁ is the combination הינוֹ-איש.

Having said all this, we suddenly come to the apparently pure, neutral, names רבקה, 'pet sheep?', רחל, 'jumpy sheep?', and לאה, 'old sheep?', that appear coming from the pen rather than from the temple.

Isaac Fried, Boston University