On naming a boy “Dog”
Caleb is a common English name that parents might give their son after the outstanding tribal leader Calev whom Moses sent to “spy out the land of Canaan” from Kadesh Barne’a in “the wilderness of Paran,” along with eleven more Israelite leaders; each tribe and its chief (with Calev being the head leader of the tribe of Judah). We read about this historical and monumentally failed mission in this week’s Torah portion (according to the diaspora calendar).
Only two of the tribal princes, Caleb and Joshua, courageously stood their ground proving to be faithful to their task of mere intel gathering without proactively offering uncalled-for wrongful and misleading analysis of their findings, alongside skewed (theological and practical) conclusions that trashed the divine “Zionist idea” even in the public square.
Since the name Caleb is the anglicization of the Hebrew name Calev, it is likely that contemporary parents naming their son by this appellation might not be aware that it literally means a dog, even if they are dog lovers. Still, that Calev’s parents named him “Dog” might attest to their utmost appreciation for the Canis species; Calev must have meant for them a shortened form of klb-el, meaning “Dog of God,” i.e., a foremost faithful and obedient servant. Or as the Bible, has it: “[he] followed the Eternal fully” (Joshua 14:8), not unlike Moses himself (Deut. 34:5).
Quoting from my new book Taming the Beast: Human-Animal Encounters in the Bible (Wipf and Stock Publishers), “Caleb, a man of an upstanding stature, was rewarded for his faith in God, a dog-like devotion to his master; it was featured in his bold public assertion of his full confidence in the Israelites’ ability to capture the land of Canaan. The ten other tribal leaders, who were Caleb’s fellows on the scouting mission of the promised land, incited the people to defy God’s plan by returning to Egypt.”
While Moses pledged Hebron to Caleb as a reward to him for his bold stance and faith, Joshua, Moses’s successor, delivered on Moses’s oath 40 years later; both men outlasted these many years of sojourning in the desert that God decreed in retribution for the people’s defiance of his plan.” Naming a child Calev (Caleb), then, is a tribute to dogs and testimonial to the high image dogs enjoyed at that specific period of time. As my book narrates the history of the biblical dog, we witness, however, significant vicissitudes in that image.