Vayetze: Naming the Future from the Past
Following last week’s Toldot – genealogies, or generations – Vayetze sees the naming of eleven of the twelve Tribes of Israel, giving names to the generations that will follow. Across two chapters of Tanach, two of Ya’akov’s wives – Leah and Rachel – name eleven boys, four of whom are born from their maidservants, Bilhah and Zilpah, and one girl, born from Leah. The lineage of the Jewish people suddenly expands, going from Avraham’s one son to Yitzchak’s two to Ya’akov’s twelve, and each of the twelve – Binyamin comes later – has a reason behind their name, a reason tied to their parents, or more specifically their mother.
The parasha begins by reaffirming G-d’s covenant with the Jewish people, G-d telling Ya’akov in a dream that והיה זרעך כעפר הארץ, ‘your descendants will be as the dust of the earth’ (Gen. 28:14), something which can only happen if he finds someone with whom to have children. He meets Rachel, crying as he falls deeply in love with her, working for seven years to make himself her husband. He is tricked by her father Lavan, finding himself married the next morning to Leah instead. He marries Rachel and works another seven years, his love for her clearly outweighing any love he may have for his other wife (Gen. 29:30). Tanach tells us that G-d feels for Leah, giving her love through another avenue of life – a child. She has Reuven, ראובן, literally meaning ‘see a son’, though the verse indicates that it also means כי ראה ה’ בעניי כי עתה יאהבני אישי, ‘G-d has seen my affliction; [it also means:] now my husband will love me’ (Gen 29:32). These two separate meanings are extrapolated from the two etymological aspects of the name, the former from ‘ראו’, ‘he saw’, and the latter from the association of בן with יאהבני, ‘he will love me’. Reuven’s name is clearly tied to the experience of his mother, her hopes for her marriage and what this child, this source of love, could do for the other potential sources of love in her life.
Each of the children who are subsequently born from Leah, and from her maidservant Zilpah, have reasons attached to their names; Shimon is associated with the verb שמע, ‘to hear’ (Gen. 29:33); Levi with attachment (Gen. 29:34); Yehudah with אודה, ‘I will praise’ (Gen. 29:35); Gad with ‘luck’, Asher with the idea of being fortunate; Yissachar with the ‘my reward’; and Zebulun with the concept of a choice gift. Rachel’s children, including those born through her maidservant Bilhah, also have the meanings ascribed to their names sealed in the words of Torah: Dan is named so because Rachel feels vindicated by the birth of a child associated with her (Gen. 30:6); Naphtali because of the contest she wages with her sister for the affection of her husband through children (Gen. 30:8); and Yosef, her child born of her own womb, is associated with her ‘barrenness’ being taken away and G-d adding to her life (Gen. 30:23-24). Again, as with Leah, the naming of Rachel’s children is associated with her relationships and her own status in her marriage, as a woman previously unable to provide children for her husband in the same way as her sister. The only one who seems to not be named by a maternal figure is Levi, the text writing קרא-שמו לוי, ‘he was named Levi’, the break from the narrative structure of ‘saying Leah names [her child]’ in the surrounding naming passages indicating that he was named by someone else, namely his father, Ya’akov.[1]
Academics have explored different incidents of naming across the Hebrew Bible, with Edward Bridge noting that ‘mothers naming children occurs more frequently than fathers naming children’, happening a total of 23 times; for Bridge, this suggests that Tanach ‘recognised that women had significant standing and influence in the ancient Israelite household’.[2] It is clear from the attention this week’s parasha gives to Leah and Rachel’s relationships and the competition between them engendered by their father Lavan’s trickery of their husband, that their interactions are central to their shared household. Each child, born from the wish to love and be loved, is named via linguistic etymologies which make ‘manifest the meaning behind the text’ of Tanach, deepening our understanding of the very human relationships involved in the perpetuation of the Jewish people.[3] Indeed, the competition between the two women foreshadows the competition which will emerge between Rachel’s child Yosef and his brothers when Yosef, seen as being arrogant as he tells of his dreams, is sold by his siblings into slavery, framed as dead in an intergenerational echo of their mothers’ rivalry. That Vayetze puts such an emphasis on naming also foreshadows one of the most famous instances of renaming in Tanach in next week’s parasha, that of Ya’akov being given the second name Yisrael after wrestling with a divine being. As with the names of his children, the name Yisrael adds a layer of meaning to Tanach and to Ya’akov’s character, depicting how he contended and connected with the divine and the human, proving himself able to prevail with both.
The significance of names in Tanach, and the significance of those who give them, has filtered down through generations of Jewish thought and tradition. Indeed, ‘the close bond between bearing a name and belonging to a community’ has long been demonstrated in scholarship, and the Jewish community is no exception.[4] It is a widespread practice to name Jewish children after biblical characters or with Hebrew words imbued with particular etymology, as demonstrated by the tribes’ names in Vayetze. As Omi (Morgenstern Leissner) notes, ‘the act of naming often plays an integral and important part in a given society’s ritual rites of passage’, inducting children into families.[5] Curiously, there is ‘no explicit commandment obligating (or authorising) parents to bestow a name upon their offspring’ in Tanach, yet the example of doing so is clearly set by our matriarchs. With the exception of Levi, and Ephraim and Menashe, who are named by Yosef (Gen. 41:51-52), ‘the tribes were named by women’.[6] Our matriarchs powerfully name their children based on specific elements of their lives, linguistically infusing them with the home, the relationships and the familial situation from which they have come. The midrashic commentaries on these passages concur with this idea, an examination of the midrashim concluding that ‘whenever the name is given by the mother [… it] is connected with her experience of the conception or the birth, of her relationship with the father, of her sorrow or her joy in connection with the birth, and so on’.[7] Even when it is not a mother who names, but another, ‘the explanations tend to revolve around an event in the life of the name-giver or in the life of the nation as a whole’, connecting the named child with their parents and their wider community in a way which runs much deeper than DNA.[8]
When parents name a child, that child becomes interconnected with the entire family and community that has come before them. That Judaism has specific rituals associated with the naming of children is therefore no surprise; boys are traditionally named during their brit milah at eight days old, whilst girls are named during a mi shebarach, ‘a blessing recited when the father is called up to the public reading of the Torah’.[9] According to Omi, the manner of naming girls through this blessing ‘takes the place of the sacrifice that the mother would have brought in Temple times’, making the mother integral to the ritual in the same way in which Tanach depicts Leah and Rachel as being integral to the naming of their children, though these children are boys (apart from Dinah, whose name is given no explanation of meaning, a fact which deserves an entire exploration of its own). Nowadays, Jewish parents often adhere to the Jewish tradition of ‘naming children after ancestors, particularly grandparents’, a custom which ‘some identify [as finding its] roots […] in the Bible’.[10] In naming those that came before us, we often hope to imbue our children with the characteristics of these ancestors, with the meaning their names took on as they developed as people and interacted with others, making their own mark on their world.
Our names, as depicted in Vayetze, tell us much about the people we came from. They reflect the situations of our parents, their relationships with each other and often their relationships with our biblical and spiritual ancestors, those that came before us in our central texts. Our names give us the opportunity to learn from the unique atmospheres and environments in which we came into the world, in which we became part of our communities. They allow us to take the names we have gained from our pasts and bring their meaning and power into our futures.
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[1] Edward J. Bridge, ‘A Mother’s Influence: Mothers Naming Children in the Hebrew Bible’ in Vetus Testamentum, Vol.64 No.3, (2014), pp.389-400, pg.394
[2] Bridge, pg.389
[3] Herbert Marks, ‘Biblical Naming and Poetic Etymology’ in Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol.114 No.1, (1995), pp.21-42, pg.34
[4] Omi (Morgenstern Leissner), ‘Jewish Women’s Naming Rites and the Rights of Jewish Women’ in Nashim: a Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies & Gender Issues, No.4, (2001), pp.140-177, pg.140
[5] Omi, pg.140
[6] Omi, pg.142
[7] Omi, pg.143
[8] Omi, pg.143
[9] Omi, pg.143-144
[10] Omi, pg.150
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The author notes that this week’s (or last week’s!) article is a little behind schedule due to unforeseen circumstances. However, better late than never…
