Anah

ענה


Genesis 36:20 names him as a son of Se'ir the Chorite; and brother of Lotan, Shoval and Tsiv'on (Zibeon).

Genesis 36:29 then entitles him as a duke or tribal chieftain.

But:

Genesis 36:2 and 14 call him the daughter, not the son, of Tsiv'on the Chivite, not Chorite, and one of Esav's wives - as such she would be the grand-daughter not the grand-son of Se'ir the Chorite; by no means the first or last time we will see a disagreement within the Tanach between Chivite and Chorite, or between male and female.

And:

Genesis 36:24 tells us that "this was the Anah who found the mules in the wilderness as he fed the asses of Tsiv'on his father", which is a most banal and unlikely thing to remember in an epic of national history, unless it has some deeper significance that would have been obvious to an audience then but isn't to us now. There is of course a second version of this, when Sha'ul goes off in search of his father's donkeys (1 Samuel 9)… and the journey just happens to take him on what seems to be a kind of pilgrimage to every important shrine in Yehudah, a donkey-procession not unlike the one that brought Yeshu to Yeru-Shala'im in Luke 19, or John 12 as you prefer... and he (I was meaning Sha'ul, but actually Yeshu too) ends up anointed as the king of Yisra-El.

Which is he, or were there two? Possibly, as with Dan and Dinah, there was a matriarchal sister-tribe.

The name means "to lift up the voice", both in the sense of "singing" (Exodus 32:18, Psalm 147:7) and of "speaking out" or "answering" (Genesis 23:14, Job 33:12 and 13 ). From the latter it is also used for "to testify" (Exodus 23:2, Numbers 35:30).

However, just as there appear to be two very different persons named Anah, so the root also has two very different meanings; the second, spelled identically, meaning "to put to work", and used both for cultivating the ground (ma'anah - מענה = "a furrow") and for enforced human labour (Ecclesiastes 1:13 and 3:10), with further inferences of "submission" and "humiliation" such as Deuteronomy 22:24, and of "affliction" (1 Kings 2:26). The latter appears in the Psalms as ANAV (ענו) rather than ANAH (Psalms 9:13, 10:12, 10:17, 22:27 et al; though two of those, as you will see at the links, are questionable) and may well be one of those instances where two similar words of very different meanings become merged into one over time (compare "curb" and "kerb" or "storey" and "story" in modern American English; though the two meanings are radically different, the first of these spellings has disappeared in both instances).





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