Beri'ah

בריעה

Genesis 46:17 names him as one of the sons of Asher; his brothers were Yimnah, Yishvah and Yishvi, and his sister was Serach. His own sons were named Chever (חֶבֶר) and Malki-El (מַלְכִּיאֵל).

1 Chronicles 7:31 likewise has a Beri-Yah (בריעה) who was a son of Asher, with the same two sons, Chever and Malki-El, the latter of whom founded the city of Birzayit (בִרְזָיִת). Genesis 46:17 echoes this, though a grammatical idiosyncrasy renders his name there as Veri'ah (בְרִיעָה).

The root is normally thought to be linked to the name Bera (ברע) - the king of Sedom at the time of the War of the Kings - and therefore to mean "a gift". Probably it was Beri-Yah, and the gift came from the goddess.

1 Chronicles 7:23 has another Beri'ah (בְּרִיעָה), or again it may be Beri-Yah, who was a son of Ephrayim, born, it reads, after the men of Gat had slain his other sons; the name Beri-Yah (or it may be Beri'ah), is given because "he was born in the time of evil which was in his house" A different meaning from Asher's Beri-Yah? A son to replace his murdered elder siblings would indeed be considered a gift from the goddess, so both meanings are in fact viable here.

1 Chronicles 8:13 makes him a son of El-Pa'al (אלפעל) in the tribe of Bin-Yamin - clearly a misreading of El-Ba'al - who lived in Ayalon after expelling the inhabitants of Gat (I wonder if that was revenge for what happened to Ephrayim's sons); which might suggest that this Beri-Yah was a tribe and not a man (or if a man, the princely title and the tribal designation were the same), who moved out of Ephrayim and into Ayalon, first defeated by the Beney Gat, then winning the right to stay in their new settlement. For Beney Gat we can read Pelishtim, of which Gat was their capital; it was the town where Shimshon was born, and where David went to procure a hundred foreskins as the bride-price for Sha'ul's daughter Michal (1 Samuel 18).

If it was indeed an accidental, or even a deliberate mis-writing of El-Ba'al, then it describes the most ancient Kena'anite polytheism, in which El was the father and Ba'al the son. It would follow logically that the goddess and the "reborn son" would also be expurgated, and we have seen repeatedly the replacement of Yud (י) by Ayin (ע) as a means of doing that to conceal the name of the Chevronite mother-goddess Yah. Assuming this to be the case here, it would render the original name of Ber'iah as Bar-Yah (בר-יה); Bar is the Aramaic equivalent of Ben = "a son", though it is primarily used as a word for "a prince". Thus Bar-Yah could mean "son" or "prince" of the goddess Yah, an appropriate title for the son of El-Ba'al, comparable with King David and King Shelomoh's Yedid-Yah, "the beloved of Yah". But the Aramaic is obscure, and anachronistic; worth trying out the hypothesis, but it seems to me to leak badly.

Beri'ah's daughter is named in 1 Chronicles 7:24 as She'erah (שארה), who built both the upper and lower parts of Beit Choron (בית הרון) as well as Uzen She'erah (אזן שארה), neither of which are Yehudit names, both of which look like equally amateurish attempts to disguise the name of Asherah. This Beri'ah's sons were named Rephach, Resheph, Telach, Tachan, La'dan, Ami-Hud, Eli-Shama, Nun and Yehoshu'a. from whom comes a great genealogy leading at last to Yehoshu'a bin Nun himself; a fact which must induce considerable scepticism about the authenticity of the list, and was presumably an attempt to aggrandise Yehoshu'a, as was done with David later, by bestowing on him a "proven" pedigree!

Or it may have been an attempt to disguise a rather different list. Include Beri-Yah himself, and the two murdered brothers - Ezer and El-Ad, and we have yet another family tree with twelve males and a female, looking remarkably like Robin Hood, Maid Marian and the twelve knights of Sherwood Forest - or any of the other versions of the horoscope you care to pick as a parallel.

1 Chronicles 7:28 informs us that the tribe inhabited the towns surrounding, and the shrine of, Beit-El, east as far as Na'aran, west to Gezer (known today as Abu Shushah), as far north as Shechem and across all the way to Azah (Gaza) - which is a pretty massive territory and just happens to encompass all the major shrines connected with precisely this version of the pantheon. Princes of Yah they must indeed have been, these Ephrayimites, to possess so large a portion of southern Kena'an, far more than, say, King Sha'ul could ever claim to have sovereigned, and quite specifically that area which is the focus of all the major Biblical stories - most especially, it must be said, those in the Ephrayimite Books of Chronicles where they appear!

Beit Choron (בית חרון) means "place of the hollow" - a gorge presumably. There were said to be two towns, called upper and lower because one was in the north of Ephrayim (Joshua 16:5 and 21:22), the other in the south on the Benjamite border (Joshua 16:3 and 18:13). She'erah (שארה) who built it, is, as suggested above, yet another variant on the name of the goddess Asherah, so we can read the word "built" as meaning for her, not by her - the prince in his role as god-surrogate marrying his sister as the goddess is reflected several times in Av-Raham-Sarah and Yitschak-Rivkah stories, and is a fundamental rite of her worship.

Uzen She'erah is more complex. Uzen (אזן) can mean an "implement" or "weapon" (cf Deuteronomy 23:14), and Ozen (אזן), from the same root, is "an ear". Joshua 19:34 refers to Aznot Tabor (אזנות תבור), "the Ears of Tabor", an obvious enough figure of speech since the mountain has twin peaks (though the Irish equivalent makes the figure of speech out of her breasts, naming them "The Paps of Anu", which is much more logical for a fertility goddess). Uzen is presumably a deliberate error for Ozen, and Ozen should be read as figurative, indicating a second shrine to the same goddess on the adjacent hill-top: Ozen Asherah, "the ears of Asherah", much as Ashterot Karnayim, "the horns of Asherah", elsewhere. This may in fact be the erroneous reason for naming two towns as Beit Choron, the one upper and the other lower. The famous slaughter at Beit Choron in the time of the Maccabees was at the "lower" site, on the Benjamite border (1 Maccabees 3:15-26).

Rephach (רפח) means "to be rich", as does Asher, the male version of the goddess Asherah.

Resheph (רשפ) means "a flame" and is used for lightning, giving us a further link to Ba'al in his role as storm-god.

Telach (תלח) means "a fracture", the one part of this riddle for which TheBibleNet has not so much as a supposition.

Tachan is "a camp" (Numbers 26:35 et al), but probably the intention here is TECHINAH (תחנה), from a different root, CHANAN, meaning "grace" or "mercy".

La'dan (לעדן) is a word only found in Chronicles; the Arabic equivalent means "order".

Ami-Hud, literally, means "my friend is majestic", so further explanation is obviously unnecessary.

Eli-Shama, literally "my god has heard", so likewise no further explanation needed.

Nun, and I suspect the meaning here is less significant than the fact that Yehoshu'a was Bin Nun, which may mean the biological son of a man named Nun, except that he is Bin, and only he and Bin-Yamin have that variation. Logic says it was a god-name - but which god? Or goddess even, given that the Babylonians have Inanna as their mother-goddess, and the Egyptians have Naunet, the wife of Nun, as one of theirs.

Yehoshu'a: Mosheh's heir, who was, it hardly needs stating, an Ephrayimite.

Do we then have a genealogical table, or a list of the twelve tribes and one sister-tribe of Ephrayim, or the list of the heavenly constellations, led by the sun and moon, which were the Ephrayimite Olympus? Probably a merging of all three, the aim, as always with the Tanach, to establish a plausible history while losing as much as possible of the no-longer-acceptable mythology and cult.

*

1 Chronicles 23:11 notes that, in David's enrollment of the Levite priesthood, a Beri'ah son of Shim'i, grandson of Gershon, Levi's son, was reckoned with his brother Ye'ush as a single family since they had too few children to do Temple duty. What is intriguing about this reference is the time-scale: to think that a great-grandson of Mosheh could serve in the time of King David, when the one is usually reckoned, even by the most conservative estimate, to be three hundred years earlier than the other.

1 Chronicles 3:22 also has a Bariyach, (בריח) one of the innumerable sons of King David. It has no connection whatever with the other names listed here. In fact it comes from Livro'ach which means "to flee" and was probably the nickname of some refugee whom David took into his band of mercenaries. But people get confused between the Heys and the Chets, so I thought I would point it out.

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