אפרתה
Traditionally the root has been reckoned to be from APHAR (אפר) which, with a first-letter Aleph (א), means "ashes", and is often confused with EPHER with an Ayin (ע), which means dust, and is used for grave-dust. However, it is plain and obvious that the root cannot be APHAR, because that ignores the fourth-letter Tav (ת). In fact the root is PERAT, in its Aramaic spelling; the first-letter Aleph (א) being the reason why Sumerian Perat eventually became English Euphrates.
Genesis 35:16/19 tells us that it was on the way to Beit Lechem Ephratah that Rachel died in childbirth, naming her son Ben-Oni (Ya'akov however named him Bin-Yamin).
Genesis 48:7 again identifies Ephratah with Beit Lechem (Bethehem).
Other references occur in Ruth 4:11 (where the two are identified adjacently, but not as the same place), Micah 5:1 (which definitely identifies the two as one) and Psalm132:6.
1 Chronicles 2:19 names Ephrat (אפרת) as the third wife of Kalev ben Chetsron (כָלֵב בֶּן חֶצְרוֹן) - not to be confused with Kalev ben Yephunneh, who was one of Mosheh's twelve spies - and the mother of Chur (חוּר). However 1 Chronicles 2:50 corrects this to Ephratah (אפרתה) and 1 Chronicles 2:24 says that Chetsron died at Kalev-Ephratah (not Kalev-Ephrat as most English versions render it).
1 Chronicles 4:4 has Chur naming his eldest son Ephratah, and states that it was Ephratah, or possibly Chur himself, who founded Beit Lechem, confirming the link of the two names, but also giving us the first evidence of an attempt to divert the meaning away from its Babylonian source and connection. There is nothing in the structure of that phrase to suggest whether the founder of Beit Lechem was male or female, though the name Ephratah has the normal feminine ending and is treated as female previously. We can thus conclude that Beit Lechem had a matriarchal origin, which may explain why it became so important a town in the non-Yahwist mythologies and cults: the birthplace of David and Jesus inter alia. 1 Samuel 17:12 names David as "the son of an Ephrati of Beit Lechem in Yehudah named Jesse"; Ephrathite being used here, as elsewhere, as virtually a synonym for Beit Lechem.
Traditionally the root has been reckoned to be from APHAR (אפר) which, with a first-letter Aleph (א), means "ashes", and is often confused with EPHER with an Ayin (ע), which means dust, and is used for grave-dust. However, it is plain and obvious that the root cannot be APHAR, because that ignores the fourth-letter Tav (ת). In fact the root is PERAT, in its Aramaic spelling; the first-letter Aleph (א) being the reason why Sumerian Perat eventually became English Euphrates.
Genesis 35:16/19 tells us that it was on the way to Beit Lechem Ephratah that Rachel died in childbirth, naming her son Ben-Oni (Ya'akov however named him Bin-Yamin).
Genesis 48:7 again identifies Ephratah with Beit Lechem (Bethehem).
Other references occur in Ruth 4:11 (where the two are identified adjacently, but not as the same place), Micah 5:1 (which definitely identifies the two as one) and Psalm132:6.
1 Chronicles 2:19 names Ephrat (אפרת) as the third wife of Kalev ben Chetsron (כָלֵב בֶּן חֶצְרוֹן) - not to be confused with Kalev ben Yephunneh, who was one of Mosheh's twelve spies - and the mother of Chur (חוּר). However 1 Chronicles 2:50 corrects this to Ephratah (אפרתה) and 1 Chronicles 2:24 says that Chetsron died at Kalev-Ephratah (not Kalev-Ephrat as most English versions render it).
1 Chronicles 4:4 has Chur naming his eldest son Ephratah, and states that it was Ephratah, or possibly Chur himself, who founded Beit Lechem, confirming the link of the two names, but also giving us the first evidence of an attempt to divert the meaning away from its Babylonian source and connection. There is nothing in the structure of that phrase to suggest whether the founder of Beit Lechem was male or female, though the name Ephratah has the normal feminine ending and is treated as female previously. We can thus conclude that Beit Lechem had a matriarchal origin, which may explain why it became so important a town in the non-Yahwist mythologies and cults: the birthplace of David and Jesus inter alia. 1 Samuel 17:12 names David as "the son of an Ephrati of Beit Lechem in Yehudah named Jesse"; Ephrathite being used here, as elsewhere, as virtually a synonym for Beit Lechem.
My own view is that the full name of the town was Beit Lechem Ephratah, "the temple of the corn-god of the Euphrates", which is to say Tammuz. Jesus was born in a "manger" there, manger coming from the Greek translation of the Yehudit word for "threshing-floor", which was, so to speak, the nave of the corn-god's temple. The founding mother is thus Innana, an early form of Ishtar, which of course gives us the word Easter. Rachel's death and burial here allows us to treat her as an Aramaean form of Inanna. That she served as fertility-goddess is still in evidence to this day - witness the number of modern Israeli women who queue at her shrine at Tseltsach (usually pronounced Zelzah in English - see 1 Samuel 10:2) like pilgrims at Lourdes. Ben-Oni is the Egyptian form of the corn-god - the name meaning the "sacred" or "divine child of On", the city which the Greeks called Heliopolis, and which was the centre of the Egyptian sun-disc cult at the time of Akhenaten. Jesus' crucifixion echoes the nailing of Tammuz to the winnowing-board (compare the English John Barleycorn"), and the location, beside the Temple on Mount Mor-Yah, was previously, before King David purchased the site (2 Samuel 24:18-25), the threshing-floor of Ornah, or Arawna (the Gaelic Arawn is probably a variation), the Rachel of the Tammuz myths. Tammuz continued to be worshipped at the north gate of the Temple right through to Yechezek-El's (Ezekiel's) time, as we know from his complaint about it in Ezekiel 8:14.
Ephratah (אפרתה) and Ephrayim (אפרים) are also frequently, and erroneously, treated as synonyms, a consequence of the first error, which sees Ephratah as a branch from the root EPHER, which does indeed give Ephrayim.
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