Nevayot

נביות

Genesis 25:13 names him as the eldest of the twelve sons of Yishma-El; however the feminine ending, and the meanings of the other sibling-names, leave me wondering if he wasn't originally female. See the next two paragraphs, and especially the blog-pages on Machalat and Basmat, rather than me repeating the entire argument here.

Genesis 28:9 has his sister Machalat (מחלת), who marries Esav (Esau); slightly odd, but not untypical in the Tanach, that 25:13 did not mention any sisters.

Genesis 36:3 makes it Basmat (בשמת), not Machalat, though still claiming she was the sister of Nevayot. Given Ya'akov's marriage to two sisters, it is not impossible that Esav married both.

Gesenius states that the Nevayot were almost certainly the Nabataeans, the ancient inhabitants of Petra in what is today Jordan. However we now know from archaeology etc that this cannot have been the case, as the Nabataeans did not come to Petra until very much later. Petra of course lies at the heart of Edom, so the identification is logical.

Isaiah 60:7 refers to the flocks of Kedar and the rams of Nevayot in its description of the coming of the Messiah. Kedar is a brother of Nevayot according to Genesis 25:13; given that the coming of the Messiah is intended astrologically as the rebirth of the sun in the heavens, and the twelve tribes as the 12 constellations, can we treat the flocks and rams as symbols and thereby read which star-signs the two tribes represent? And if so, self-evidently Aries, which happens to be the principal star-sign of the epoch of this text.

The name Nevayot probably means "high places" from the root Navah (נבי). The priestly Benjamite town of Nov (נוב) on one of the seven hills of Yeru-Shala'im (1 Samuel 21:2, 22:9-19; Nehemiah 11:32; Isaiah 10:32) is linked.

What would require much more scholarship to evince, and well worth the effort, is to deduce whether the Yehudit Navah (נבה) and the Chaldean word which comes into Yehudit as Nebo (נבו), or Nevi (נבאי) is also linked. Nevo (Nebo) was the mountain where Mosheh went to die (Deuteronomy 34:1); a Navi later became the Yehudit word for a prophet - the traditional Jewish explanation of the word Navi as being a diminutive of "niv sephatayim - fruit of the lips" (Isaiah 57:19) is pleasing, given the call of Yesha-Yahu in Isaiah 6:5, but otherwise fanciful; most especially because the Yehudit text doesn't actually say "niv sephatayim" anyway, but "nov sephatayim", which Hebrew scholars don't like, precisely because of the argument above, and so parenthesise as "niv" instead: the text appears in Yehudit scrolls as: נוב (נִיב) שְׂפָתָיִם.

Nebo is the Chaldean equivalent of the planetary deity Mercury and gives its name both to that mountain on the borders of Mo-Av on whose summit Mosheh went to die (Deuteronomy 32:49, 34:1; Numbers 32:3; Isaiah 15:2), and to a town in Yehudah where Mercury worship took place (Ezra 2:29, 10:43; Nehemiah 7:33). Given that "high places" (cf Giv-On, Giv'ah etc) were invariably hill shrines at which oracular prophecies were made, it seems only logical to draw the link - worth reading Shaul's coronation story in 1 Samuel 19:24 to understand the detail of these hallucinogenic acts of speaking in tongues. This would then identify Nevayot, Yishma-El's first-born, with the planet Mercury; and by surely no coincidence, the Egyptian founding father-god was named Geb, which may well be the source of the Giv part of each of those names.

See also 1 Chronicles 1:29.

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