Ra'amah

רעמה


Genesis 10:7 names it as a city of the Ethiopian Kushites, in the descent of Cham, though the Septuagint follows Strabo in treating it as Mesopotamian Ra'amah, on the Persian Gulf, and most modern commentators now follow this as well. Once again the dispute is over the location of Kush, which is the name for Ethiopia, but also, sometimes, for an unspecified area of southern Mesopotamia.

Ezekiel 27:22 speaks of it in conjunction with several known cities of Arabia.

The root is probably Ra'am (רעם) = "thunder". Psalm 96:11 and 98:7 use it for the roaring of the sea, as does 1 Chronicles 16:32.

This name raises another question over Av-Ram and Av-Raham, and whether the name Av-Ram might originally have been Av-Rem (אברם) i.e. the buffalo-god, from Re'em (ראם), or Av-Ra'am (אברעם) i.e. the thunder-god, as per Ra'mah here; both epithets were used for El/Zeus etc, so it is actually possible that both are intended. 

Psalm 29:3, Job 40:9 and 1 Samuel 2:10 all use it for the thunder of YHVH; see also Psalm 77:19 - which reminds us also of Eli-Yahu (Elijah) in his cave in 1 Kings 19:11-13 - and 81:8. 

Job 26:14 uses it to mean the combined powers of all the gods of the whole universe. The suggestion then is that Av-Ram might have been the name for the thunder-god, the equivalent of Thor, Zeus, Odin, Wotan, Ba'al Chadad, and many others, while Av-Raham as "great father" is the equivalent of Ouranos, Brahma etcetera, but that the two became amalgamated as one when monotheism began to replace polytheism around the 5th century BCE. The hypothesis requires more textual and non-textual evidence, but it is certainly not without its plausibility.

Despite the coincidence of the first three letters, there is no link to Ra-Meses (Rameses - רעמסס), the Egyptian Pharaoh.

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