Shamah

שמה

Genesis 36:13 names him as a son of Re'u-El; his brothers were Nachat (נחת), Zerach (זרח) and Mizah (מזה); but the end of the same verse seems to say that they were the sons, not grandsons, of Basmat, one of Esav's wives.

1 Samuel 16:9 and 17:13 name him as a son of Yishai (יִשַׁי - Jesse) and brother of David, but 2 Samuel 13:3 calls him Shim'a (שמעה) with an Ayin (ע), and surprisingly, almost certainly erroneously, Shim'a (שמעא) with both an Ayin (ע) and an Aleph (א) in 1 Chronicles 2:13.

There is also:

1 Chronicles 11:27: Shamot (שמות).

and even:

1 Chronicles 27:8 - Sham'hut (שמהות).

The root is not obvious, and the variants with Aleph suggest that there is both a Yehudit and an Aramaic, possibly the same root with different spellings, possibly two different roots - which may sound strange, but think how many words have come into English from Norse, from Norman, from Latin etc, and sometimes the Norman was originally Norse, but sometimes it was originally Latin... languages do that all the time. So it may be Yehudit Shem (שם) = a name; or it may be Aramaic Shama (שמא) = desert?

And then there is the Ayin version, which suggests that it wants to be from Sham'a (שמע) = "to hear", and this is supported by Shemu'ah (שמועה), which is used in 1 Samuel 4:19 to mean "a message" or "tidings" of the annunciatory kind, and in Isaiah 53:1 and Jeremiah 10:22 and 49:14 to mean "instruction" or "teaching" in the very specific sense of a message sent from the deity. If Shemו-El (שְׁמוּאֵל) were in fact Shema-El (שמעאל), it would make a fascinating correspondence with Yishma-El (יִשְׁמָעֵאל), Av-Raham's son by Hagar (Genesis 16 ff), and also with Shim'on, Ya'akov's second-born.

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