Tol'a

תלע


Genesis 46:13 names him as the eldest son of Yisaschar. His brothers are Tol'a (תולע), Puvah (פֻוָּה), Yov (יוב) and Shimron (שִׁמְרוֹן). The name means "a worm".

1 Chronicles 7:1 gives the same information, but then adds that "The sons of Tol'a were Uzi (עֻזִּי), Repha-Yah (רְפָיָה), Yeri-El (ירִיאֵל), Yachmai (יַחְמַי), Yivsam (יִבְשָׂם) and Shemu-El (שְׁמוּאֵל), "heads of their fathers' households. The sons of Tol'a were mighty men of valour in their generations; their number in the days of David was 22,600".

But what a strange name to give your first-born son! Tal'a = "a worm", especially one bred on putrefaction; i.e. linked to the death-cult and the Underworld. See also Exodus 16:20; Isaiah 14:11 and 66:24; Jonah 4:7; Deuteronomy 28:39 and Psalm 22:7, all of which use the word with this meaning.

Judges 10:1 informs us that "after Avi-Melech died, there arose to save Yisra-El Tol'a the son of Pu'ah, the son of Dodo, a man of Yisaschar; and he dwelt in Shamir¹ in the hill-country of Ephrayim"; in other words a Judge of Yisra-El - for twenty-three years, according to the verse that follows. Given that the Judges were not judges as we think of them today, but oracular prophets, and that the snake was the principal oracular beast, perhaps the name Tol'a isn't quite so surprising; we are in the realms of Nechushtan and of the Nachash of Eden etc. The Avi-Melech mentioned here is not the one from the Av-Raham and Yitschak stories in Genesis, but the man made king of Shechem in Judges 9. [¹ see my notes to Judges 10:2 for Shamir]

cf Numbers 26:23 for Tol'a'i, the Tol'a'ites who were Tol'a's tribal descendants.

Tol'a is also used to mean "scarlet" (some translations prefer "crimson"), in Lamentations 4:5 and Isaiah 1:18, which links to the scarlet thread on Parets' ankle (Genesis 38), and to the three shades of colour used in the priestly vestments and the adornments of the ark and the Torah. The scarlet is Tola'at Shani (תוֹלַעַת הַשָּׁנִי), the purple Argaman (אַרְגָּמָן), and the blue Techelet (תְּכֵלֶת) - cf Exodus 39:1. This leaves open the question: was he named Tol'a because he wore the priestly robes, or was he named Tol'a because he was an oracular prophet? Entirely possible of course that he was named Tol'a because his parents liked the name!

The oddity of two such different meanings for the same word leads me to wonder if there might have been a reason for it, that requires context to fathom. I am going to make a speculation, and leave it here for others to wonder: we have no idea what was the name by which the ancients knew the snail that we call the murex, the one that was used to produce those dyes which made the three colours of the priestly garments possible. But the way the worm is described in all of the references linked above, not just a worm but a very slimy sort of worm, a kind of living putrescence, could very easily describe the snail, rather better indeed than it does the regular garden worm. Was Tol'a "scarlet" because Tol'a wasn't "a worm", but "the murex"?

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