ירד
Genesis 5:15 and 1 Chronicles 4:18 name him as the son of Mehalal-El (מהללאל); he fathered Chanoch (חנוך), or Enoch, at the age of 162, and lived to be 962; his other sons and daughters are neither named nor numbered.
The Chronicles text is one of the leading competitors for my special prize for "the worst redacted piece in the entire Tanach", though to be fair it isn't the Redactor who is culpable here, but a strange conspiracy of no-doubt-well-intentioned translators, Jewish, Christian and secular, in the centuries since, who have undertaken their own further redaction, and for reasons that make absolutely no sense. The text in Yehudit goes as follows:
VE ISHTO HA YEHUDIYAH YALDAH ET YERED AVI GEDOR
וְאִשְׁתּוֹ הַיְהֻדִיָּה יָלְדָה אֶת יֶרֶד אֲבִי גְדוֹר
which is really very plain:
"And his wife, who was from the tribe of Yehudah, bore Yered the father of Gedor."
The New International Version has no problem with this, simply preferring "gave birth to" where I have chosen "bore". The New Living Translation gets the meaning right, but is overly complex in expressing it: "He married a woman from Judah, who became the mother of Jered (the father of Gedor)..." English Standard Version is convoluted, and of course it too has Jered for Yered, but still correct: "And his Judahite wife bore Jered the father of Gedor...".
But elsewhere... The New American Standard Bible simply anachronises with "His Jewish wife bore Jered the father of Gedor...", ignoring, or unaware, that the concept "Jewish" is historically inapplicable before 70 CE - a mere seventeen hundred years after this event.
And then the King James: "And his wife Jehudijah bare Jered the father of Gedor..." Jehudijah? Is this sourced from one of the Jewish translations? Maybe it just borrowed Wycliffe, which has "Also Jehudijah, his wife, childed Jered, the father of Gedor..."
The Orthodox has: "And his isha Yehudiyah bore Yered avi Gedor" which is a new technique on me - translate every other word and transliterate the remainder. Bizarre! ("isha" means "wife" and "avi" means "father", but it's "Yehudiyah" which is the business here).
But that Orthodox text is quite recent compared with the 1917 JPS (Jewish Publication Society) edition, the one that serviced Soncino, Hertz and Plaut in their commentaries, which are now the main texts of Liberal, Reform and Conservative (United Synagogue) communities throughout the world; its version reads: "and his wife Hajehudijah bore Jered the father of Gedor..." Hajehudijah? Exactly the same in the Chabad text, Mechon-Mamre. Hajehudijah! What a splendid name. If ever I have another daughter I shall name her Hajehudijah, with the js pronounced like jam.
The name Yered means "descent". Christians may be interested to note that Yared is mentioned in Luke 3:37, and interestingly rendered as Yared, which is probably correct.
In one sense that is all there is to say. However, there is also the endlessly repeated question: why would anyone give a child such a name?
Genesis 4:17 offers a variation in the genealogy, giving Chanoch (Enoch) as a son of Kayin (Cain) and making Irad (עירד) Chanoch's son. Which version of the genealogy is correct? And which version of the name? Has the Ayin (ע) been dropped or added? See notes to Irad/Arad.
The river Yarden (Jordan - ירדן) shares a root with Yared. This is easily explained by the fact that rivers begin high up in hills and "descend" to the sea; all rivers are thus "Jordan", as in Celtic all rivers are "Avon" - all except the Thames and the Tamar anyway, for which see my notes to Tamar. The three major rivers of the Semitic world were the Tigris, the Euphrates and, though smaller and less significant, the Yarden; at the point where each obtains the plains, a city stands, sacred to the moon: Ur, Charan and Yericho (Jericho). The moon too "descends", in the waning period of every month.
By logic we ought to be able to find an equivalent moon-shrine in the heights from which these rivers spring, and if we could, we could safely wager that the notion of waxing or "ascent" would be incorporated in their names. But there are so many of these Ramot, or hill-shrines, we would need to sift through the entire database to locate the one we wanted; and besides, rivers spring from many sources, that conjoin at some later point. Presumably there were small shrines at every source. Not presumably; we know there were. And they were all sacred to the river-goddess and her water nymphs, surrounded by tree-gods etc etc.
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The Argaman Press
This was a really neat read.
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