TheBibleNet

Tid'al

תדעל

Genesis 14:1 refers to him as the "king of Goyim" (מלך גוים); he was one of those who took part in the War of the Kings. Goyim is today used as a generic term for "nations"; originally it was a distinct nation, somewhere to the north-east of Bavel (Babylon) and the term attached, in the same way that Ashkenaz and Sepharad appear to have been randomly chosen for the mediaeval Jews of central Europe and Spain respectively.

The root means "fear" or "reverence", from the Samaritan root Da'al (דעל) = "to fear", according to Gesenius. Samaritan? Rather anachronistic? Presumably he means that it came into Yehudit through the Shimronim, when they were brought to settle in Yisra-El after the conquest in 586 BCE.

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Teyma

תימא

Genesis 25:15 - a son of Yishma-El.

The Septuagint changes it to Teyman (תימן), linking him to that Edomite tribe; but this is probably erroneous.

Isaiah 21:14 and Jeremiah 25:23, also Job 6:19, make it a country of the northern Arabian desert, on the borders of Assyria; whereas Teyman was in eastern Edom, possibly the area known today as Yemen though Edom never stretched that far.

In Arabic Teyma means "untilled land" and is also used for scrub desert.

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Tevach

טבה

Genesis 22:24 mames him as a son of Nachor.

The word was a wrightname - like Tailor, Smith and Baker in English, they designate a trade - this one being the ancient equivalent of the Shochet, the man who slayed the animals on the altar of sacrifice; and also the chief executioner who slayed men on the block. It was a job, not a person, and it appears most significantly in the Yoseph story (Genesis 37:36; 39:1 et al), where Sar Ha Tabach (סר הטבח) is translated as "baker" when it should really be translated as the "royal executioner", though whether he executed orders or people, or indeed both, may be a matter of context.

See also 2 Kings 25:8, Jeremiah 39:9 and 41:10, all three of which speak of Nevu-Zaradan, Nebuchadnezzar's Rav Tavachim (נְבוּזַרְאֲדָן רַב טַבָּחִים), who first comes to warn the Beney Yisra-El, then to take them into captivity; not a task normally delegated by Emperors to their chief baker.

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Terach

תרח

The son of Nachor the Elder and father of Av-Ram, Nachor the Younger and Haran. According to the Book of Jubilees he was called Terach = "suffering", after flocks of ravens ravaged the crops of Ur. Some sources say Terach married twice: Amitlai the daughter of Bar Nevo and Edna the daughter of an elder kinsman named Av-Ram; and that Av-Ram was named for Edna's father. Other versions say that Terach had a third wife, Jessica bat Kesed, who was Av-Ram's mother. Av-Ram's wife Sarai is also said to be the daughter of one of Terach's wives, but it is not clear which. Some versions make Av-Ram the youngest, others the eldest: as Nachor bears his paternal grandfather's name it is logical to see him as the eldest; just as Av-Ram bears the name of Edna's father, which is the normal custom for the second son.

An Assyrian inscription of the 9th century BCE refers to Til Turahi near Charan.

Genesis 11:24 names him as Av-Ram's father, as does Joshua 24:2, though the latter refers to Av-Raham rather than Av-Ram.

Numbers 33:27 and 28 name Tarach (תָרַח) as a station of the Beney Yisra-El in the wilderness; though all translators automatically render this as Terach, as they do his name in Genesis 11:24. In the case of the name this is probably correct, as references to him afterwards all name him as Teracgh; in the case of this caravanserai however there is no evidence for the alteration.

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Teman, Teyman

תימן

The word means south or southland or southern quarter.

Genesis 36:11 and 34 state that Esav had a grandson of that name, his father being Eli-Phaz. A "chief of Teman" is twice mentioned in a passage that also names Chusham (חושם) of the southland as a king of Edom.

Eli-Phaz the Temani was also one of Iyov's (Job's) comforters (Job 4:1 ff) - odd coincidence that he has both parts of the same name.

Teymeni (תֵּימְנִי) in 1 Chronicles 4:6 is almost certainly a variant of the same name.

A town and a country both bear the name, and are referred to in Jeremiah 49:7; Ezekiel 25:13, et al. The country is probably what we now think of as the Yemen.

The town of Timnah (תִמְנָה) was one of the most ancient in Kena'an, given to Yehudah at first (Joshua 15:10 and 57) but later transferred - somewhat surprisingly, given its location(s), to Dan (Joshua 19:43).

Judges 14:1 (in which Shimshon/Samson sees a woman at Timnah who he wants for a wife) and 2 Chronicles 28:18 (which describes the area in which King David slew Gol-Yat-Goliath) both make it clear that it was in the territory, or at least the aspirational territory, of the Pelishtim, and we know that Pelishtim may be the same thing as Dan, and therefore makes the transfer from Yehudah to Dan, provided it means Dan before it moved to La'ish, more plausible. Gesenius states that it lay to the east of Edom, which was way beyond the reach of the Pelishtim or the Beney Dan, so we can assume that he is speaking of the country.

This Timnah should not be confused with Timna (תמנע), the aboriginal gorge near Eilat on the Red Sea. That Timna is spelled with a final Ayin/ע, where the Dan/Yehudah/Peleshet town has a Hey/ה). There is also a Timna in the Yemen, the capital of the Qataban kingdom, which may be the source of the name.

The word may also be a variant form of Yamin (ימין) which means "right" in the directional sense; east is generally right on a compass in the northern hemisphere; interestingly, the region we know as Teman coincides precisely with the modern Yemen, being the southernmost quarter of Arabia, and from Yemen to Yamin is no great distance (linguistically).

Psalm 78:26 uses Teymanah to mean "the southern wind", and Exodus 26:18 and 27:9 as an alternative to Negbah (נגבה) for the direction "south". Isaiah 43:6 and Job 9:9 likewise use it simply to mean "south".

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Tamar

תמר

Literally the date-palm; from a root meaning "to stand erect", including the phallic and towers.

Ezekiel 47:19 and 48:28 makes it a town on the southern border, following the definition of the borders given in Numbers 34:3 ff. That text identifies Tamar, by implication at least, with Kadesh Barne'a, which Numbers 20:3 ff also calls Merivah, the place where Mosheh struck the rock to draw out water. I only mention this because, if Tamar and Kadesh Barne'a and Merivah are all the same place - one the palm-shrine, one the town, one the spring - then Mosheh and the Beney Yisra-El spent a great deal of those forty years of wandering actually already well inside what would become Yisra-El! Indeed, wandering homelessly in precisely those locations where Sha'ul would pursue David during his "wilderness" years! Are we then in the realms of mythology, or history?

Genesis 38:6 makes her the daughter-in-law of Yehudah, and has an interesting tale of harlotry and incest which is explained in the textual commentaries, and which is an alternate version of the rape in 2 Samuel 13, where she is a daughter of King David whose son Amnon beds by force.

2 Samuel 14:27 however makes her a daughter of Av-Shalom (Absalom), where previously she was his sister.

But really she is the goddess in one of her classic symbolic forms, the highly sexual date-palm whose bright orange fruit suggest nothing so much as testicles.

The Arabians worshipped the Palm of Nejran as a goddess. The god of Byblos was born under a palm tree, which makes him a variation of Osher (Osiris), as the palm grew around his coffin when it was washed up.

The English river Tamar is thought to come from the the legend of Tamara the Water Nymph, whose story you can read here, and which has absolutely nothing but pure coincidence to do with Biblical Tamar.

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Tachash

תחש

Genesis 22:24 names him as a son of Re'umah, Betu-El's concubine. Verses 21-24 list the children of Milkah (מלכה) = the Queen of Heaven, and Nachor (נחור) = the bull-god/sun-god, as Uts (עוּץ), Buz (בּוּז), Kemu-El (קְמוּאֵל), Kesed (כֶּשֶׂד), Chazo (חֲזוֹ), Pildash (פִּלְדָּשׁ), Yidlaph (יִדְלָף) and Betu-El (בְּתוּאֵל), significantly the lastborn in the light of the ultiogeniture-primogeniture conflict that will recur throughout the Tanach. Added to these are Rivkah (רִבְקָה - Rebecca), Betu-El's daughter, and the sons of Re'umah: Tevach (טֶבַח), Gacham (גַּחַם), Tachash (תַּחַשׁ) and Ma'achah (מַעֲכָה).

It is surely no coincidence that this gives exactly the same twelve sons and one daughter that Ya'akov would later have; that his list would likewise include sons of concubines; that Ya'akov's mother was Rivkah; that Nachor was Av-Ram's brother; etc etc. What we have is an earlier version or a regional variation on the Beney Yisra-El, and like the Beney Yisra-El it is an astrological chart first; which is to say a family tree of the gods, each represented in the form of a constellation of the heavens, ruled by the sun-father and moon-mother: the Arthurian round table. The same pattern can be seen in the families of Esav and Yishma-El.

Exercise for B'nei Mitzvah classes: Look up the meanings of all these names and work out a zodiacal chart; then compare it with the Ishmaelite and Israelite and Greek and Arthurian and other equivalents. Note that the temple duties of the tribes coincide with their zodiacal month and that often the tribal name denotes the temple duty, or is linked to a particular god of the duadecatheon (to coin a term) - the twelve-god ruling pantheon. Some help may be found in my notes to the Number Twelve.

Tachash is a complex word, taken to be an animal though the etymology is obscure. Orot Tachasim (עורות תחשים) in Numbers 4:6 means "skin", but not of goats, despite the mistranslation in the link. The word appears several times in Exodus (25:5, 26:14, 35:23 et al), always related to the making of specific items for the Sanctuary; Ezekiel 16:10 has women's shoes made of it, from which many logically presume leather; but from which animal? Badger, seal and weasel have been conjectured, though the link here prefers dolphin.

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