Magdi-El

מגדיאל


Genesis 36:43 names him as an Edomite chieftain (cf 1 Chronicles 1:54).

The name links to Magad (מגד) = "nobility", "honour" and "glory"; but which is written in Aramaic and later Yehudit as Nagid (נגיד) = "prince". Thus we can read the Edomite Magdi-El as "prince of El", a typical royal title.

From the same root comes Migdal (מגדל), which came to mean "a tower" in later Yehudit, apparently (thus per the scholars) from a confusion with Migdad (מגדד), which means "a crowded place", from the root Gadad (גדד), though it might just as likely have been that it took a royal to get one built, and the "honour" of so doing was thus conveyed: the Migdalim were more for the observation of the heavens than the look-out for enemies, so much "glory" in the doing of this.
Jeremiah 44:1 and 46:14 refer to a town on the northern border of Lower Egypt (the term is confusing to Europeans, who think of lower as being south, and upper as being north, because that is the angle from which we look at the map; Lower Egypt was in fact the northern part) named Migdal (מגדל), as does Ezekiel 29:10 and 30:6; this is almost certainly the Migdol (מגדל) mentioned in Exodus 14:2 and Numbers 33:7.


There are numerous places which contain Migdal as part of their name, all of them translated as "tower" though this may be mistaken; properly they should be regarded as having been royal cities of the Beney Kena'an, from the meaning of Migdal as "nobility, honour and glory". Thus Migdal-El (מגדל-אל) in Naphtali (Joshua 19:38); Migdal Gad (מגדל-גד) in Yehudah (Joshua 15:37); Migdal Eder (מגדל-עדר) near Beit-Lechem (Genesis 35:21, Micah 4:8) etc.

The town of Megiddo (מגדו) was a fortified city of the Beney Menasheh, within the boundaries of Yisaschar, formerly a royal city of the Beney Kena'an, which entered history through the rather silly eschatological prediction of Har Megiddo (הר מגדו) = Armageddon.

The name Mary Magdalene means Mary from Migdal, known in the Gospels as Magdala, in her case the tiny village of Migdal (some Christian versions call it Magadan) on the north-west corner of the Sea of Galilee. Cf Mark 16:9, Luke 8:2, Matthew 15:39 et al.

Copyright © 2019 David Prashker

All rights reserved

The Argaman Press