Section VIII.—Later Israelite Names.

By the time the kingdom was established most of the Israelite names were becoming repetitions of former ones, and comparatively few fresh ones come to light, though there are a few sufficiently used to be worth cursorily noting down.

Hezekiah meant strength of the Lord, and in the Greek became Ezekias. Ezekiel is like it, meaning God will strengthen. The great prophet who was the chief glory of Hezekiah’s reign was Isaiah (the salvation of the Lord), made by Greek translators into Esaias, and thence called by old French and English, Esaie, or Esay. The Russians, who have all the old prophetic names, have Eesaia; but it is not easy to account for the choice of Ysaie le Triste as the name of the child of Tristram and Yseulte in the romance that carried on their history to another generation, unless we suppose that Ysaie was supposed to be the masculine of Yseulte! the one being Hebrew, and meaning as above, the other Keltic, and meaning a sight.

Contemporary with Hezekiah, and persecuted by the Assyrian monarch when he returned to Nineveh after the miraculous destruction of his host, was the blind Israelite of the captivity whose name is explained to have been probably Tobijah (the goodness of the Lord), a name occurring again in the prophet Zechariah, and belonging afterwards to one of the Samaritan persecutors. Probably, in Greek, came the variation of the names of the father and son; perhaps the latter was once meant for Tobides, the son of Tobias.

The marvellous element in the book of Tobit gained for it much popularity; scenes from it appeared in art. Thus Tobias had a diffusion in the later middle ages much greater than the names of his contemporaries of far more certain history, and in Ireland Toby has enjoyed the honour, together with Thaddeus and Timothy, of figuring as an equivalent for Tadgh, a poet.

Hephzibah (my delight is in her), was the wife of Hezekiah, and it may have been in allusion to her that Isaiah spoke of the land being called Hephsibah. It has been rather a favourite name in America, where it gets turned into Hepsy.

As Judah sinned more and more and her fate drew on, Jeremiah stood forth as her leading prophet. His name meant exalted of the Lord, and became Jeremias in the Greek, Jeremy in vernacular English. As the name of some of the early eastern saints it has had a partial irregular sort of use in the West, and is adopted direct from the prophet in the Greco-Slavonic Churches. The French, struck by the mournful strain of the prophet, use Jeremiade to express a lamentation; and the English are rather too ready to follow their example. Jeremy is considered as another variety of equivalent for the Gaelic Diarmaid, and this has led to the frequency of Jerry among families of Irish connection. In Switzerland, Jeremias is contracted into Meies or Mies; in Russia it is Jeremija; but nowhere has it been so illustrious in modern times as in the person of our own Jeremy Taylor. The king whom Jeremiah saw led into captivity was Zedekiah (justice of the Lord).

The prophet of the captivity, Daniel, bore in his name an amplification of that of Dan (a judge). The termination signified God the judge, and the alias Belteshazzar, imposed upon him by the Chaldean monarch, is considered to translate and heathenize the name, making Bel the judge. It is observable that Daniel never calls himself thus, though he gives these heathen titles to his three companions.

Daniel has always flourished as a name in the East. Daniel and Verda (a rose), were martyred by Shapoor in 344; another Daniel was crazy enough to succeed Simeon Stylites on his pillar; and thus the Armenian, Montenegrin, and Slavonian races are all much attached to Daniela, or Daniil, as they call it in Russia; or in Esthonia, Taniel or Tanni. The Welsh adopted it as Deiniol, the name of the saint who founded the monastery of Bangor, the High Choir, in the sixth century, and it was thus known to the Bretons; and in Ireland it was adopted as the equivalent to Domnall, Donacha, and other names from Don (or brown-haired), thus causing Dan to be one of the most frequent of Irish contractions.

St. Jerome “transfixed with a dagger”—with his pen—the additional chapters of the Book of Daniel relating to the story of Susanna, to show that he did not regard it as genuine, but, like the story of Judith, it was greatly more popular than the narratives in the canonical books, and was commemorated in ballad, mystery, tapestry, and painting. The name was properly Schuschannah (a lily), though we know it as Susannah. It belonged to one of the holy women at the sepulchre, and it was likewise in the calendar, for two virgin martyrs, named Susanna, had suffered in the times of persecution, and though not commemorated in the Western Church, Queen Susanna, the “Lily of Tiflis,” had died for the truth in the hands of Mahometans. The name has been chiefly popular in France and Switzerland, as in England. The Swiss contraction, Züsí-Ketti, for Susanne-Catherine, is quaint.^[19]

This may be the best place to mention the Aramean Tabitha, explained by St. Luke as the same as Dorcas (a roe or gazelle), the Greek word being from its full dark eye. Tabitha and Dorcas both have associations unsuited to the “dear gazelle.” As the charitable disciple raised by St. Peter, her names were endeared to the Puritans.

Of the minor prophets, the names have been little employed. Joel meant strong-willed; Amos, a burthen; Obadiah, servant of the Lord, has been slightly more popular, perhaps, in honour of him who hid the prophets in a cave, with whom the mediæval imagination confounded the prophet, so that loaves of bread are the emblem of Obadiah in ancient pictures of the twelve prophets. Even the Abbacuc, as the Apocrypha calls him, who, in the story of Bel and the Dragon is carried off by the hair to feed Daniel in the den of lions, seems to have been likewise supposed to be the same person in the strange notions of Scripture history that once floated among our forefathers. The name of Abacuck, or Habbakkuk, was conferred upon a child by one of the last persons one would have suspected of such a choice, namely, Mary, Queen of Scots. On her way to mass, she was waylaid by one of her caterers, who acquainted her that he had a child to be baptized, and desired her to give the name. “She said she would open the Bible in the chapel, and whatever name she cast up, that should be given to the child;” and for the child’s misfortune it proved to be ‘Abacuck!’ The name comes from the verb to clasp, and means embracing.

Micah is a contraction of Micaiah, and means “Who is like unto the Lord.” Nahum—to us connected with “Tate and Brady”—was consolation; Nehemiah expanded it, adding the Divine termination; Zephaniah is, protected of the Lord; Haggai (festival of the Lord), called Aggae, when brought through a Greek medium, is rather a favourite in Russia.

Zachariah (remembrance of the Lord), has been more in favour. After belonging to a king of Israel and to the priest murdered by King Jehoash, it came forth after the captivity as Zechariah with the prophet; and in the New Testament, as Zacharias, names the father of the Baptist; and the mysterious martyr who was to fill up the measure of the iniquity of the Jews; and again appears as Zaccheus, the publican of Jericho. It was rather frequent among Eastern Christians, and belonged to the pope who first invited the Franks into Italy to protect him from the Lombards; nor has it ever quite died away in the West, although nowhere popular.

Of those to whom these later prophets were sent, Ezra’s name is thought to be the same as that of Zerah, son of Judah, the rising of light, from whom likewise Heman, the writer of the 88th Psalm, is termed the Ezrahite. The name of Ezra is hardly to be recognized in that of Esdras, as the Greek translators rendered it.^[20] The house of Aphrah, mentioned in the Prophet Micah, means the house of dust, or ashes, and the Puritans, with their love of piteous names, adopted Aphra as a name. As well it appears as ‘Dust’ and ‘Ashes’ in actual English.^[21]

Section IX.—Angelic Names.

We have thrown these together, because, though our common term for those spiritual messengers is Greek, yet all the other words for them, as well as the three individual angelic designations that have come into use as baptismal names, are derived from the Hebrew.

Moreover, the first of these belonged to the last of the prophets, Malach-jah, the angel or messenger of God. It has even been thought by some commentators that this title of the prophet was the quotation of his own words, “Behold, I send my messenger (or Malachi) before my face.”

Malachi would never have been a modern name, but for the Irish fancy that made it the equivalent of Maelseachlain, the disciple of St. Sechnall, or Secundus, a companion of St. Patrick; and as the era of him who is now called King Malachi with the collar of gold, was particularly prosperous, the name has come into some amount of popularity.

The Septuagint always translated Malach by Ἀγγελος, even in that first sentence of the prophet, which in our version bears his name. Angelos had simply meant a messenger in Greek, as it still does; but it acquired the especial signification of a heavenly messenger, both in its own tongue, and in the Latin, whither Angelus was transplanted with this and no other sense.

Angelos first became a name in the Byzantine Empire. It probably began as an epithet, since it comes to light in the person of Konstantinos Angelos, a young man of a noble family of Philadelphia, whose personal beauty caused him, about the year 1100, to become the choice of the Princess Theodora Komnena. It is thus highly probable that Angelos was first bestowed as a surname, on account of the beauty of the family. They were on the throne in 1185, and Angelos continued imperial till the miserable end of the unhappy Isaac, and his son, Alexios, during the misdirected crusade of the Venetians. Angelos thus became known among the Greeks; and somewhere about 1217, there came a monastic saint, so called, to Sicily, who preached at Palermo, and was murdered by a wicked count, whose evil doings he had rebuked. The Carmelites claimed St. Angelo as a saint of their order, and his name, both masculine and feminine, took hold of the fancy of Italy, varied by the Neapolitan dialect into Agnolo or Aniello—e. g., the wonderful fisherman, Masaniello, was, in fact, Tomasso Angelo; by the Venetian into Anziolo, Anzioleto, Anzioleta; and by the Florentine, into Angiolo, Angioletto, and thence into the ever-renowned contraction Giotto, unless indeed this be from Gotofredo. It passed to other nations, but was of more rare occurrence there, except in the feminine. The fashion of complimenting women as angels, left the masculine Ange to be scantily used in France, and Angel now and then in England; but in Italy alone did Angiolo, and its derivative Angelico, thrive. All the other countries adopted the feminine, either in the simple form or the diminutive, or most commonly, the derivative, Angelica (angelical), noted in romance as the faithless lady, for whose sake Orlando lost his heart, and his senses. She was a gratuitous invention of Boiardo and Ariosto; whose character for surpassing beauty made her name popular, and thus Angelica and Angelique have always been favourites.

Angel was most often a man’s name in England. We find it at Hadleigh, Suffolk, in 1591, and sometimes likewise in Cornwall.

Archangel has even been used as an English name.

The mysterious creatures that are first mentioned as “keeping the way of the tree of life,” then were represented in the tabernacle overshadowing the ark, and afterwards were revealed in vision to the Prophet Ezekiel and to the Apostle St. John, combined in their forms the symbols of all that was wisest, bravest, strongest, and loftiest in creation—the man, the lion, the ox, and eagle.

In the lands where Art made the Cherub a mere head with wings, Cherubino arose as a Christian name, for it is hardly ever to be met with out of Spain and Italy.

Equally misused is Seraph—now a lady’s name, as Seraphine in France; Serafina, in Spain and Italy. The word seraph, or saraph, signifies burning, or fiery, and would apply to that intensity of glory that Ezekiel struggles to express in the cherubim by comparisons to amber and to glowing embers, or to their intense fervour of love.

Three individual angels have been revealed to us by name as of the seven that stand in the presence of God, and foremost of these is Michael (who is like unto God), he who was made known to Daniel as the protector of the Jewish people; to Zechariah, as defending them from Satan; to St. Jude, as disputing with Satan for the body of Moses; and to St. John, as leading the hosts of Heaven to battle with the adversary and prevailing over him.

His name would have seemed in itself fit only for an archangel, yet before apparently he had been made known, it had been borne by the father of one of David’s captains, and by a son of Jehoshaphat, and it was almost the same as Micaiah, the name of him who foretold the destruction of Ahab.

Constantine the Great dedicated a church in his new city in honour of St. Michael, the archangel, and thenceforth Mickaelion, or Mikael, have been favourites with all branches of the Eastern Church.

An appearance of the archangel in Colosse led the way to another legend of his descent upon Monte Galgano in Apulia, somewhere about 493. Then came a more notable vision, seen by Gregory the Great himself, of the angel standing with outstretched sword on the tomb of Adrian, which has ever since been called the castle of St. Angelo. In 706, St. Michael was again seen to take his stand upon the isolated rock on the Norman coast, so noted as the fortress and convent of Mont St. Michel. Moreover tradition placed him upon the Cornish rock,—

He was above all others the patron of the Christian warrior; his armour-clad effigy was seen in almost every church; the young knight was dubbed in his name, as well as that of the national saint; and since the prevalence of saintly names, his name has been frequently bestowed. It is, perhaps, most common in the Greek and Slavonic countries; but Ireland makes great use of it; and Italy has united it with the epithet angel, in the one distinguished instance of Michelangelo Buonarotti.

There is some confusion in the German mind between it and the old michel (mickle, large), which, as a name, it has quite absorbed. It has the rare feminines,

Legend has been far less busy with Gabriel, “the hero of God;” the angel who strengthened Daniel, and who brought the promise to Zacharias and to the Blessed Virgin. His name is chiefly used by the Slavonians; and in Hungary we find it in combination with Bethlehem, belonging to that noted chieftain, Bethlem Gabor.

It was known and used everywhere, however; and the Swedish house of Oxenstjerna considered it to have been the saving of their line from extinction, all their sons having died in the cradle, owing, it was thought, to Satan’s strangling them; till at length one was named Gabriel; and having thus obtained the protection of the guardian angel, survived to be the ancestor of the minister of the great Gustavus. The feminine, Gabrielle, has been a favourite in France ever since la belle Gabrielle gave it a reputation for beauty.

Raphael (the medicine of God), is the angel who guided Tobias and healed his father. Italy and Spain are the countries where his name is most used, and well it may, in the first named, after the fame of him who has made it the highest proverb in art. It hardly varies, except by the double ff Italian, and the single one of Spain, to supply its Greek φ. I have heard of a girl at Mentone called Ravelina, probably Raffaellina.^[22]