Bigamy (Gen 4:19)

You Can’t Go Home Again

¹⁹ one named Ada and one named Zílla. שֵׁ֤ם הָֽאַחַת֙ עָדָ֔ה וְשֵׁ֥ם הַשֵּׁנִ֖ית צִלָּֽה׃

That’s z as in pizza; Zilla’s name begins with a צ, a tz sound. But I couldn’t resist the temptation to give Lémekh two wives who run the gamut from A to Z. You may remember that Rashi (quoting the midrash) explained that one of these women was for procreation and the other was a sex toy. Of course, there’s no basis in the text for this other than the fact that there are two of them. Both women will have children once we get to v. 22. Be patient, Rashi.

And now for a rather unusual face-off, between Nahum Sarna and Abraham ibn Ezra. Both men were Jewish Bible scholars, of course, but as far as I’m aware the only other thing they have in common is that Sarna was born in London and Ibn Ezra wrote his “Sabbath Epistle” there. Oh, and that both were religious men who were committed to understanding the text rationally — yet they had a fundamental disagreement on an interesting point that we’ve already had occasion to discuss. Here’s Sarna:

Adah. . . Zillah  The names may respectively mean “dawn” and “dusk,” the first being connected with Arabic ghadāt, the second with Hebrew ts-l-l, “shade.” Adah may also derive from Hebrew ʿadi, a “jewel,” and Zillah from Hebrew ts-l-l, “to tingle.” This name would then be the equivalent of the modern English name Melody.

To which — not historically, but in the timeless sense of the “commentators’ conversation” about Jewish texts — Ibn Ezra responds (quoting the lemma in bold from NJPS):

The name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other was Zillah. Don’t pay any attention to what Saadia says about the meanings of names. Even if we knew the entire Hebrew language of those days, we couldn’t possibly know everything that happened to everyone. The only way to know why someone was given a name is when the Torah itself tells us, as it does for (e.g.) Moses and Issachar.

To be fair to Sarna, the teacher of some of my teachers, three of the first four human characters in the Bible have names whose meaning is obviously important to the story:

• Adam — from adama ‘earth’

• Ḥavvah — from חיה ‘be alive, give life’

• Abel — Heb. הבל hével ‘gas, vapor’

By now, though, besides Cain, we’ve had a long list of names that have told us little or nothing about the men who bore them. I don’t suppose the meanings of the names Ada and Zilla are significant for our story either. It would certainly be interesting to know how they acquired those names and what their parents (presumably) intended by giving the names to them. But since I can’t even answer that question about my own name, looking deeply into theirs would seem to be pushing things farther than they can reasonably go.

There are names in the Bible that are significant for the stories they appear in. The most important such example I know of is the book of Ruth, where it’s clear that all the names except for Ruth’s own were chosen to shape the story. You can read a bit about that here and more in the “Women’s Voices” chapter of my book The Bible’s Many Voices. For now, we’re going to spend a few minutes looking at the language that announces their names.

It’s an interesting phenomenon of Hebrew, in those days and this. Where in English we would say “the one … and the other,” Hebrew speakers and writers say “the one … and the second.” That’s right:

- Why did the chicken cross the road?

- To get to the second side.

That phenomenon occurs a number of times in the Bible, often, as here, with names (there’s an example in Ruth 1:4). One other example is another case of bigamy, the two wives of Elkanah in 1 Samuel:

one named Hannah and one named Pnina

שֵׁ֤ם אַחַת֙ חַנָּ֔ה וְשֵׁ֥ם הַשֵּׁנִ֖ית פְּנִנָּ֑ה

In that case, the two “rival wives” (as 1 Sam 1:6 calls them) had a difficult relationship. Hannah was desperate to bear a child of her own (that’s what מרת-נפש in v. 10 means), while Pnina lost no opportunity of reminding Hannah about her situation by doing this verb: