Chapter II: The Significance of Names

=1. In the earliest periods= of human history names, either for persons, places, or things, had meanings which were in some sense applicable to the person, place, or thing named. This was specially true in Hebrew history, and of this we have already had illustrations; for when Eve was brought to Adam “he called her name _woman_, because she was taken out of man,” but afterwards, because Eve in the Hebrew meant life, he “called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living.”

Adam’s name denoted his relation to the ground (Hebrew, _Adamah_), from the dust of which he was taken; and as Eve’s body was derived from that of Adam, the name of the two was _Adam_ (Gen. 5:2), which was the name given by God “in the day when they were created,” and this name was exclusively the description of the first man and the first woman.

In Gen. 2:23 we have the generic name given to the race in the Hebrew terms “_Ish_” and “_Ishah_” for “man” and “woman,” given by Adam to himself and to the woman: “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called woman (Ishah), because she was taken out of man (Ish).”

=2. The root=, or primitive meaning, of Ish is uncertain, but from its subsequent use we may infer that it denoted a characteristic of humanity higher than that expressed by the word Adam, and may have occurred to the father of men while naming the animals as an appellative distinguishing his own from the inferior order of the animate creation.[11]

It is remarkable that the ancient Assyrian name for the first man is Admu or Adamu, the Assyrian form of the Hebrew Adam.[12]

=3. In the Hebrew history=, therefore, names are not to be regarded as mere sounds or combinations of sounds, attached at random to certain objects or persons, so as to become the audible signs by which we distinguish them from each other, but very frequently proper names had a deeper meaning and were more closely connected in men’s thoughts with character and condition than among any other ancient nation with the history and literature of which we are acquainted.[13] Thus it is that, as Archbishop Trench says, words are often the repositories of historical information.[14]