Monday, October 23, 2023

Thamar E. Gindin on the Plausibility of a Jew (Mordecai) having the Name of a Gentile God

  

4 And Let the girl who pleases the king be queen instead of Vashti.’ This pleased the king, and he did so. 5 Now there was a Jew in the citadel of Susa whose name was Mordecai son of Jair son of Shimei son of Kish, a Benjamite.

 

Mordecai. The connection between Mordecai’s name and that of the god Marduk is well known. In the MT, the name is vocalized /mordŏxai/; in the Septuagint it is Mardchaios. The god Marduk, mentioned in the Bible as Merodach, began his way—just like Mordecai the Jew—as a secondary deity in the Mesopotamian pantheon. His name was written in cuneiform as amar-utu, commonly interpreted as Sumerian amar uku.k ‘calf of the sun-god’.

 

It wasn’t until the time of Hammurabi (early second millennium BCE) and Babylon’s rise as the cultural and religious center in Mesopotamia that he won his place as the godhead of the Babylonian pantheon.

 

In the second year of his reign, while crushing a rebellion in Babylon, Xšayāršā destroyed Marduk’s statue. The choice of names here may serve to show that at the end, Marduk will prevail.

 

Can it be that a Jew bears the name of a gentile—and even of a gentile god? Certainly. There was a year when all the sons of Jewish priests bore the name Alexander’ in addition to their Hebrew name, and in return Alexander of Macedonia retracted the order to place his statue in the temple; to this day, many Iranian Jews bear names with the element Allah. It seems, then, that a gentile-theophoric name for a Jew is quite plausible. We also know that the name Marduka was quite common in the Achaemenid period. There was at least one official with this name at the royal court, possibly of Babylonian origin. Marduka whose clay tablets have remained was in charge of the flour supply. The clay tablets he left are part of a whole collection of such tablets in Elamite cuneiform in the excavations at Persepolis. (Thamar E. Gindin, The Book of Esther Unmasked [N.P.: Zeresh Books, 2016], 89-90)