gad

The deity Gad is named by name only at Isaiah 65:11, paired with Meni; the standard reference treatments are Sergio Ribichini's entry "Gad" and S. David Sperling's entry "Meni" in the Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (2nd ed., 1999; Gad at 339-341). The traditional derivation, reflected in BDB and repeated in the descriptive tradition, traces the noun to a root meaning to cut or apportion, so that fortune is what is meted out to a person; some prefer to treat it as an unanalyzable primary noun. HALOT and DCH keep this lexeme distinct from the homonym for coriander (Exodus 16:31; Numbers 11:7) and from the root gdd behind gedud, a raiding band, although the paronomasia of Genesis 49:19 deliberately blurs the two. Two accounts of the word's history are live. The older one, associated with Otto Eissfeldt and with Jeffrey Tigay's classification of Gad among semi-divine beings or spirits rather than full-fledged deities, sees a secular abstraction personified comparatively late into a Tyche-like figure, matching the post-exilic setting of Isaiah 65 and the spread of Aramaic, Nabatean, Palmyrene and Safaitic theophoric names from roughly the fifth century BCE onward. Ryan Thomas ("The God Gad," JAOS 139.2 [2019], 307-316) argues from the onomastic evidence that Gad takes the same predicates as El, Baal and YHWH, is consistently male, and is best explained as a descriptive epithet of the personal god El attested from early in the first millennium, with the female Tyche equation a late Hellenistic development. On the verse itself, Joseph Blenkinsopp (Isaiah 56-66, Anchor Yale Bible, 2003, 274-279) compares the rite to a Roman lectisternium, food spread on a table before the image of a god; Goldingay, Shalom Paul, Wildberger, Westermann and Childs likewise take Gad and Meni as genuine deities of Fortune and Fate venerated by a faction in the post-exilic Jerusalem community, while Thomas cautions that so late and rhetorical a polemic is a weak basis for reconstructing earlier belief. The versions confirm the sense: the Septuagint renders Gad by τῷ δαιμονίῳ and Meni by τῇ τύχῃ (Jerome reports a reversed order in his day, which fits the Hebrew better, since Gad is Fortune), and the Vulgate uses Fortuna for both. In later Aramaic, Palmyrene and Nabatean, gadda is the tutelary Fortune of a city or tribe; Ted Kaizer, Lucinda Dirven and Javier Teixidor treat the Gad of Palmyra and the Gad of Dura-Europos, depicted as Tyche-type figures with the mural crown, and a Palmyrene bilingual inscription equates gd with Greek Tyche. John F. Healey connects Meni with Nabatean Manawat and Arabic Manat. Older identifications of Gad and Meni with the planets Jupiter and Venus (Gesenius, Cheyne, Keil and Delitzsch, Ibn Ezra, Kimchi) are historically interesting but are not part of the current consensus.