StrongerBible

melekh

מֶלֶךְ

HebrewH4429Proper Noun“Melech”

Appears 2 times · tap a cell to see the verses

1Ch 8:351Ch 9:41
Word studyResearch-gradeMEH-lekhnoun

What melekh means

Melech: a descendant of Saul, the second of the four sons of Micah in the family record of Saul's line; the name is spelled exactly like the everyday Hebrew word for "king"

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

The name turns up twice, and both times in the same short list. 1 Chronicles walks through the family of Saul in chapter 8 and then goes over much of it again in chapter 9, and in both places the sons of Micah are given as Pithon, Melech, Tarea, and Ahaz. The second copy of the list spells the third brother Tahrea, and the Hebrew there stops after three names, so English Bibles fill in Ahaz from the earlier list.

Micah's father was Merib-baal (מְרִיב בַּעַל), the man the book of Samuel calls Mephibosheth, and Merib-baal's father was Jonathan. That makes Melech a great-grandson of Jonathan and a great-great-grandson of Saul, born into the family that had lost the throne to David. He does nothing in the story. He is a name kept in a family record, and the record is the only reason we know he lived at all.

The name itself is simply the ordinary Hebrew word for a king (מֶלֶךְ). Israelite families built names out of that word freely, and usually said more with them than this one does:

Bare "Melech" belongs with the last of those. It may be a shortened form of a longer name that honored God as king, or it may say no more than "King" and carry the memory of a family that had once held a throne. Two verses are not enough to settle it, and the shortest names are always the hardest to read.

One thing the surrounding list does show is that these old family names were kept as they stood. Saul's son Eshbaal and his grandson Merib-baal both carry the word for "lord" or "master" that the book of Samuel swaps out for the word for "shame", giving the more familiar Ish-bosheth and Mephibosheth. Here nothing was smoothed over, and a boy in a dethroned royal family could still be called King.

1Ch 8:351Ch 9:41

What scholars say about melekh

BDB and HALOT both keep the personal name apart from the common noun, listing it only for the two occurrences in Chronicles, 1 Chronicles 8:35 and 9:41, where it designates the second son of Micah son of Merib-baal in the Benjaminite genealogy of Saul's house. No lexicon reads the word in these verses as the appellative. The two verses are a doublet of one list: 1 Chronicles 9:35-44 goes back over 8:29-40, and the commentators (Williamson, Japhet, Knoppers, Klein) treat the repetition as the Chronicler resuming his source at the hinge between the genealogies and the Saul narrative, not as evidence of two families. The transmitted differences inside the doublet are minor and text-critical: Tarea in 8:35 against Tahrea in 9:41, and the absence of Ahaz in the Masoretic text of 9:41, which the parallel verse and the ancient translations supply. On the name itself, Noth's classification of Israelite personal names treats the element melek in name formation as a divine epithet, so that Malchiah, Malchiel, Malchiram and Malchi-shua are sentence names about the deity and a bare Melech, like Malluch, is most plausibly a hypocoristic form of one of them. The alternative, that the simple noun was used directly as a name in a family that had held the throne, cannot be excluded from two occurrences, and the standard treatments do not adjudicate it. Two further observations recur in the literature. The same Saulide list preserves the uncontracted Baal names Eshbaal and Merib-baal against the bosheth forms of Samuel, which is one reason the genealogy is generally held to rest on older material (on the substituted vocalization see Geiger's classic argument, taken up in the discussion of Molech by Heider and Day). And on the underlying noun, Ringgren's TDOT article surveys the wider use of melek in West Semitic naming, including the divine Malik of the Amorite and Eblaite name material collected by Huffmon.

In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

  • HALOT, s.v. מֶלֶךְ II (personal name)lexicon
  • BDB, s.v. מֶלֶךְlexicon
  • Martin Noth, Die israelitischen Personennamen im Rahmen der gemeinsemitischen Namengebung (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1928)monograph
  • Gary N. Knoppers, I Chronicles 1-9, Anchor Bible 12 (New York: Doubleday, 2004), on 1 Chronicles 8:29-40 and 9:35-44commentary
  • Ralph W. Klein, 1 Chronicles: A Commentary, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006), on 1 Chronicles 8:35 and 9:41commentary
  • Sara Japhet, I & II Chronicles: A Commentary, Old Testament Library (London: SCM, 1993), on 1 Chronicles 8 and 9commentary
  • H. G. M. Williamson, 1 and 2 Chronicles, New Century Bible Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), on 1 Chronicles 8 and 9commentary
  • H. Ringgren, "melek," in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, ed. G. J. Botterweck, H. Ringgren, and H.-J. Fabry, vol. 8 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997)dictionary
  • Herbert B. Huffmon, Amorite Personal Names in the Mari Texts: A Structural and Lexical Study (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965)monograph

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of מֶלֶךְ

m

מֶלֶךְ

1Ch 8:35, 1Ch 9:41