mattan

BDB lists the personal name separately from the common noun (s.v. מַתָּן II; Strong's H4977), covering the Baal priest of 2 Kings 11:18 // 2 Chronicles 23:17 and the father of Shephatiah at Jeremiah 38:1. The form is the ordinary maqtal noun מַתָּן from נתן, on which see Lipiński, TDOT 10:90-107, who also documents the Northwest Semitic bifurcation of the root (Ugaritic and Phoenician ytn against Hebrew and Aramaic ntn) and the corresponding noun mtn. On the Baal priest, Cogan and Tadmor (Anchor Bible II Kings, 130) describe Mattan as bearing a common Phoenician name, which fits the Tyrian provenance of the Jerusalem Baal cult under Athaliah; Josephus (Contra Apionem 1.18), citing Menander of Ephesus, preserves Tyrian kings of that name. Benz's catalogue of the Phoenician and Punic onomasticon shows MTN as an extremely productive element (Mattan-Baal, Mattan-Astart, Mattan-Milk, Mattan-El), with bare Mattan functioning as a hypocoristic once the divine element drops; Cross's epigraphic work supports the same picture. Whether the Jerusalem priest was ethnically Phoenician or simply bore a Phoenician-influenced name cannot be decided from the biblical text. On the Israelite side of the same naming pattern, Noth classified the נתן names as Danknamen, thanksgiving names in which the parent confesses the child as the deity's gift, and Fowler's study of the epigraphic corpus corroborates the classification; the fuller theophoric forms include Mattaniah, the birth name of Zedekiah (2 Kings 24:17), and Mattithiah. Stager and Wolff's analysis of the Carthage Tophet shows Punic votive usage of mtn for children offered to Baal Hammon and Tanit, sharing the lexical field but not the sacrificial referent of the Hebrew names. The Greek Ματθάν of Matthew 1:15 continues the same name.