naḥash

In Hebrew this name is spelled and said exactly like the ordinary word for a snake (נָחָשׁ), so anyone who heard it heard something like "Snake." Names taken from animals were a normal part of the Hebrew stock of names, and the Bible never pauses to comment on this one, so the echo is a fact about the name rather than a joke the storyteller is making.

Almost every appearance belongs to one man, a king of Ammon whose shadow falls across two reigns:

• he besieges the town of Jabesh-gilead and offers terms only if every man in it gives up his right eye
• that outrage is what rallies Israel behind Saul and wins Saul his first victory
• Samuel later points back to him as the reason the people demanded a king at all
• years afterward David remembers a kindness this same king had once shown him and sends condolences when he dies
• the son who receives them, Hanun, humiliates the envoys, and a war follows

Chronicles retells that last episode in almost the same words.

The oldest surviving Hebrew scroll of Samuel, found near the Dead Sea, opens the siege story with an extra paragraph in which this king had already been mutilating Israelites east of the Jordan, and a few modern Bibles print that longer opening.

One verse pulls the name away from Ammon altogether. In 2 Samuel 17:25 Abigail, the sister of Joab's mother Zeruiah, is called the daughter of Nahash, while the family records in Chronicles make both women sisters of David and so daughters of Jesse. Either a second man of this name stands behind that line or something has slipped in the record, and the reference works and the commentators come down on different sides.

Here the same word sits inside a two-word place name, "city of" plus this word, so the phrase reads as something like "Snake Town" or "the town of a man called Nahash." It appears once, in a long list of Judahite families where the phrase "father of" regularly means the founder of a settlement rather than a birth parent, so Tehinnah is being remembered as the town's founder.

Nobody has identified the place, and the Bible says nothing about it beyond the name. The three Hebrew letters behind the word for a snake (נָחָשׁ) also open the separate Hebrew word for copper and bronze, so it is not certain whether the town was named for snakes, for a man, or for something else again.