Naamah: a Hebrew name meaning "the pleasant one", borne in the Bible by two women and by one town in Judah
Naamah is a name rather than an ordinary word, and like most Hebrew names it says something. It is built from a root that runs across the whole Semitic world with remarkably little change of sense: pleasant, lovely, delightful, sweet. The same root gives Hebrew its adjective for what is pleasant (נָעִים), its noun for loveliness or favor (נֹעַם), and a large family of names, among them Naomi (נָעֳמִי) and Naaman (נַעֲמָן). A family that chose this name was voicing a hope, much as English-speaking parents once chose Grace or Joy.
Three different bearers of the name turn up in the Bible, and not one of them says or does anything:
- the daughter of Lamech and Zillah in Cain's family line, the only daughter named there, listed after three brothers who each found a trade and given none of her own
- the Ammonite wife of Solomon and mother of King Rehoboam, named twice in Kings and once in Chronicles in the standard note that records who a king's mother was
- a town in the low hills of Judah, listed among the towns near Lachish, its site still unidentified
That emptiness is the whole story of the name's afterlife. Because the Bible names these women and then tells us nothing about them, later readers filled the silence, and filled it in opposite directions. The daughter of Lamech was identified by one rabbi as Noah's wife, by others as a woman who drummed for idols, and eventually, in medieval mystical writing, as a queen of demons. The Ammonite mother of Rehoboam, whose foreign origin the book of Kings uses to help explain her son's failures, was later honored in the Talmud alongside Ruth the Moabite as an outsider whose line ran on toward David.
One further thing hovers around the word. In the Bronze Age texts from Ugarit the same root is a term of praise, applied to the god Baal and used as a standing title for two royal heroes, and by the first millennium a form of it was a name of the dying god Adonis. Isaiah 17:10 speaks of the plantings of Naaman (נַעֲמָן), almost certainly the garden plots grown for that god's festival. Whether an Israelite who heard the name Naamah caught any of that is the one genuinely open question about it.
Nuances
Why Naamah is named in Genesis 4:22 at all. Her brothers Jabal, Jubal and Tubal-Cain each receive a culture-founding aetiology (pastoralism, music, metallurgy); she receives only her name, which is anomalous in a list whose organizing principle is founding etymology.
- contestedThe verse preserves the residue of a fuller genealogy in which Naamah too was credited with something, since lost or edited out; the bare mention implies a figure already well known to the first readers, possibly connected with song, given that the root behind the name later yields a word for melody.; John Skinner, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Genesis (ICC; T&T Clark, 1910), 118-119; Hermann Gunkel, Genesis, 3rd ed. (HKAT; Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1910), ad loc.; Claus Westermann, Genesis 1-11: A Continental Commentary, trans. J. J. Scullion (Fortress, 1984), on the Cainite genealogy; Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis (JPS Torah Commentary; Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 37-38; Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses (Norton, 2004), ad Genesis 4:22
- contestedShe is named for the symmetry of the list: each of Lamech's two wives contributes two named children, and no further significance is intended.; Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15 (Word Biblical Commentary 1; Word, 1987), 114; R. R. Wilson, Genealogy and History in the Biblical World (Yale University Press, 1977), 144
- contestedThe text is complete as it stands: the name itself is the point, an aesthetic counterweight to the three technological brothers (whose names are built on one root), with no lacuna to reconstruct.; Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis, Part I, trans. I. Abrahams (Magnes, 1961), 236-237; Kenneth A. Mathews, Genesis 1-11:26 (New American Commentary 1A; Broadman and Holman, 1996), ad loc.; Bruce K. Waltke with Cathi J. Fredricks, Genesis: A Commentary (Zondervan, 2001), 100; Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, Chapters 1-17 (NICOT; Eerdmans, 1990), 239
Whether the longer Greek text of Kings preserves genuine information about Rehoboam's mother. The supplement at 3 Kingdoms 12:24a-z calls her the daughter of Ana (Hanun) son of Nahash, king of the sons of Ammon, a genealogy absent from the Masoretic Text.
- contestedThe Greek supplement rests on an older Hebrew form of the narrative: Naamah was an Ammonite princess, and her marriage to Solomon, contracted before his own accession given that Rehoboam was forty one when he became king, sealed a diplomatic reconciliation with Ammon after David's Ammonite war.; Abraham Malamat, Naamah, the Ammonite Princess, King Solomon's Wife, Revue Biblique 106 (1999): 35-40; Julio Trebolle Barrera, Salomon y Jeroboan: Historia de la recension y redaccion de 1 Reyes 2-12, 14 (Salamanca and Jerusalem, 1980); Adrian Schenker, Septante et texte massoretique dans l'histoire la plus ancienne du texte de 1 Rois 2-14 (Cahiers de la Revue Biblique 48; Gabalda, 2000); Mordechai Cogan, I Kings (Anchor Bible 10; Doubleday, 2001), 386-390
- contestedThe fuller Greek genealogy is a later midrashic elaboration of the Kings narrative rather than an old tradition, and carries no independent historical weight.; John Gray, I and II Kings: A Commentary, 2nd ed. (Old Testament Library; SCM, 1970), ad loc.; Volkmar Fritz, 1 and 2 Kings, trans. A. Hagedorn (Continental Commentary; Fortress, 2003), ad loc.
Disputed
Whether the name preserves an old divine epithet. In the Ugaritic texts the adjective nʿm and the form nʿmn praise Baʿl and serve as a fixed epithet of the heroes Aqhat and Kirta (nʿmn glm ʾil), and in the first millennium naʿman is attested as a Semitic name or epithet of Adonis; Isaiah 17:10's nitʿe naʿamanim is widely read as a reference to the Adonis gardens. Whether West Semitic personal names formed from the root, including נַעֲמָה, carry any of that religious charge is disputed.
- minorityThe name reflects a divine epithet: Semitic naʿman, the darling or lovely one, was an epithet of the dying and rising god Adonis or Tammuz, preserved at Isaiah 17:10 and in the Greek sources, so biblical personal names on the root stand in continuity with that usage.; W. Robertson Smith, English Historical Review, April 1887; J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: Adonis, Attis, Osiris, 3rd ed. (Macmillan, 1914); W. F. Albright, Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan (Athlone, 1968); E. Lipinski, Adonis, in Lindsay Jones, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed. (Macmillan Reference, 2005)
- majorityThe comparative linguistic evidence is accepted but the inference is not: at Ugarit nʿmn characterizes heroic youths such as Aqhat and Kirta far more than it functions as a fixed divine title in the Baal Cycle, and biblical personal names built on the root are ordinary West Semitic quality names rather than survivals of a specific Adonis cult.; Mark S. Smith, The Death of Dying and Rising Gods in the Biblical World: An Update, with Special Reference to Baal in the Baal Cycle, Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 12 (1998): 257-313; Simon B. Parker, The Pre-Biblical Narrative Tradition (SBL Resources for Biblical Study 24; Scholars Press, 1989); John Day, Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan (JSOTSup 265; Sheffield Academic Press, 2000)
- minorityAn intermediate position: Adonis, bearing the Semitic epithet naʿman, together with Melqart and Eshmun and with qualifications Baal, does belong to genuine ancient patterns of divine death and return, and the Ugaritic nʿmn material belongs within that discussion, without requiring that biblical onomastics be read as cultic survival.; Tryggve N. D. Mettinger, The Riddle of Resurrection: Dying and Rising Gods in the Ancient Near East (Coniectanea Biblica Old Testament 50; Almqvist and Wiksell, 2001), 113-154, 175-179