Oreb: one of two Midianite commanders run down when Midian's army collapsed after Gideon's night attack, and the crag where he died that afterward carried his name, which is the everyday Hebrew word for a raven
Oreb was a Midianite commander, one of two seized by the men of Ephraim when Midian's army fell apart after Gideon's night attack. Judges tells his end in a single crowded sentence: he was cut down at a rock, the other chief, Zeeb, at a winepress, and both heads were carried across the Jordan to Gideon. Afterward the two spots carried the two names, so the landscape itself kept the record.
The name does two jobs in the four verses that use it:
- Three of them name the man, hunted down, beheaded, and later held up as the pattern of a beaten enemy.
- Two of them name the place, the crag called the rock of Oreb, which a prophet could cite generations later without retelling the story.
- Judges 7:25 does both at once, killing the man at the rock that took his name.
The name is not exotic. It is the ordinary Hebrew word for the raven (עֹרֵב), the big black scavenger that nests in cliffs above dry streambeds, and the man beside him was called Wolf (זְאֵב). Hebrew readers met the two chiefs as Raven and Wolf: the bird that strips the dead and the animal that carries off sheep. Naming a fighting man for a dangerous animal was ordinary in that world, and the usual explanation is that such a name was meant to make its bearer sound terrifying, though some earlier scholars read names of this kind as clan emblems instead.
There is a sting in where he dies. A man called Raven is cornered and killed at a rocky crag, exactly the sort of place a raven nests, and whether the crag was already known for its ravens and lent the chief his name, or the killing gave the rock its name, is argued both ways. Either way the phrase stuck hard. Long afterward Isaiah could promise that God would strike Assyria "as in the slaughter of Midian at the rock of Oreb" and expect to be understood, and a psalm could pray that a fresh alliance of enemies would end the way Oreb ended.
Nuances
Disputed
How to account for two enemy commanders bearing the plain animal names Raven and Wolf.
- majorityAnimal names of this type are an ordinary class of West Semitic personal names, widely attested in North Arabian material on the very roots behind Oreb and Zeeb, and the standard explanation is that such a name expresses the wish that its bearer prove as fearsome to enemies as the animal.; Martin Noth, Die israelitischen Personennamen im Rahmen der gemeinsemitischen Namengebung, BWANT III/10 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1928), 229-30; Theodor Noeldeke, "Beitraege zur semitischen Sprachwissenschaft," ZDMG 40 (1886): 148-87; G. Lankester Harding, An Index and Concordance of Pre-Islamic Arabian Names and Inscriptions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971)
- minorityAnimal names in Ugaritic and Hebrew function as heroic epithets or status designations rather than intimidating nicknames.; Patrick D. Miller, "Animal Names as Designations in Ugaritic and Hebrew," Ugarit-Forschungen 2 (1970): 177-86
- minoritySuch names preserve older clan or tribal emblems, so Raven and Wolf name the raven clan and the wolf clan rather than two individuals.; W. Robertson Smith, Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1885), 190-218