Zillah: the second wife of Lamech in Cain's family line, a name that most likely means "shadow", in the sense of shelter and protection
Zillah is a name rather than an ordinary word, and it turns up only three times, all of them inside one short paragraph of Genesis 4. Almost every Hebrew lexicon builds the name from the common word for shade (צֵל), which covers the literal shadow of a tree or a roof and, far more often in the Bible, shelter and protection. Names shaped like this one are usually shortened prayers: the full version would have said something close to "God is my shadow", and the divine name has simply fallen away. The same element stands in the open in Bezalel (בְּצַלְאֵל), "in the shadow of God", and shortened again in Zillethai (צִלְּתַי). Mesopotamian records are full of names built exactly this way, so the pattern is ordinary rather than odd.
A second reading has been argued by some of the most careful readers of Genesis, and it will not go away. Hebrew has another word spelled just like the one for shade, meaning to ring or to tinkle. It is the word behind the Bible's cymbals (מְצִלְתַּיִם) and behind the ringing in the ears of anyone who hears terrible news. Read from that word, the name means roughly "the ringing one", a compliment about a sweet voice. What makes it tempting is the company the name keeps: the other wife is Adah (עָדָה), "ornament"; one stepson is remembered as the ancestor of every player of the lyre and the pipe; her own son forges the bronze that cymbals are made of; her daughter is Naamah (נַעֲמָה), "the pleasant one". On that reading, Lamech opens his song by calling out to Ornament and Ring.
What Genesis actually reports about her is short:
- Lamech takes two wives, Adah and Zillah, the first man in the Bible to do so
- Zillah gives birth to Tubal-Cain, who works bronze and iron, and to his sister Naamah
- Lamech orders both wives to listen while he boasts that he has killed a man
She never speaks, and nothing else is said about her. Whichever way the name is read, an irony sits inside it that only the Hebrew makes audible: a woman whose name whispers shelter is the mother of the first man to forge weapons, and she is summoned to stand and hear a boast about revenge repaid seventy-sevenfold.
Disputed
Which of the two homonymous roots spelled צלל lies behind the name צִלָּה, and therefore what the name means. The form itself could derive from either, so the question is decided by comparative onomastics on one side and by the literary texture of the Cainite genealogy on the other.
- majorityThe name derives from צלל I, "to be or grow dark, cast a shadow", the root of צֵל, and is a hypocoristic of a theophoric name of the type "(the god is) my shadow, my protection". The onomastic parallels are exact: Akkadian sentence names of the type Ṣillī-DN (Ṣillī-Aššur, Ṣillī-Bēl, Ṣillī-Marduk) with the hypocoristic Ṣillāya, and prepositional names of the type Ina-ṣilli-DN including the feminine Ina-ṣilli-Esabad, stand alongside Hebrew בְּצַלְאֵל and צִלְּתַי, while no comparable ring or cymbal name-type is attested anywhere in the West Semitic or Akkadian onomasticon.; HALOT 3, s.v. צִלָּה; BDB, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Clarendon, 1906), 854, s.v. צִלָּה; David J. A. Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, vol. 7 (Sheffield Phoenix, 2010), s.v. צלל I; H.-J. Fabry, צֵל, in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament 12 (Eerdmans), 372-381; C. Barth, צֵל, in Theological Lexicon of the Old Testament 3 (Hendrickson, 1997); Hans Rechenmacher, Althebraische Personennamen (Ugarit-Verlag, 2012), 114
- minorityThe name derives from the onomatopoetic homonym צלל II, "to tingle, ring, resound", the root behind מְצִלְתַּיִם and צְלָצַל, and alludes to the sweetness of the female voice. Paired with עָדָה, "ornament", it evokes the two attributes of feminine charm named in Song 2:14, and it accounts for the features that the shadow reading leaves unexplained: this is the only genealogy in Genesis 1 to 10 that names women at all, it clusters them with musical and metalworking sons, and Lamech's song opens by demanding that the two women listen.; Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis, Part I: From Adam to Noah, trans. I. Abrahams (Magnes, 1961), 232-239; Claus Westermann, Genesis 1-11: A Continental Commentary, trans. J. J. Scullion (Fortress, 1984), on 4:19-24; C. F. Keil and F. Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament: The Pentateuch, trans. J. Martin (T&T Clark, 1866), 1:118; Hermann Gunkel, Genesis, trans. M. E. Biddle (Mercer University Press, 1997), on 4:17-24; John Skinner, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Genesis, ICC, 2nd ed. (T&T Clark, 1930), 118-120; Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15, Word Biblical Commentary 1 (Word, 1987), 112-113
- minorityעָדָה and צִלָּה were originally personifications of Dawn and Dusk, figures of light and darkness embedded in an older Hebrew saga, with צִלָּה as "Shade". This reading is now largely abandoned on philological grounds, since עָדָה is best derived from עדה, "to adorn", yielding עֲדִי, "ornament", though the weaker intuition that the two names form an aesthetic pair survives in mainstream commentary.; Heinrich Ewald, Geschichte des Volkes Israel, 3rd ed. (Dieterich, 1864); Ignaz Goldziher, Der Mythos bei den Hebraern und seine geschichtliche Entwickelung (Brockhaus, 1876); August Dillmann, Die Genesis, 6th ed. (Hirzel, 1892), on 4:19 (critical discussion)