resheph

Resheph here is not the ordinary Hebrew word for a flame or a plague; it is a man's name, and it appears exactly once in the Bible, in the long genealogy of the tribe of Ephraim in 1 Chronicles 7. The list runs father to son by a fixed formula, "so-and-so his son," tracing the line all the way down to Joshua son of Nun. Resheph is set between two other names, Rephah and Telah, though the text drops the usual "his son" right where his own name appears, so it is not entirely certain whether he was Rephah's own son or simply listed alongside him as a brother. Either way, nothing further is told about him: no story, no deed, only his place in the chain.

What makes the name worth a closer look is that it is spelled exactly like רֶשֶׁף, the poetic Hebrew word for a flash of fire, a flying arrow, or a deadly plague, and that word in turn preserves the name of a real god: a Canaanite deity of war, arrows, and disease worshipped from Syria to Egypt to Cyprus for roughly two thousand years before this genealogy was written down. By the time the tribe of Ephraim was being listed in Chronicles, that god had no place in Israel's worship. Naming a child after him, however, was nothing unusual for the wider culture: Israelite families sometimes kept elements from older Canaanite names the way a modern parent might name a child after a figure from mythology, with no intention of worshipping that figure. Here the name survives purely as a family label, a fossil of an older naming custom rather than any claim about what this Ephraimite family believed or served.