shoham

Shoham appears exactly once. First Chronicles works through the priestly and Levite families being sorted into their turns of temple service, and when the list reaches the line of Merari it names Jaaziah's sons: Shoham stands there with Zaccur (זַכּוּר) and Ibri (עִבְרִי). That is all we are told about him. No story, no descendants, no duty singled out as his.

His name is not invented for him. It is the ordinary Hebrew word for a costly gemstone (שֹׁהַם): the stone the people donated for the sanctuary, the stone cut like a seal with the names of the twelve tribes and worn on the high priest's shoulders, the stone a poem in Job sets beside the gold of Ophir when it wants to say that wisdom cannot be bought. Naming a child after a precious stone was unremarkable, in Israel as elsewhere, and the name doubled as a small boast over a newborn son.

There is a catch that most readers never hear. Nobody today knows for certain which stone the word named. English Bibles say "onyx" because the old Latin translation did, but the ancient Greek translators reached for at least six different words for it and once simply spelled the Hebrew out in Greek letters, and the standard Hebrew dictionaries still divide between onyx, beryl, a pale green stone, and a red one. So the honest sense of the name is "that valuable stone," with the particular stone lost.

The verse he sits in is one of the harder stretches of Chronicles to follow, and English Bibles handle it differently.

• The line just before it has already introduced Jaaziah, so the names arrive twice over in a way that reads awkwardly.
• The word standing right before Shoham is read by some versions as a fourth brother, Beno, and by others as the plain Hebrew phrase "his son."
• A number of scholars think the whole notice about Jaaziah was added to the list at a later stage.

None of that unsettles Shoham himself. However the list is untangled, he is named in it as one of the sons.