tiqvah

This Tikvah belongs to one scene, told twice. In the eighteenth year of King Josiah (יֹאשִׁיָּהוּ) a scroll is found during repairs to the temple, the king is shaken by what he hears read out of it, and he sends his highest officials to a prophetess in Jerusalem to ask what it means for the nation. She is introduced the way a woman was introduced in such records, through her husband and his line: Huldah (חֻלְדָּה), wife of Shallum (שַׁלּוּם) son of Tikvah son of Harhas (חַרְחַס), keeper of the wardrobe. Tikvah says nothing and does nothing. He is one link in the chain that ties his son's household to a post in the royal service, and the wording leaves it slightly open which man in that chain actually held the post, though it is usually read as Shallum's.

The two accounts of the scene spell the family names differently. Kings gives the father as Tikvah and the grandfather as Harhas; Chronicles gives them as Tokhath and Hasrah (חַסְרָה), and the written text of Chronicles preserves a third spelling of this name that the traditional reading corrects. Since both accounts name the same Shallum, the same Huldah, the same city quarter and the same royal office, these are taken as variants of one set of names, with the differences arising as the text was copied rather than in the family itself. Which spelling stood there first is not settled, and nothing in the story turns on it.

The name is simply the ordinary Hebrew word for hope (תִּקְוָה), used exactly as it stands, built on the verb for waiting expectantly for something (קָוָה). Naming a child with a plain noun of this kind was normal practice, and any Hebrew reader heard the word inside the name at once. That is the one thing the English spelling loses entirely.

A different man, living roughly a century and a half after the first, and named once. When Ezra pressed the returned exiles in Jerusalem to separate from the foreign wives they had married, the record pauses to name two men who stood apart from the rest of the crowd, and one of them is Jahzeiah (יַחְזְיָה) son of Tikvah. As with the earlier Tikvah, the father is a name and nothing more: he identifies his son and then drops out of the story.

What those two men actually did is not clear. The Hebrew says they stood over, or stood against, the matter, and English Bibles divide accordingly: some have the pair opposing the plan, others have them put in charge of carrying it out. Neither reading changes anything about Tikvah, who is only the name attached to his son.

Nothing connects this man to the Tikvah of Josiah's reign. The two are separated by generations, they belong to unrelated family records, and they share only a common name, the plain Hebrew word for hope.