# Etymology of Abraham and Sarah



## Mahaodeh

I was wondering what the etymology of *Abraham *and *Sarah* are, and possibly *Isaac* and *Ishmael*. The general understanding of most people is that the names are of Hebrew origin; I don't really know whether they are or not, but assuming the story of Abraham is true (so as not to get into an historical debate), then his name should more likely be of Babylonian or Acadian origin since he was born to people from Mesopotamia and Hebrew is part of the Western Semitic languages and came to existence much later in history.
 
Any thoughts on the origin of the names?
 
I'm not sure if this falls under the scope of the forum, mods, please feel free to delete it if it is not.


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## xmarabout

At the beginning the name of Abraham was Abram (אַבְרָם ) and the meaning of this could be "Father from Aram" (Ab Aram) or "High father" (Ab Ram). When he met God, God changes his name and the one of Sarah (Saraï) by adding the Hebrew letter ה (he) with probably the meaning of wisdom or knowledge.

Other interpretation: "father of multitude"

Sarah could means "princess" ((*שָׂרָה*) in Hebrew)


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## berndf

Mahaodeh said:


> I don't really know whether they are or not, but assuming the story of Abraham is true (so as not to get into an historical debate), then his name should more likely be of Babylonian or Acadian origin since he was born to people from Mesopotamia and Hebrew is part of the Western Semitic languages and came to existence much later in history.


Well, Aramaic is a West-Semitic language as well. The two are very close, probably originally dialects of the same language. We are in mythical times here (as far as Jewish history is concerned and we don't have any other accounts of the story of Abraham than the Torah). It is unclear which language Abraham actually spoke. Most likely a variant of Aramaic. It might have been Hebrew or at least something close to it. The very name "Hebrew" suggests it: the language of "Avram ha`irvi" (Genesis 14:13). `ivri is derived from the verb `-B-R (עבר) which means to cross, to pass in both Hebrew and Aramaic. The traditional understanding is that Abraham and his entourage brought the language with them when they crossed the Jordon into Canaan. But we don't really know. The Torah was writen down some 600-900 years after these events.


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## origumi

The names Isaac and Ishmael are also Hebrew. Their etymology is detailed in the Bible, although this is not necessarly scientific.

Isaac (Yitzkhak) is related to root tz-kh-k (something like dh-7-k, if this is the right spelling, in Arabic), which means "he shall laugh". 

Ishmael is related to root sh-m-` (something like s-m-3 in Arabic) + El (God), which means "God shall listen" or "God shall hear", exactly like Arabic Isma3il I guess.


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## ThomasK

Couldn't it be true that the -h(-) is 'mine': both of them are considered God's children as they do God's will ? (I think I heard that explanation from someone)


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## Mahaodeh

berndf said:


> Well, Aramaic is a West-Semitic language as well. The two are very close, probably originally dialects of the same language. We are in mythical times here (as far as Jewish history is concerned and we don't have any other accounts of the story of Abraham than the Torah). It is unclear which language Abraham actually spoke. Most likely a variant of Aramaic. It might have been Hebrew or at least something close to it. The very name "Hebrew" suggests it: the language of "Avram ha`irvi" (Genesis 14:13). `ivri is derived from the verb `-B-R (





berndf said:


> עבר) which means to cross, to pass in both Hebrew and Aramaic. The traditional understanding is that Abraham and his entourage brought the language with them when they crossed the Jordon into Canaan. But we don't really know. The Torah was writen down some 600-900 years after these events.



 
Well, there is another account, which is the Quran. Up to my knowledge, Islamic sources say he was born in Babylon, a few others say Kish and I think there is a single source that says Damascus. Biblical sources say it's Ur. Whether it was this or that, they are all in Mesopotamia prior to the time that Aramaic was spoken, which was during the Neo-Babylonian period (starting 612). I'm basing this on the fact that the Torah was written down during the exile to Babil in the 6th century BC; if you go back 600 years (the least of the two numbers you gave), that would be 600 years before Aramaic peoples starting moving into Mesopotamia and roughly 200 years before Aramaic existed (according to Wikipedia, it's 3000 years old). This is quite a conservative estimate (I made it myself) because generally sources say that it was earlier (see this Wiki article).
 
Accordingly, it seems to me that neither Hebrew nor Aramaic existed at the time, in Mesopotamia it was mostly Acadian and in Canaan it was Canaanite.
 
_If Abraham brought any language to Canaan, it should be Acadian. That is my point, all along; shouldn’t we be looking for the meaning in Acadian rather than Hebrew or Aramaic?_
 
Regarding the meaning of Hebrew, in Arabic it's 3ibri, with the exact same meaning. Abraham was not called a 'Hebrew' from day one though, later his ancestors were called that. It's worth wondering whether Hebrew means the same thing in Acadian and/or Canaanite.


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## xmarabout

Mahaodeh said:


> _If Abraham brought any language to Canaan, it should be Acadian. That is my point, all along; shouldn’t we be looking for the meaning in Acadian rather than Hebrew or Aramaic?_


 
You surely are right with the language spoken by that person... But the name of the person is given first by the Hebrew Bible then maybe they created the name of their ancestor based on their language. You can consider Abraham not as a person who really existed but just as an example of somebody coming from Mesopotamia to Canaan and then one of the ancestors of the Hebrews and they gave him a name with a signification for them...


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## berndf

I think most scholars agree that Genesis is substantially older than the Babylonian exile, written between 950BC and 650BC, although we have no pre-exile records.

The "Ur Kasdim" (אוּר כַּשְׂדִים) of the Bible can hardly be understood to be the Ur of southern Mesopotamia. There is no consensus about the exact location but most scholars agree on a location in the upper Euphrates region, the same region as Aram.




Mahaodeh said:


> Abraham was not called a 'Hebrew' from day one though, later his ancestors were called that.


As stated above, you can find his name as "Avram Ha3vri" in Genesis 14:13.



Mahaodeh said:


> It's worth wondering whether Hebrew means the same thing in Acadian and/or Canaanite.


Hebrew is a Canaanite language. Hebrew, Aramaic and Phoenician are all very closely related languages. 




Mahaodeh said:


> _If Abraham brought any language to Canaan, it should be Acadian._


I don't know (and doubt) if Akkadian was ever popular language of the upper Euphrates region. It certainly was lingua franca of the region, much like Imperial Aramaic during much the first Millennium BC.

It is interesting to note, though, that first Millennium Canaanite languages (including Phoenician and Hebrew) and also Aramaic share some phonetic simplifications with Akkadian which cannot (yet) be found in Ugaritic (the only Northwest-Semitic language of which we have records from a time close to that of Abraham) and its closest West-Semitic relative Arabic: ש < ث, س, ش (though most Hebrew dialect as well as biblical and modern Hebrew know to different pronunciations of ש indicated by the diacritical marks שׁ and שׂ, i.e. the merger was not complete in Hebrew) and צ < ظ, ص, ض. But these mergers exist in other Canaanite languages as well, not only in Hebrew. Hence, if this were a sign of Akkadian influence, you could not deduce from it that Hebrew was originally a non-Canaanite language.


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## berndf

ThomasK said:


> Couldn't it be true that the -h(-) is 'mine': both of them are considered God's children as they do God's will ? (I think I heard that explanation from someone)


It doesn't ring a bell with me (which might be entirely due to my complete ignorance). The 1st person singular possessive suffix is normally characterized by the letter Yod, not He.


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## origumi

Thanks berndf for the excellent explanation. Just one clarification:



berndf said:


> ... first Millennium Canaanite languages (including Phoenician and Hebrew and also Aramaic)


 
The Canaanite language familiy does not include Aramaic. The two splitted maybe around 2000BC. Cannanites could (or almost could) understand each other in Biblical times (including at least the Hebrews, Phoenicians, Edomites, Moabites, Ammonites). Personally I was shocked to learn that I'm a Moabite speaker - reading the Mesha Stele. Hebrews, however, could not understand Aramaic in mid 1st millenium BC as documented in the Bible, 2 Kings 18:26.


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## berndf

Sorry, misplaced ")". What I meant was "Canaanite languages (including Phoenician and Hebrew) and also Aramaic". Thank you for spotting the mistake.


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## Mahaodeh

origumi said:


> The Canaanite language familiy does not include Aramaic. The two splitted maybe around 2000BC.


 
I had no idea Aramaic was so old, my understanding was that it's about 3000 years old, hence I assumed it first existed around 1000 BC.



origumi said:


> Cannanites could (or almost could) understand each other in Biblical times (including at least the Hebrews, Phoenicians, Edomites, Moabites, Ammonites).


 
That would be understandable, since I would imagine that languages first start as dialects and then further evolve in seperate languages. Usually one can understand other dialects of the same language.


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## berndf

origumi said:


> ...The two splitted maybe around 2000BC...


Which is not far away from the time when Abraham is supposed to have lived. Maybe The Precursors to Canaanite and Aramaic were still mutually intelligible at the time. Who knows?

What I really find remarkable is how much closer (in my perception) Hebrew and Aramaic are compared to the earlier Ugaritic. It would be interesting for me to know if you as a native Hebrew speaker perceive it the same way as I do.


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## berndf

Mahaodeh said:


> I had no idea Aramaic was so old, my understanding was that it's about 3000 years old, hence I assumed it first existed around 1000 BC.


The problem is that Northwest-Semitic languages are so poorly documented in the 2nd millennium BC. The Phoenician alphabet (aka Paleo-Hebrew because it was used to write Hebrew before being replaced by the Imperial Aramaic alphabet) were developed around 1000BC and the different Aramaic alphabets derived from it shortly thereafter. Texts in earlier writing systems (Proto-Canaanite and Ugaritic) are scarce. This makes it difficult to reconstruct with some degree of accuracy when and where certain development steps happened during the 2nd millennium BC. The only thing most scholars would probably subscribe to is that the common precursor to all Northwestern-Semitic languages was spoken by people living somewhere in the Western part of the Fertile Crescent, possibly (if not probably) as nomadic tribes.


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## Outlandish

Although I lack the basic knowledge of the history of the proposed languages, I had a thought and awaits confirmation about it. Supposing that Aramaic appeared after the time of Abraham and Sara, it did not just come out of no where, there most have been a huge basis of vocab and lingual structure borrowed from a sister language or dialect which comprises the nucleus of the newly evolving language. Thus, it is possible that a huge amount of the vocab and grammar of Aramaic were part of the specific language spoken by Abraham.
On a different spectrum, I once came across an Aramaic site affirming that Sarah is an Aramaic name which means "moon".


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## origumi

berndf said:


> It would be interesting for me to know if you as a native Hebrew speaker perceive it the same way as I do.


 
It depends on the reading material. First time I opened _Onkelos_ (the Aramaic translation of the Pentateuch, accepted by both Jews and Syriacs, 1st-2nd century AD) after few hours of theoretical study of the difference between Hebrew and Aramaic, I understood immediately 80% or more of the vocabulary and most of the grammar. But this is "unfair" - as a translation it's similar to the source language. In more complex scripts like the Talmud (2nd-5th century AD) my success rate is maybe 60%, in the Syriac NT less than 50%.

NOTE: the Aramaic discussed here is the one of about 1000BC-700AD. Modern Aramaic is different to the level that Hebrew (or even "classic" Aramaic) speaker would understand almost nothing.



Outlandish said:


> Supposing that Aramaic appeared after the time of Abraham and Sara, it did not just come out of no where, there most have been a huge basis of vocab and lingual structure borrowed from a sister language or dialect which comprises the nucleus of the newly evolving language. Thus, it is possible that a huge amount of the vocab and grammar of Aramaic were part of the specific language spoken by Abraham.


It's the opposite: Abraham is likely to have been of Aramaic origin who migrated to Canaan. Along hundreds of years his language changed enough to become a new one, called Canaanite.



> On a different spectrum, I once came across an Aramaic site affirming that Sarah is an Aramaic name which means "moon".


Sahar is moon.


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## berndf

origumi said:


> NOTE: the Aramaic discussed here is the one of about 1000BC-700AD. Modern Aramaic is different to the level that Hebrew (or even "classic" Aramaic) speaker would understand almost nothing.


That is understood. 

And what about Ugaritic which represents an older development stage of Northwest-Semitic? How difficult is that to understand for you?


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## origumi

berndf said:


> And what about Ugaritic which represents an older development stage of Northwest-Semitic? How difficult is that to understand for you?


The problems with Ugaritic are first of all the cuneiforms, their unnatural transliteration to Latin letters (as appears in most books), and the lack of vowels.

Let's take an example - a love song from here: https://www.eisenbrauns.com/assets/valentines/2009/AnUnpublishedPoeticTabletf.pdf. This is my transliteration into Hebrew letters (whenever I could) from the Latin transliteration, with additional vowels:

מי כמשת חורייה
מי בעלמותם נעימות
???
שערך ירוק חרוץ
??? שינייך
שפתייך כמו שושנים
יקראן קולך מרחוקתם
על צבי ירחף
אשת חלומי את
עלמת ??? מן איל​ 
And this is the Hebrew equivalent:​ 
מי כמוך חורייה
מי בעלמות הנעימות
???
שערך צהוב זהוב
??? שינייך
שפתייך כמו שושנים
יקרא קולך מרחוק
על צבא ירחף
אשת חלומי את
עלמת ??? מן האל​ 
Seems rather similar. Case suffixes need to be removed, the color names are totally different, the gem names are a riddle to me, the definite article is different, no clue what vowels were there for plural and dual. I guess that this isolated example does not represent the real distance between the languages.​


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## berndf

Thank you very much, Origumi!


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