someday, except that, I reasoned, I would have a daughter too early for that. We didn’t name our children after the living, like Sephardic Jews do. It would have to be my granddaughter’s name.
Of all the passive and submissive women in the Bible I could have been named after, somehow Deborah ended up on my birth certificate. No one in my family had ever been named that, and Ashkenazi Jews never give their children random names. The custom is always to name a child after a dead relative.
Indeed, I was given two names at my Kiddish, the Jewish equivalent of a christening for girls: Sarah and Deborah. I was called Sarah growing up. There were plenty of dead Sarahs in my family.Deborah was an afterthought, rarely mentioned. I never heard any tales told about an ancestor with that name. When I scoured the family tree I had managed to assemble through careful sleuthing, no one by that name showed up, even when I went back seven generations. Why Deborah?
In the book of Judges, Deborah is introduced with the words “
eshes lapidus
.” It’s common in the Bible for people to be tagged in such a way, with descriptions following their names. Wife of, son of—that’s how they were identified in those days. The weird thing is, if the words
eshes lapidus
, or “woman of Lapidus,” are to mean that Deborah is a wife, why is Lapidus never identified separately in the scripture? Why isn’t he given a patronym? In the Bible, all male figures are identified by the names of their fathers, sometimes even their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, too.
Lapidus
is a Hebrew word for torch, or fire. It is not the mundane term, but a literary word, a term with elevated connotations. It is an unlikely name for a person. Educated people infer that the description of Deborah therefore translates to “woman of the torch,” or “fiery woman,” as opposed to wife of anyone.
Woman of fire.
Nothing was beyond the scope of Deborah’s achievement. She is undoubtedly the most empowered woman in Jewish history. She was a judge, a leader, a military strategist and commander, a prophetess, and an icon. The Greeks later put her effigy on a coin. She was revered for her beauty, her wisdom, and most of all, her strength. Men tried to marry her, rabbis surmise, but she refused. So she was given the ambiguous affixation—
eshes lapidus.
When I first applied to college, needing a legal name for documents, I discovered that my birth certificate said only Deborah,and from then on, the Sarah was dropped. To me, Sarah was my old name, a name for a passive girl. Deborah would be my future.
Deborah, woman of fire.
Centuries after Deborah’s rule, Jews were still talking about her, but not necessarily politely. The group of rabbis who sat around a table in a synagogue and argued with one another about every word in the Bible, and who had the minutes of their meetings transcribed into a collection of work that would become the Talmud, made a point of belittling, with a pernicious determination, the few women who had made it into biblical history. They focused on Deborah with unreserved vitriol, for of the paltry group of women who received positive mentions in scripture, she is truly the only threat. Not just a holy woman, neither a mother nor a wife, Deborah broke every rule in the book by occupying a position that had only ever been held by men and would never again be held by a woman. She died untamed, although surely there were those who wanted her retired into a convenient marriage to sink behind the name of her husband into obscurity.
There is a particularly memorable passage in the Talmud that records a conversation in which rabbis compete with one another to mock the names of the female prophets. By happenstance, some of the women were named after animals, names designed to denote industriousness, a cherished quality in a Jewish woman.
Deborah
is the Hebrew term for bee, a hardworking creature. The rabbis poke fun at Deborah by attacking her
Of all the passive and submissive women in the Bible I could have been named after, somehow Deborah ended up on my birth certificate. No one in my family had ever been named that, and Ashkenazi Jews never give their children random names. The custom is always to name a child after a dead relative.
Indeed, I was given two names at my Kiddish, the Jewish equivalent of a christening for girls: Sarah and Deborah. I was called Sarah growing up. There were plenty of dead Sarahs in my family.Deborah was an afterthought, rarely mentioned. I never heard any tales told about an ancestor with that name. When I scoured the family tree I had managed to assemble through careful sleuthing, no one by that name showed up, even when I went back seven generations. Why Deborah?
In the book of Judges, Deborah is introduced with the words “
eshes lapidus
.” It’s common in the Bible for people to be tagged in such a way, with descriptions following their names. Wife of, son of—that’s how they were identified in those days. The weird thing is, if the words
eshes lapidus
, or “woman of Lapidus,” are to mean that Deborah is a wife, why is Lapidus never identified separately in the scripture? Why isn’t he given a patronym? In the Bible, all male figures are identified by the names of their fathers, sometimes even their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, too.
Lapidus
is a Hebrew word for torch, or fire. It is not the mundane term, but a literary word, a term with elevated connotations. It is an unlikely name for a person. Educated people infer that the description of Deborah therefore translates to “woman of the torch,” or “fiery woman,” as opposed to wife of anyone.
Woman of fire.
Nothing was beyond the scope of Deborah’s achievement. She is undoubtedly the most empowered woman in Jewish history. She was a judge, a leader, a military strategist and commander, a prophetess, and an icon. The Greeks later put her effigy on a coin. She was revered for her beauty, her wisdom, and most of all, her strength. Men tried to marry her, rabbis surmise, but she refused. So she was given the ambiguous affixation—
eshes lapidus.
When I first applied to college, needing a legal name for documents, I discovered that my birth certificate said only Deborah,and from then on, the Sarah was dropped. To me, Sarah was my old name, a name for a passive girl. Deborah would be my future.
Deborah, woman of fire.
Centuries after Deborah’s rule, Jews were still talking about her, but not necessarily politely. The group of rabbis who sat around a table in a synagogue and argued with one another about every word in the Bible, and who had the minutes of their meetings transcribed into a collection of work that would become the Talmud, made a point of belittling, with a pernicious determination, the few women who had made it into biblical history. They focused on Deborah with unreserved vitriol, for of the paltry group of women who received positive mentions in scripture, she is truly the only threat. Not just a holy woman, neither a mother nor a wife, Deborah broke every rule in the book by occupying a position that had only ever been held by men and would never again be held by a woman. She died untamed, although surely there were those who wanted her retired into a convenient marriage to sink behind the name of her husband into obscurity.
There is a particularly memorable passage in the Talmud that records a conversation in which rabbis compete with one another to mock the names of the female prophets. By happenstance, some of the women were named after animals, names designed to denote industriousness, a cherished quality in a Jewish woman.
Deborah
is the Hebrew term for bee, a hardworking creature. The rabbis poke fun at Deborah by attacking her
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