Endnote 31 – What’s in a Name?

Bickerman’s colleague Morton Smith (both scholars taught at Columbia University) held that Bickerman’s view was “a possible and plausible explanation of the facts,” but nonetheless suggested that an alternative explanation was possible: “that the parents who bore pagan names were not Judeans, and that their imposition of Yahwist names on their children was due to the increasing repute of Yahweh as a god of miraculous powers,” partly due, perhaps, to the rebuilding of his Temple. Since Isaiah 56:3, 6 indicates that there were indeed gentiles in Babylonia who “attached themselves to YHWH,” it is possible that some of the pagan-named men who gave their sons Yahwistic names were among them. See Morton Smith, “Jewish Religious Life in the Persian Period,” in W.D. Davies and Louis Finkelstein, eds., The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 1, The Persian Period (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), p. 222.