Endnote 5 – Getting Personal

Hess, Names, pp. 61–62. The names are mlk’dm (“Adam is king”) and ‘bd’ dm (“servant of Adam”). See Corpus inscriptionum Semiticarum ab academia inscriptionum et litterarum humanorum conditum atque digestum, Pars Prima Inscriptiones Phoenicias Continens 1 (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1881), p. 367, text 295, line 4; J.-B. Chabot, “Punica,” Journal asiatique 10 (1917), p. 54, text Costa 21, line 2. Both names are Punic, a late dialect of Phoenician, with inscriptions dating from the fifth century B.C.E. to the sixth century C.E. Adam is used as the name of a god in forming these two personal names. The letter “d” in the first name is not clear so the only certain example is the second one. Adam was also read as a personal name in one of the Arad ostraca from southern Judah. However, the first letter must be restored. As a result, André Lemaire suggested the more likely restoration of a “q” and read the name as qdm, “Qiddem.” Anson F. Rainey, ed., J. Ben-Or, trans., Arad Inscriptions (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1981), p. 68; and André Lemaire, Inscriptions Hébraïques I: Les Ostraca, Littératures anciennes du proche-orient 9 (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1977), p. 206.