Page 268 - Coincidences in the Bible and in Biblical Hebrew

CHAPTER 19 NON-HEBREW NAMES OF

SELF-PROCLAIMED FOES OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL

CHAPTER 19

Non-Hebrew Names of Self-Proclaimed Foes of
the People of Israel

19.1 Introduction

The Jewish nation had, and still has, enemies posing grave threats to its survival
over the centuries, either when Jews were scattered in Diaspora or when they
entertained sovereignty in their own ancestral homeland, the land of Israel . These
enemies had names that originated in various sources unrelated to the Hebrew
language. Yet, by still another bizarre coincidence, an improbable proportion of
these names turn out to have extremely negative meaning in the Hebrew lan-
guage, which at times expresses very precisely the character of the threat that these
enemies have posed to the very existence of Jews, as a nation or as individuals.
In this chapter, we present some of these names. Not all names that fall into
this category of coincidences are given here; some might be perceived as politically
incorrect and were therefore omitted. We feel that although the excluded names

define, in the Hebrew sense, the essence of the enemy and the nature of the threat
posed to the Jewish people, some readers may find these examples offensive. They

were therefore removed.
The author apologizes to those readers who might still take offense to any
names in the set of remaining examples given. I wish to assure you that offense or
controversy is not the intention here. Only self-proclaimed enemies of the Jewish
people are included, and no judgmental or evaluative statements are intended.
Our sole purpose in this chapter is to demonstrate the bizarre phenomenon
(coincidence) that in numerous cases people and organizations who had declared
themselves, at one period or another, enemies of the Jewish people, by deed and
by talk, turned out to own names of non-Hebrew origin that in Hebrew possess
extremely negative meanings.

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