🔼The name Bithynia: Summary
- Meaning
- Unknown but perhaps House Of Answer, Business, Affliction, Singing
- Etymology
- Unknown but perhaps from Bethany: (1) the noun בית (beth), house, and (2) the verb ענה ('ana), to answer, be busy, afflict or sing.
🔼The name Bithynia in the Bible
The name Bithynia belonged to a kingdom on the northern coast of Anatolia, directly to the east of modern Istanbul. In 74 BC it fell to Rome, along with its neighbors. The name Bithynia occurs only twice in the Bible, namely in Acts 16:7, where we read that the Spirit of Jesus would not allow Paul, Silas and Timothy to go eastward from Mysia into Bithynia, and in 1 Peter 1:1, where the author addresses those of the diaspora residing in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, who were chosen "by the sanctifying work of the Spirit, to obey Jesus Christ". This apparent contradiction is probably best explained by their relation to the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD (Paul pre- and Peter post-), which in turn relates to the death and resurrection of Jesus set in the 30s.
As we explain in more detail in our article on the name Jesus, the story of Jesus is not a piece of journalism; it's not history, and it's not true because it really happened. Instead, the story of Jesus is not concerned with true history and biological descent (hence, "Woman, what have I to do with thee?" — John 2:4), but rather in which ways Jesus was a son-by-law of Joseph (Luke 3:23), to whom he was related only legally and not naturally. The story of Jesus is about law; not human law but God's law. The story of Jesus conveys not the doctrine by which we should live, but rather the regularities in which everything that can happen does happen, and it is true because that's how things happen every time. The gospel is like E=mc2, which isn't true because it happened that once and somebody quickly wrote it down, but rather because it's true always regardless of what's going on. Like the Torah, the gospel tells of universal truths and natural laws that cannot be broken, and by which all things must occur.
All goings on in the universe are related by a huge web of patterns that is a fractal in all directions. And once you know where you are in that fractal, it becomes relatively easy to predict what's coming next. See our article on Gog and Magog for a small demonstration of this. And note that likewise Paul didn't go around delivering compelling speeches but instead rather calmly demonstrated the Spirit's power for all to see (1 Corinthians 2:4). How he did that isn't told, but here at Abarim Publications we like to demonstrate the Spirit by pointing out patterns.
🔼Etymology of the name Bithynia
Bithynia (Βιθυνια) was named after the Bithyni (Βιθυνοι), a Thracian tribe who had migrated into Anatolia from the Balkans, probably in or due to the turmoil caused by the Bronze Age Collapse of 1177 BCE. They did so alongside another tribe, called the Thyni (Θυνι), with whom they were friendly and cooperated and intermarried. Or so noted Herodotus in the fifth century BCE, whose allegiance to truth frequently gave out to his love for invention, but whose inventiveness did not reach so far as to explain why the Thyni and the Bithyni wouldn't simply be one tribe. Also unexplained is why two tribes would have names that sounded suspiciously like Thing and Thing Two.
It's no longer clear where the names Thyni and Bithyni came from, or even from what language. And whether the origin story of the Thyni and the Bithyni has roots in physical reality may never be clear, but in the few centuries after the Bronze Age Collapse, the entire Mediterranean was dominated by Phoenicians, who dominated not by military power but rather by their offering of free trade to anyone who had anything to trade. They spoke a language closely similar to Biblical Hebrew and would give the world the alphabet (see our article on YHWH). Perhaps some Phoenician traders found this uprooted double tribe wandering about Anatolia and jocularly called them תהו ובהו (tohu wa bohu), or void and formless (Genesis 1:2), or something like that. Joke names were not at all uncommon in the Semitic language basin: see our article on Tiglath-pileser. We already mentioned the duo Gog and Magog, whose name has a deliberate comedic element. Paul's greeting to Tryphaena and Tryphosa is similarly jocular. And modern Yiddish too has its share of terms like fancy-shmancy, mayor-shmayor and cancer-shmancer.
But whatever the true source of our name, and whether in the Phoenician period, the Greek one or the Roman one, a refugee from Canaan would probably have been struck by the similarity between our name Βιθυνια (Bithunia) and the names Βετθια (Bethia) or Bithia, meaning Daughter of Yah, and Βηθανια (Bethania) or Bethany, meaning House Of Reply: where Mary, Martha and Lazarus lived, or perhaps the similarly named place in the wilderness where John baptized.
Several coins (BMC Greek (Pontus)/Catalogue of Greek coins, 17 page 106) and inscriptions (Inscriptiones Greacae ad res Romanas Pertinentes Tomus IV, page 157, under header 385) have been found around Bithynia that feature a curiously different spelling of our name, namely Βειθυνιας (Beithunias), and the "Beit-" part rather obviously points toward the widely attested Semitic word for house:
בית
The noun בית (bayit) means house. It sometimes merely denotes a domestic building, but mostly it denotes the realm of authority of the house-father, or אב (ab). This ab is commonly the living alpha male of a household, but may very well be a founding ancestor (as in the familiar term the "house of Israel"). The אב (ab) may also be a deity, in which case the בית (bayit) is that which we know as a temple.
In the larger economy, a house interacts with other houses. These interactions are governed by the אב (ab), or "father" and executed by the בנים (benim), or "sons": those people living in the house, irrespective of any biological relation with the אב (ab). The "sons" combined add up to אם ('em), which means both "mother" and "tribe".
The second part of our name, or at least to the creative refugee from Canaan who mistook the name Bithynia for Bethany, would come from the broad cluster ענה ('ana):
ענה
There are four verbs of the form ענה ('nh), or perhaps one verb with four distinct usages:
Verb ענה ('ana I) means to answer, respond or correspond, and since in the old world time was considered a cycle, noun עת ('et) means time. Temporal adverb עתה ('atta) means now; adjective עתי ('itti) means timely or ready, and conjunction יען (ya'an) means on account of. Noun מענה (ma'aneh) means an answer and noun ענה ('ona) means cohabitation.
Verb ענה ('ana II) means to be busy or occupied with. Noun ענין ('inyan) means occupation or task, and noun מענה (ma'ana) means place for or agent of a task.
Verb ענה ('ana III) means to afflict, oppress or humble. Noun ענו ('anaw) refers to the poor, afflicted or needy. Noun ענוה ('anawa) means humility. Noun ענות ('enut) means affliction. Adjective עני ('ani) means poor or afflicted. Noun עני ('oni) means affliction or poverty, and noun תענית (ta'anit) means humiliation.
Verb ענה ('ana IV) means to sing.
🔼Bithynia meaning
It's no longer clear what Bithynia meant or whether it was a serious name or a joke name, perhaps creatively projected upon refugees by some Phoenicians, or named after the original Bethany in Canaan as a kind of homage to home. If the latter is the case, then it means House Of Answer or Business or Affliction or Singing.