Esarhaddon meaning

Meaning

Ashur Has Given A Brother

Keenness Imprisoned, Swift Capture

Etymology

From the Assyrian term asur-ah-iddina.

From (1) the verb אסר ('asar), to bind, and (2) the verb חדד (hadad), to be sharp, keen or swift.

Related names

• Via אסר ('asar): Asarel, Asriel, Assir, Masoretes, Moserah, Shalmaneser, Tiglath-pileser

• Via חדד (hadad): En-haddah, Hadad, Haddakel, Hadid, Hazor-hadattah, Jahdiel, Jehdeiah

The name Esarhaddon belongs to a king of Assyria, who reigned from 681 to 669 BC. He is briefly mentioned in two separate Biblical scenes. Both Isaiah and the Book of Kings report that king Sennacherib was murdered by Adrammelech and Sharezer in the temple of his deity Nisroch, and that his son Esarhaddon ascended the throne in his place (2 Kings 19:37 = Isaiah 37:38).

The other mention of the name Esarhaddon in the Bible is in the Book of Ezra, which tells that when the Jews were restoring the temple of YHWH in Jerusalem, certain folks (either Israelites, Samaritans or gentiles) who had been captured and deported by king Esarhaddon, demanded to be allowed to partake in the restoration works. Zerubbabel, Jeshua and the other leaders denied them this (Ezra 4:2, spelled without the maqqep).

King Esarhaddon died in 669, and was succeeded by his son Ashurbanipal.

The importance of the Assyrian and Babylonian exiles was playfully alluded to by Carl Sagan in his portentous 1985 novel Contact, which was made into a wonderful 1997 film starring Jodie Foster as Ellie Arroway, a scientific prodigy who manages to tap into a mysterious data stream (Psalm 19:1-3) and seeks funding to pursue it. And that, as the story goes, brought her to S. R. Hadden, a benefactory but deadly ill engineer who was named after the ancient king Esarhaddon (and see Exodus 31:1-11 for the significance of S. R. Hadden being a technician).

King Esarhaddon was obviously named after Ashur, the titular deity of Assyria, who was frequently depicted seated in a winged solar disk. True to form, S. R. Hadden takes his refuge in a helicopter first and the space station later. This in obvious contrast to Ellie's journey, which not only takes her orders of magnitude farther than S. R. Hadden, it also take place primarily in the space of the human mind.

Certainly significant, in 1903, the Russian author Leo Tolstoy published a short story called Esarhaddon, King of Assyria, in which king Esarhaddon finds himself briefly forced to live in the skin of an Arab king called Lailie, whom he has conquered and put in a cage awaiting execution by impalement (or arrows). Esarhaddon experiences Lailie's fear, takes pity on him and rather than have him killed, gives him the province of Bazu to rule over as king (Bazu, as a side note, is Hebrew for [his] plunder).

Curiously (notes also Christie Carr of the University of Oxford), king Lailie is on all accounts a very minor king who is barely mentioned in extant inscriptions and known by name only to a handful of specialists, which Tolstoy wasn't. Carl Sagan was also no Assyriologist, but his juxtaposition of airborne super-engineer S. R. Haddon against destitute scientist Ellie Arroway was done with an undeniable wink to Tolstoy's short story.

That short story, in turn, did not emerge in a literary vacuum but was part of an anthology that commemorated the outrageous Kishinev Pogrom of April 1903. That same pogrom prompted Hayim Nahman Bialik to write his famous poem In the City of Slaughter (published in 1904). That poem inspired many young Russian Jews to abandon the pacifism that had signified Jews pretty much since their ill-fated revolt against the Romans. The "no more mister nice guy" attitude of young Russian Jews did not help the Tsar, but it did help Communism, and this in turn strongly influenced the chain of events that would result in the Second World War. And that war, obviously, had a lot to do with the formation of the State of Israel in 1948.

As Yuval Noah Harari dryly notes: Bialik's poem In the City of Slaughter is "mandatory reading for anyone wishing to understand how after two millennia of being one of the most pacifist groups in history, Jews built one of the most formidable armies in the world" (Nexus, 2024, chapter 3). What Harari doesn't say and perhaps not even implies is that there are multiple separate entities called Israel, that somehow conflate but never truly consolidate and are erroneously considered one and the same by any careless observer. There are Israel the land, Isarel the people and Israel the state, and all are the center of their own universe and plead their case and call their supporters toward the barricades and once more onto whatever breach they perceive.

Here at Abarim Publications we continue to be awestruck with how the mycelium of literary clairvoyance weaves its webs within the rotting forest floor of human discourse. How much did Tolstoy know? Or Sagan? Or Harari, for that matter? In Contact, the instructions on building the Machine come spliced into a recording of a speech by Hitler. So OK, the world received the specs, and a small team of experts pieced them together. And indeed, why build one when you can have two at twice the price?

The name Esarhaddon, or rather the original Assyrian Asur-ah-iddina means something like Ashur Has Given A Brother (says BDB Theological Dictionary). Ashur was the primary Assyrian deity, and the ah-part is the same as the Hebrew word אח ('ah), meaning brother (see names such as Ahab and Ahijah). Alfred Jones (Dictionary of Old Testament Proper Names) agrees with the gift-part but translates the first section of our name with fire, and reads Gift Of Fire.

The Hebrew authors allowed themselves considerable freedom in transliterating the names of foreign kings, and often appear to have garbled these names to such an extent that they acquired a meaning in Hebrew that wasn't there before and which was rather like a miniature commentary. The Assyrian name Asur-ah-iddina was transliterated into אסר־חדן, which consist of two parts, the first one being an expression of the verb אסר ('asar), meaning to bind:

The second part of our name may seem to be derived of the verb חדד (hadad), meaning to be sharp or keen or even swift:

Altogether, the name Esarhaddon appears to mean Keenness Imprisoned or perhaps Swift Capture, which could be seen as reminiscent of the name Maher-shalal-hash-baz, which means Swift The Booty, Speedy The Prey, and which was designed to warn people for the imminent Assyrian invasion (Isaiah 8:3).