Phoenix meaning

Meaning

Palm Tree

Your [God's] Face, Your [God's] Presence

Etymology

From φοινιξ (phoinix), palm tree.

From פני, face of ... , plus the pronoun ך (cha), your.

Related names

• Via φοινιξ (phoinix): Phoenicia

• Via פנה (pana): Hazelelponi, Jephunneh, Peniel, Peninnah, Penuel, Phanuel, Phinehas, Pinon, Punon

The name Phoenix (also known as Phenice) as mentioned in the Bible (Acts 27:12) belongs to a modest harbor village on Crete that was evidently so modest that the author had to add that it was on Crete, lest the audience wouldn't immediately understand that. There was also a town called Phoenix on the south-western coast of Asia Minor, which was rather associated with the island of Rhodes, directly to its south. And there was a town called Phoenix on the coast of Lycia near Attalia, to the northwest of Cyprus.

Despite its evident modesty, Phoenix on Crete appears to have been a suitable place to winter, but the ship that was transporting Paul to Rome was blown away from its coast by a wind called Euroclydon, which drove the ship past Crete, Clauda and Syrtis until after whopping fourteen days of storm (probably not a literal one) it finally beached on the reefs of Malta.

As we explain in more detail in our article on the name Malta, Paul's journey from Jerusalem (soon to be destroyed) to Rome is rather obviously based on Odysseus' journey from the sacked citadel of Troy to his home on Ithaca — but this not as a mere retelling, but rather an innovation of the Nostoi genre of which also Virgil's Aeneid was a manifestation.

As everybody in the original audience of the book of Acts would have remembered, Phoenix was also the name of an important mythological prince of Tyre, who was also known as Phoenicia (clearly personifying the people he was prince of). This Phoenix was the brother (or father, says the Iliad in 14.321) of Europa, the Phoenician princess whom was impregnated by Zeus in the form of a bull. Zeus took Europa to Crete where she became the first queen, whilst giving her name to the entire continent. This story obviously conveys the relationship between Greek and Phoenician cultures: among the offspring of Zeus and Europa was Minos of Minotaur fame who conversed with Zeus for nine years, the hero Sarpedon who fought on the side of Troy during the war, and the stern Rhadamanthus who became the judge of the dead. Rather comparable with the reaction of king Menelaus of Sparta, whose wife Helen was seduced and abducted by Paris of Troy, king Agenor sent prince Phoenix and his two brothers to find the abducted Europa and bring her back. The brothers failed and instead settled far off lands, obviously as semi-independent spheres of Phoenician settlements along the Mediterranean coasts.

Phoenix was also the name of a Greek prince who had tutored Achilles and joined him in the Trojan war (as told in Homer's Iliad book 9). This Phoenix was somewhat comparable to Reuben of Israel, as both had had relations with their father's women and were punished for that.

By the time of the New Testament, our name Phoenix was also firmly associated with the familiar Phoenix bird, whose resurrection was not unlike that of Christ, as over the millennia many commentators have noted.

Our name Phoenix is most obviously identical to the Greek word for palm:

By the late fifth century BCE, the Carthaginians had begun to circulate a coin with a palm on it, which prompted foreigners to start calling them Palm People; hence the name Phoenicians. And since Carthage was a colony of Tyre in Canaan, that whole area began to be referred to as the Phoenician homeland in retrospect. As we explain in much more detail in our article on the name Phoenicia, the Phoenicians may actually have been known as Palm People long before the Carthaginians minted their coin, and their design with a palm may actually have derived from their existing reputation.

Palms are actually not trees but a kind of grass, and in any desert but particularly some new desert (by merciless logging or a fire), palms indicated the first new beginning of life. They would sprout where water hid just below the surface, and any thirsty desert traveler would scan the horizon for the striking crowns of these plants, exuberantly indicating an oasis. Palms are fast growers, some grow as much as a meter in one year. And the oases they marked would grow into villages first and then sprawling urban centers.

All this may be why the Phoenicians had come to be known as such: Palm People. They had re-invented themselves first after the Bronze Age Collapse that wiped out all civilization in the Levant in the 12th century BCE , and then in the 7th century upon the rise of the military superpower of Assyria, as the colony of Carthage. Long before Carthage became the powerhouse it would be, the Phoenicians had created strings of settlements and trading posts where they not only offered wares but also stories, law and statecraft and ultimately the alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet, from which the Greek and Latin ones derives, allowed people to write down and preserve their legacies. It allowed them to give names to unseen things, and explore the marvelous world of philosophy and speculation. The alphabet quite literally brought the modern world into being (see our articles on YHWH and Adam). Without the alphabet, there would have been no Greek Golden Age, and there would certainly not have been a Republic, let alone a Democracy.

The Phoenix bird, likewise, may actually have been an embodiment of the amazing ability of the Phoenicians to reinvent themselves. This embodiment attained the body of a bird not because the Phoenicians could somehow fly but because the ancients understood that birds had evolved wings primarily to protect their chicks with, and flight was only a pleasant side effect of that. This is also the reason why angels, God and the Word of God all have wings: not to fly with but to protect with (Psalm 91:4, Matthew 23:37). The Phoenix was quickly imagined to be blood-red, possibly because of the similarity of our word φοινιξ (phoinix) to the adjective φοινος (phoinos), blood-spilling red, from the noun φονος (phonos), meaning a murder or a slaying. But perhaps more so because writing only works when the language has been standardized and everybody writes the same way. That means that natural diversity had to take a nose dive and some local dialects even had to lose their head all together.

In antiquity, only information that had to be preserved was written down on expensive paper (hence the name Byblos) or parchment (hence the name Pergamum). All other scribbles, tallies or administrations on the fly by busy merchants or students practicing their letters was done on a folded tablet of wax that could easily be erased and used again. This in turn may have reminded of the Phoenix legend. Such a tablet was known as a πιναξ (pinax), as in "fatal tokens; many murderous signs incised in a folded tablet" (Iliad 6.169), which in turn reminds of Paul's observation that the letter kills (2 Corinthians 3:6-7). This word πιναξ (pinax), writing tablet, rather obviously resembles the verb πινω (pino), to drink, which ties into the theme of the oasis. Note that the "platter" upon which the head of John the Baptist was presented to Salome (Matthew 14:8) was not a dinner dish but precisely such a πιναξ (pinax):

It's a mystery where our noun φοινιξ (phoinix), meaning palm, came from, as it doesn't look like anything native to the Indo-European basin. But the early Greeks were avid trading partners of the Phoenicians, who spoke a language closely similar to Biblical Hebrew. For all these reasons, here at Abarim Publications we guess that our word φοινιξ (phoinix) originated in a Hebrew expression: one of a long list of terms that were imported into early Greek together with the alphabet. The term we are thinking of is פניך (panecha), meaning "Your face" or "Your presence", with the pronoun commonly referring to God: "from Your Face I will be hidden" (Genesis 4:14), "mercy and truth precede Your Presence" (Psalm 89:14), "they will be glad in Your Presence" (Isaiah 9:3).

The noun that means face comes from the verb פנה (pana), to turn:

In our article on the name Phoenicia we discuss these things at much greater length. Our name Phoenix simply means Palm, but by application it also means Phoenician Town, and since the ethnonym Phoenician could also refer to the signature purple dye for which the Phoenicians were famous: Center For Purple-Dyed Clothing.

Note that the progression of the Biblical narrative clearly comes in main steps of 500 years each. And after Christ, mankind evolves comparable to the goings on before Christ, but reversed, like a temporal palindrome. If you wonder why there might be predictable patterns in history, see our article on Gog and Magog.

Note that Noah lived 350 years after the flood, and his son Shem lived another 502 years after the flood, and outlived Abraham by 35 years. So, in the reverse, the first signs of the final destruction of the earth should be expected to become evident when world unites, first in the outrageous warfare of 1914-1945 (Matthew 24:6-8), but then in pseudo-peaceful standards and norms of the postwar era and ultimately the Internet (Revelation 20:9). Those who belong to God have nothing to fear. The others, well, see our article on Apollyon.