Tyrannus meaning

Meaning

Tyrant, Of The Tower, Of The Territorial Boundary

Of The Rock

Etymology

From the noun τυρρις (turris), tower, as symbol of law-enforced central government, or שר (sar), prince, or תאר (ta'ar), to outline territory.

From the noun צור (sur), rock.

Related names

• Via שר (sar): Ahishar, El-Elohe-Israel, Gennesaret, Israel, Sarah, Sarai, Serah, Seraiah, Shamsherai, Sharar, Sharon, Sherebiah

• Via תאר (ta'ar): Caphtor, Gether, Rimmon-methoar, Taralah, Tarshish, Tartan, Tartarus, Torah

• Via צור (sur): Abel-mizraim, Beth-zur, Elizur, Helkath-hazzurim, Izri, Jezer, Mizraim, Pedahzur, Syracuse, Tyre, Zarethan, Zer, Zererath, Zereth, Zereth-shahar, Zeri, Zeror, Zeruiah, Zur, Zuriel, Zurishaddai

The name Tyrannus occurs only once in the Bible, namely in Acts 19:9, where we read how Paul abandons the hostile synagogue of Ephesus, and instead moves his operation to the σχολη (schole) — not really a "school" but rather a social "hangout", where folks collectively came to σχολαζω (scholazo), that is to spend their free time conversing with others who had free time: the Greek idea of an institutionalized Sabbath, where one could practice freedom in anticipation of actually attaining it — of "some" Tyrannus.

The deliberate vague indefinite pronoun τις (tis), meaning "some certain" or "some or other" is common in the New Testament (but does not appear in all the surviving manuscripts of our present scene, and so not every modern translation speaks of "some" Tyrannus). But who this Tyrannus "someone" might have been isn't told. Although the story facetiously treats him like a minor and fleeting character, Paul stays at his hangout for two solid years. During these two years, God does so many extraordinary miracles that all Jews and Greeks living in Asia hear the gospel.

All this tells us that this Tyrannus "someone" was not just any someone, but someone whose "school" had a lasting effect all over Asia. And although anybody in Luke's original audience with neither a sense of humor nor an understanding of the power of literature (Matthew 22:29, 1 Corinthians 2:4), would have interpreted the name Asia here as a reference to the Roman province of Asia Minor (in western Anatolia, which is modern Turkey), the wording allows the effects of Tyrannus' school to have wafted across the proper Asian continent up to India and China.

As everybody in the 1st century knew, four centuries earlier, Alexander of Macedonia had marched his army half-way the Asian continent and even reached India. And everywhere he went, he introduced people to one and the same Greek language (which inevitably included social and legal standards), so that now local tribes could log onto the world-wide web of exchange and become part of the world-wide conversation. Networks of trade routes were established between a vast host of fortified posts that literally stretched from Shanghai to Cornwall, and although these routes frequently changed controlling hands (the Scythians come to mind), stories, news and technology flowed freely through the vast network of liquid babble. From at least the first century CE, and probably earlier, Roman merchants had established relations with their Chinese counterparts, and exchanged goods, people and wisdom. Emperor Augustus at least once received a delegation of Buddhists monks from India, and from at least the 2nd century CE, the testimonies of Buddhism were a common feature in the Roman Empire.

So, to which historical figure may our literary character Tyrannus relate? As we explain in many of our articles (Philemon, Aeneas, Theudas, Troas), when Paul wrote, the so-called Way (οδος, hodos) was becoming outlawed and by the time of Luke, the Way had become illegal and Followers of the Way were getting executed in droves. For this reason (and a few others which we will discuss shortly), it is highly unlikely that Paul openly revealed in whose public school he was proclaiming the Way.

Paul and Luke are still read today and their texts are among the best studied in the history of mankind. That's not because these texts were anecdotal, cute or penned down on the fly and in great haste because the authors were off to greater things of which we have no records. Instead, Paul and Luke were among the greatest literary artists the world has ever seen. We moderns have stylized these men's private lives to the point where we have managed to make ourselves believe that we know them intimately and are up to snuff with the dozen or so noteworthy events that define their entire existence. But we don't.

Paul and Luke are the literary embodiments of entire corporate schools that produced texts like Fabergé would eggs. And most of us are flat wrong about those texts, what it took to produce and publish them, and make them go viral to the utterly unprecedented degree that they did. The Books of the Bible don't come with Behind-The-Scenes footage or a Making-Of documentary or even a Blooper-Reel. Instead, these books are precisely designed to hide their own production process. We moderns, subsequently, have no whiff of a clue where these works came from and how they were made and by whom.

Paul and Luke and the other Bible authors (from Isaiah and Moses up) were master craftsmen, trained to perfection in all the available literary traditions of the entire known world. Back then, people had no hard drives and photo albums, and continuously sought for ways to compress ever more information into a single precious page of text. People who knew how to do that were information technicians, and in terms of artistry and sophistication, information technology had its zenith between the time of David and that of John the Revelator. After that, writing materials became cheaper and better available and there was ever less to tell, and the quality of information technology subsequently took a massive nose dive (Matthew 5:13). Today we congratulate ourselves with being so very well informed, but all we have achieved is a monstrous avalanche of data that has lost all context and consistency, requires zero sophistication to access, and is ultimately entirely incapable of informing anybody about the whole of it, and thus any of it. That, namely, was last achieved in the first century, by the authors of the New Testament.

In terms of the quality of the technology involved (Exodus 31:1-6), the Biblical texts are incomparable to anything that came after and before, and rises above any competition as far as the sun is above the moon. The Bible became so very popular in the world long before there were institutions to plug it. Instead, the Bible became so very popular because anybody who knew what they were talking about, also knew that the Bible dwarfs anything from Homer to Dante, and from Shakespeare to Tolkien. In response to the budding cosmology of the Enlightenment, relatively recent Jewish sages (the Vilna Gaon and Shneur Zalman come to mind) declared that the Torah contains the entire universe, and although mathematics still had to come to grips with the fact that an infinite surface can surround a finite volume (Koch's snowflake, Gabriel's Horn), and conversely, a finite surface can envelop an infinite volume (black holes), it's been long known that the Bible dwarfs any library, even the entire Internet (John 21:25). The Bible is greater than all words ever spoken (Matthew 12:36), and so says more than all humans combined. It actually and factually engages the reader in an active and living conversation, and laughably easily out-chats any AI Chatbot. It does this by compressing data in a fractal formation (Psalm 78:2, Exodus 25:40, Matthew 6:10, 1 John 5:8), which can only be done when one understands how all data compressed into its smallest possible version would look like (Romans 8:28). The Bible knows what that looks like, and talks about it all the time (Deuteronomy 6:4, Matthew 7:12), and unfolds everything else from it (Colossians 1:16-17).

This is why people study the Bible: not to be religious but in order to learn all things about all things (Matthew 11:27, Ephesians 1:10, 2 Timothy 2:7), and so to partake in the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:16, Hebrews 1:3) and hence participate in the nature of the One called YHWH (2 Peter 1:4, Ephesians 4:1-6, John 17:20-23).

The name Tyrannus (Τυραννος, Turannos) is identical to the Greek word for Tyrant, and before "tyranny" attracted its systemic hate from Liberators and such, tyranny was entirely common and the go-to form of government until the rise of the Republic.

Tyranny was simply the word for any centralized authority. Any king or tribal lord (the proverbial societal "father") was a tyrant, and in deep antiquity, tyranny was simply the only way available to keep power consolidated, which in turn was the only way to keep the population (the proverbial societal "mother", of whom every individual was a "son") peacefully ordered and happily productive. Tyranny always works via violent law enforcement, of which the fasces became the symbol (see our articles on Memphis and Three Taverns).

This means that when people began to contemplate the Republic, they imagined a societal "mother" who had no kingly "husband", but still managed to give birth to a "son" (Isaiah 9:6), who embodied the societal maturity of freemen who were mature enough to not need any further governance (1 John 2:27). This "son" would rule the world with an iron scepter (Psalm 2:9, Revelation 2:27), which later Platonic tyrants helpfully explained to be an implement of law enforcement, so as to explain why they had reverted back to tyranny. The truth, rather ironically, is that this iron scepter represents the personal discipline and autonomy that every freeman (every anointed one: Galatians 5:1) holds in his own sovereign hand, and which touches that of the next guy, so as to form a network of freely flowing information.

It's worthy to note that with the European Renaissance, people again began to yearn for the Republic, in which their central royalties would somehow be replaced by governing networks of councils of well-informed and well-disciplined freemen. A transition like that, however, is the same as between a barely verbal child and a mature adult, and requires bridging an enormous gap in which hormones rage freely and nobody really understands what bliss maturity and skillfulness might be heir to.

In order to somehow learn how to get from tyranny to Republic, the Europeans had a choice between two schools of thought on the matter: the Greco-Roman one, and the Hebrew one. The first came with the benefit of an enormous library of readily available Greek and Latin texts, but also with the unfortunate truth that every single Greek and Roman Republic that had ever existed had become unstable and spiraled into chaos and ultimately crashed right back into tyranny (hence Icarus and the European Dark Ages). The latter came with the observation that the Hebrew Republic had existed since the Bronze Age (see Exodus 18), and had prevailed for three thousand years, with or without land and even with or without a king (who had neither police nor treasury, and whose sole job was to guarantee the Republic: Deuteronomy 17:14-20), but with the unfortunate truth that Jews are clearly superior to non-Jews in matters of statecraft. The Europeans being Europeans unanimously chose to emulate their Greco-Roman examples, which entirely explains why our present world is yet again about to collapse. Our celebrated Western world will once again self-implode and go up in smoke, and these cycles will go on until the entire world willingly and voluntarily embraces the disciplined freedom that only exists in the Hebrew Republic: see Zechariah 8:23, Isaiah 2:3, Micah 4:1, also see Genesis 12:3, Matthew 24:14 and Revelation 22:2. And for more on the Hebrew Republic, see our article on Gog and Magog.

In antiquity, tyranny was common, the gods were gratefully considered tyrants, and in the Greek period, our word described a perfectly respectable thing to be. Even when pure tyrannies made way for constitutions and systems of law, our noun τυραννος (turannos) related to the enforcement, applications and innovations of said law, and described anybody with the authority to handle, explain or tweak law (and, true to European form, also their children, friends and nephews and such).

But where this important word comes from is enticingly unclear. It's tempting to link our noun τυραννος (turannos) to the name Τυρος (Turos), which is Tyre, the name of the much lamented Phoenician city which fell from its graceful height in the late Bronze and early Iron Age, to the depth of proverbial derision during Greco-Roman times, but no extant Greek author ever made this connection, and although anybody is free to point out any overlap they think they see, there is no data to confirm that such an association was current by the time Luke wrote.

Otherwise, there is only a minor character in Greek mythology, namely prince Tyrannus, son of king Pterelaus of Taphia (islands in the Ionian Sea, directly off the west coast of modern Greece), and brother of Antiochus, whose name may have helped inspire the name Antioch. The name Pterelaus means People Of The Wing or Popular Feathers: the noun λαος (laos), means people or population, and πτερον (pteron), means feather. This latter word is suspiciously similar to the noun πτερνα (pterna), meaning heel, which brings the name Pterelaus in close proximity to the People Of Jacob (from עקב, 'aqeb, heel). The Hebrew word for feather is אבר (abir), or Abir, which is an epithet of the God of Jacob (Isaiah 49:26), who is also our fortress (Psalm 18:2).

Tyrannus' great-uncle Ithacus had given his name to Ithaca, of which Odysseus would be king, which implies that the mythical story of Tyrannus is not about some family somewhere but rather an excursion into various related methods of government, i.e. various ways to enforce one's laws upon the plebs. Or as Homer puts it: "Tell me, o muse, about that resourceful man ... many townships he saw, and learned their ways of thinking" (Od.1.1-3).

Where the name Tyrannus in turn comes from isn't clear, but it appears to be a Hellenized version of some existing name or title in some pre-Greek or non-Greek language, which corresponds to similar titles for holders of authority in many languages in and around Anatolia, and even some Semitic languages, where our word appears to relate to the noun שר (sar), prince:

In our article on the name Sarai, we show that the story in which Sarai (שרי) gets heisted by the "princes of" (שרי, same spelling) Pharaoh is very clearly also a meditation on statecraft. Another Semitic word of interest is the verb תור (tur), to explore or survey, but rather associated with a broadly circular sweep instead of an actual traveling about. Verb תאר (ta'ar) means to outline or trace, and is also used to describe the many borders of the tribal territories:

Noun צור (tsur) means rock or fortress and is also the Hebrew version of the name Tyre, namely Τυρος (Turos):

More striking even is the assumed relationship between these widely attested words for central authority and the noun τυρρις (turris), meaning tower (the source of our English words "tower" and "turret").

In antiquity, people built towers (and later fortresses) to house their ruling class: in part to provide the population with a visible center of their world, and in part to protect the ruling class from any objection that the population might offer to this arrangement. The tower of Babel was precisely such a tower. And although any house-father or small-scale business owner would be foolish to let general consensus govern his enterprise — which is why small land-owners obviously built towers on their properties (Matthew 21:33), and also explains why the Magdalene (meaning "she from the tower", which translates as: a society of a myriad of small local towers) was such a favorite of Jesus — a large population can only be properly governed by a free exchange of information between the many local towers, but not by a Tower to rule all towers (yes, hence the premise of Lord Of The Rings).

Any such national or even international tower will inevitably destabilize and collapse under its own weight. That is good news for anyone who thirsts for the righteousness that only the Hebrew Republic can provide, because any surrogate will inevitably result in some sort of centralized tower, and such a centralized tower in turn will inevitably collapse. All the thirsty righteous have to do is wait.

The obvious counterpart of the land-based tower is a sea-going ship, which in all stories from Noah and the animals to Jason and the Argonauts and ultimately Jesus and the disciples, speaks of councils of well-informed and well-disciplined men, who jointly navigate the great waters of all the talk in all the languages in all the world (Revelation 17:15). For more on ship-like government, see our articles on ναυς (naus), ship, and the verb κυβερναω (kubernao), to steer or pilot a ship (which is where both our English words "government" and "cybernetics" come from).

The name Tyrannus means Of The Tower and like the name Magdalene, refers to centralized pockets of power that encase themselves against attacks from the outside. This in turn offers a polemic against the tendency of certain scholars to distantiate themselves from the general population (this is precisely why the Besht, of blessed memory, started Hasidism) and unwanted interference from governments (hence people like the Amish). But although this approach may seem vigilant, it's really quite cowardly, and ultimately results in fractures and rivalling sects that all believe that they are right and all the others are wrong.

The Bible, meanwhile, urges to make peace with one's neighbor and make sure that they are safe, warm and fed, and imagine why they might have different perspectives on certain issues, or even are too intellectually challenged to learn the language in which the Word came to mankind and never stopped speaking to mankind.

Language is all about coming out of one's own ivory tower (pun intended: see ελεφας, elephas, elephant) and meeting the outer guy in the open field in between, so as to gradually settle on common terms for things. Words describe reality, but since God spoke the world into being, the words came first and the world represents the words. That means that the words exist buried in the earth, and can be pried out and raised only where two or more lay aside their difference and voluntarily and freely establish common ground (Matthew 12:40, 18:20).

Imagine what it might be like for someone to yearn for communication with God while nobody bothered to teach them the language of God, and instead gave them a distorted shadow of an echo of the living Word, sloshed together from their ever changing local swamp slang (Matthew 7:9-10).

No single person in the history of life can be represented by something that is not that person, and the Bible is not about anything that can be translated into any other language. Sellers of translations and associated political identities will surely beg to differ, but the Word is a language in which to partake, and not an account in which to believe.

The Persians are usually credited with having invented the postal system, but what is not often explained is why they would have done that. The obvious answer is that not the Persians but rather the Jewish refugees in Persia did that. They had erected their famous wisdom schools, but also understood that they had to continuously correspond with their colleagues, lest their sacred and miraculous Torah would morph into as many versions as there are forms of Christianity today.

In the literary reality of the Book of Acts, the multitudinous school of Tyrannus is the opposite of the singular synagogue of Ephesus, where hearts hardened and walls rose. At Tyrannus, students rather smashed the walls of fear and shattered defensive bricks like pottery, and so doused the whole of Asia in a flood of living water.

As we explain in greater detail in our article on Stephen, the Bible very frequently tells the same story multiple times and from multiple angles. The story of how a single-cellular creature first learns to live in a colony with other single-cellular creatures, whose diversity is written into their near-identical but ever amending DNA, until one day our single-cellular creature begins its first ever mitosis and becomes a multi-cellular create with a single, unified soul, appears in the Bible as the story of how prokaryotic Israel emerged from Egypt and became eukaryotic during the First Temple Period, and multi-cellular in the Second Temple Period. As we further explain in our article on Stephen, in this particular pattern, Jesus is the world's first ovum that first gets condemned to death and expelled, but then fertilized by the "spirit" of the Father and brought back to life, and finally reabsorbed by the societal body that first expelled him as one of its own many cells, but now receives him as a societal Body like itself, with a singular mind shared between its cells.

That distinctive movement, from single-cellular to cooperative colony to multi-cellular single mind, is by Luke told in the story of the school of Tyrannus.