For a while now, as part of a major project on Talmudic onomastics, I’ve been collecting names that appear in Talmudic literature and categorizing them according to how they’re formed: given names, patronymics, nicknames, names based on places, and so on. This research has resulted in two surveys: From Abba to Zebedee, which focuses mainly on rabbinic names, and Figures on the Fringes, which covers named people who aren’t rabbis, including Jewish commoners, non-Jews, angels and demons, and women.1
My list of named Jewish women has just twenty-nine entries. By comparison, the survey as a whole includes well over a thousand names, almost all of them men, and most of them rabbis. Of course, the fact that women are so underrepresented in the Talmud is hardly surprising. But when I went through the names individually, several patterns stood out, both in how the Talmud identifies women and in the kinds of stories where their names appear.
Named through someone else
The first thing worth pointing out is that most women mentioned in the Talmud aren’t named at all. Instead, they’re identified by their relationship to a man. The Aramaic phrase deveithu de-X, “the wife of X”, appears in about thirty passages of the Babylonian Talmud; berateih de-X, “the daughter of X”, in about twenty-five; and imeih de-X, “the mother of X”, in roughly the same number. Rav Pappa’s wife, Rav Yosef’s wife, Rav Ḥisda’s daughter, Abaye’s mother: these women speak, act, and are sometimes quoted at length, but we’re never told their names.
Even when a woman is named, she’s often identified in relation to men. The best-known female scholar of the rabbinic period is introduced in the Babylonian Talmud as “Beruria, the wife of Rabbi Meir, the daughter of Rabbi Ḥanina ben Teradyon” (Avodah Zarah 18a). Yalta is identified as Rav Naḥman’s wife, Ḥoma as Abaye’s wife, and Yehudit as Rabbi Ḥiyya’s wife.
The reverse situation, where a man is named after a woman, is much less common. There are a few rabbis with matronymics, meaning names derived from their mothers rather than their fathers. One example is Abba Shaul ben Imma Miriam. Another is Rav Mari bar Raḥel, who is named after his mother, Shmuel’s daughter. The usual explanation connects this to a story in which she was taken captive and her son was born to a convert.
There’s also Abba bar Marta, whom the Talmud explicitly identifies as Abba bar Minyumi. Aharon Hyman suggested that he was named after his mother because of a story in which she saved his life.
Whatever the explanation for each individual case, these are exceptions. The standard practice in rabbinic literature is to identify a man by his father’s name.
“What is your name?”
The second pattern is especially interesting. In several Talmudic stories, a rabbi meets a woman and asks her name, mah shemekh? (”What is your name?”). Her answer then plays a central role in what happens next.
One example involves a neighbor of Rabbi Ḥanina ben Dosa who was building a house. The ceiling beams were too short to reach from one wall to the other, so she came to him for help. He asked her name, and she answered Ikku. He responded with a pun on her name: Ikku, “if so”, may your beams reach (Taanit 25a). According to a baraita, the beams then extended a cubit beyond the walls on each side. The sage Palaimo even claimed to have seen the house.
Another example appears in a story about Rav Adda bar Ahava. He saw a woman in the market wearing a garment made from a forbidden mixture of wool and linen. Assuming she was Jewish, he tore it off her. It turned out that she wasn’t Jewish, and he was fined four hundred zuz for humiliating her.
He then asked her name. She answered Matun, and he responded: Matun, matun, two hundred plus two hundred, four hundred zuz (Berakhot 20a). The joke is based on the similarity between her name and the Aramaic word for “two hundred”.
A third example concerns Rabbi Mani, who complained to his teacher, Rabbi Yitzḥak, that his wife wasn’t beautiful. Rabbi Yitzḥak asked what her name was. When he was told that it was Ḥana, he declared, “Let Ḥana become beautiful”, and she did. But she then became arrogant, so Rabbi Mani complained again. Rabbi Yitzḥak responded, “Let Ḥana return to her blackness” (Taanit 23b).
In this case, there’s no real pun involved. Instead, asking for her name seems to be part of the process of bringing about the change.
Perhaps the most elaborate example appears in a legal discussion in Nedarim. A man had vowed that his wife couldn’t benefit from him until she showed Rabbi Yishmael son of Rabbi Yosei something beautiful about herself. Rabbi Yishmael and those around him examined her features one by one, but found fault with all of them: her head was round, her hair resembled flax, her eyes were narrow, and her feet were as wide as a goose’s.
Finally, Rabbi Yishmael asked whether her name might be beautiful. Her name, it turned out, was Likhlukhit, roughly “little dirty one”. He declared that her name suited her, since she was covered in blemishes, and on that basis released her husband from the vow (Nedarim 66b - I discussed this sugya in a previous piece of mine as well.).
It’s a rather cruel (and misogynistic) story, but the reasoning is interesting: the fact that a name accurately describes someone is treated as a kind of beauty.
What’s especially interesting about these stories is that the woman’s name is often almost the only personal detail we’re given. We know virtually nothing about Ikku or Matun apart from these incidents; their names were recorded because the stories depended on them.
There’s also a story that reverses this pattern. Rabbi Ḥiyya bar Ashi’s wife overheard him praying to be protected from sexual temptation. She disguised herself and walked past him in the garden. When he asked who she was, she gave a false name: “I am Ḥaruta, returning from my day” (Kiddushin 81b).
Unlike the other examples, here it’s the woman herself who chooses the name; her actual name is never mentioned.
Names in documents
Another interesting source for women’s names is the Talmud’s legal discussions, particularly those dealing with divorce documents. Since a bill of divorce has to identify the parties correctly, the Talmud sometimes preserves women’s names simply because there was a question about their spelling.
For example, one woman’s name was Nefata, but the witnesses who prepared her bill of divorce wrote Tefata, using the wrong initial letter. As a result, the document was invalid (Gittin 63b). In other words, we know this woman’s name only because someone misspelled it.
These spelling issues are relevant to my research as well. The Babylonian Talmud (at least in the printed editions) doesn’t always use the spellings familiar from later sources. Queen Helene of Adiabene appears as Hilni (Nazir 19b), Queen Shelomzion as Shelzion (Shabbat 16b), and Beruria’s name is spelled with a final alef rather than the more familiar he.
For a project like mine, different spellings can make it look as though two references are to different people, when they’re actually referring to the same person. I’ve therefore tried to record the spelling found in the (printed) Talmud itself, alongside the more familiar form where relevant.
Names mentioned in passing
Many of the other women’s names appear only incidentally, in passages that aren’t really about them.
For example, Rav Naḥman once asked his daughter Donag to come and pour drinks for a guest. The guest objected, citing Shmuel’s ruling that one shouldn’t make use of a woman in this way (Kiddushin 70a). Donag’s name is likely Persian; it resembles the names of several Sasanian queens.
Similarly, Rabbi Ḥiyya’s twin daughters, Pazi and Tavi, are mentioned in just one sentence about his children (Yevamot 65b).
A woman named Me’oret is mentioned because she instructed her slave to carry out a dangerous medical treatment, which resulted in his death (Gittin 70a).
There are also some cases that require care when compiling a list like this. For instance, the names Ḥana and Marta appear among the sons of Abba bar Aḥa Karsela, even though both names look feminine. And Matun, mentioned earlier, wasn’t Jewish according to the story itself.
This is one reason I’ve found it important to check each name against its original passage, rather than relying on the name alone.
What can we learn from this?
Twenty-nine named Jewish women is a remarkably small number, especially compared to the many hundreds of named men in the Talmud. And without the stories that specifically depend on women’s names, the number would be smaller still.
I don’t think this list tells us very much on its own about women’s actual roles in rabbinic society. That’s a much larger subject, and one that’s been extensively studied. What I think it does tell us is something about the Talmud as a text, and about the circumstances in which women’s names were considered worth recording.
In many of these cases, a woman’s name appears because it’s relevant to a joke, a wordplay, a legal technicality, or a story involving mistaken identity. In other cases, it’s mentioned almost by chance, as a minor detail in a passage about something else.
So although the list is short, I think it’s an interesting illustration of how selective and often incidental the preservation of personal names can be in rabbinic literature.
This post is based on the lists in my Talmud NLP/onomastics survey. See especially my general survey “From Abba to Zebedee”, now published and revised at ezrabrand.github.io/abba-to-zebedee. This is a work-in-progress; I plan to write more about it soon.
Also see my recent concordance page: “Concordance of Names and References to Commoners and non-Rabbis in the Talmud“.