🔼The name Baara: Summary
- Meaning
- Consuming
- Etymology
- From the verb בער (ba'ar), to consume or to clean out.
🔼The name Baara in the Bible
The beautiful name Baara (pronounced Ba'arah) is rare, even in the Bible. She's the wife of yet another obscure figure, namely a Benjaminite named Shaharaim who sends her and his other wife Hushim away for non-disclosed reasons.(1 Chronicles 8:8). Some scholars say that Baara is the same as Hodesh of 8:9, but the text seems to indicate the Hodesh was a third wife, and that Baara was the only one of three wives to remain childless.
🔼Etymology of the name Baara
The name Baara comes from the verb בער (ba'ar), meaning either to kindle or, rather unkindly, to be stupid, or even to remove evil from the land:
בער
The verb בער (ba'ar) seems to essentially mean to consume or clean out. Noun בערה (be'era) is a rare word for fire; it literally means consumer or that which consumes. Noun בעיר (be'ir) denotes cattle, and particularly cattle that would graze whole fields clean.
The verb essentially means to consume but covers a broad pallet, ranging from being beastly stupid to raging madly to be purifying as fire. It often denotes the removal of evil.
The final aleph may be explained by seeing it as a substitute for the letter he, which is the common extension to make a word feminine. The substitution of aleph for he is not uncommon. See for instance the name Ezra(h).
🔼Baara meaning
For a meaning of the name Baara, NOBSE Study Bible Name List goes with the beastliness and reads a rather uncompromising Foolish. Jones' Dictionary of Old Testament Proper Names leans towards the fire and reads Kindling Of The Moon (meaning: new moon). However, this root refers never to the moon, and nowhere in the Bible is the moon reported to burn or even be warm. Jones probably proposes this because of the proximity of the name Hodesh (=New Moon) to the name Baara.
The name Baara means Consuming but suggests both a mindless chomping as a singeing purification.