Sardis meaning

Meaning

Unknown but perhaps Survivors Camp or Center For Nets-Making or Place Of Standardization

Etymology

From the verb שרד (sarad), to survive, or rather the noun סרד (sarad), net-maker.

Related names

• Via סרד (sarad): Ellasar, Masoretes, Sarid, Sered, Sirah, Sur

The name Sardis belongs to a city in the Roman province of Asia Minor, home of one of the seven churches to whom Christ, via John the Revelator, directed an unsettlingly stern message (Revelation 1:11, 3:1 and 3:4 only). As we discuss at length in our article on the name Jesus, much of the momentum of the New Testament comes from the fact that the Hebrew language can do things that no other language can, and that a translation of the Hebrew Bible has one and only one purpose and that is to direct people to the Hebrew language.

Said simpler: the Greek version of the Torah is useful if — and only if — it demonstrates to the reader the Torah's dazzling depth and complexity and profundity, and instills in the reader the intense desire to get to know all of it, or rather: it for real (Matthew 13:46). The Greek (or Latin or English) version of the Bible is an emissary whose job it is to lure the reader along, like the gold rings and bracelets that Eliezer put on Rebekah, saying: "There's plenty more where that came from, plus a husband and an eternal legacy." The Greek (or English) version of the Bible is a Door, whose sole function is to swing open onto an otherwise unimaginable realm of utter unity (and if you want to see a modest demonstration of the vast difference between the Hebrew original and any translation, check out our article on the name Adam).

Unlike Christianity, the Hebrew world is not doctrinal but empirical. The Hebrew world is a free economy of information and it's described by the only language in which a person literally attains freedom of speech (Galatians 5:1), and can say whatever they want and so doing create entire worlds. Christianity is a school, whose sole function it is to bring people to the Hebrew world. Christianity exists on the Temple's outer court as the interface between the outer darkness of utter animal lawlessness and ignorance, and the inner complex of human enlightenment. It is impossible for anyone native to the outer darkness to simply cross into the sophistication of the inner templar complex, so in Christianity we unlearn our natural beastly competitiveness and learn our supernatural human kindness by studying language and history, literature and narrative, archetypes and tropes, rules and theories, music and song, manners and social codes, science and mathematics, physics and cosmology, politics and economic wisdom, and of course (if your church is worth a hoot): the Hebrew language — and all of that is so that we may come to the Door and no longer be beneath it (that's the meaning of the word christianos, "under Christ"), but enter it and be in Christ rather than beneath him (John 15:15; Ephesians 2:13, John 17:21). In Christ, and not under Christ, there is perfect freedom by means of the perfect law of liberty (James 1:25), and see our article on the word ελευθερια (eleutheria), or freedom-by-law.

Evidently, in Sardis there were still people who were stubbornly concocting pseudo-sanctifying doctrine like spiritual alchemy: some seething sort of condensed methodology, some spell or ritual or bumper-sticker slogan, some secret password or magic gesture that would allow the wielder to zip into heaven without having to actually learn how: to get to the party without proper dress or the choir without having learned the song. Rather tellingly, Jesus declares to the church in Sardis: "I know your deeds, that you have a name that you are alive, but you are dead." That's rather striking because, as we will see below, the name Sardis looks suspiciously akin to the noun שריד (sarid), survivor.

The city of Sardis had existed since deep antiquity, and was dominated by the Hittites until roughly the time of king Solomon of Israel (10th century BC), after which it eventually became the capital city of the Lydian Empire — and note that Solomon's mother Bathsheba had been the wife of Uriah the Hittite. This Lydian empire ended when Sardis was sacked by the Persians in 547 BC, a mere 40 years after the Babylonians had sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the First Temple, and a mere decade before the first Jews began to return and Zerubbabel began the building of the Second Temple.

In 334 BC, Sardis surrendered without resistance to Alexander the Great-To-Be, and in 129 BC it was annexed to the Roman Republic. Despite its many changes of government, and many more sieges by various would be invaders and natural disasters such as earthquakes, Sardis was always quickly rebuilt or restored and never stopped being a formidable hub of commerce and culture.

Significantly, until his defeat by the Persians, the legendary king Croesus of Lydia ruled his vast empire from Sardis, and became as mythologized by the Greeks as Solomon had been by the Hebrews. The main difference between the two, of course, was that Solomon had wisdom, which starts with the fear of YHWH and which allowed him to extend his sphere of influence all over the known world (1 Kings 4:34) without having to forcibly subdue anyone or having to enforce his orders by means of an expensive military, which in turn necessitated extensive taxes. Croesus had no such wisdom, and, as is common, didn't know that he didn't, and neither did the Greeks who adored him. And so Croesus had to conquer and destroy most of his Anatolian neighbors and butter up everyone else. But he was exceptionally good at that, and formed friendly relations with rulers from Mesopotamia to Egypt and Greece.

Like Solomon, Croesus became fabulously wealthy, so that his name became proverbially descriptive of a very wealthy person, comparable to the name Rockefeller in our times. His great gift to the world was the invention of the standardized unit of account (a gold coin called the Croeseid), which was a significant improvement on the contribution of his father, king Alyattes of Lydia, who had invented coin money but had not secured procedures to guarantee each coin's weight and purity. Croesus appears to have realized that standardization is the key to all economic success, because it enforces honest transactions and is conductive of commercial webs that are beneficial to everybody involved. Law itself is ultimately a matter of standardization, and in that too Croesus was not unlike Solomon, under whose supervision the world was endowed with the alphabet (see our article on YHWH).

Croesus' court at Sardis attracted wise men from all over the realm. Among them was the great Solon, the inventor of the democracy, who realized that the happiness that Croesus derived from his financial security was not necessarily virtuous, and perhaps sickly (a theme played on by Tolkien in his meditations on king Thorin's dragon sickness). Croesus main mistake was the same as made by king Hezekiah of Judah, who thought that showing off the national treasury to the emissaries of a vast and competing empire was a prudent thing to do (2 Kings 20:12-18). And doubtlessly many in the original audience of Jesus would have thought of Croesus when he said, "For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?" (Matthew 16:26).

A man named Adrastus, who had been hired to protect Croesus' beloved son and crown prince Atys during a boar hunt, ended up accidentally killing him (and committed suicide upon his grave). The king mourned his son for two solid years. After those two years, he thought he would attack Cyrus of Persia, who had come looking for Croesus' legendary riches. King Croesus consulted the oracle at Delphi, which famously informed him that his attack upon Cyrus would destroy a great empire. Bolstered, he attacked.

At the Battle of Thymbra (in the Troad, less than ten kilometers from the ruins of Troy), Croesus' armies were destroyed, and fourteen days later, Cyrus captured Sardis and its king. The king's wife committed suicide and Croesus was taken in chains to Cyrus, who condemned him to death on the pyre. Fortunately also for the fourteen innocent Lydian youths who were to be burned alive along with Croesus, everybody's favorite deity Apollo sent rains that extinguished the fire, and Croesus stayed on as advisor to Cyrus (somewhat reminiscent of the fate of king Jehoiachin of Judah).

Croesus' brother was Adramytos, after whom was named the city Adramyttium.

The name Sardis is a bit of a mystery, but one full of tantalizing intrigue. Vast libraries of Hittite texts remain, but none mention Sardis by that name. The Lydian language was Indo-European, and it's possible (probable even) that the name Sardis originated in some comparable form in Lydian. But it's no longer clear what it might have meant to the Lydians. What is clear, though, is that the European coastal regions were strongly influenced by the Phoenicians, whose language was Semitic (and very closely related to Hebrew). When the Phoenicians arrived on the island now known as Sardinia (off Italy's west coast), they recorded its name by means of a root that was common for them: SRD(N).

The English word "sardine" is often explained to mean "fish from Sardinia", but factually comes from the Greek word σαρδινη (sardine), which has described a kind of small fish long before the Greek began to import fish from the western Mediterranean Sea. That means that the word "sardine" much rather reminded everybody back then of one of the dreaded Sea People called the Sherden or Shardana, which were spoken of in Egyptian and Ugaritic records since the 13th century BC.

Where the Sherden or Shardana originated is not entirely clear, but their homeland appears to have been situated roughly where the Bible locates the territory of Zebulun, on the northern coast of Israel, closely to or overlapping with the area of Sidon and Tyre (signature Phoenician cities). All this is significant because Zebulun's first son was called Sered (סרד, sered), which is strikingly similar to both the name Sherden and the word σαρδινη (sardine).

The name Sered, in turn, may derive from the noun שריד (sarid), and mean Survivor, as is often claimed, but probably rather derives from the Aramaic noun סרד (sered), meaning net-maker. Metaphorically, the art of net-making (like the art of being fishers of men) has to do with aligning things and creating standards and thus laws. That means that the Seredites were Net Makers, and figuratively Law Makers, or more generally: Standardizers:

In Greek, the name Σαρδεις (Sardeis), or Sardis, is a third-declension plural and no singular form exists — comparable to always-plural names like Athens, Thyatira or Colossae, or the Dardanelles or the Netherlands. Note that in both Hebrew and Greek, the name Jerusalem is also a plural.

The name Sardis may mean Place(s) Of The Standard(s) or Place Of Standardization and derive from the Phoenician appreciation of law and order, and thus standardization of coinage and the effective invention of money and with that the modern economy. In the old world, Sardis may have been the proverbial place from which radiated the blessing of money in the same way in which Jerusalem became forever associated with the perfection of the alphabet, and the great world of literacy that radiated out from it.

Note that the English adjective "sardonic", meaning bitter or mockingly cynical, is commonly explained by its association to a bitter plant called Ranunculus sardous, which apparently was associated with Sardinia since antiquity. Here at Abarim Publications we suspect that the plant was rather named after the bitterness of the learning process, when one's natural inclinations are clipped into proper form. Especially to young children who have just begun this process and have reaped very few rewards, learning is a bitter affair. Or as Solomon said: "in much wisdom there is much grief, and increasing knowledge results in increasing pain" (Ecclesiastes 1:18).