Shunammite meaning

Meaning

Unknown, but perhaps Glyph-Developer (or Silences or Teeth).

Etymology

Perhaps from the verb שאן (sha'an), to be quiet, or the verb שנן (shanan), to sharpen, to be teethed.

Related names

• Via שאן (sha'an): Beth-shan, Beth-shean, Shunem, Shuni

• Via שנן (shanan): Jashen, Jeshanah, Nisan, Shen, Shinar, Vashni

There are two women in the Bible who sport the curious epithet Shunammite:

• The beautiful Abishag the Shunammite (השונממית), who assumed the duty of keeping the old and ailing king David warm (1 Kings 1:3, 1:15, 2:17-22). She was obviously more than just a warm body as her story closely parallels that of Esther (see Esther 2:2) and even Homer's Helen of Troy. The allegorical function of Abishag's character appears to have to do with the development of technologies that were needed to support the development of alphabetical writing (Solomon's temple of YHWH was ultimately devoted to the Hebrew-Phoenician alphabet) — one could perhaps think of the development of paper and pens; see our article on the name Gebal. The request of Bathsheba to Solomon to allow his rivalling brother Adonijah marriage to Abishag the Shunammite arouses the king's lethal suspicion that Adonijah is actually still after his kingdom, again demonstrating that Abishag is more than a living stove (2:22). See our article on the word θεραπων (therapon) for more on the hotness of Abishag the Shunammite.
• An otherwise unnamed "prominent woman" at Shunem (שונם), who extends her (and her husband's) lasting hospitality to the prophet Elisha and his wayward servant Gehazi by preparing an "upper chamber" for him to rest (2 Kings 4:8-37). The reference to this upper chamber of repose and the previously established calorific qualities of at least one other Shunammite woman raises the suspicion that this story is also about more than meets the eye. In an obvious nod to the annunciation of Isaac's birth (Genesis 18:10), Elisha and Gehazi tell the woman that she will bear a son the next year (4:16). That happens, but the boy becomes ill, develops a headache and dies while seated on his mother's lap. His mother rushes to fetch the prophet, who returns with her and raises the boy back to life. Much later, after a battle with Aram, Elisha warns the lady to flee an impending famine, which has her take her family to the land of the Philistines in a move not unlike that of David's (1 Samuel 27:1), and evidently also telling of the development of script (8:1-6).

It's not clear where the name Shunem and thus the ethnonym Shunammite come from, or even whether Abishag was called a Shunammite because she too was from Shunem or whether all three of these entities were named after a joint quality that had to do with the development of some technology that became beneficial to the development of writing as we know it. Shunem may have been a scribal city, like Jabez, or perhaps a paper-producing place like Gebal or a parchment-producing place like Pergamum.

Alfred Jones (Dictionary of Old Testament Proper Names) joins the formidable Gesenius in the belief that the names Shunem/Shunammite and Shuni derive from an alternate form of the verb שאן (sha'an), to be quiet:

But a chance exist in equal measures that these names rather derive from an alternative spelling of any of the following שן-words:

For a meaning of the name Shunammite NOBSE Study Bible Name List reads A Native Of Shunem, and for the latter it reads Uneven, for no reason that jumps to mind with great conviction. Jones' Dictionary of Old Testament Proper Names follows Gesenius and reads Two Resting Places for Shunem, asserting that the form constitutes a dual. BDB Theological Dictionary indeed groups the three names together but proposes no joint root and offers no meaning or interpretation.

Here at Abarim Publications we don't know either, but perhaps the scribes of Shunem tried to develop the glyph, what in English is the space between words, the space that separates the words and makes text much easier to read and understand. Glyphs are really as essential as any letter and were developed along with the alphabet. For obscure reasons, the Greek scribes began to drop the glyph and their texts, and subsequent Latin and European texts became scriptio continua until in the 7th century Irish monks brought the blank-space glyph back into use.