🔼The name Ziim: Summary
- Meaning
- Dry Place Dwellers, Tradition Clingers
- Etymology
- From the noun צי (si), a dweller in dry places.
🔼The name Ziim in the Bible
The name Ziim is probably not really a name. According to only the Young translation, a people named the Ziim is mentioned in Jeremiah 50:39, and Isaiah 13:21, 23:13 and 34:14. It's not clear why Young figures that only these four occurrences of the word ציים denote a people, and not the others.
Young also speaks of a people called the Iim ("Therefore dwell do Ziim with Iim..". — Jeremiah 50:39) and the Aiim (Isaiah 13:22 and 34:14: "And met have Ziim with Aiim..".).
🔼Etymology of the name Ziim
The "name" Ziim is a plural form of the noun צי (si), which in this case should probably not be interpreted as ship but rather as desert-dweller:
צוה ציה צי
Across several separate roots, the Bible sports an obvious connection between dry land to stand on and an established wisdom tradition to stand on. Adversely, new applications of wisdom or even new insights require new rain, which is why the word for teacher is the same as that for rain: מורה (moreh).
Verb צוה (sawa) either means to command or be dry. Noun ציון (siyun) either means signpost or dry place. Noun מצוה (miswa) means commandment but also applies to the full code of the law. Noun ציון (sayon) means dryness or parched land, and also points toward an time-honored wisdom tradition that has stopped growing because of an extended drought.
Noun צו (saw) means command. Noun צי (si) means either ship or refers to a kind of desert creature.
The power of ships, of course, is that they keep going around on their same trade routes and do everything the same each time. A desert dweller is of course also a creature that leans wholly on the "rocks" of a massively stagnant intellectual ecosystem, where very little life sprouts and grows (and please note that radically rejecting rocks won't bring back rains).
🔼Ziim meaning
Whether Ziim is a name or not, it probably literally means Desert-Dwellers or Desert-Creatures, but it is interpreted by various translations as: wild beasts (KJV in Isaiah 13:21 and 34:14 and Jeremiah 50:39) or even a curiously specific wild-cats (JSP, same verses). Here at Abarim Publications we guess that the Ziim dwelled in an intellectual desert, rather than a physical one, and were Tradition Clingers.