Some Notable First-Century BCE Palestinian Jews With Greek Names

As reported in the newspapers, the Israel Museum has put on display part of the shaft of a stone column, recently discovered in a Jerusalem excavation, on which is chiseled the Hebrew/Aramaic inscription “Hananiah bar Dodalos mi-Yerushalayim,” that is, Hananiah the son of Dodalos from Jerusalem. (Unless Dodalos is Didalos or Dudalos—it’s difficult to be sure of the exact vowel represented by the second letter, which may be either a vav or a yod.)

Dated to the 1st century BCE, this inscription represents one of the few times that the spelling of Yerushalayim (with a yod) rather than Yerushalaim, the version that generally appears in the Bible, has been found from the Second Temple period. This confirms, say the linguists and paleographers in stressing the find’s importance, that already in late-Second Temple times, the name of the city was written and pronounced with the two-syllable ending “-ayim,” as it is today, rather than with the monosyllabic diphthong “-aim,” as it apparently was in earlier periods.

And yet it is the “the son of Dodalos” part of the inscription that strikes me as more interesting. The Haifa University archaeologist Ronny Reich and the scholar Yuval Baruch of the Jerusalem Antiquities Authority, to whom the initial analysis of the discovery was entrusted, have suggested that Dodalos is an ancient Hebrew or Aramaic form of the Greek name Daedalus. Given the fact that no similar-sounding name occurs in either Jewish or Greek sources, this would appear to be a reasonable assumption—and, if correct, an intriguing one.