Matthew 1:18. “Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost.”

There is the general belief that the name Mary in the Hebrew is Miriam. The problem with this is that Miriam means rebellious or bitter.  In the Greek the word that is used is Maria, which passed into the Latin pretty much unchanged but when we get into the English it becomes Mary.

However, within Christianity, especially with the Catholic Church the name of Mary is so revered or considered holy that no one cares to really mess with this name. So I hope my Catholic readers will not be offended if I just journey down a little linquistical history of the name Mary.

The people of Judea and really in the area of Palestine spoke Aramaic not Greek or Latin.  We are really unsure what the Aramaic word was for Maria. It is merely a guess that the Aramaic or Hebrew equivalent for Mary is Miriam, but as I pointed out, that really has a pretty negative meaning.

Something that we in the Western world have difficulty in understanding is that Semitic literature feels no real obligation to use a person’s real name.  Names in the ancient Semitic culture were not as tied into one’s identity as it is in the Western world. A person could go by a number of names as there were no official records like we have today, bank accounts, charge accounts, SSN and all those other things that tie our name to our personal identity.  Thus, a person could be known by one name among his family another by his occupation and another by his drinking buddies, so to speak.  The tendency in ancient Semitic literature was to give their characters names that describe what they were even in nonfiction and historical literature. I am not saying that Joseph did not refer to his wife as Mary. But that is after all, a Western name. He may have called her Maria or Mariam but let me just say, we are really not sure just what name she responded to.

The Peshitta uses the word Mari or Mary.  Vowel pointings were not found in first century documents so we really are unsure what vowels were used.  What we really have in the Aramaic is Mry or Mem, Resh and Yod.   This is not really an Aramaic word or even a Semitic word, but appears to be a loan word from the Middle Egyptian which was really an Afro-Asiatic language.  Modern Egyptian is more of a modern Egyptian Arabic and was Copic prior to that.

MR in Middle Egyptian means love and MRY means beloved.  It could very well have been pronounced as Mary as you can readily see.  The point is that this would fit the Semitic tendency to use a personal description of a main character rather than their given name.  I mean I would much rather see the mother of Jesus being known as beloved rather than bitter or rebellious.

I hesitated to put this little study on our blog as I really do not see any spiritual edification from all this other than to point out that when it comes to names in the Bible, things can really get a little messy.

I once had someone who read my blog entry question why I, as a Hebrew teacher did not refer to Jesus by his real Hebrew name Yeshua.   Did I not think it would insult Him to use a Greek name, when I really knew what his real name was?   For one thing we really do not know how to correctly pronounce His Hebrew name as we are not sure how it was pronounced in those days. But among the many arguments that she could have used (and I have heard quite a few) she uses the argument, “How would you feel if someone referred to you by another name other than Chaim.”  Really bad argument, Chaim is not my real name.