Agrippa meaning

Meaning

Beginning To Be Cultivated

Vigilant Dozing

Etymology

From the noun αγριππος (agrippos), wildish olive, from αγρος (agros), acre or field.

From the verb αγρυπνεω (agrupneo), to "field-sleep", to doze while vigilant.

There's only one man named Agrippa in the Bible, and he is mentioned 12 times from Acts 25:13 to 26:32 — see full concordance — namely king Herod Agrippa the Second, fully named Marcus Julius Agrippa, son of the identically named Marcus Julius Agrippa (king Herod Agrippa the First). Significantly, father Agrippa I isn't called Agrippa in the New Testament but, like his predecessors, simply Herod (Acts 12:1-21). The seamless transition from one Herod into the next demonstrates that the Biblical narrative is solely interested in the formal and official office of the Herodian monarchy, and not at all in whatever individual body happens to be the physical hand that animates the royal glove — and this is the Biblical rule rather than the exception:

The Bible is a series of vastly complex compositions that use fractal structures to comment on every possible event in real-time history (Psalm 78:2). That means that all great characters from Adam to Abraham and Moses to David represent dynamic stations in mankind's evolution rather than one-time flesh-and-blood individuals. Most spectacularly, perhaps, is the literary character of Jesus of Nazareth, who was born in the decade from before the death of Herod the Great in 4 BC (according to Matthew) to the inauguration of Quirinius as governor of Syria in 6 AD (says Luke). Jesus (and see our article on Stephen for more on this) was a Levite female according to blood, which he shared with Mary, who was a close kin of Elizabeth, who, like Moses, was a Levite, says Luke (Luke 1:36, see 1:5) and a Jewish male according to law, via his adoptive father-by-law Joseph, who, like David, was a Jew — in Luke 3:23, the author uses the verb νομιζω (nomizo), to legalize, from the noun νομος (nomos), law.

Also by law, Joseph (i.e. mankind's legal adoptive fatherhood of the Word of God in human flesh) arrived on earth via two distinct lines of descent, namely through Solomon (reports Matthew) and Nathan (says Luke). This obviously corresponds to the apparent dual nature of the Law (Matthew 22:36-40), which in fact is quite one (Matthew 7:12). And it corresponds to the familiar theme of the misplaced royal prince, who subsequently came to be raised by (a long and patient lineage of) shepherds — hence too the story of Paris of Troy, the "shepherds abiding in the field" of Luke and the "magi from the east" of Matthew (also see 1 Samuel 16:11).

The Book of Acts, which is essentially the Gospel of Luke Part Two (see Acts 1:1), is a literary masterpiece of dazzling depth and profundity, certainly one of the greatest works ever written. It's one of the latest books of the Bible, and, like Revelation and the Gospel of John, composed from the perspectives available only at the closing of the tumultuous first century. This is three or four decades after the events the Book describes, which transpired in the last few decades before the destruction of the temple (in 70 AD), when the Jewish world was utterly destroyed and widely presumed dead.

The name Agrippa is hugely important, since the literary character named Agrippa is one of the clearest bridges between the Bible's non-linear narrative and history's very linear timeline, and between the literary character of Paul and the historian Josephus (but in a particle-antiparticle sort of sense, using the character of Sergius Paulus as a literary suture).

In the Bible, a name-change indicates a functional change in the literary character that bears the name (Abraham and Sarah, Jacob, Joshua, Simon Peter, Paul, and perhaps even Jesus who was supposed to be named Immanuel), and in the case of Agrippa, this character is the broader Herodian king — which runs from Herod the Great who killed Bethlehem's innocents (Matthew 2:16, which ties into Esther 3:6, which ties into Exodus 1:16), his son Herod Antipas who killed John the Baptist (Matthew 14:10), and his son Herod Agrippa I, who killed James son of Zebedee (Acts 12:2).

The last to be called Herod in the Bible (the Herods mentioned in Acts 13:1 and 23:35 refer to earlier ones) is the historical Herod Agrippa I (the father of our Biblical Agrippa), who died whilst being hailed as god rather than man (Acts 12:23). This happened in 44 AD, when the historical Herod Agrippa I was 59 years old. The Book of Acts uses this event to begin the transition from the Petric era to the Pauline era, and the start of the latter is marked by Paul's name-change on Cyprus, his two sermons to the Jews of Pisidian Antioch, and the attempted deification of Paul and Barnabas by the pagans of Iconium — their rejection of which comes full circle with Agrippa's earlier acceptation of it (also see Luke 4:41).

The name-change of the face of the royal office (from Herod to Agrippa) appears to tell of a change in formal policy toward the gospel, and thus a change in (or rather the death of) the literary character of Herod. The name Herod means Wild Ass, and, as we will see below, the name Agrippa derives from the first step of the domestication process. The historical Herodians obviously adopted this name to signify their allegiance to the great shepherd in Rome: emperor Augustus, but the literary character named Agrippa in the Book of Acts, equally obviously, signifies the slow turn of the formal governments of Rome from being wholly pagan and self-deifying into Stoicism first and finally Christianity. Agrippa's great-grandfather Herod the Great had ordered the wholesale destruction of Bethlehem's innocents in an attempt to eradicate Christ, but now, perhaps only semi-facetiously, Agrippa quips to Paul: "In a little bit you will persuade me to become a Christian" (Acts 26:28).

As we discuss more elaborately in our article on the name Christian, the word Christian means Under The Anointed, and originally described people who aimed to subject themselves to the rightful Jewish King (i.e. Anointed) of Judea; the people that Jesus diligently avoided (John 6:15). The Herodians weren't Jews but Edomites, and were never anointed into office but got it from their benefactor, the emperor in Rome, whom they served rather than God.

When Agrippa quipped that he might become a Christian, that word still referred to a radical nationalistic liberation movement. It would have required him to denounce his own lineage and become a Jew, and oppose the government in Rome who had given him his kingdom. That never happened, of course, although Agrippa was quite probably a Jew by religion, or at least by faith (Acts 26:27). Despite increasing pressure from his subjects, Agrippa never denounced Rome, and in 66 AD, he and his sister Bernice were expelled from Judea by the rebels, therewith effectively ending Israel's monarchy (in whatever diluted form it had existed).

When Titus finally sacked Jerusalem in 70 AD, Agrippa was with Josephus in Rome, supplying him with information for his formidable and ever influential Antiquities of the Jews. Josephus would ultimately accuse the Jewish Zealots for the destruction of the temple, and claim that his benefactor Titus stood idly by, deeply regretting such waste and foolishness.

Like Jehoiachin in Babylon, Agrippa died in Rome as a king without a kingdom, in the last decade of the first century, having first witnessed the senseless decapitation of the Jewish state, and then its miraculous survival and subsequent continuation as a spiritual entity rather than a physical one. Like Pilate before him, Agrippa might actually have been one of the good guys — a man who bravely contradicted the legacy of his bloody family and greater tribe (see Acts 27:7), who had diligently pursued learning and love of virtue, and who ultimately became one of the very few to understand that the People of the Way had nothing to do with a political or military king of the Jews.

Agrippa seems to have understood that the People of the Way were certainly no threat to Rome, and their movement neither warranted empire-wide persecutions nor the destruction of the temple of YHWH in Jerusalem. Agrippa and Paul appear to have recognized an ally in the other (Acts 27:26), and Agrippa realized that Paul had deliberately traded his freedom for a chance to speak with the Emperor (Acts 27:32).

We moderns like to contemplate the rise of the Roman Empire (from the ashes of the collapsed Roman Republic, from the blood-soaked soil of the defeated Roman kingdom, from the suffocating grip of the transcended Roman wilderness) in scientific, historical, sociological and perhaps anthropological terms, but to the Romans, the rise of the Empire was first and foremost a theological event, and was contemplated in theological terms. Julius Caesar (in 42 BC) and Emperor Augustus (in 14 AD) were deified not out of vanity, but out of theological considerations: the Empire was a theocracy, created and governed by a deity, whose name meant Light and referred to enlightenment in all the intellectual and civilized senses of the word.

Augustus was the first to be called Son of God (Divi Filius, namely of Julius) and Savior of the World, and his birthday was celebrated as the ευαγγελιον (euaggelion), evangel, gospel or "good news" to the world — and these familiar imperial terms appear in the New Testament hijacked and ostentatiously reapplied to the proverbial commoner Jesus of Nazareth — Jesus was a very common name, and Nazareth means All Over The Place: This name that is above all names paraphrases as Tom, Dick or Harry from Anywhere (Philippians 2:9-11, Acts 4:12, Ephesians 1:21) — not out of intellectual vandalism but as a thoughtfully crafted rebuttal of Roman Imperial Theology.

Roman Imperial Theology was a form of utterly sophisticated statecraft, an alternative to the sadly failed democracy of the Greeks. The classical Greeks had regarded divinity as the biological source of mankind (which made the Greek gods essentially human ancestors; hence the controversial declaration in Luke 3:38), and all human civilization a move away from divinity and onto autonomy. When the Romans saw Caesar's Comet (in 44 BC, but note that "east" equals "past"; see קדם, qedem; hence Matthew 2:2), they radically reversed the direction of humanity's cultural evolution and began to head toward divinity, and began to see it as destination rather than origin.

Roman Imperial Theology had nothing to do with pagan superstition, and everything with the way the Romans defined the word "divinity", namely as equal to power in every physical, political and military sense of the word, and manifested in domination and superiority in any way. By effectively reinstating the monarchy, Julius and Augustus had brought divinity back to earth, and they themselves, and their successors, embodied the dazzling point of intersection of the worlds of men and gods, that blinding solar center around which everything revolves and where kings are gods.

The Romans believed that all individuals, places and even lifeless items were endowed with a genus: an individual instance of divine nature (Romans 1:20). But they further believed that some genii were superior to others, and that the greatness of a human person demonstrated the greatness of his genius, relative to the others. This is the reason why polytheism, and competition amongst the gods, was utterly fundamental to Roman Imperial Theology, and why monotheism was such a threat to it (1 Corinthians 1:13).

Where the Romans emphasized individual power and dominion, the People of the Way emphasized individual weakness and servitude (Matthew 20:28, 1 Corinthians 15:24, 2 Corinthians 12:10) — not out of misplaced piety or ritualistic humility, but because they believed that divine power is greatest when seated in community rather than in one man. The People of the Way believed that divinity was humanity's origin, and that humanity was destined to move away from individual dependence on the deity (Psalm 8:5), and thus onto individual autonomy and sovereignty, but that, at the end of this process, there awaited a state of collective divinity and a union with the creative deity like the union of marriage (Genesis 2:24; Revelation 21:22).

The core difference between Roman Imperial Theology and the Gospel of Jesus Christ has to do with the nature of society's law. The Romans believed that humanity could only function when its natural enthusiasms were curtailed by the unbending decrees of a central government, whose will had to be proclaimed from outside the ignorant population and enforced by police, lawyers and judges. The People of the Way, on the other hand, insisted that law was an emergent property of society: an inherent but minute and wispy quality of each and all human individuals (and their genii; Acts 12:15, Matthew 18:10), that organically bubbled to the top when society had cooled down enough to form and sustain a common genus, whose qualities were a common language, a common culture and finally a common law based on general consensus (Deuteronomy 30:14, Luke 17:21).

Everybody desires the freedom to say whatever is in one's heart, but few realize that this freedom depends on one's mastery of the rules that govern the language (which in turn is a shared and emergent property of society). Likewise, a society based wholly on freedom depends entirely on people's adherence to the laws that govern society. This curious phenomenon of freedom-by-law had been contemplated by the Greek philosophers as the ultimate democratic ideal. They had called it ελευθερια (eleutheria), and Paul wrote that it is precisely for ελευθερια (eleutheria), freedom-by-law, that Christ has set us free (Galatians 5:1).

In antiquity, peoples were deemed mothers (see אמם, 'amam, mother or people) and kings were deemed fathers (אב, 'ab), which makes a people without a royal government, i.e. a democracy, a virgin. The nickname of Athena was παρθενος (parthenos), virgin, and when Isaiah proclaimed that the Virgin would be with Child (Isaiah 7:14), upon whose shoulders the government would be (Isaiah 9:6), nobody for centuries to come would fail to understand that the prophet was talking of a government as emergent property rather than kingly decree; a Virgin Birth rather than marriage to some earthly brute.

The city of Rome had been founded by Romulus, whose father Mars, the god of war, had ravished Rhea Silvia, a Vestal Virgin. Her subsequent inexplicable pregnancy angered the incumbent king, and her children, the twins Remus and Romulus, were surrendered to the river Tiber, but miraculously survived (by the graceful help of a wild animal and a lowly shepherd couple).

The ancients had called YHWH a Man of War (Exodus 15:3), and Mighty in Battle (Psalm 24:8), but the word for war and battle, namely לחם (laham), also means bread. The familiar name Bethlehem, therefore, means both House of Battle and House of Bread. Like Rhea Silvia, the Virgin Mary was divinely impregnated but unlike Rhea, Mary was first properly courted and asked (Luke 1:26-37), and she gave permission before the Creator would "overshadow" her (Luke 1:38; compare Luke 1:35 to Genesis 1:2).

The New Testament is not merely the founding text of a religion, and it's certainly not merely religious or spiritual, but a hands-on, real-life meditation on the great cosmic battle between Freedom and Empire, between mastery and being mastered, between survival of the weakest and survival of the fittest (see our article on κυων, kuon, dog), between πονηρος (poneros), evil, and שלום (shalom), peace:

The adjective πονηρος (poneros) is the New Testament's word for evil. It derives from the verb πενομαι (penomai), meaning to toil or labor (see Genesis 3:17-19 and Exodus 1:13-14). The familiar word שלום (shalom), peace, comes from the verb שלם (shalam), to be complete or whole.

The Romans believed that the perfect city would come about when an almighty Emperor would have shaved all the hairs of imperfection off the bristly ball that is human behavior: when all humans stand like legionnaires in their grid, receiving instructions from some captain up front, and voided of their own voice, their individuality and their spontaneity. To the Romans, the key to perfection was bondage. The People of the Way, on the other hand, believed that the perfect city, the New Jerusalem, would come about when all voices were heard, when all emptiness was filled, all dirt washed off, and all humans were equal. To the People of the Way, the key to perfection was freedom.

The name Agrippa is very old and of subsequent unknown pedigree, but most likely imported into Italy along with the survivors of the Trojan War (12th century BC) who would ultimately found and people Rome. By the first century, the name Agrippa had become a popular praenomen (first name) of both men (Agrippa) and women (Agrippina), and a cognomen (second surname, indicative of a sub-clan within a larger family, or gens) of notable gentes such as the Julii, which included the original Caesars, and Vipsanii, among whom Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, a hero and enabler of the early Empire and almost-successor of Augustus (he was appointed heir but died before Augustus). This same Agrippa had been appointed governor of Syria in 17 BC, where his virtues earned him the respect of the Jewish population. This very likely inspired the later Herodians to assume his name.

The man first named Agrippa, after whom all subsequent Agrippas were named, was an ancient member of a kingly lineage that descended from Lavina, a daughter of Latinus — himself a son of Odysseus, "who saw many men's townships and learned their νους (nous), mind" (Od.1.3) and Circe, a daughter of Helios, the Sun (also see our article on κυκλος, kuklos, circle) — and her husband Aeneas, who was a son of a Trojan prince and the goddess Aphrodite (see our article on Cyprus for the significance of this), and, via Priam, king of Troy, a cousin of Hector and Paris (our word parchment comes from Pergamum, which comes from Priam, quite like the way our word Bible comes from βιβλος, biblos, paper, which comes from the name Gebal).

As we show in our article on Hellas, the familiar Greco-Roman mythologies as well as the Bible, essentially tell of the rise and spread of information technology, which in those days was dominated by the freshly developed Semitic alphabet (see our article on YHWH), its conversion into the Greek alphabet and its subsequent conversion into the Latin one (hence the first 6 books of Virgil's Aeneid). A very symbolic ten generations after the great Aeneas, Agrippa was king of Latinum (914 to 873 BC), which makes him rather ostentatiously a contemporary of the house of rebel king Jeroboam of Israel (922 to roughly 900 BC) plus that of his murderous successor Baasha (to about 886 BC). The story of Baasha, which was written in its present form in the mid-sixth century, also serves to reflect on a government other than by successive monarchy, and thus provides a careful commentary on the Overthrow of the Roman Monarchy (in 509 BC), which resulted in the Roman Republic.

After the ancient king Agrippa, whose full name was Agrippa Silvius, came Romulus Silvius (Silvius means Wooded, see our article on the name Silas for the profundity of this). King Romulus Silvius' great-great-granddaughter Rhea Silvia was raped by the god Mars and gave birth to Romulus and Remus.

Abandoned on the banks of the Tiber (revisiting the baby-Moses theme; see our article on the name Tigris for a look at the relevance of rivers in classical narrative), Romulus and Remus were found by a she-wolf (lupa, from λυπη, lupe, meaning sorrow; see Psalm 137:1), and raised by shepherds (revisiting the Paris of Troy-theme, the same theme that would later also serve to explain how the divine Word came to be received and raised by mere mortals). Romulus killed his brother Remus (revisiting the Cain and Abel theme), after which he, like Cain, began to build a city, namely Rome. Cain's city was called Enoch, which means Inaugurated or Trained, which ties into the idea that all civilization is based on a common law, which, when not wholly understood is a cruel task master, but which, when understood and wholly absorbed and mastered, has the effect of utter liberation (hence the aforementioned term ελευθερια, eleutheria, or freedom by law).

Instead of providing a list of inconsequential lords presiding over accidental progress, these genealogies tell of mankind's gradual rise from the wilderness (both mentally and literally) and onto civilization and culture, and the invention of script was of course a major catalyst in this process. Quite akin the literary characters of Cain and Abel, the name Agrippa relates to the very rudiments of agriculture, irrespective of whether this is by actual etymology or else by the poetic license of later chroniclers, and equally irrespective of whether this agriculture speaks of literal farms or else farms of the mind — in which figurative "sowers" go out to "sow" the seeds of reason (Matthew 13:19); see our articles on σιτος (sitos), grain, αρτος (artos), bread, φυραμα (phurama), a mix of clay or dough, αμπελος (ampelos), vine, βυρσευς (burseus), a tanner.

The formidable historian Pliny (the Elder), who wrote his masterpiece Natural History probably immediately after the demise of Nero, whose mother's name was Agrippina, explained the name Agrippa as a contraction of aegre partus, or "born with difficulty". He did so in his chapter VII, which he helpfully titled "Monstrous Births" and strewed with dubious or plain jocular etymologies: "It is contrary to nature for children to come into the world with feet first, for which reason such children are called Agrippa, meaning that they are born with difficulty" (Plin.Nat.7.6).

Although Pliny's explanation is now generally rejected as serious candidate for a technical etymology, Pliny continued to explain that such children commonly paid for their obstinacy at birth with subsequent weak legs, and that connects Agrippa rather to Hephaestus, the crippled and ridiculed Olympian, the bronze-working blacksmith who had fashioned Achilles' dazzlingly elaborate shield and armor (Il.18.468-617). Far from being a baseless myth, the Homeric story of Hephaestus obvious declares the greater truths of humanity's transition into modernity. The Bible touches on these same themes in Tubal-cain the Über-smith, Mephibosheth the crippled royal heir, and the Word of God as Great and Elaborate Shield (Genesis 15:1; see 2 Samuel 1:21 and 1 Samuel 17:38, and of course Isaiah 59:17 and Ephesians 6:11-17).

Despite Pliny's facetious jabs, to anyone in the classical era, the name Agrippa would have sounded like it came from the noun αγρος (agros), acre or field, and any Laconian (i.e. Spartan) would have surely heard the noun αγριππος (agrippos), semi-cultivated wild olive:

According to Acts 12:23, the father of the Biblical Agrippa died due to an infestation by worms. The key adjective here is σκωληκοβρωτος (skolekobrotos), which literally means turned to worm-poop, and that is precisely what a fertile field is: worm-poop (a pun on both Isaiah 66:24, hence Mark 9:42-50, and Exodus 16:19-26, see Isaiah 58:9-14). The verb βιβρωσκω (bibrosko) means to consume or digest. The word σκωληξ (skolex), worm or wriggler, relates to σκελος (skelos), leg or bender, which is of course doubly hilarious in regard to the crippled smith Hephaestus.

Contrary to Hephaestus's legs, Christ's legs (σκελη, skele, same word) remained unbroken (John 19:31), and the noun Christ means anointed: anointing was done with olive oil — ελαια (elaia), means olive; hence the noun αγριελαιος (agrielaios), semi-wild olive (Romans 11:17 and 11:24).

The reality of the resurrection of the Christ was first established from the absence of his body from the tomb. The Magdalene famously found the tomb empty (John 20:14) and supposed that the risen Christ was the κηπουρος (kepouros), or garden-keeper. The resurrection, which started with Christ, turned death into sleep: no longer a permanent state of utter decomposition (βιβρωσκω, bibrosko, to consume or digest), but only a temporary slumber, to be awoken from, refreshed at dawn (Matthew 27:52, John 11:11, Acts 7:60).

In order to prevent the spread of the news of Jesus' resurrection, the Jewish elite paid off the soldiers who had guarded the tomb, and instructed them to say that the disciples had been able to abduct the body because they, the guards, had fallen asleep (Matthew 28:11-15). The Jews also promised to keep them out of trouble, which was a generous thing to offer but probably utterly in vain. A decade later, Peter found himself asleep in Herod's prison (to history this was father Agrippa I), but was freed by an angel of the Lord. The guards who had been charged with his incarceration were subsequently examined and "lead away", which implies that they were executed (Acts 12:19). Right after that, Herod died from having been turned to worm-poop, and his literary character carried over into that of Agrippa.

The word for sleeplessness in the sense of wakefulness or watchful alertness is αγρυπνια (agrupnia), which is not unlike the name Agrippa. This noun's parent verb, namely αγρυπνεω (agrupneo), to be watchful, occurs most spectacularly in: "Watch and pray: for you know not when the time is" (Mark 13:33) and "Obey your leaders and submit to their authority. They keep watch over you as men who must give account" (Hebrews 13:17).

But Herod was not the only one who became worm-food: the same fate befell Judas Iscariot (whose not too subtle name translates as: the Urbanized Hellenized Jew). His thirty αργυρια (arguria), or silverlings, were used to buy Potter's Field as a burial ground for foreigners (and Herod was one; Matthew 27:7). There Judas spilled his bloody bowels (reminiscent of Eglon's bowels and judge Ehud's double edged sword: Judges 3:16, see 3:22), after which the field was called Akeldama, or Field of Blood. As Luke commemorates: "Let his homestead be made desolate (see 1 Kings 14:10 and 16:3-4), ... his office let another man take" (Acts 1:18-20).

The word for Potter is κεραμευς (kerameus), which is related to the noun κερασ (keras), meaning horn, and thus αιγοκερως (aigokeros), or Capricorn. The noun κερασ (keras), horn, is also related to κρανιον (kranion), skull, the Greek name for Calvary. And that reveals an obvious link between the earth of man below, the starry skies above, and the crucified Christ who bridges the two (Genesis 1:8, Matthew 27:38).

As noted earlier, the Biblical Agrippa quipped that Paul might make him a Christian (Acts 26:28), which he probably meant but not the way modern readers commonly understand it. The word χριστιανος (christianos) is formed from the rather rare suffix -ianos, which means "under" or "under the directorate of". People who intimately know Christ also know that true followers of Christ are in Christ, and not under Christ (John 15:15). This is actually a very big deal because the -ianos suffix served mostly to denote someone born under (and thus under the directorate of) a specific star or constellation.

That means that the word χριστιανος (christianos) declares that Christ is the actual star (Genesis 1:14-15, Matthew 2:10), and the Body of Christ a heavenly constellation (Genesis 15:5, see Galatians 3:7, Daniel 12:3), whereas the Body of Christianity is the mere projection of Christ on earth, formed by people who obey Christ but are not in Christ, who are very diligent to heed Christ's instructions but have no real clue what these instructions are ultimately for (John 8:21-24) — rather like a shepherd's dog, and note that the name Jesus is the Greek version of Joshua, whose best friend was Caleb, which means dog. Dog, in turn, is domesticated lupus or sorrow.

The story that tells of the rescue of Romulus and Remus by the she-wolf, also tells how the she-wolf carefully protruded from the forest, desiring a drink of water, and so came upon the baby boys and gave them of her milk. In the Hebrew Bible, this same story is told in Psalm 42:1-3, with the protruding thirsty animal a deer (representing the weeping poet's soul), and the waters the Living God. This same story is rather obviously told again in John 4:10-15.

The function of the Sabbath was to ween humanity off dependence on the natural cycles, most obviously represented by the Zodiac. That's not to say that the constellations are bad things, it just means that the constellations, like anything else, must be understood first and then mastered and then transcended (Acts 27:19). Astronomy is a huge element of the Bible's scope — the most obviously mentioned constellations are Bear, Pleiades and Orion (Job 9:9), but blatant reference are made all over the Bible, from Aries (Genesis 22:13) to Fishes, Aquarius (Mark 14:13), Gemini, Drako (Job 26:13), and many others. The familiar noun ραββι (rabbi) means both my master and my archer (hence Sagittarius). The Great Year corresponds to 12 periods of roughly 2,300 years, but the wheels-within-wheels fractal nature of all this (Ezekiel 10:10), results in the 2,300 days of Daniel 8:14 (see 2 Peter 3:8).

A word similar to χριστιανος (christianos), meaning "under Christ", is αιγοκεριανος (aigokerianos), which means "under Capricorn" (this word does not occur in the New Testament). The word for Capricorn is αιγοκερως (aigokeros), which consists of αιξ (aix), meaning she-goat, and the noun we mentioned above, κερασ (keras), meaning horn. The horns of female goats are smaller than those of males, so a word meaning she-goat-horn is rather similar to "little horn" (Daniel 7:8), which is also, and rather conveniently, the meaning of the name Cornelius.

The noun αιξ (aix), goat, comes from the PIE root "heyg- (1)", goat, whereas the identical PIE root "heyg- (2)" means oak. In Hebrew the root אלל ('alal) describes a leading, sticking out or protruding, with derivatives אלון ('allon), אלה ('alla) and אלה ('elah) referring to oaks and terebinths, and nouns איל ('ayil) and איל ('ayyal) to dapperly protruding rams and deer (Psalm 42:1). This in turn suggests that there is only one PIE "heyg-", which likewise means to protrude or lead, and that the constellation Capricorn (from the Latin equivalents capri, goat, and cornu, horn), wasn't really known as a Goat Horn, but rather a Protruding Horn or even a Leading Female Horn or Female Horn of Salvation (Luke 1:69), which obviously ties into the same idea of the Virgin of Salvation that was Athens. Horns are the forward part of any horned animal, suggesting that Capricorn is the very first glimpse of the head of something much, much larger, like the first chapter of a much larger story that unwinds over the ages (compare Genesis 3:15 to 49:17 and Acts 26:14).

The Hebrew noun שער (sa'r), means horror and the noun שער (se'ar) means hair. A she-goat is called שעירה (sa'ira) and a he-goat is שעיר (sa'ir). The latter noun is the same as the name Seir, which belonged to the mountain which Jacob's hairy brother Esau settled. Esau's descendants became known as Edom, or Idumea in Roman times. The Herodians were Idumeans: Goat Guys.

When Agrippa told Paul that he might become a Christian, Paul said he wished everyone to be like him except for his chains (Acts 26:29). In Homer, the star Sirius is called Orion's Dog. The name Sirius is the adjective Σειριος (seirios) and means Bound One, and comes from the noun σειρα (seira), rope or binding. It's not clear where this noun comes from, but it's suspiciously similar to the name Seir. It may also derive from the verb ειρω (eiro), to bind in rows or to ask, which relates to ειρων (eiron), meaning one who feigns ignorance, which in turn relates to ερος (eros), wool, and ερις (eris), strife, and εριφος (eriphos), kid or young goat (we discuss all these goat-words in our article on the noun αιξ, aix).

The word for male goat is τραγος (tragos); the familiar noun τραγωδια (tragodia), tragedy, literally means Ode To Goat, or Ode To Adversity, the opposite of Ode To Joy. The word for sheep is προβατον (probaton), forward-stepper, from the verb προβαινω (probaino), to progress. Joy, freedom, progress, wisdom, light and love all go together. Grief, bondage, adversity, ignorance, darkness and hate do too.

The original meaning of the name Agrippa is obscure, but to a creative Greek speaker, it would have sounded like Originally Wild But Becoming Cultured By Prolonged Use. To anyone in the first century, it would have reminded of the second-in-command to Rome's founding emperor, and Jews would have associated this with Joseph, the proverbial viceroy of Egypt (and namesake of the father of Jesus). People from the Spartan region would probably have thought of the noun αγριππος (agrippos), wildish olive, and Jews from that region would have attached that to the ritual of anointing, and thus the verb χριω (chrio), to anoint, and thus the noun χριστος (christos), Anointed.