🔼The name Artemis: Summary
- Meaning
- Unclear but perhaps Security, Healer
- or Perfect Assemblage
- or She Gathers The People
- Etymology
- Unknown but from it come αρτεμης (artames), safe and sound, and αρτεμια (artemia), soundness or recovery.
- Perhaps from the αρτ- (art-) group of words that also include art and order.
- Or from (a) the verb ארה ('ara), to gather, and (2) the noun אם ('em), mother or people.
🔼The name Artemis in the Bible
Artemis of Ephesus was a local goddess, derived of the much larger general Artemis cult of Asia Minor, which in turn was the equivalent of the Roman cult of Diana. She was considered a daughter of Zeus and Leto, and represented the female aspect of Apollo, who was her consort (mostly her latter-born twin-brother and sometimes husband) and the national deity of Greece.
Like her half-sister Athena, she was an eternal Virgin. Like Apollo, her main attribute was the bow, which connects her likewise to the Milky Way (see our articles on αργυρος, arguros, silver, and γαλα, gala, milk). And she was a δεα σωτειρα (dea soteira), a savior goddess (from σωτηρ, soter, savior), in which capacity she healed the deadly wounded Trojan prince Aeneas (Iliad.5.447), who proceeded to go west and sire the royalty of Rome.
Artemis became associated with the moon (σεληνη, selene), while Apollo was typically solar (ηλιος, helios). She was the protector of young sucking animals, which is significant in that Egyptian mythology considered the rising sun as the "calf" of the heavenly cow Hathor (see our article on אחלמה, 'ahlama, amethyst, a.k.a. the dream-stone or "calf's eye").
The effigy of Artemis was famously endowed with a myriad of bulbs, which enthusiastic but not very well informed early Christian reformers interpreted as breasts or even testicles, attesting to Artemis' patronage of fertility. Modern scholars have been able to relate these bulbs to elaborate but regular jewelry which served to ornament and not to represent fertility.
Artemis is mentioned in Acts 19:23, where a silversmith named Demetrius made a handsome living from creating little Artemis souvenirs for tourists. When Paul evangelized to the Ephesians, Demetrius feared negative legislation (απελεγμος, apelegmos, legal ban) of Artemis worship and subsequent inflation of his trade and instigated an uproar. Paul's travel companions Gaius and Aristarchus were nearly lynched by the mob, and the evasive gestures of a Jew named Alexander — who had nothing to do with Paul's mission — caused the crowd to erupt in a single outcry, "Great is Artemis of Ephesus!" which lasted for two hours.
Artemis of Ephesus should be regarded as somewhat separate from the general Artemis cult because this one came with an image that had fallen from the sky (Acts 19:35). Some scholars nowadays assume that this item was a meteorite, but that's by no means certain. The whole phrase "fallen from the sky" is an interpretation of the word διοπετης (diopetes), which consists of Dios (the genitive of Zeus) and the verb πιπτω (pipto), meaning to fall.
Since the word Dios may indeed come from the same root as the Latin diem, meaning day or daylight-sky, the image may have been a meteorite, but it may also have been an item (perhaps a mechanism?) somehow derived from the core definition of Zeus. How that would work is not immediately clear, but the idea of a God-derived image is obviously not foreign to the Bible (Genesis 1:27, Colossians 1:15).
The name Artemis occurs 5 times in the New Testament; see full concordance.
🔼Etymology of the name Artemis
The name Artemis stems from deep antiquity and has existed long before Greek was Greek. Subsequently, even two thousand years ago, it was no longer clear how this name was formally formed, or even from what language (or language group) it came, and what it had originally meant to convey. Quite probably, the deity evolved and matured in the greater mythological basin, and the proper meaning of her original epithet became less and less important.
But by the classical period, her character was so well-developed that her name had spawned a small cluster of words that help to explain what the Greeks thought her name meant: the verb αρτεμεω (artemeo) "to be artimized" meant to be safe and sound, adjective αρτεμης (artames), "artemisized" meant well and restored, and noun αρτεμια (artemia), "artemisation" meant soundness or recovery. A plant named αρταμισια (artemissia) was noted for its aromatic qualities and supposed healing effects. Since at least the time of Pliny, a plant genus called Artemisia contains many species that yield essential oils (named after the 4th century BC Queen Artemisia II of Caria, who was both a magnificent naval commander and a botanist; she was obviously named after the goddess Artemis).
Our name clearly reminds of the (formally unrelated) noun αρτεμων (artemon), which appears to have described the central and triple-disk pulley of a complicated elevator that was used on building sites. This elevator comprised a dynamic cluster of independently moving beams and nets, that could deposit heavy building materials a few stories up, and which could only be operated by experts. This noun occurs only in the story of Paul's shipwreck (Acts 27:40), which is significant since it derives from the verb αιρω (airo), to lift up and carry along, as famously used by Jesus when he described what happened when Noah entered the ark and the rest of mankind drowned: "They knew not (γινωσκω, ginosko, to know) until the flood came and up-lifted (αιρω, airo) them all" (Matthew 24:39).
Our name may have been associated with a widely attested Proto-Indo-European root meaning to fit together, which not only gave English words like art and order, but also reminds of the word τεκτων (tekton), meaning "assembler", which is the word for the earthly vocation of Jesus (erroneously translated as "carpenter"), and which relates to words like technology, textile and text:
αρτι
The adverb of time αρτι (arti) means just or exactly right and stems from an ancient root meaning to join or put together — hence also English words like art and order, but also 'armor' and words with "-ard" suffixes such as wizard (wise-ard).
The noun αρτος (artos) means bread and symbolizes the synchronicity of the vast industrial complex required to produce it, and specifically the agricultural, technological and legislative sophistication of the culture at large.
The final "-mis" part of our name could be a remnant of some ancient grammatical construction (like how the noun δυναμις, dunamis, power, derives from the PIE root "dewh-", also meaning to fit). Or it stems from an ancient theonym like Mut (i.e. death; see Adramyttium) or Men (i.e. the moon; see μην, men).
Another word that surely reminded Koine speakers of our name is αρταμος (artamos), meaning butcher or cook. It's not fully understood how this word was formed, but our cluster of "art-" words could explain the first part. And the second part could easily be derived from the verb τεμνω (temno), to cut or cleave, or even the noun ποταμος (potamos), river (rivers symbolize cultures as streams of wisdom: see our article on the Tigris).
Without the Greek and Latin alphabets, there would have been no famous Greek civilization or Roman Republic (or Empire), and both are adaptations of the Hebrew alphabet, which was most probably introduced to the Europeans by the great trading culture of the Phoenicians (who had been instrumental in building Solomon's temple). Subsequently, much of the great ancient foundational texts (the Homeric epics, the Aeneid, the Bible) can be understood in a large part as the story of how the alphabet created the modern world (see our article on the name YHWH).
That said, our name Artemis may very well have been a construct of Greeks learning Hebrew (see our article on the many Hebrew roots of Greek), possibly forging a phonetic match upon an existing name, or crafting a Hebrew term upon a Greek idea, or else perhaps trying to understand an idea that was native to Hebrew and fully integrated into the structure of the language, but which was alien to European languages — this in the same sense in which the word "computer" has been adopted by every modern language, but not the verb to compute or even any "com-" words (company, compress, companion) or "-pute" words (dispute, repute, amputate).
That might bring our name Artemis in proximity of the formidable verb ארה ('ara), to gather or collect:
ארה
The verb ארה ('ara) means to collect, pluck or gather. Nouns ארי ('ari) and אריה ('aryeh) both mean lion, which indicates that in Biblical times lions symbolized any power (individual or national) that plundered, gathered and hoarded. And as always, lions are not intrinsically bad; it all depends on what they gather (and at what cost).
Noun אריה ('urya) means manger or crib, which is a thing around which domesticated animals gather — and that is obviously why mankind's slowly waxing collective wisdom was placed in one by "His" mother.
The "t" of Artemis may be ascribed to a third person feminine singular: she gathers. And the final part of our name would match the word אם ('em), mother:
אמם
The unused verb אמם ('mm) probably meant to originate in a social sort of way. Noun אם ('em) means mother, but — as do the words אב ('ab), father, and בן (ben), son — primarily refers to a social function rather than a mere biological relation. Hence noun אמה ('amma) refers to a "mother" city or a "mother" land, and אמה ('umma) means tribe or people (and is obviously comparable to עם, 'am, meaning people in a socially inclusive way).
The noun אמה ('ama) describes a female servant, and female servants were of course as much "included" in the master's house as did some of the including themselves as in early Biblical times, surrogate motherhood was a common function of female servants (see our expanded article for a discussion of this). The common hypothetic particle אם ('im) means "if," and an if-statement essentially proposes inclusion.
🔼Artemis meaning
Although Artemis was a perpetual Virgin, she was also the primary goddess of childbirth and childcare: κουροτροφος (kourotrophos), from κουρος (kouros), meaning son. That brings her literary character very close to that of Mary, the mother of the Logos incarnate.
She was the goddess of the hunt, so it wouldn't be odd if some Greeks thought of her as the Butcher, αρταμος (artamos), or at least having to do with order (specifically bringing order to the lawless wilderness), with weaponry and armor or with artistic or artesian skills. For them she would represent or embody Perfect Assemblage. Greeks who knew their Homer and the verbal derivations of the name Artemis, would have considered her Healer or even Security.
And Greeks with a knowledge of Hebrew might have suspected that Artemis represented a great reason-birthing and civilization-progressing Virgin Mother who Gathers Her People (compare Matthew 23:37 with Galatians 4:26 and Revelation 21:24).