Chorazin meaning

Meaning

Smoking Furnace

Choir, Separation

Etymology

From (1) the noun כור (kur), a furnace, and (2) the noun עשן ('ashan), smoke.

From χορος (choros), choir or dancers, or χωρος (choros), separated place, or place of separation.

Related names

• Via כור (kur): Beth-car, Carites, Cherethites, Cherith, Corinth, Crete

• Via עשן ('ashan): Bor-ashan, Ashan

• Via χορος (choros): Prochorus

The name Chorazin occurs in the Bible in Matthew 11:21 and Luke 10:13 only, and appears to belong to some town that is in some way associated to Bethsaida, as Jesus says, "Woe unto thee, Chorazin! woe unto thee, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works, which were done in you, had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes."

This, of course, refers to what happened in Nineveh, after Jonah preached there and the people believed him and repented. The problem, though, is that Tyre and Sidon were well documented cities and Bethsaida is mentioned by Pliny and Josephus (although it was known as Julia at the time), whereas Chorazin is mentioned by no other writer in the vast body of literature we have on Judea of the first century.

So why would Jesus make a point out of some hamlet that was known to exist by hardly anybody? He himself was from Nazareth — and in those days, being "from" somewhere had more to do with the intellectual school one was associated to than the place where one may have been born, which, after all, would have been Bethlehem for Jesus. Nazareth, like Chorazin, was such an inconsequential place that no writer prior to the evangelists mentions it, and here at Abarim Publications we suspect that the original audience of the gospel understood the name Nazareth to refer to the Diaspora rather than some specific settlement (and see our article on Nazareth for our argumentation).

Here at Abarim Publications we further suspect that contrary to common perception, even the very name Jesus refers not so much to a single man of flesh and blood, but rather to a movement of multiple people (albeit, of course, animated by one Spirit), or more precise: the school of thought that understood that the unchanging Hebrew language is always far superior than any perpetually changing language such as Greek, Latin or English (and see our article on the name Jesus for a much more elaborate discussion of this). Jesus famously mentioned that only a fool would build his house on shifting sand, and while everybody enthusiastically recognizes the wisdom in that, most of us still build the library of our wisdoms in languages that shift like sand, so that these libraries disintegrate into unrecognizable gobbledygook within a few centuries. Hence, modern readers need dictionaries and commentaries to make it through anything by Chaucer (14th century) and a whole different set for Shakespeare (17th century) but anybody who knows Hebrew can read anything from Isaiah (8th century BCE) to Toldot Yaakov Yosef (1780) as if it were published yesterday.

All this is relevant because the names Sidon and Bethsaida are closely related (Bethsaida essentially means House of Sidon), whereas the name Tyre means Rock (from צור, sur, rock). That's not to say that the name Chorazin is etymologically related to Tyre (because it isn't), but rather that "Bethsaida and Chorazin" may form a proverbial phrase rather than refer to an arbitrary couple of actual urban centers. Just like the place one is "from" does not so much refer to the place one was physically born but rather the place one was educated, so (in this context) the names Tyre and Sidon don't so much refer to any streets and buildings or even governments or general populations, but rather the wisdom schools (comparable to Oxford and Princeton in our modern world) or technological industries (like Detroit, Silicon Valley, Shenzhen) that were signature for the intellectual climate there.

That means that what Jesus said in Matthew 11:21 and Luke 10:13 has not so much to do with anybody doing anything on the streets and squares of some town somewhere, but rather in the gates and reading halls of centers of learning: "If what happened on Wikipedia and LinkedIn had been done in Oxford and Princeton, they would have switched to Open Source long ago" or "If what happened to the postal service and the book industry would happen in Milan and Paris, we would all be wearing home-made 3D-printed duds."

Both phrases "Tyre & Sidon" and "Chorazin & Bethsaida" are not geographical but proverbial, and either element is not simply the crescent half of some split whole, but rather one of two integrated principles of one unified process — something like "flesh and blood" or "Jabin and Boaz" or "yin and yang" or "work and pray". We must remember that in the first century, it was still largely a mystery how information worked and how the human individual and human society related to it. Many people believed that whoever had the biggest mouth (or the biggest stick) automatically had the authority to declare what's what. Others believed that reality was essentially governed by a pantheon of ever conflicting deities, and one had to marry oneself to any one of them and butter them up via endless rituals and supplications to wing them out of their graces. When in the late classical age, rationality (i.e. the Logos) came along, it lived like a mouse among the T-Rex: much more efficient but otherwise relentlessly outcompeted. The earliest schools of rationalism had to compete with very well established traditions whose roots were securely anchored in the culture, the norms, the superstitions and their exploitation by society's ubiquitous power mongers. Rationality somehow had to prove to the masses that scientific enquiry was superior over devotion to some god — or rather that YHWH was endlessly superior to any "other" god, and that for a very specific reason:

Anything that exists, exists because at some point in time it emerged from existence, and existence is the whole dynamic circus of physical interactions of all things that exist. Existence is a collective enterprise and all things that exist do so by merit of all the other things that exist and that brought forth all things that came after them. The great innovation of Abraham was the comprehension of the great symmetrical Oneness of the whole of everything (whatever goes up must come down; hence the preservation laws: all energy must stay the same, and all electrical charge, and angular momentum and baryon number, and so on), which means that the Oneness of reality is what brings everything that exists about, and governs it.

Long before there was anything, there was Oneness, and from Oneness came everything and Oneness keeps everything together (Colossians 1:16-17, John 1:1). In modern terms we say that the singularity was never compromised, and that it still determines everything in the world today: all objects but also all laws by which all objects relate. That Oneness itself does not exist, because if it did it would depend on existence. Instead, existence depends on it, and it produces existence rather than the other way around.

Everybody knows that the physical universe exists between two extremes, two possible states: the singularity (in which all energy is compressed into one point) or heat death (in which all energy is dispersed so much that no particle can ever find any other), and the arrow of time forces all things to develop from singularity toward heat death (that's the second law of thermodynamics: entropy must increase). But at some point, somehow, the first most primitive living things popped into being. And they decided to pull a U-turn and stop diverging along with the rest of the universe.

When the first living things emerged, they did not do so in a state of singularity but rather in a state of heat death: none of them had ever experienced any other one, and they were all perfectly anti-social. For them, a whole second arrow of "anti-time" began to dictate their development. Instead of drifting ever further apart, they rather drifted ever closer together. They began to discover the others, and began to communicate and learn from each other. Language, in its most rudimentary form, emerged. Societies formed on common rules and predictable regularities. Cultures and colonies became cities and soon the whole world became one.

That idea, that life "evolves" perfectly contrary to how spacetime evolves, namely from heath death toward singularity, gave rise to the understanding that while the physical singularity must comprise all energy, all potential particles and objects and all potential for all physical law in perfect harmony and without violating anything that might emerge, so life and mind must naturally evolve toward a state of oneness (called an "attractor") that comprises all soul and all spirit, all thought, all identity and all meaning. That singularity is the Lord of Life (John 12:32, Ephesians 4:3-6, Deuteronomy 6:4, Romans 8:28).

All physical things that exist are local (in space and time). That means that all things that exist are concentrations of energy. All things are centers of power, which means that they are somewhere but not everywhere. The Oneness not only does not "exist" (although everything that does exist, exists in Him), He is also not a center of power (although all power is contained in Him). People who contemplate omnipotence commonly don't consider how much power it takes to make someone love you. Because all the power in the universe won't be enough for that, and love can only come about when power is distributed evenly and equally. That is why Israel's God is the God of peace, cooperation, equity, and ultimately information: not a booming doctrine but a conversation within a language. And that is why God is love. Language can only work when everybody learns from everybody else, and everybody listens and common rules are submitted to. Because only when one does, one attains freedom of speech. The ancients called it ελευθερια (eleutheria), or freedom-by-law: a freedom that cannot be compromised because it derives from unmitigated submission to a law that cannot be violated: the perfect law of liberty (James 1:25).

Here at Abarim Publications we would guess that both "Tyre & Sidon" and "Chorazin & Bethsaida" refer to the two pillars of scientific enquiry: law and freedom, with Tyre and Chorazin pursuant of law, and Sidon and Bethsaida pursuant of freedom. These two principles correspond to any kind of evolution or any sort of progression, which in turn in the Bible is most often metaphorized in the process of metallurgy: rock goes in, and metal and slag come out, and each go their separate way.

It's not immediately clear where our name Chorazin comes from or even what precisely it may have signified to the original audience of the gospels. Some commentators have proposed that our name Chorazin is a Hellenized version of the name Chor-ashan, belonging to a town close to Ziklag (1 Samuel 30:30). However, the name Chor-ashan is either a variant of or an error for Bor-ashan (the Hebrew letters כ, ch, and ב, b, are as similar as the Latin Q and O and are not rarely confused by beginners), whereas neither Bor-ashan nor Chor-ashan may actually be a proper name but rather mean "the well (בור, bor) of Ashan" or the "pasture land (כר, kar) of Ashan", referring to an oasis around which first the village of Ashan grew up and later its pasture lands were claimed. But either way, Ashan, its founding well and its surrounding pasture lands were located in Judah (Joshua 15:42), and in a geographic sense had nothing to do with any goings on in the north.

Still, in theory, our name Chorazin might have been the name of an otherwise unmentioned town in the north of Israel, whose Greek name was a transliteration of a Hebrew original (that also nobody mentions) and that happened to be the same as one of two references to a minor settlement in Judah, namely Chor-ashan. In that case, our name consists of two elements, the first deriving from the verb כרר (karar), to surround or go round (which is not dissimilar to the meaning of the name Galilee):

The second part of our name might relate to the noun עשן ('ashan), meaning smoke:

Altogether, our name might be interpreted as Smoking Furnace, and applied to the metallurgic process that serves as a major metaphor in the Bible: natural rock goes into the natural process of a fire within an artificial furnace, where it is separated into purified metals on one side and slag for the garbage heap on the other — see our article on the verb αρνεομαι (arneomai), to reject, and note the obvious correspondence between the Hebrew word כר (kar), meaning lamb, and the Greek word αρνιον (arnion), also meaning lamb.

The word כר (kar) may also describe a pen in which animals are safely kept. In Greek, this is described by the word χωρος (choros), which literally means [place of] separation:

This word χωρος (choros), separation, shares its root with the familiar noun χορος (choros), meaning chorus, or more general: an exclusive place for the pursuit of social merriment:

Having or making collective merriment or social felicity in turn is expressed by the likewise related verb χαιρω (chairo), to rejoice. From this latter verb stems the important noun χαρις (charis), which literally means social felicity (hence the English words charm and charisma). This word is often translated with "grace" — as in: "by grace you have been saved through faith" (Ephesians 2:8) — but that is rather incorrect. Likewise the idea that Jesus might be one's "personal lord and savior" is ludicrous and ultimately pagan. Instead, the emphasis lies on the collective nature of salvation: the Word is not the object of our belief but rather the language or environment in which all believing is performed. The object of our belief is anything at all, since love believes all things (1 Corinthians 13:7). This is why with God there is no favoritism (Romans 2:11), and the kingdom of God is among us (Luke 17:21).

The name Chorazin expresses the principle of separation and asks to which extend the people of God are to be within the world, albeit not of the world (John 17:15-18), special and holy (Leviticus 15:31, 2 Corinthians 6:17) but spent until death (Matthew 5:16, Philippians 2:17, Revelation 2:10).