🔼The name Dorcas: Summary
- Meaning
- Deer, Seer
- Etymology
- From the noun δορκας (dorkas), deer or doe.
🔼The name Dorcas in the Bible
Dorcas, also known as Tabitha, is a female disciple of Jesus living in Joppa, where she manufactures garments (Acts 9:36 and 9:39). When she falls ill and dies, her fellow disciples call for Peter, who is just in the neighboring town of Lydda. When Peter prays over her body and says, "Tabitha, arise," she promptly does.
🔼Etymology of the name Dorcas
The name Dorcas is the same as the proper Greek noun δορκας (dorkas), meaning deer or doe or at least denoting an animal of the deer kind (Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon). Liddell and Scott add that this animal is "so called from its large bright eyes", presumably because this word for deer is thought to derive from the verb δερκομαι (derkomai), meaning to look or see. Neither of these words are used in the New Testament, but from this verb δερκομαι (derkomai), to see, also comes the familiar noun δρακων (drakon), snake or dragon.
The link between Dorcas and the dragon commonly puzzles commentators into declaring that the association is accidental and the link non-existing, but here at Abarim Publications we doubt that. Instead, the dragon or snake is proverbially untamable and denotes lawlessness, chaos, fire and destruction (see our article on Beelzebub). The deer, likewise, is notoriously resistant to domestication — and the word for wife, namely δαμαρ (damar), comes from the verb to domesticate: δαμαζω (damazo). The difference between the snake and the deer, of course, is that despite its lawless nature, the deer is a lovely and friendly creature, who eats vegetation and is perfectly happy to live in large herds in the semi-wilderness between the agricultural estates around great cities.
🔼Dorcas meaning
Dorcas means Deer but indirectly it means Seer: someone who understands the importance of rules and algorithms, and the safety these provide to the human world, but isn't happy within the confines of any public religion and rather stays out where the wild things are, and to serve life there.