Gennesaret meaning

Meaning

Harps, Lyres

Gardens Of Princes

Etymology

From the plural of the noun כנור (kinnor), harp or lyre.

From the plurals of (1) the noun גן (gan), garden, and (2) שר (sar), prince or ruler.

Related names

• Via כנור (kinnor): Chinnereth

• Via גן (gan): En-gannim, Ginath, Ginnethoi, Ginnethon, Guni

• Via שר (sar): Ahishar, El-Elohe-Israel, Israel, Sarah, Sarai, Serah, Seraiah, Shamsherai, Sharar, Sharon, Sherebiah

The name Gennesaret belongs to a region in the north of Judea, specifically the west bank of the eponymous lake/sea of Gennesaret, which was also known as the lake of Galilee and the Sea of Tiberias. The latter is a city on the lake's western shore. The former refers to an area much larger than Gennesaret. Another notable city of Gennesaret was Magdala, home of the famous Magdalene.

Our name Gennesaret occurs in the New Testament in Matthew 14:34, Mark 6:53 and Luke 5:1 only, twice in reference to the land and once to the lake. And for this we must note that in Biblical jargon, roughly and on average, lands tends to refer to schools of thought that are mostly concerned with the hard sciences (natural law, technologies, history and national legislation), whereas waters tend to refer to more mystic schools of thought (arts and music). Both are based on regularities but science tries to make sense of what is observed, whereas mysticism tries to make sense of what is not (yet) observed and must be retrieved from a place beyond reality and applied to the observed world.

In the Old Testament, this same region or sea is referred to as Chinnereth (Numbers 34:11, Deuteronomy 3:17, Joshua 13:27 and 19:35) and Chinneroth (Joshua 11:2 and 12:3, 1 Kings 15:20). In Rabbinic literature appears also the variant Ginosar, גינוסר (ginosar), which is the same name but in a different dialect, and probably with an Aramaic twang.

The name Gennesaret is one of the most meaningful names in the Bible: one could easily fill an entire book about it. The Hebrew literary tradition, and that includes the New Testament, is far less doctrinal than later Constantinian Christianity, and is far less interested in the one and only technical etymology, but much rather in the very serious art of puns and word jokes, or whichever many ways our name (in whatever form it happens to have been handed over from antiquity) may have meaning to any creative interpreter who knows their way around the contemporary literary tradition. Like any viewer of any painting, in Hebrew, the meaning of a name (or any word, for that matter) is whatever any reasonable and well-informed observer might be able to recognize in it.

That said, the name Gennesaret most obviously transliterates the Hebrew name Chinneroth (כנרות, kinarot), which is spelled identical to, but (according to the medieval Masoretes), pronounced slightly different than, the word כנרות (kinnorot), which is the plural of the noun כנור (kinnor), meaning harp:

Reading a meaning of Harps in our name is attractive because the familiar city of Magdala was also known as Magadan, whose name may derive from the Greek noun μαγαδις (magadis), meaning harp. Another Greek word for harp is κιθαρις (kitharis), which in some eyes perhaps resembles the adjective καθαρος (katharos), meaning pure or clean. This is significant because in the same creative eyes, our Hebrew noun כנור (kinnor), harp, may have resembled the compound כ (ke), meaning like, and נור (ner), meaning lamp or flowing river.

As noted above, water usually refers to the mystic approach to the Torah (rather than the equally essential legalistic one), and the harp, of course, was the signature attribute of David. The significance here is that the Messiah, though entirely faithful to the legal side of the Torah, was specifically a descendant of David, and thus a mystic, who brings about new things for the world rather than fix the world with the things already available in the world. David's son and immediate successor Solomon built the First Temple, and used the same "wood" to provide both the Temple and the royal Palace with foundation, and make harps from (1 Kings 10:12). To some readers, this statement is rather not about architecture and carpentry but says something about the crucial role of disciplined mysticism in the formation of Solomon's empire — and see our article on the name YHWH for more details about that.

Around 900 BC — in literary terms: from the throne and Temple of Solomon — the Hebrew alphabet was exported to the world. There it was adapted into the Greek and Latin ones and began to support philosophy, literature and the administrations of entire empires. It recorded the world's stories and gave lasting legacies to all language basins (Psalm 16:10), like a river with many trees on both its banks (Ezekiel 47:1-12).

In our article on the verb נהר (nahar), meaning to flow (what a river does) and to shine (what a lamp does), from which stems the above mentioned noun נור (ner), lamp, we show that within the Hebrew language there is a strong correlation between words having to do with water and words having to do with light, implying an equally strong correlation between enlightenment and the mystic experience of baptism. The obvious relationship with the equally essential legalistic Torah study is that one cannot stay in the waters and is always supposed to emerge from them and step ashore (and note that one drowns in water as easily as one burns or is mugged or torn apart by wild beasts on dry land).

All this may help to explain how the Revelator came to say: "And I heard a voice from heaven, as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of a great thunder, and (this voice that I heard was) as harpers harping with their harps" (Revelation 14:2).

Some later commentators have proposed that the lake of Gennesaret was named after the harp because it has the shape of one. That is problematic because people back then had no Google Maps and subsequently very little idea what the lake would look like from far above. Additionally, to the right kind of eyes, the lake may have seemed shaped like one harp but surely not many of them. Moreover, the harp associated with Judah and House David was box-shaped, like the Hebrew letter ם. This box-shaped harp was common to the entire region from Egypt to Mesopotamia. The familiar round Ω-shaped one was used only in Homeric Greece.

Much more worthy of our consideration is that our name's synonym, namely Galilee, stems from a verb that describes a circular motion: גלל (galal), to roll or go around. Since extant Hebrew shows no sign of a root כנר (k-n-r) from which to derive our noun כנור (kinnor), it may instead have been associated with another verb of circular motion, namely כרר (karar), to go around. Derived noun ככר (kikkar) means round [thing] and the valley of the Jordan was known as ככר הירדן (kikkar hayorden).

Commentators often point out that in Aramaic, the very similar word כנרא (kinnara) or כינרא (kinnara) had come to refer to a very special kind of low tree or shrub: the Ziziphus spina christi, a.k.a. the lote tree or Christ's Thorne, whose leaves had medicinal properties and fruits were sweet and widely used (some other plants called Christ's Thorn have no such fruits). Its popular name derives from the legend that Christ's crown of thorns was made from it, while its Aramaic name suggests that harps were made from it. These are clearly literary truths (i.e. having symbolic functions) rather than practical ones because this tree's wood is too brittle to bend or weave into a garland. By the time Muhammad received the Quran, this lote tree had assumed a position of utmost importance as it came to mark the upper limit of the seventh heaven and thus the boundary of all knowledge, human or angelic. As Muhammad experienced and could only have experienced mystically, beyond the lote tree, there is only God (Ephesians 3:19, Philippians 4:7).

In Megillah 6a of the Jerusalem Talmud, a highly joyful conversation is recorded between Rabbis Yohanan and Rava, in which Rabbi Yohanan recalls that as a child, he had declared that the land Chinnereth was named such "because its fruits are sweet like the voice [קול, qol] of the kinnor", and when he took that assumption to the elders, they had agreed with him. This possibly says more about how the Hebrew elders viewed the inspired inventions of children than the etymology of our name, but it clearly shows that the name primarily points to the harp and only secondarily to the כנרא (kinnara) tree (or rather that both tree and lake independently point toward the harp).

In the same conversation, Rabbi Yohanan (as a child) states that Chinnereth is Ginosar (כינרת זו גינוסר) but does not explain the name Ginosar (which is nevertheless clearly the same name, transliterated into a different dialect). The pun here, possibly, comes with the similarity between our name גינוסר (ginosar) and the familiar Greek verbs γινωσκω (ginosko), meaning to know, and γινομαι (ginomai), to be or begin to be, hence words like generation and genealogy. Also from the latter comes the term γενεσια (genesia), meaning birthday or commemorative festival (mostly of royals and emperors), which spelled in Aramaic is גיניסיא (ginisia), and גניסא (genisa), meaning family or gentry.

The final "-sar" part of our name Ginosar could evoke anything from σαυρος (sauros), lizard (see δρακων, drakon, snake), to σαρος (saros), which was a Babylonian astronomical unit of time — a period of 223 lunar months, or a little over 18 years — that was essential in the calculation of solar and lunar eclipses.

In Midrash Rabba 98, one Rabbi informs us that the name Chinnereth belonged to "the environs of Beth-shean", while another one connected it to "the entire coast of the Sea of Tiberias". All together they proclaimed that its alternative name Ginosar stemmed from the compound גני שרים (ganei sarim), meaning Princely Gardens or Gardens of Princes. The first part of this compound is the plural of the common noun גן (gan), garden:

And the second part of our compound would come from a plural of the noun שר (sar), chief or ruler:

For their reasoning of this meaning, the Rabbis pointed to 1 Chronicles 12:34, which reads "Of Naphtali there were a thousand princes..."

An alternate Aramaic transliteration of our name reads גוניסריות (gunysarot), where the "-sarot" part could easily pass for a transliteration of the plural of the familiar word שרה (sara), princess (hence the name Sarah). And גוני (guny) is the common Aramaic transliteration of the familiar Greek noun γυνη (gune), meaning woman or wife (hence also our English word gynecology).

To the average passerby, the name Gennesaret probably mostly meant Harps. But the same passerby would have known that the harp strongly symbolized the mystic element of Judaism that supervened upon the legalistic element of it and governed it like a shepherd does his flocks (and see our article on Gog and Magog for more on mysticism and supervening realities).

Mysticism baptizes a person in unspeakable music, and cleans them from within from all the thorns and thistles that may have emerged from their ever busy rational minds. Finally, the name Gennesaret clearly celebrates the promise that humankind is destined to be the Bride of the Most High, elevated onto Divine Royalty.