Lydia meaning

Meaning

From Lud

Etymology

From the name Lud.

Related names

• Via Lud: Ahilud, Lud, Ludim

The name Lydia is applied to one woman and one country in the Bible. The one and only female Lydia in the Bible was Paul's first European convert; a woman originally from Thyatira but living in Philippi in Macedonia, working as a trader in purple fabrics (Acts 16:14 and 16:40). Thyatira (now Akhisar in western Turkey) was made a Macedonian colony in 290 BC and became part of Pergamum in 190 BC. But long before all that, Thyatira was known as Pelopia, and was probably founded by the Lydians, who were once a people that dominated western Anatolia, which is Asia Minor, during the 6th and 7th centuries BC.

The Lydians originated as Hittites, who had moved north after their kingdom fell. The Romans believed that the Etruscans came from Lydia, and that the Lydians, specifically the Ephesians had invented the monetary coin. This sounds wonderfully productive but it's not really. See the note below.

The country called Lydia is referred to by John the Revelator but not actually named. It's the area that contains the cities of Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea (Revelation 1:11). A little to the north of these seven lay the legendary city of Troy (the noun τρωσις, trosis, means wound).

The Lydians called themselves Sfard, but for some reason, the Greeks began to call them the Meiones, and their kingdom Maionia. The Trojan War had everything to do with Paris' seduction of Helen, the breath-taking but oath-breaking wife of Menelaos, the Spartan king whom the goddess Athena both protected and had assaulted. Homer described the state of Menelaos' subsequent wound "as when some woman — perhaps a Maionian or Karian — stains ivory with purple" (Il.4.141, see Revelation 13:3).

To the original audience of Acts and Revelation, this information would have been common knowledge and the deliberate connection between the purple-selling Lydia and death-bringing Helen an obvious one. In other words: the Lukan author of Acts was using lessons learned from Homer's Iliad to comment on the Battle of Philippi, which is where the Roman Republic was delivered its final death blow. See our article on Hellas for a closer look at Helen. See our article on Thyatira for a look at what sort of death the purple may have referred to.

When a Maionian king Lydus came along, the Greeks began to call his people the Lydians of Lydia. In the Old Testament occurs the name Ludim, which in some translations (NIV for instance) interprets as Lydians or men from Lydia (Jeremiah 46:9, Ezekiel 27:10 and 30:5). Other translations have kept the Hebrew names Lud and Ludim.

There's also a town in Hebrew called לד (Lod — 1 Chronicles 8:12, Ezra 2:33) which in the Greek of the New Testament is called Λυδδα (Lydda — Acts 9:32). It was situated where now the Tell Aviv airport is (says Spiros Zodhiates).

Someone from לוד (Lud) would be called לודי (Luday). A female Ludite would be called לודיה (Ludyah), which transliterated into Greek would form Λυδια (Luddia). That name transliterated into Latin forms our familiar name Lydia.

The name Lydia, therefore, means From Lud, but since Lud means Bender or Almond Tree, the name Lydia means From The Bender, or From The Almond Tree. Trees were of enormous significance in the old world; think of Abraham beneath his oaks (possibly denoting weakness or foolishness, which in turn necessitates social bonding), Deborah beneath her palm (possibly denoting justice), and Nathanael under his fig tree (possibly denoting an immature state of righteousness).

What the almond would have signified is hard to guess at, but perhaps an ability to bend into whatever way; to adapt. The Lydians, after all, arose from the shards of the Hittite empire, and the Etruscans arose from the Lydians, and the rise of the Romans may have been helped by the Etruscans, and surely by their varied use of coin money.

Another famous name that's really an ethnonym is Magdalene.

The invention of the coin brought about two major changes in culture. The first, most obvious change was an increased ease to indebt and thus enslave people. Coinage made it easier for rulers to tax subjects and to pay soldiers, meaning that it became much easier to form and maintain a standing army. These fighting men wouldn't even have to be convinced about the justice of their deeds, as before, because with the invention of coinage, business was business and nothing personal.

Secondly, the coin with its image and brief, stylized message on it, was the first real mass medium for propaganda. A king who had sacked a neighboring kingdom could turn the looted gold and silver into coins with his face and name on it, so that with every transaction, people could see with their own eyes how much wealth the king had brought into the country. And that had as curious side-effect that a unit of precious metal could become more or less valuable, depending on the persuasions of the people that transacted with cash.

That meant that demonizing a rival could effectively devaluate his money, and that's where the various currencies and exchange rates came from. By inventing the exchange rate, people were able to create phantom value; theoretical value not coupled to goods or services, which in turn meant that goods and services with intrinsic value could lose their market value. And this led to a new kind of warfare that could leave other people just as devastated, but for which no one had to be bothered with activities that people might come to abhor, such as actual warfare and genocide. Coinage and currency exchange allowed people to break all of the Ten Commandments without actually breaking them personally (Matthew 21:12).