🔼The name Menna or Menan: Summary
- Meaning
- Portion, Destiny
- Home Stayer
- Etymology
- From the verb מנה (mana), to count or to reckon.
- From the verb μενω (meno), to stay.
🔼The name Menna or Menan in the Bible
The name Menan occurs only once in the Bible, namely in Luke 3:31, where he is mentioned in the genealogy of Joseph, as father of Melea, son of Mattatha and great grandson of David via Nathan.
Some less important and later manuscripts (like the Byzantine Majority Text upon which the King James Version and our own interlinear New Testament are based) have Μαιναν (Mainan) or Menan, but the earliest versions have Μεννα (Menna), which is followed by most modern translations such as the NAS and NIV. Why this discrepancy exists isn't known — neither name appears in the Hebrew Bible — but something perhaps comparable is going on with the name Cainan (Luke 3:36).
🔼Etymology of the name Menna
It's fairly safe to assume that the original name of the great-grandson of David was Hebrew, which puts it in proximity of the name of the god of fate, Meni, comparable with the Arabic deity Maniyyat or Manat and the Nabataean deity Manutun. If so, then this name derives from the verb מנה (mana), to count or to reckon, and in particular from the noun מנה (mana), meaning portion or part:
מן
The interrogative pronoun מן (man) means "what?" but the preposition מן (min) means "out of" or "from". The latter is often deployed as prefix, in which only the מ (m) is written. Nouns formed from "מ plus root" commonly describe an "agent" or "place-of" whatever the action of the root describes.
The core function of these words is to distinguish an entity from its environment: hence to distinguish. In Proto-Indo-European appears a strikingly similar root, namely men-, from which we get words like mnemonic and mind (and money).
Verb מנה (mana) means to count or assign or partition (to demarcate a thing from where it emerged from). Nouns מנה (mana) and מנת (menat) mean portion or part. Noun מנה (maneh) is a unit of weight; the mina. And noun מנה (moneh) means time (not clock time but as in ten "times").
Noun מן (men) describes a harp string and is an Aramaic loan word.
But the alternative spelling of our name also seems to hint to a cluster of Greek words that are centered on the verb μενω (meno), meaning to stay. That's not to say that in 900 BC, somebody created a name for one of David's princely great-grandsons by means of some Greek verb, but rather that in the first century CE, people used elaborate wordplay to innovate interpretations of the Hebrew originals or to demonstrate that the Greek language was strongly informed by Semitic ones (see our article on the many Hebrew roots of Greek).
Either way, any Greek speakers in Luke's original audience would have been remined of the verb μενω (meno):
μενω
The verb μενω (meno) means to stay, i.e. to stay in some location or even with some teaching. The noun μονη (mone), describes a "place of remaining," i.e. a home.
🔼Menna meaning
The name Menna is probably Hebrew and means Portion or Destiny. But it may also be interpreted as a Greek name, in which case it would mean Home-Stayer, and remind of what was said of Jacob: "When the boys grew up, Esau became a skillful hunter, a man of the field, but Jacob was a peaceful man, living in tents" (Genesis 25:27). By the first century, Esau had become synonymous with Rome.