🔼The name Mijamin: Summary
- Meaning
- From The Right Side, Right-Handed One
- Etymology
- From (1) the preposition מן (min), from, and (2) the noun ימין (yamin), the right hand or side.
🔼The name Mijamin in the Bible
It's not clear how many different men named Mijamin (or in some translations: Miamin) there are in the Bible, but it's predominantly a Levite name. The men named Mijamin are:
- A descendant of Aaron through either Eleazar or Ithamar (it's not clear which) in the latter days of king David (1 Chronicles 24:9).
- One of the signers of Nehemiah's sealed document (Nehemiah 10:7). Fragments of the list of names of Nehemiah 10 appear to be repeated in Nehemiah 12, and the Mijamin of chapter 10 seems to somewhat coincide with the Miniamin of chapter 12. This makes scholars believe they are the same man.
- A Levite who came back from the Babylonian exile together with Zerubbabel (Nehemiah 12:5, only here spelled מימין).
- One of the descendants of a man named Parosh, who divorced their foreign wives during the purge of Ezra (Ezra 10:25).
🔼Etymology of the name Mijamin
The name Mijamin is a compilation of two distinct elements. The first part is מ (mem), the short version of the preposition מן (min), meaning from:
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.
The second element of our name is the noun ימין (yamin), meaning the right hand or right side:
ימן
The root ימן (ymn) is of unclear pedigree and meaning but it has to do with both the right hand side and the southern direction, which are both decidedly positive (whereas left and north have negative connotations). This also indicates that one normally faces east, which corresponds to the past.
Noun ימין (yamin) means right, i.e. right hand, side or the right of other parts of the body. Adjective ימיני (yemini) meaning on the right. Verb ימן (yaman) means to go or choose the right or use the right hand. Adjective ימני (yemani) meaning right hand or right. Noun תימן (teman) meaning south.
🔼Mijamin meaning
For a meaning of the name Mijamin, NOBSE Study Bible Name List reads From The Right Side, and Jones' Dictionary of Old Testament Proper Names proposes From The Right Side. BDB Theological Dictionary does not translate or interpret this name.
The plural of our name, namely מימינים (mijaminim) occurs in 1 Chronicles 12:2 with the meaning of 'right-handed ones'.