🔼The name Minnith: Summary
- Meaning
- Distribution, Apportioned
- Etymology
- From the verb מנה (mana), to reckon or count.
🔼The name Minnith in the Bible
The name Minnith occurs twice in the Bible. It belongs to a city in Ammonite territory, which was known for its wheat production (Ezekiel 27:17, also see 2 Chronicles 27:5).
When the judge Jephthah ravished the Ammonites, he slaughtered them from Aroer to Minnith, and as far as Abel-keramim (Judges 11:33).
🔼Etymology of the name Minnith
The etymology of the name Minnith is disputed. Alfred Jones (Dictionary of Old Testament Proper Names) takes it from an Arabic word meaning to be little, but transliterated into Hebrew it looks like it has to do with the verb מנה (mana), meaning to count, or perhaps to be bounteous:
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.
🔼Minnith meaning
For a meaning of the name Minnith, Jones' Dictionary of Old Testament Proper Names reads Small. NOBSE Study Bible Name List, apparently, takes it from the Hebrew verb discussed above and reads Distribution, although that's a very free interpretation. BDB Theological Dictionary doesn't translate or interpret this name.