🔼The name Paseah: Summary
- Meaning
- Lame
- Etymology
- From the adjective פסח (piseah), lame.
🔼The name Paseah in the Bible
It's unclear how many different men named Paseah appear in the Bible, but the following are the candidates. It's possible that the latter two are the same person, but it's also perfectly possible that they're all the same man, or even the same town:
- One of three sons of Eshton of Judah; the men of Recah (1 Chronicles 4:12). The names of one of these sons looks suspiciously like the name of a town (Beth-rapha), and the other, Tehinnah is the "father" of Ir-nahash, which is means City Of The Snake.
- The patriarch of a family of Nethinim (temple servants) that returned from the exile (Ezra 2:49, Nehemiah 7:51). This Paseah may very well be the same as the next:
- An otherwise unspecified Paseah, whose son (which means descendant) Joiada repaired Jerusalem's Old Gate during the post-exilic restoration project, together with Meshullam, son of Besodeiah (Nehemiah 3:6).
🔼Etymology of the name Paseah
The name Paseah is the same as the adjective פסח (piseah) meaning lame, or perhaps infantile:
פסח
The verb פסח (pasah) describes the existence of a shortage, and that shortage may lead to an impaired mobility or an intense desire or a debilitating indecisiveness. It's the Bible's common verb for being lame.
The Bible's common verb for being blind is based on a verb that means to have too much (namely skin where it shouldn't be, namely over the eyes). Hence the proverbial duo of "the lame and the blind" more generally describes everybody burdened by not having enough of something, and everybody burdened by having too much of something. Note that all humans are born lame and most die blind, which associates our verb פסח (pasah) with being child-like and immature.
Noun פסח (pesah) is the word commonly translated with Passover. Adjective פסח (piseah) means lame or cripple.
🔼Paseah meaning
For a meaning of the name Paseah, both NOBSE Study Bible Name List and Jones' Dictionary of Old Testament Proper Names read Lame. BDB Theological Dictionary proposes Limper.
Latin names that may express lameness (but probably with a different connotation) are Claudius and Claudia. In Hebrew the name Paseah has a semi-parallel in the name Zelah, which comes from the verb צלע (sela'), meaning to lean or limp.