Tag Archives: names

Naming conventions

According to the story in the book of Genesis, Noah and his wife are the ancestors of all human beings after the flood, with the exception of their three daughters-in-law. Yet Mrs. Noah, as she is often quaintly called, is not named in the canonical scriptures. Nor, for that matter, are the daughters-in-law, though that doesn’t seem as great an omission as the failure to name the woman who is, in a certain sense, another Eve. We know the names of the wives and concubines of the patriarchs, the mothers of nations and tribes, but not the names of the women to whom all humans can trace their ancestry since the flood. Makes me think that there must have been something powerful and dangerous about the identity of those four women. Makes me wonder what it was.