Six Degrees of Biblical Separation

By Steven Feldman

May 4, 2007

The play and movie Six Degrees of Separation made popular the notion that we are only about six people away from anyone else in the world. For example, if I found George Bush’s personal copy of his high school yearbook at a yard sale and figured he’d appreciate it back but worried that putting in the mail simply addressed “White House” would get it lost for years in some faraway security screening location, I’d give the yearbook to our friend Jeff, who works for a television network and is based at the White House, and ask him to give it to Press Secretary Tony Snow to pass on to the president—only two people between me and the President of the United States.

It occurred to me that we can also think of Degrees of Biblical Separation—the number of steps between something in our daily lives and something mentioned in the Bible. I was thinking of this because yesterday I attended a press conference/lunch meeting with Sallai Meridor, Israel’s ambassador to the United States. Meridor spoke about the large political problems facing his country—Iran’s looming nuclear capability, Hezbollah’s missiles in southern Lebanon and Hamas’s desire to acquire more deadly missiles in Gaza. None of this is directly related to the Bible (I do not play Guess the End Times with the Bible), but something at the meeting started me thinking about a particular Biblical figure. Meridor began by quipping that he was glad he was meeting the press on a day when there was so little news from Israel. Everyone laughed because we all knew that there had been quite a bit of news from Israel this week. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is fighting for his political life in the wake of a scathing report that found great fault with his performance and that of his government during last year’s war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Many people in Israel have called for Olmert to resign, and just before Ambassador Meridor met with us, Israel’s Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, also called for Olmert to step down. And it was Livni who got me to thinking about the Bible.

How so? Like many people in Israel, Livni is known by her nickname—Tzipi is short for Zipporah. Her name goes back to the Biblical Zipporah, the wife of Moses. Zipporah plays a fairly small role in the Bible except for the enigmatic episode in Exodus 4:24-26, in which God attacks Moses (or perhaps Moses and Zipporah’s son) but lets him go once Zipporah circumcises their son. This odd little story is treated by Bible scholar William Propp as part of a larger discussion of the meaning of circumcision to the early Israelites; Propp’s article, “Circumcision: The Private Sign of the Covenant,” appeared in the August 2004 issue of Bible Review.

As long as I’m at it, I’m going to introduce another concept: Six Degrees of Biblical Archaeology Separation. When I mentioned the connection of Israel’s Foreign Minister and the Bible to Susan Laden, our publisher, she told me that her daughter had adopted Zipporah as her Hebrew name; she had been named Faygel, after her grandmother, but that is a Yiddish name and she wanted an “official” Hebrew name; both names mean “bird.” When Sue mentioned that, I remembered that Sepphoris, the beautiful site in Galilee, is called Tzippori in Hebrew—which also means “bird.” Sepphoris was a boom town in first-century A.D. Roman Galilee, and it’s possible that Jesus and Joseph may have worked there as carpenters—Sepphoris was only an hour’s walk from Nazareth. Biblical Archaeology Review has written extensively on Sepphoris; you can start with “Sepphoris—An Urban Portrait of Jesus,” by Richard A. Batey and “The Sepphoris Synagoge Mosaic,” by Zeev Weiss.

So now you, too, can look for degrees of Biblical separation. But be warned—it might become habit forming.