The Hebrew word for the city of Bethlehem is Beit Lechem, or house of milk. I understand (although this could be wrong, I think my source is a travel guide), that the Arabic word for Bethlehem is Bet Lahm, which means (again, I could be wrong) House of Meat.
My question is: is there a seperate historical reason for the Arabic name, or is it simply a homonym? I’m pretty sure that the Hebrew name came first.
Als, while looking up something in the Torah, I noticed that in Genesis, Rachel was buried on the road to Efrat, which is now Bethlehem. There is a modern town in the West Bank called Efrat, an Israeli settlement very close to Bethlehem. Is there a historical basis for its location? Or was the name selected because the town’s location happens to be close to the original Efrat?
Lechem is Hebrew for bread. Chalav is Hebrew for milk.
From some Googling, modern Efrat started as Kibbutz Etzion in 1934, but was abandonded after riots in 1939. It was a pivotal battle point until May 1948 and the partition, and then resettled soon after 1967. Efrat was founded in the 1980s by Rabbi Shlomo Riskin. I’d just guess that it was a modern founding using an old biblical name; much like S’dom in on the Dead Sea and I can’t imagine that it stands in the place of the Biblical Sodom.
Just to mention in passing that in Christian Bibles Efrat is rendered Ephratah (very rarely Ephrath) and is considered to be a synonym for Bethlehem. (Jewish/Israeli Dopers? Were they two separate nearby communities in Bible times?)
I’d understood that Bet (is that also rendered Bayt?) Lahm was merely Beth Lehem transliterated into Arabic, without intentionally carrying the meaning it happens to have. But that’s purely impression of how toponymy in the Holy Land has usually gone, not anything I can advance a cite on.
The etymology of place names around here can be pretty interesting. The ancient Israelite city of Schem, for instance, was conquered and possibly razed by the Romans, who rebuilt it under the name of Neapolis - “new city”. Over the years, the name was altered by its eventually Arabic-speaking citizens into Nablus, the common name for it today. However, in Hebrew the city is still called Scehm.
There are several other interesting linguistic histories. The town of Ramalla, for instance, was built near the site of the ancient Jewish city of Ramot. Conversely, I used to live in a place called Kibbutz Metzer, the name of which comes from the neighboring Arab village of Maiser. And then there’s Modi’in (the Israeli Milton Keynes), which was built from scratch about 15 years ago near - but not on - the site of the ancient city of the same name, the home town of the Hasmoneans.