Dove-Bear

A distant relative of the griffin

At one point in Ari Barak and the Free-Will Paradox by Shaul Behr, a policeman gets Rabbi White's first name wrong and refers to him as Tzvi rather than Tuvia. Wondering whether this were a different form of Tuvia or an entirely different name, I looked it up. It's a different name, meaning "gazelle" in Hebrew. A few weeks ago I posted in "The antelope, both fierce and fell" about a character whose name is a homophone of the Chinese word for "gazelle," so that got my attention. The Wikipedia article on the name Zvi (Tzvi being an alternate transliteration) mentions that "It is sometimes paired with Hirsch, the German and Yiddish word for 'deer', in a bilingual pleonasm."

Clicking for the article on bilingual pleonasms, I discovered that it is a fairly common pattern in Yiddish names to compound a Hebrew animal word with its German synonym. Tzvi-Hirsch was the second example listed; the first was Dov-Ber, with dov being the Hebrew for "bear." This Hebrew word has come up once before, in "St. Christopher, Deseret, and -- bear with me, it's all connected" (2021), where it served to link Jonah ("dove" in Hebrew) with the bear (dov in Hebrew). This onomastic research was occasioned by a book written by a Jew named Behr, which is a further sync.

Shortly after reading about the name Dov-Ber, I turned to the Book of Isaiah, which I have been reading. I had finished Chapter 58 last night, so I picked up where I had left off. Just a few verses in, I found this:

We roar all like bears, and mourn sore like doves: we look for judgment, but there is none; for salvation, but it is far off from us (Isa. 59:11).

Incidentally, 貝爾熊 -- bèi'ěr-xióng, a transliteration of the English word bear compounded with the Chinese word for "bear" -- is fairly common in Chinese, though not as a personal name.