Shua in Judah’s and Saul’s Families

The last chapter read the name Yeshua as two parts: yod, pointing to the LORD, and Shua, meaning salvation. Everything in that reading depends on the second part. If Shua were only a fragment, a piece left over when a longer name was shortened, we would have to borrow an explanation from somewhere else to know what it meant. But Scripture does not leave us to borrow. In two places it shows Shua standing on its own, and those two places settle the question from the text itself.

A Name in Judah’s Story

The first is in Genesis, in the account of Judah’s family.

Genesis 38:2 And Judah saw there the daughter of a man (ish אִישׁ eesh), a Canaanite, whose name was Shua; and he took her, and went in to her.

The father of Judah’s wife is called Shua (H7770). In Hebrew his name is spelled with three letters: shin, vav, ayin. These are exactly the three letters that follow the yod in Yeshua, and the vav sits inside the name just as it does there.

Notice what this means. Here Shua is not cut out of a longer word, and it is not the short form of anything. It is a whole name that a man actually bore, written by itself in the text, and it carries the meaning “salvation,” with the further senses “wealth” and “abundance.” The point for us is simple: the three letters that make up the second half of Yeshua were already a word, and a name, long before the angel spoke to Joseph.

A Name in Saul’s Family

The second place is the list of Saul’s children.

1 Samuel 14:49 And the sons of Saul were Jonathan and Ishvi and Malchi-shua; and the names of his two daughters: the name of the firstborn Merab, and the name of the younger Michal.

English Bibles usually print the third son’s name as one word, Malchishua. The YLV prints it with a hyphen, “Malchi-shua,” and that hyphen is not decoration. It follows the Hebrew.

In the Masoretic text, the Hebrew text handed down by the scribes, this name is written as two words, not one. The first word is Malki (מַלְכִּי) and the second is Shua. Between them stands the maqqef, a short raised stroke that Hebrew uses to bind two words together so that they are read as one unit. It works much like our hyphen. The joined words remain two words, each with its own letters and its own meaning. The verse that follows shows the same stroke at work in an ordinary phrase, “the daughter of Ahimaaz” (1 Samuel 14:50), where “daughter” and “Ahimaaz” are plainly two words joined by it.

Nor is this a single slip of a scribe. The name of Saul’s son appears in five verses (1 Samuel 14:49; 31:2; 1 Chronicles 8:33; 9:39; 10:2), and in every one of them the text writes Malki, the joining stroke, and Shua. A lexicon may list the name as one headword for convenience, but the text itself spells it as two words. The YLV keeps the hyphen in Chronicles as well.

1 Chronicles 8:33 And Ner begot Kish, and Kish begot Saul, and Saul begot Jonathan, and Malchi-shua, and Abinadab, and Eshbaal.

Each time the Hebrew writes Malki and Shua, joined but not fused, the reader is shown two words that can each be read for what they mean.

“My King Is Salvation”

Now read the two words.

Malki is the ordinary Hebrew word melek, “king,” with the small ending -i that means “my.” Shua is the same word we met in Genesis. Together the name says “My king is salvation.” And in this name, Shua does not need anything before it to be understood. It sits beside Malki as a word in its own right.

The Same Pattern in Yeshua

Set the two names next to each other and the pattern is plain.

In both names the second part is the same word with the same meaning. What changes is the first part. In the name of Saul’s son, the first part says “my king.” In the name of Mary’s Son, the first part points to the LORD.

Think of a house number painted on a gate. On one gate it may stand alone, and on another it may follow the name of the street, but the number means the same on both. Shua is like that. In Genesis 38:2 it stands alone as a name. In 1 Samuel 14:49 it follows Malki. In Yeshua it follows the yod. Its meaning does not change from place to place.

What the Two Witnesses Prove

These two passages prove two things together. First, the vav is part of Shua. In Genesis 38:2 the name is spelled shin, vav, ayin, with nothing missing, and the same three letters stand in Yeshua. Second, Shua means salvation, and it carries that meaning as a word of its own, because it stands alone as a name in Genesis and as a separate word beside Malki in Samuel and Chronicles.

So the meaning of the name Yeshua, “The LORD is salvation,” can be shown from Scripture alone. It does not depend on any theory about how the name was formed. We only need to read the letters as the text writes them and let the text tell us what Shua means.

Dictionaries record that Shua carries the sense of salvation, that Genesis 38:2 has a man named Shua, and that 1 Samuel 14:49 has the name Malchi-shua. What this study adds is the use of the two-word spelling in the Hebrew text as a witness that Shua means salvation in its own right.

There is, however, another explanation of the name Yeshua that most dictionaries give first. It says that Yeshua is simply the short form of the name Joshua. That explanation is right in its own way, and it deserves a fair hearing before we see what Scripture adds beside it.