On a related note, "Noah" has an odd gender thing about it, as well.

In the Hebrew alphabet, there is a letter called "chet". It sounds like a hard "h", almost like the short version of the sound you make when bringing up phlegm in your throat. It starts such words as "chai" (life), "chen" (grace), and "chesed" (mercy).

Thing is, when people translated the "OT" into English, the "chet"s were softened into the closest thing they knew -- the "h". Haggai (Chaggai), Nahum (Nachum), and Hananiah (Chananiah) are examples of affected names. So the man with the ark was named "Noach", but the language thing changed it to "Noah".

But here's the catch: we find in Numbers a man called Zelophehad (Tselophchad; the "Ts" to "Z" thing is for another post) who is famous for having all girls, thus bringing up an interesting problem of inheritance. One of these daughters was named "Noah", and is correctly so called (at least until we figure out the distinction between the two "silent" letters). So we have a female named "Noah" (means "movement"), and a male named "Noach" (means "rest") but called "Noah". The man with the ark is more famous (builing a ship to ride out a flood on the orders of God, when rain was unheard of, or a participant in a question of inheritance), so "Noah" is readily considered a male name.

As a side note: there are other, better ways to represent the "chet", none of which can be done here. The ones I've seen are: underlining the "H"; putting a dot under the "H"; attaching a tilde; and, one that only I seem to be doing currently, using a Paleo-Hebrew chet. It looks like a double-runged "H" that's been tilted. All are better than what happened when the names were taken into Greek for the "NT". "Naum", "Ananias", and "Noe" (Nachum, Chananiah, Noach), to name three.

Nyperold