The etymology suggested in Genesis for the name of Ben-Oni is a sample of those plays upon words in which Oriental writers have always delighted, and of which the Hebrew Scriptures contain so many illustrations. They all spring from the old confusion between the name and the thing, which substituted the name for the thing, and believed that if the name could be explained, the thing would be explained also. Hence the slight transformations in the form of names which allowed them to be assimilated to familiar words, or their identification with words which obviously gave an incorrect sense. Hence, too, the choice of etymologies which was offered to the reader: where the real origin of the name was unknown or uncertain, it was possible to explain it in more than one way. Isaiah (xv. 9) changes the name of the Moabite city of Dibon into Dimon in order to connect it with the Hebrew _dâm_, ‘blood,’ and the writer of Genesis gives two contradictory derivations of the name of Joseph (Gen. xxx. 23, 24). The latter fact is of itself a sufficient proof of the true value of these etymologies, or rather, popular plays upon words, and the sayings in which they are embodied can still be matched by the traveller in the East. Similar embodiments of popular etymologising are still repeated to explain the place-names of Egypt.[90] The origin of some of the names of the sons of Jacob is as obscure to us as it was to the writer of Genesis. We do not know, for instance, the meaning and derivation of the name of Reuben. Equally doubtful is the real etymology of the name of Issachar.[91] The name of Simeon is already found among the places in Canaan conquered by the Egyptian Pharaoh Thothmes III. before the age of Moses, and in Judah we have a name which seems to be the same as that of a tribe in Northern Syria.[92] Levi, like Naphtali, is a gentilic noun, and must be connected with the _lau’â(n)_, or ‘priest’ of Southern Arabia.[93] Gad was the god of good fortune, Dan ‘the judge,’ the title of certain Babylonian deities, and Dinah is the feminine corresponding to Dan.