It’s Biblical! This week: Jesse

Some people in the Jewish community and beyond choose to name their son Jesse or the Hebrew equivalent, Yishai.

What is the origin and significance of this name?

Jesse appears in the Tanach, the Hebrew Bible, but if one looks there doesn’t seem to be much detail about him, his life or what kind of a person he was.

However, we do know that he was a righteous individual. The Talmud in Succah 52b describes Jesse as one of the eight princes who would save the Children of Israel from the Assyrians. Sanhedrin 102b and other sources refers to King David as simply ‘Ben Yishai’, which in English means the son of Jesse, because of Jesse’s greatness and Shabbat 55b describes Jesse as one of the four people who lived in this world that never sinned.

So what exactly was it about Jesse that propelled him to great spiritual heights and made him worthy of such praise from the Talmud?

There is a verse in Samuel II 17:12 that says there was an old man in the days of Saul who came with men. The Talmud in Berachot 58a tells us that this man was Jesse and that he went out with a crowd, he came in with a crowd and he expounded Torah with a crowd.

Jesse was a Marbitz Torah: he constantly and successfully spread the message of our sacred Torah and its traditions.

The Maharsha, the great 16th-century Rabbinic authority, adds that when Jesse was young, he was a man of war, but as he grew older he adapted himself to become a man of wisdom – he was versatile and able to operate successfully in any environment.

May we learn and internalise these critical lessons, and as a result be righteous in our own unique way.

•  Sam Taylor is the community rabbi at Western Marble Arch Synagogue

Listen to the Jewish Views podcast: