Aben Ezra says the name is derived from wmh ryba abir-hamon, ""a powerful multitude.""

Rabbi Solomon Jarchi defines the name cabalistically, and says that its numeral letters amount to two hundred and forty-eight, which, says he, is the exact number of the bones in the human body. But before the h he was added, which stands for five, it was five short of this perfection.

Rabbi Lipman says the h he being added as the fourth letter, signifies that the Messiah should come in the fourth millenary of the world.

Clarius and others think that the h he, which is one of the letters of the Tetragrammaton, (or word of four letters, hwhy YeHoVaH,) was added for the sake of dignity, God associating the patriarch more nearly to himself, by thus imparting to him a portion of his own name.

Having enumerated so many opinions, that of William Alabaster, in his Apparatus to the Revelation, should not be passed by. He most wisely says that ab-ram or ab-rom signifies father of the Romans, and consequently the pope; therefore Abraham was pope the first! This is just as likely as some of the preceding etymologies.

From all these learned as well as puerile conjectures we may see the extreme difficulty of ascertaining the true meaning of the word, though the concordance makers, and proper name explainers find no difficulty at all in the case; and pronounce on it as readily and authoritatively as if they had been in the Divine council when it was first imposed.

Hottinger, in his Smegma Orientale, supposes the word to be derived from the Arabic root rahama, which signifies to be very numerous. Hence ab raham would signify a copious father or father of a multitude. This makes a very good sense, and agrees well with the context. Either this etymology or that which supposes the inserted h he to be an abbreviation of the word mh hamon, multitude, is the most likely to be the true one.But this last would require the word to be written, when full, wmh µark ba ab-ram-hamon.

The same difficulty occurs, ver. 15, on the word Sarai, yr which signifies my prince or princess, and Sarah, hr where the whole change is made by the substitution of a h he for a y yod. This latter might be translated princess in general; and while the former seems to point out her government in her own family alone, the latter appears to indicate her government over the nations of which her husband is termed the father or lord; and hence the promise states that she shall be a mother of nations, and that kings of people should spring from her. See ver. 15, 16.

Now as the only change in each name is made by the insertion of a single letter, and that letter the same in both names, I cannot help concluding that some mystery was designed by its insertion; and therefore the opinion of Clarius and some others is not to be disregarded, which supposes that God shows he had conferred a peculiar dignity on both, by adding to their names one of the letters of his own: a name by which his eternal power and Godhead are peculiarly pointed out.

From the difficulty of settling the etymology of these two names, on which so much stress seems to be laid in the text, the reader will see with what caution he should receive the lists of explanations of the proper names in the Old and New Testaments, which he so frequently meets with, and which I can pronounce to be in general false or absurd.

Matthew Henry Commentary

Original Hebrew