It’s almost Passover and I’ve been thinking about the human protagonists; Moses, Aaron, and Miriam. Three siblings. Each with special skills.

But there’s a problem with Miriam’s name. If you break down the two Hebrew syllables, you get the words for bitter (mar) and ocean (yam).

Why would she be named what can only be understood as Ocean of Bitterness?

The heroine who was instrumental in saving baby Moses at the shore of the Nile?

The prophetess who led the women in song after crossing the sea on dry land?

And, according to legend, the source of the well that followed the people for 40 years in the desert, nourishing an entire community of thousands?

There had to be a better answer.

So I started reading and studying. No one had an answer. In fact, almost no one questioned her name. They ignored the reference to bitterness and moved on.

I found a clue in Brown Driver Briggs. Known fondly as BDB, it is a comprehensive dictionary and reference of every word in the Hebrew Bible.

After a long list of every use of the word mar in the Bible, always meaning bitter or bitterness, I found this: “Alternative definition: מַר  n. drop.”

The reference is from Isaiah 40:15: “Behold, the nations are as a drop from a bucket…” For Hebrew readers, the phrase is גּוֹיִם כְּמַר מִדְּלִי.

Here was my answer.

Isaiah used the word mar to mean a drop of water. It appears only once in the Bible, a poetic term to emphasize smallness and fragility. 

If mar can be interpreted as a drop, then Miriam can be imagined as one who gathers and channels those drops—transforming something small (one drop) into something sustaining (an endless well of clear water).

Seen through this lens, Miriam’s name becomes an apt definition of a figure of life-sustaining presence, not bitterness.

Throughout her story, she is associated with water: at the bank of the Nile, the shore of the Sea, the well that faithfully followed her through the desert.

She represents the quiet accumulation of what seems small: attention, courage, persistence, care. A single drop may be insignificant—but enough drops become a well, a river, an ocean.

Mirjam, 1862, by Anselm Feuerbach.