The change from a Yiddish family name such as Perelman, to a Hebrew family name such as Ben-Yehuda, provided many Zionist settlers in Palestine with a prototype for emulation in a process of self-invention and self-indigenisation. This process also inspired Prime Minister and Defence Minister David Ben-Gurion who used the Israeli army after 1948 to impose general Hebraicisation and purification procedures of family and personal names. Ben-Gurion himself was born David Grün in Russia; his mother was called Scheindel and his Russian-born wife was called Pauline Munweis when she met and married Ben-Gurion in New York (she later changed her name to Paula); after immigrating to Palestine David Grün became David Green; and he subsequently changed his family name to the biblical- sounding, and literally lionised and predatory, name David Ben-Gurion (literally ‘son of the lion cub’). He also chose a biblical-sounding name for his daughter Geula (‘redemption’) and his son Amos, after a minor prophet in the Hebrew Bible.

For Ben-Gurion, the invention of a Hebrew tradition and the synthesising of a nation meant that the Hebrew Bible became not a religious document or a repository of theological assertions; it was reinvented as a nationalised and racialised sacred text central to the modern foundational myths of secular Zionism. As a primordialist ideaology of secular nationalism, asserting the antiquity of Jewish nationalism (Smith, A. 1986, 1989: 340‒367), and inspired by Eurocentric völkisch and racial ideologies, Ben-Gurion’s Zionism viewed the Bible in an entirely functional way: the biblical language, narrative and place names functioned as a mobilising myth and as an ‘historical account’ of Jews’ ‘title to the land’ – a claim not necessarily borne out by recent archaeological findings. For Ben-Gurion, it was not important whether the biblical narrative and place names were an objective and true record of actual historical events and the past. It is not entirely clear whether Ben-Gurion assumed that the ancient events the Israeli state was re-enacting had actually occurred. But, as he explains, ‘It is not important whether the [biblical] story is a true record of an event or not. What is of importance is that this is what the Jews believed as far back as the period of the First Temple’ (Pearlman 1965: 227; also Rose 2004: 9).