Biblical Hebrew name meaning delight or pleasantness; one of Zelophehad's five daughters.
Tirzah is a name of remarkable depth and beauty drawn directly from the Hebrew Bible. Its meaning in Hebrew is "delight" or "pleasantness" — *tirzah* comes from the verb *ratzah*, meaning "to be pleased" or "to be favorable." It appears twice in the Hebrew scriptures in ways that gave it both personal and geographical significance.
In the book of Numbers, Tirzah is one of the five daughters of Zelophehad who successfully petition Moses for their father's inheritance when he dies without male heirs — a moment of early legal feminism celebrated by Jewish and feminist scholars alike. The name also belongs to an ancient Canaanite city in Samaria that became so beautiful it served as the first capital of the northern Kingdom of Israel after the division of the monarchy. The Song of Songs invokes its loveliness directly: *"You are beautiful, my darling, as Tirzah, lovely as Jerusalem"* — placing it alongside Jerusalem itself as a standard of beauty.
This made the name not merely a personal name but a lyric, a geography of longing woven into the most poetic book of the Hebrew canon. In later history, the English artist and poet William Blake used Tirzah as a symbolic female figure in his mythological poetry, representing the limits of the material world. Despite this rich pedigree, the name has remained genuinely rare in modern usage, giving it the quality of a hidden gem — biblical without being over-familiar, soft and liquid in sound (tir-ZAH), and carrying within it the whole weight of ancient female courage.