such as ben Ami ("son of my people"), or ben Artzi ("son of my country"), and terms related to the Israeli landscape, such as bar Ilan ("son of the trees", also similar phonetically to the bearer's original family name Berlin). Another famous person who used a false patronymic is the first Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion. His former family name was Grün, and he adopted the name "Ben-Gurion" ("son of Gurion"), not "Ben-Avigdor" (his father's name). Gurion was a Jewish leader in the period of the First Jewish–Roman War. Change of name Change of name was not an unusual occurrence in Biblical times, if one may judge by the instances occurring among the Patriarchs, and it seems to have been not altogether unknown in later times. Thus, Moses Benveniste mentions a certain Obadiah who wandered from Germany to Turkey in 1654 and changed his name to Moses because the former name was unusual. Later in the Middle Ages a person who was dangerously sick would change his name in the hope that the Angel of Death, who summons persons by name, would be baffled thereby. This custom, known as meshanneh shem, is given in the Talmud and is mentioned by Judah Ḥasid. One of the names thus adopted was the appropriate one of Ḥayyim. In order to prevent any misunderstanding at the resurrection the cabalists later recommended persons to learn a psalm the first and last verses of which began and ended with the first and last letters of their names. Particular care is to be taken in the writing of names in legal documents, the slightest error in which invalidates them. Hence there are quite a number of monographs on names, both personal and geographical, the first of which was that written by Simḥah Cohen; the best known is that of Samuel ben Phoebus and Ephraim Zalman Margulies entitled Ṭib Giṭṭin. It was also common for Jews to change or adapt their name according to their place of living to make it easier to pronounce or to avoid discrimination, for example in the Soviet Union. Superstitions It was thought that Jews of the same name should not live in the same town or permit their children to marry into each other's families; this seems to have some reference to exogamy. It is even urged that one should not marry a woman of the same name as one's mother; or