Holy Moses
Just days before the arrival of Passover, actress Gwyneth Paltrow and her husband, Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, made a pilgrimage to Mount Sinai (the New York hospital, that is), bore a son and named him Moses. The couple raised eyebrows two years ago when they named their first child, a daughter, Apple. In retrospect, perhaps they have been drawing from the Bible all along — first from Genesis and now from Exodus. The name Moses has been part of Paltrow and Martin’s intimate vocabulary for some time. Just before the couple’s 2003 wedding, Martin wrote a song for Paltrow that drew from the story of the Old Testament prophet. “Like Moses has power over sea,” he sang, “so you’ve got power over me.” Though Paltrow’s mother, actress Blythe Danner, is from a Quaker family, Paltrow’s father, late producer/director Bruce Paltrow, is said to have been a descendant of 17th-century sage Rabbi David HaLevi.