BOTH OF MY KIDS have made babies who haven’t yet inhaled their hometown air.
The first one, a boy, is due to draw breath around Christmastime. That will be my daughter’s kid.
The second one, we hope to know which sex later this week, is supposed to arrive mid-March. That will be my son’s kid.
Both families are working up names.
I hold out little hope for the reincarnation of my father’s name: Clyde. But I mention it here as a reminder.
We tend to name kids these days after favorite movie stars, sports figures, and beloved relatives – Clyde, for example, a name in the Top 100 during the 1930s, and making a comeback these days don’t you know.
I fail to see much evidence of people doing that in Bible times – not that they had movie stars and such. But they did have beloved relatives.
Yet instead of naming kids after someone else, they seemed to name their kids as a way of sending a message, or of describing something unique about the kid or a hope they had for the child.
- “Name him Jesus – ‘God saves’ – because he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21).
- “Rebekah gave birth, the first baby was covered with red hair, so he was named Esau [Hairy]” (Genesis 25:24-25).
- “The second baby grabbed on to his brother’s heel, so they named him Jacob [Heel]” (Genesis 25:26).
- “The king’s daughter named him Moses [Pull Out], because she had pulled him out of the water” (Exodus 2:10).
- “I’ll name him Noah [Comfort] because he will give us comfort, as we struggle hard to make a living on this land” (Genesis 5:29).
With that in mind, let’s say my daughter’s water breaks while she’s watching the movie “Bonnie and Clyde.” If she were operating under biblical principles, she could very well name my grandson Clyde.
She would have absolutely no choice but to name him Clyde if her water broke while she was touring alongside the banks of the River Clyde that flows through Glasgow, Scotland. That river seems to be the source of the name Clyde, though we are left to scratch our head over how on earth the river got its name.
What my daughter would not do, if she worked from biblical principles alone, is to Google the Top 100 names for boys.
Clyde is not there, by the way.
RandomNames.com reports that Clyde is in the top 35% of liked boys names. It also describes Clyde as “an exceedingly eloquent name, for stunning people.”
So my daughter – and my son, if he and his wife have a boy – would be following biblical principles if they named their son Clyde in the hope that their son would exude eloquence and grow into a stunning man.
People in Bible times had a different way of naming their kids, all right.
For better or worse. Sometimes for worse:
- “Name the boy Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz [Coming Swiftly: Looting and Stealing] because the king of Assyria will take away all the wealth and possessions of Damascus and Samaria before the boy learns to say ‘my father’ or ‘my mother’” (Isaiah 8:3-4).
I’d have called him Swifty.
PS for my kids. You know I’m kidding, right?
For more about Bible names
- “Name,” Illustrated Bible Dictionary, page 340
- Let’s call him Swifty
- Jacob was a heel
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