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Naming from the Bible

In seventeenth-century New England, eighty percent of children were given names from the Bible. In Boston, ninety percent.

People knew the book. In 1647, Massachusetts required every town of fifty households to keep a school, so that children could read the Scriptures for themselves. They learned their letters from the New England Primer, which taught the alphabet in couplets: “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all.” Then they read the Bible itself, straight through, in class. The Bible sat on the schoolmaster’s desk, the magistrate’s bench, and the kitchen table at evening prayers.

Parents drew most often from the Old Testament. They also often gave daughters what were called virtue names, meant as a blessing or an instruction. Wing Rogers (1740–1816) [link: Wing Rogers] married a Deliverance, and then a Mercy.

This family’s records are full of these names: Caleb, Nathan, Joshua, Levi, Asa, Enos, Ebenezer, Abigail, Rhoda, Lydia, Phebe, Eunice, and Orpah. Two of them come up again and again.

In 1755, Caleb Smith (1718–1797) [link: Caleb Smith] and his wife Deborah Chickering (1722–1818) had twins. They named them Barak and Deborah.

Both names come from the Book of Judges. Deborah was the only woman ever to serve as a judge over Israel. A Canaanite king had ruled the Israelites when Deborah sent for a commander named Barak. She told him to take ten thousand men to Mount Tabor and fight. Barak refused to go unless Deborah came with him. She went, and they destroyed the Canaanite army.

Every neighbor who heard the twins’ names knew that story. They had read it in school.

The names carried forward. Barak Smith (1755–1828) [link: Barak Smith and the Revolution] marched to Lexington and Concord. His brother Nathan named a son Barak (1787–1868) [link: Mary and Barak Smith]. That Barak named a daughter Deborah Chickering Smith (1831–1905), after her great-grandmother. By then the name pointed less to Judges than to a woman in the family. It had become a way of remembering.

The name kept appearing down different lines of the family. Orpah Smith (1809–1866) married Ryal Strang and named a son Barak. Deborah Chickering Smith married George Pierson and named a son Barak.

People still name their children from the Bible, and some of those names are more popular now than they were in the eighteenth century: Noah, Elijah, Abigail, Levi, Caleb, Phoebe. But we hear them differently. When parents choose the name Deborah today, most are thinking of an aunt, or of the sound of it, and not of a judge with an army at her back. Barak has grown rare, and where it appears now, most people hear a president’s name, spelled a little differently.

The stories behind these names have faded. The names have not. They are still on the headstones, still in the records, still handed down.

Sources

The twins Barak and Deborah, and the Book of Judges connection, were identified by family genealogist Clarance Maris Smith. Puritan and Quaker naming practices, including the use of virtue names, are described in David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford University Press, 1989). Statistics on the prevalence of biblical names in seventeenth-century New England come from the New England Historical Society. The 1647 Massachusetts school law and the New England Primer are documented by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Current figures on biblical baby names draw on Social Security Administration data as reported by Nameberry and Christianity Today.