There are all kinds of nifty name-related holidays this week.  To begin with, it’s Celebrate Your Name Week.  Celebrate Your Name Week is accompanied by a number of more specific “name holidays,”  like Learn What Your Name Means Day (4th) and Unique Name Day (5th).  And Daughters and Sons Day is on the 3rd!  All of this talk of daughters and sons and names got me thinking about our own daughters’  names.

Names in the Bible

In the biblical culture, names had great significance.  In sense, your name defined you.  Consequently, we like for our children’s names to be meaningful.

Our Criteria

We have a list of criteria that names have to meet before they’re the right ” fit”  for our family.  This can make it a little tricky to not run out!  But we like the results.  The criteria are, roughly:

• Michael and I both have to like it.  This probably goes without saying, but just in case, I’m saying it anyway.  😉
• First names come from the Bible.  This is not because we think that unbiblical names can’t be meaningful, or anything.  It just helps us to remember to focus on the Bible as the standard in everything.  We’ve definitely stretched this one, though — if it’s in the Greek or Hebrew Bible, it’s fair game!
• It needs to not be too super-common, if we can help it.  We’re not necessarily looking for “weird” (in fact, we prefer if our children don’t have to spell/pronounce their first names for every single person they ever come into contact with), but we’d like for them to not have 5 other people in their classes with the same names.  (As “Michael”  and “Rachel,”  we’ve found this to be a rather familiar experience.)
• It has to mean something significant (not necessarily earth-shattering, just not, say, ” dirt”  or “tree”) and positive.
• Oh, and it can’t be a name already in use in our household or close family, or very similar to one of these names (simply to avoid confusion).

The Names

Thus far, we have all girls.  And as I come from a family of girls, many of the obvious “girl names”  of the Bible are already “taken.”  Rachel, Rebekah, Anna, Hannah, Susan — which is not a Bible name, exactly, but is pretty close to Susanna.  Leah.  You get the idea.  Plus some of these are pretty common already in conservative Christian circles.  So our list is growing a little short.  (Hopefully — name-wise — this coming baby will be a boy, as he’ll be much easier to name. lol  We have a boys’  name that’s been picked out for ten years now — in case Ariel was not Ariel 😉 — but the options list is shrinking for girls’  names.)  So we have:

Ariel M’Kaela

If I recall correctly, Michael had sort of picked out Ariel before we met.  It was just a name that happened to strike his fancy.  You might be surprised to learn that it’s a Bible name.  It’s used in Isaiah as a reference to the nation of Israel.  Interestingly, in Israel, “Ariel”  is usually a man’s name, even though it’s clearly used as a feminine reference in Scripture.  Ariel means “lion of God.”

M’Kaela was the middle name we chose to go with it — both of us liked the name, it went well with Ariel, and we liked the meaning: “who is like God.”  But we couldn’t decide what vowel we liked in the first syllable.  Did we want Michaela, Makayla…  Finally, Michael said, “Well, the Hebrew doesn’t have a vowel there; why do we need one?”  If it had been her first name, we probably wouldn’t have gone with such a strange spelling, but as a middle name (that she doesn’t have to spell for most casual acquaintances), it works.

Sophia Betakyah

With Sophia, we kind of bombed on the “not too common”  thing.  It actually wasn’t that common when we first picked it, but it jumped to the top of the popularity list the very year our Sophia was born.  (Go figure! lol)  Sophia is only found in the Bible if you read it in the original Greek — it’s the Greek word for “wisdom.”

Betakyah (pronounced like Beh-TOCK-yuh) is made up — sort of — but it’s biblical, too.  It comes from Proverbs 3: “Trust in the LORD…”  which, in Hebrew, is “Betak el YAHweh.”  Michael pretty much just contracted it to make the phrase a single word.  So Sophia Betakyah essentially means “wisdom = trust the Lord (YAH).”

Livia Grace

Livia’s name is the biggest stretch at all, as far as biblical references go.  It’s a respelling of the Hebrew Livyah, which means “garland”  or “ornament.”  In Proverbs, it’s used to refer to wisdom as a “garland of grace”  (which is also where we got her middle name).  Michael appreciates the little “bonus” reference, too, to his grandfather, N. Garland Ramey.  We opted to spell Livia the way we did, rather than alliterate it as Livyah, to make it easier for her to spell to others.  She can simply say, “like Olivia, but with no ‘O’.”  (Ironically, Olivia jumped up to the top of the charts around the same time Livia was born.  If I could predict stock trends as well as I seem to choose name trends, we could be quite well-off. 😉 )  Another little tidbit: Livia is pretty rare here in the U.S. but does not seem to be bizarrely uncommon in Europe.  I had no idea it was an actual name until after we chose it, but apparently there was a “Livia”  of historical significance in ancient Rome.

???

So now you know all about our quirkiness when it comes to names.  Our criteria shorten the lists considerably — but that can be a beneficial thing — it keeps the choices from numbering in the millions!  And you see some of what we view as special about each of our girls.  But who is this little guy?  Is he Caleb?  Or is she…???  (Maybe we should actually come up with a “short list” of girls’  names.  Y’think?