Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

March 25, 2025

In Israel, Names from the Bible Dominate

David and Sarah remain popular.

Many early Zionists, rebels against tradition, wished to reach back over the centuries of exile to biblical times, trying to revive the language and sometimes even the practices of the Tanakh. Still others, associated with the “Canaanite” literary movement, sought to reach back further, to an imagined prebiblical era that was Hebraic but not Jewish. But when it comes to choosing names, Israelis seem to have favored the sorts of biblical names that, over the centuries, never really went out of style for Jews. JNS reports:

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