Biblical names, from Noah to Naomi

Before the names

From evergreen Noah to gently reviving Miriam, these are the biblical names in real use right now.

Scripture runs the boys' chart in a way no other source matches: this page carries thirty-three boys' names against fifteen for girls, and the depth is remarkable — Noah at #2 and Elijah at #7 lead, but Benjamin, Levi, Samuel, Ezra and Asher all sit inside the top-30 behind them.

The current wave has a distinct taste: the Old Testament's second shelf. Ezra, Levi and Silas are all at or near their highest ranks in 146 years of records, and Asher climbed into the top-30 within the last decade. The apostle-and-king classics — Thomas, David, Daniel, Matthew by way of Mateo — never left the top-100 at all; what is changing is which testament the new arrivals come from.

The girls' side moves in longer cycles. Ruth and Esther, top-30 names of the 1890s, are both marked comebacks in the current data; Sarah, Hannah, Rachel and Rebecca — the biblical girls of the 1970s-90s, every one a former top-10 name — are resting exactly where their generation left them. Two revival waves, a century apart, visible on one page.

And one name shows how completely the ground can shift: Delilah now charts higher than at any point in the record before this decade, sitting at #51 and rising. In biblical naming, the story a name carries is renegotiated by every generation that uses it.