What does the name Elijah mean?

Two words in one name

In Hebrew the name is Eliyahu, and it has two parts.

• Eli, “my God”: El, the common Semitic word for god, plus the ending -i, “my.”
• Yahu, a short form of Yahweh, the name of Israel’s God, written with the four letters YHWH (what YHWH means).

So the name is a whole sentence: my God is Yahweh. A shorter spelling, Eliyah, appears a few times, in 2 Kings 1 and in Malachi’s promise of his return.

The same short form of the divine name ends many Hebrew names that English spells with -iah: Isaiah, Yeshayahu, “Yahweh saves”; Jeremiah; Hezekiah. It is in the shout hallelu-yah, “praise Yah,” too. And Joel, Yoel, puts the same two words the other way around.

A name that takes sides

Names in the Bible often carry a claim, and this one lands in the middle of a fight. King Ahab had married Jezebel, a princess of Sidon, and built a temple for Baal in his capital, Samaria (1 Kings 16:31–32). Baal means “lord.” Into that court walks a prophet whose name answers the question of the day before he says a word.

The narrator never explains the name, but the story plays on it. On Mount Carmel, Elijah asks the people how long they will waver between two sides (18:21). Fire falls, and the crowd answers.

When all the people saw it, they fell on their faces. They said, “Yahweh, he is God! Yahweh, he is God!”

In Hebrew the cry joins the same two words for God that make up his name. The prophet’s name has become the people’s confession.

Other names in the story take sides as well. The palace steward who hid a hundred of Yahweh’s prophets is Obadiah, “servant of Yahweh” (18:3). Ahab’s own sons, Ahaziah and Jehoram, bore names with Yahweh in them: the king never meant to drop Israel’s God, only to keep Baal beside him. That is exactly the wavering Elijah attacked. Jezebel’s name, by contrast, may echo a cry to Baal (who was Jezebel).

Not the only Elijah

The name was not rare. Chronicles lists a Benjamite Elijah, son of Jeroham (1 Chronicles 8:27), and Ezra’s list of men who had married foreign wives includes two more (Ezra 10:21, 26). Two neighbors are easy to confuse with it. Eli, the priest who raised Samuel, has a different Hebrew name, from a root meaning high. Elisha, Elijah’s successor, means “my God saves” (Elijah and Elisha).

From Eliyahu to Elias

In Greek the name became Elias, the form of the Septuagint and the New Testament. Latin kept it, and so did the King James Version in its New Testament, where Moses and Elias appear at the Transfiguration. Portuguese Bibles still say Elias, Spanish ones Elías, and the Quran’s form is Ilyas. English went back toward the Hebrew sound with Elijah, now among the ten most popular boys’ names in the United States. Jewish families still say Eliyahu, and the English surname Ellis grew out of the medieval Elias.