Using statistical methods first developed to decode Nazi messages in WWII, new study on ancient Hebrew names sheds light on society and belief in First Temple period
May 12, 2025 10:08 pm IDT
Here’s an “Enigma” for you: What links Alan Turing, famed cracker of Nazi codes, to rare butterflies and Hebrew names from the First Temple period?
The answer is that a team of researchers has revealed new information about the history of the biblical kingdoms of Judah and Israel by studying the Hebrew names scribbled on pottery or etched on personal seals during the First Temple period. The analysis used statistical methods first developed during World War II by Turing and colleagues to decode Germany’s Enigma cipher, and which have since been applied by ecologists to study rare species.
Parents in the northern Kingdom of Israel chose more diverse names for their babies than their southern neighbors in Judah, a team of archaeologists and mathematicians reports in PNAS on Monday.
This suggests that Israel, for long the larger and more powerful of the two Hebrew kingdoms in the First Temple period, was a more cosmopolitan society. Conversely, Judah, with its capital in Jerusalem, saw an already smaller pool of names shrink over time, indicating it was a more traditional society that became progressively more conservative and centralized, the researchers conclude.
The study grew out of the master’s thesis of Ariel Vishne, a historian and statistician at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. While it doesn’t substantially change what scholars know about the ancient Hebrew kingdoms in the First Temple period, the new research offers insight into the society of Israel and Judah, and represents a novel application of scientific methods to biblical scholarship.
Collection of inscriptions, seals, and seal impressions bearing names, and dated to the Biblical Kingdoms of Judah and Israel of the Iron Age: King Hezekiah bullae from Jerusalem, reproduction of the “lion seal” from Megiddo, square seal from Bet Shemesh, and a black stone sealCredit: Design: Barak Sober / Benjamin Sass / Michael Magen / Ouria Tadmor / Courtesy of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem / Eliyahu Yanai / Courtesy of the City of David archive
God’s in your name
Much ink has been spilled and soil sifted to determine how much of the Bible is true. The jury is still very much out on whether, at some point in the 10th century B.C.E., as the Bible claims, there really was a great United Monarchy of the Israelites under the likes of David and Solomon. But the subsequent biblical kingdoms of Israel and Judah are very much a historical fact, since they are well attested in archaeological findings and extrabiblical texts written by the Hebrews themselves and their neighbors.
The Kingdom of Israel had its capital in Samaria, today near Nablus in the West Bank. Scholars believe that during parts of the 9th and 8th centuries B.C.E., Israel was a significant regional power, ruling over vast territories in the Levant, until it was conquered by the Assyrian Empire around 722 B.C.E.
Judah, centered on Jerusalem, was smaller and was likely a vassal to Israel at times, but it endured for longer. Judah survived until the Babylonian conquest and the destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C.E.
Seal of King Hezekiah of Judah (727-698 B.C.E.), found in Hebrew University excavation of the Ophel in ancient Jerusalem, led by Eilat MazarCredit: Ouria Tadmor / Courtesy of Dr. Eilat Mazar
While the broad history of these two kingdoms is fairly clear, we don’t know that much about the society, culture and beliefs of Judah and Israel. The Bible of course has much to say about these topics, but, most scholars agree, the Old Testament is a theological document, compiled and redacted over centuries, so its narrative is colored by different ideologies and is often chronologically far removed from the events it recounts.
A more unfiltered and first-hand testimony of lifetime in Israel and Judah comes from the few surviving texts that were written in these kingdoms during the First Temple period and unearthed in archaeological digs. And among these, texts that carry names can be particularly interesting for scholars.
Ancient names in the Levant were often composed of a root – either a noun or a verb – and a theophoric element, the name of a protective deity. For example, the Hebrew name Yonathan is composed by the prefix “Yo,” an abbreviation of the Biblical deity YHWH, and the verb “nathan,” which means “gave” – so, altogether, “YHWH gave” or “God-given.”
Previous studies of theophoric names have already given support to the widespread scholarly conclusion that the ancient Hebrews, particularly in the Kingdom of Israel, were far from strict monotheists, as YHWH was only one of several tutelary deities who was attached to baby names.
‘LMLK’ – ‘For the king’ – inscribed on Judean jar handle in archaic HebrewCredit: Emil Aladjem / IAA
Invisible butterflies
The new study looks instead mostly at the root of names in Israel and Judah, extrapolating the size of the name pools in the two kingdoms and comparing them.
Because we only have some 1,000 names of Israelites and Judahites from the archaeological record, this requires using statistical methods that allow researchers to estimate the number of unobserved items in particular system.
This is the so-called “unseen species problem,” which was first posed in the 1940s by Alexander Corbet, a British naturalist. Corbet had spent a couple of years trapping and cataloguing butterflies in Malaya and, maybe because he was sick of trudging through the jungle, was wondering what was the probability of finding new species if he stayed longer.
Was he suffering, though?Credit: From the Flickr account of McKay Savage
In those same years, Turing and mathematician I. J. Good found a solution to this problem while they were working at Bletchley Park to break the cipher of the Enigma machine used by the Germans for their military communications. Of course, Turing and colleagues were not concerned with rare butterflies, but with analyzing patterns in encrypted messages and estimating the probabilities of unseen letter combinations in German codes.
Still, numbers are numbers, whether they represent elusive species or letters in the German alphabet. Turing’s intuition was that the solution to the problem lay in the most rare observations, explains Vishne, the lead author on the Hebrew names study.
“If you go to a nature reserve and you are trying to figure out how many species of birds live there it doesn’t help if you observe 300 pigeons or 304, you have to use the information from the rarest species,” he tells Haaretz.
The statistical estimation of unseen species is given by the proportion of animals that have only been observed rarely, like once or twice, he explains.
For the last decades, the Good-Turing frequency estimation has been widely used in ecology to approximate the number of species in a habitat and especially to compare between different environments while eliminating sample size bias, Vishne says. The technique has also been applied to the humanities, for example to estimate how many words Shakespeare knew, and how many medieval chivalrous stories have been lost.
It was this 2022 study that inspired Vishne and colleagues to apply the method to Hebrew names in Judah and Israel.
With names from Judah and Israel: Pottery inscription; bowl, sides and bottom, Arad; and white clay inscription from SamariaCredit: Design: Barak Sober / Michael Cordonsky / Courtesy of the Archaeological Institute, Tel Aviv University / Harvard’s expedition to Samaria / The Semitic Museum, Harvard University
For their study, the team used the Onomasticon, an open-source database of First Temple period names compiled by Dr. Mitka Golub, an archaeologist from the Hebrew University. Golub, who is also one of the authors on the study, is an expert on Hebrew onomastics (the study of personal names). Her database includes some 1000 names that appear on ostraca (pottery fragments), seals, bullae (seal impressions) and other media uncovered only in controlled archaeological digs. That’s because artifacts of this kind that surface on the antiquities market are at a high risk of being forgeries, Golub notes.
Most of the names from Israel date to the late 9th-8th centuries B.C.E., before the Assyrian destruction of the kingdom, while texts from Judah are largely from the late 8th-7th centuries B.C.E. It seems literacy spread to Jerusalem and its environs a bit later, Golub says.
It should be noted that the names largely reflect the culture and identity of the elites in these two kingdoms, as it was mostly the upper echelons of society that had access to personal seals and other tools of literacy. For similar reasons, the names that have been preserved are probably mostly of men, although at the time Hebrew names were not particularly gendered, so it’s hard to distinguish between male and female ones.
“We only have five examples of seals in which the owner is explicitly called ‘daughter of’ or ‘wife of’ someone, and then we can say for sure it belonged to a woman,” Golub says.
Worldly Israelites, Judahite hillbillies
After accounting for repetitions, the researchers were left with a sample of 643 names from Judah and 121 from Israel.
The disparity in the sample size is exactly why the team had to apply Turing’s statistical methods to account for it, explains Dr. Barak Sober, a mathematician from the Hebrew University and Vishne’s supervisor. The difference is largely due to the fact that much more archaeological digs have been conducted in Jerusalem, the capital of Judah, than in Samaria, Israel’s heartland, Sober says. Also, as said, it seems that literacy was more widespread in Judah. There, archaeologists have found personal seals made of less expensive materials, suggesting that it was not only the very top tiers of society that had access to writing, Golub explains.
What is particularly interesting however is that those 643 names from Judah derived from only 331 different roots (like “nathan – gave” or “azar – helped”), whereas the 121 Israelite names came from 97 distinct roots.
“This pattern required sophisticated statistical analysis,” explains Prof. Eli Piasetzky, a nuclear physicist from Tel Aviv University who was also involved in the project. “We developed methods to accurately compare diversity between samples of different sizes. Our findings conclusively show higher name diversity in Israel, supporting the interpretation of a more cosmopolitan society.”
The so-called “Goliath inscription” from 9th century B.C.E. GathCredit: Prof. Aren Maeir, Tell es-Safi expedition
For comparison purposes, the researchers also ran a similar analysis on modern onomastics over various periods and in countries including France, Israel, the United States and England. They report that name diversity has been increasing since the 1960s and that, in general, lower diversity in personal names correlates with societies marked by more traditional traits.
If the same cross-cultural observation also holds for the Levant in the First Temple period, this supports what we know from other research about the two Hebrew kingdoms, says Prof. Israel Finkelstein of Haifa Univeristy, a leading biblical archaeologist who took part in the study. “Israel had a larger and more diverse population, more open to interactions with neighboring entities,” he says. “Judah was a more closed, more tribal, conservative society, centered in the more isolated block of the southern highlands, with weaker connections to its neighbors.”
The fact that Judah’s pool of personal names continued to shrink toward the end of the First Temple period, even as literacy grew, may reflect changes in the kingdom’s socio-political status and mainstream ideology, Finkelstein adds. These may be linked to a growing sense of identity and the need to emphasize “us versus the other,” he says.
Another, concurrent factor may have been the religious reforms that empahsized the worship of YHWH and the centralization of his cult at the Temple in Jerusalem, enacted toward the end of this period, particularly by King Josiah, Finkelstein concludes.
“Names are about identity and identity is not just about religion,” Golub says. “But when people are more united around the same religious idea, they may be more similar to each other in their thinking, in their beliefs and also in the names they choose.”
God has replaced
The analysis also showed internal differences between the two kingdoms. In Israel, name diversity in the periphery of the kingdom was greater than in the capital. This may be because its capital, Samaria, had a relatively small population compared to the vast territories it ruled, while the periphery may have been more exposed to cultural influences from neighbouring lands, Sober says.
In Judah, the situation was reversed, with Jerusalem showing higher diversity than other locations in the kingdom. One possible interpretation of this phenomenon is that it is linked to the resettling in Jerusalem of exiles from Israel after the Assyrian conquest at the end of the 8th century B.C.E., Sober adds. We know from previous archaeological evidence that the city grew six-fold within a few decades in this period, and many experts think that refugees from the northern kingdom played at least some role in this population boom.
The fact that after the postulated influx of refugees Judah’s and Jerusalem’s name pool didn’t expand, but rather continued to shrink, may have two possible explenations, Finkelstein says. Either the incoming exiles quickly assimilated to local Judahite customs, including the choice of baby names, or their descendants were excluded, at least for a time, from the elite circles that ruled the kingdom and had access to writing, he says.
About 180 LMLK jar handles from the Kingdom of Judah administrationCredit: Yoli Schwartz, Israel Antiquities Authority
There is one more tidbit of information the study provides – although this doesn’t require much statistical acrobatics. What was the most popular Hebrew baby name in the First Temple period?
The most popular names usually contained a variation of the divine name YHWH, and included Azaryahu (YHWH helped) and Neriyahu (YHWH is my light). But the top pick for parents was Shalem, or a variation of it.
This name derives from the verb that means “to keep safe,” “make peace,” but also “replace” and “make whole,” Golub explains. The name probably had multiple meanings. It was, particularly in Judah, an alternative for the divine name – and even appears in the name of the capital, Jerusalem, she says. But at a time when infant mortality was very high, it was also a way of remembering a deceased child, and thanking god for “replacing” it with a new, healthy baby.
Seal impressions of Immadiyawm, meaning ‘YHWH is with me’. found in biblical city of DanCredit: Nelson Glueck / School of Biblical Archaeology
טביעת החותם של המלך חזקיהו (727 – 698 לפני הספירה) התגלתה בחפירות המחודשות של האוניברסיטה העברית בראשות ד”ר אילת מזר בע˙פל, שלמרגלות הכותל הדרומי של מתחם הר הבית בולה עתיקות ירושלים העתיקה ארכיאולוגיה חפירות ארכיאולוגיות מדובר באישור יחצ”ן. לשימושים חוזרים מעבר להקשר המקורי, נדרש אישור עורך או יעוץ משפטי. יש לקחת בחשבון את תאריך האישור, זהות הצלם וגורמים נוספים בעת קבלת ההחלטה מדובר באישור יחצ”ן. לשימושים חוזרים מעבר להקשר המקורי, נדרש אישור עורך או יעוץ משפטי. יש לקחת בחשבון את תאריך האישור, זהות הצלם וגורמים נוספים בעת קבלת ההחלטהCredit: אוריה תדמור / באדי