Who is named most often in the Bible?

The short answer

Counting the verses that name each person, Jesus is named most, in 1,157 verses, almost all of them in the New Testament. David follows with 964 and Moses with 786. After them the numbers fall quickly: Aaron is named in 333 verses, King Saul in 327, Abraham in 275 and Solomon in 272.

Two groups are not in the ranking. God is not counted: this page is about the people of the Bible. And Jacob, whose other name is Israel, is set apart along with the tribes named for his sons, because the same word names the man and the nation; section 06 explains why.

The 50 most named people

Each bar is the number of verses that name the person, by any of their names, split between the Old and New Testaments. Moses is named in 80 New Testament verses, Abraham in 69 and David in 54: the people of the Old Testament are some of the most named people in the New.

Name occurrences are concentrated. The ten most named people account for 29.1% of the dataset's verse-level name occurrences, and the top 100 account for 55.6%. At the other end, 1,653 people, more than half of those identified, appear in a single verse.

Named in the most places

Counting verses favours people whose stories are told at length. Counting the books and chapters that name them shows who reaches furthest. Moses is named in 31 of the 66 books, David in 28, and Jesus and Abraham in 27 each. By chapters, David leads, named in 259, ahead of Jesus in 224 and Moses in 207.

The most named women

In the TIPNR dataset, Sarah is the most named woman, appearing in 48 verses, followed by Esther and Rachel with 45 each, Leah with 32 and Rebekah with 30. Women are 174 of the 2,996 identified people and account for 5.1% of the recorded verse-level name occurrences.

The count is of names, and many women in the Bible's stories are not named: the woman at the well, the widow of Zarephath, Pharaoh's daughter, Lot's wife. They are part of the narrative but cannot be part of this list.

Who leads each book

In most books the person named most is the one the book is about. The exceptions are worth a look. In Esther, Mordecai is named in more verses than Esther: 50 against 45; Haman is also named in 45. In Ruth, Naomi leads with 20, ahead of Boaz with 18 and Ruth with 12. Ecclesiastes names one individual, David, as the father of its speaker; Solomon is never named in it. Lamentations names no individual at all.

In most of Paul's letters, Jesus is named far more than anyone else, and the letters name few other people. The books with the most names are the lists: 1 Chronicles names 1,280 individuals.

Israel, the tribes and the names of peoples

Jacob is renamed Israel in Genesis 32, and his descendants are the people of Israel. The same name form can refer to the man or the nation, so a name count cannot always separate them. The same issue applies to tribes named for Jacob's sons, from Reuben to Benjamin, and to Joseph's sons Ephraim and Manasseh. Some families work similarly on a smaller scale: the Kohathites are the descendants of Kohath, and some verses that use the name refer to the clan.

Counted with the nation, "Israel" would top any list, with 2,567 verses. That number measures the nation far more than the man, so these names are set apart here with their totals and are not ranked with individuals. Joseph stays in the ranking because his name is not a tribe's, although a few verses outside Genesis use "the house of Joseph" for the tribes descended from him.

Find anyone

Type a name to see how often each person who bears it is named, where they are first named, and when they lived. Names shared by many people, like Zechariah, list each person separately.

The lookup needs JavaScript. The 200 most named people are in the table below, and every named person is in the data file.

What the count cannot tell you

• Named is not the same as present. A verse that calls someone "he" or "the king" does not count, so a person at the center of a long scene can be named in only some of its verses. In the Berean Standard Bible, 97.2% of the verses counted for the 40 most named people print the name; in most of the rest the translators wrote "he" where the Hebrew or Greek has the name.
• Identities are scholarly judgements. Which Zechariah a verse means, or whether two names belong to one person, follows TIPNR. Some of its identifications are traditional and debated: it takes the John of Revelation to be John son of Zebedee, and the Daniel of Ezekiel 14 to be the prophet Daniel.
• Titles count when they stand for a name. Pharaoh is a title, but TIPNR assigns each use to the king meant, so the pharaoh of the exodus and the pharaoh of Joseph's time are counted as different people.
• Jesus is counted by every name the text uses for him, including Christ, and Immanuel in Isaiah 7 and 8, following TIPNR.
• Only people. God is not counted. Named angels appear where TIPNR lists them among people: Michael is, Gabriel is not.
• The 66-book Bible. The books of the wider Catholic and Orthodox canons are not included.

How this was made

To cite a figure, name the measure with it: "named in 964 verses, counted in the Hebrew". Corrections are welcome through the contact page; corrections to who is who belong with STEPBible, who maintain the source.

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