Onomastic Diversity and Social Dynamics in Ancient Hebrew Kingdoms

Seals and seal impressions (bullae),
Benjamin Sass, Michael Magen,
Ouria Tadmor, Eliyahu Yanai, Barak Sober.

 

In the world of archaeology, clay shards and carved seals are often prized for the messages they carry - inscriptions, dates, lineages. But what if the names themselves told a bigger story?

A groundbreaking interdisciplinary study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) shows that personal names from over 2,500 years ago can offer deep insight into the structure and values of ancient societies. Using diversity statistics typically reserved for ecological research, a team of Israeli scholars has discovered that the Kingdom of Israel was significantly more onomastically diverse than its neighbor, the Kingdom of Judah - a finding with important implications for how we understand identity, religion, and power in the ancient Southern Levant.

📜 From Names to Narratives

Led by Ariel Vishne and Dr. Barak Sober of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, with collaboration from researchers at Tel Aviv University and the University of Haifa, the study applied species diversity statistics to a corpus of over 1,000 ancient personal names. These names were gleaned from inscribed artifacts - seals, ostraca, and pottery fragments - dating to the Iron Age II period (ca. 950–586 BCE).

By treating names like species in an ecosystem, the researchers could measure diversity and distribution, identifying patterns that mirror societal openness, cultural exchange, and political control. In this view, a highly diverse naming culture reflects a cosmopolitan, pluralistic society, while a narrowing of name choices might suggest cultural conformity or ideological control.

🏺 Kingdoms in Contrast: Israel vs. Judah

The results were striking. The Kingdom of Israel, despite a smaller sample size of surviving inscriptions, displayed far greater name diversity than the Kingdom of Judah. This suggests a more open, trade-driven, and ethnically diverse society, especially given Israel’s strategic location along key regional trade routes.

In contrast, Judah's name diversity decreased over time, especially in the 7th–6th centuries BCE, during the final decades before its fall to Babylon. The decline coincides with historical processes of religious centralization (centered around the Jerusalem Temple) and the consolidation of political power. This narrowing of naming conventions may reflect increasing cultural and theological homogeneity - an attempt to forge a unified national identity under pressure.

🗺 Geographic Clues

Interestingly, the spatial distribution of naming diversity also tells a tale. In Israel, peripheral regions exhibited more diversity than the capital Samaria, implying that elite groups were spread throughout the kingdom. Judah showed the opposite: Jerusalem had higher diversity than the hinterlands, suggesting concentration of elites and possibly refugee influxes from the north after Assyrian conquests.

These geographic distinctions further reinforce the hypothesis that Israel was more regionally integrated and socially heterogeneous, while Judah leaned toward a centralized, urbanized elite culture.

👥 Whose Names Are These?

It’s important to note that the archaeological record preserves mainly the names of elite males - those wealthy or important enough to be recorded on official items. Still, this subset is valuable. As Dr. Mitka Golub, the scholar who curated the onomastic database, explains: “These names are windows into the past, revealing not just linguistic patterns, but religious beliefs, class divisions, and cultural affiliations.”

Moreover, name types often carried theological weight. Many included theophoric elements (e.g., references to Yahweh or Baal), which also changed over time and place - another marker of ideological shift.

🧮 From Ancient Names to Modern Statistics

The innovation of this research lies not only in its historical findings but in its methodology. Borrowing tools from ecology - including the Shannon and Simpson diversity indices - the researchers quantified not just how many names existed, but how evenly they were used across the population.

They even tested their methods on modern data sets from countries like the United States, France, Australia, and Israel, finding that:

• Female names tend to show greater diversity.

• Name diversity has increased since the 1960s.

• Societies with more traditional or homogeneous norms show lower diversity in naming practices.

This cross-validation strengthens the argument that onomastic diversity - both ancient and modern - is a reliable indicator of social openness and cultural complexity.

🔍 What This Means for Cultural History

As Prof. Israel Finkelstein (Haifa University) puts it, these findings support long-held archaeological views: “Israel was more cosmopolitan than Judah,” and this is now quantifiably visible in the names people gave their children.

By turning personal names into statistical data, the team has opened a new chapter in historical research—one where ancient identity can be charted not just through conquest and architecture, but through the lens of cultural self-expression.

📚 Citation and Further Reading

Vishne, A., Sober, B., Golub, M. R., Finkelstein, I., Piasetzky, E. (2025). Diversity statistics of onomastic data reveal social patterns in Hebrew Kingdoms of the Iron Age. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2503850122