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Kings · Judah vs Israel

Whose names live on?

After the kingdom split, 20 monarchs ruled Judah and 19 ruled Israel. Counted against 75 years of Israeli baby names, the two kingdoms' names have had very different afterlives: Israel's kings' names win by a wide margin, and some kings' names were never given to a baby at all.

Same source as the genealogy explorer: the Central Bureau of Statistics, 1949–2024, matched by Hebrew spelling.

–Israeli babies named for a king of Judah, 1949–2024
–Israeli babies named for a king of Israel, 1949–2024
–The verdict, once the names load
–Kings' names not on record
I · The trend

Year by year, 1949–2024

Every baby given a king's name in each year, summed per kingdom. Israel's line pulls away early and never looks back — its names (Menachem, Nadav, Shalom, Yoram) stayed in everyday use, while Judah's names cluster in a few favourites.

JudahIsrael
II · Every king

The table

One row per monarch, in succession order within each kingdom. “Babies” is the 1949–2024 yearly count; “All-time” is the totals table (see the method note below). * means the spelling is mostly a different name today and is left out of the kingdom totals. † means the name appears in both kingdoms. “Not on record” means fewer than five babies of one sex in a population group across the whole period, or none at all.

Kingdom
Order
KingHebrewKingdom# Babies 1949–2024All-timePeak year
Sources

Where this comes from

Kings: the monarchs of Judah and Israel after the split, in succession order, from the books of Kings and Chronicles. Athaliah counts as Judah's seventh monarch — its only reigning queen. Jeroboam I and Jeroboam II share one name, so the name is counted once.

Israeli names: Central Bureau of Statistics, release 391/2025, names of babies born in Israel 1949–2024 by population group and sex, via the CC0 babynamesIL package by Aviezer Lifshitz — the same source as the genealogy explorer. Yearly counts only include a name in years when five or more babies got it; all-time totals include every registration, but only for names given to at least five babies of one sex in a population group over the whole period. That is why the two columns differ, and why a name can be “not on record” without literally having zero babies.

Counting rules: each distinct Hebrew spelling is counted once per kingdom, summed across population groups and sexes. Names shared by both kingdoms (Ahaziah, Jehoahaz, Joash in its two spellings, Jehoram/Joram) are counted in each kingdom under their own spelling — all but Joash are not on record anyway. Elah (אלה) is flagged *: in the data it is overwhelmingly a modern girls' name, so it is shown but left out of Israel's total and the chart. Uzziah's Kings spelling עזיה is left out for the same reason (in the data it is mostly an Arabic girls' name); his counted spellings are עוזיהו and עוזיה.

Data: src/data/genealogies/kings.json (the kings) and public/data/genealogies/kings-names.json (the counts), built by scripts/genealogies/build-kings-data.py.

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