Question

I noticed that there is a stage in the Hebrew Bible when the Tetragrammaton begins to appear as part of people’s names. This shift starts in the days of David, when the phenomenon begins to establish itself, and little by little it starts to spread, until by the middle of the Temple period it appears in almost every Jewish name.
In the list of names in the genealogies of Genesis, of course, we do not find it. Not in the names of the patriarchs, the matriarchs, or the tribes, who receive names, some of which even “smell” like divine names, including Gad, Zebulun, and Ben-Oni, with the double meaning of power, sadness, and iniquity (a divine name after censorship. Rachel’s connection to the teraphim is clear, and Michal is also among her descendants). (Judah and Joseph are exceptions, and we will return to that.) The same is true of the sons of the tribes. In Chronicles this is very striking, in the oddness of the early names, which seem Canaanite, compared to the wide distribution of names with “Yah” or with an added vav.
The princes of Israel in the wilderness and those who apportioned the Land are the same; the judges too do not have the divine name in them.
The exception: we do find names that contain only at the beginning the element “Yo.” Among them are Jonathan, grandson of Moses; the son of Shimea, David’s brother; the son of Abiathar the priest; and one of David’s warriors. And of course Saul’s son. It is very unusual to find such a name in this early period, which seemingly creates a difficulty for the theory.
But if we look closely, there is no connection between the opening “Yo” and the God of Israel. There are several ancient names with “Yo”: Yoram, Job, Jobab, Jubal (perhaps also Joktan). What they all have in common is that they are all gentile names. Yoram son of Toi, king of Hamath, for example—what does he have to do with the God of Israel? Jobab is also the name of a king of Madon and the name of the king of Bozrah who ruled in Edom, and also a son of Joktan. It is fairly clear that this has no connection to the God of Israel. (In addition, all of them contain “Yov,” including Jubal son of Lamech, which indicates that this is a naming pattern in its own right, unrelated to the God of Israel.)
If so, the name Jonathan does not pose a difficulty for us, because “Yo” is a common naming pattern, as with Yoram of Hamath. So there is also no difficulty with early names like Joel, Jotham, Joash (in Chronicles), and Jusha—some of them lacking any Hebrew meaning, which indicates that this is merely a naming pattern.
Only in the days of David do we find him calling his sons Shephatiah, Adonijah, and Jedidiah. Suddenly there is an unusual name: Benaiah son of Jehoiada (twice). The name Uriah seems suspicious to me, especially since it appears among completely foreign names, and he himself is a Hittite. But the distribution is still limited (only two of David’s warriors and three of his sons). In Solomon’s time it increases: Jehoshaphat the recorder, Azariah the priest, Azariah over the officers, Jehoshaphat in Issachar, Abijah son of Jeroboam, Ahijah the Shilonite, Elijah, and Jehu son of Hanani. But still, most names are not like that. Even among the kings of Judah, up to Asa, there is no divine-name element.
The great turning point comes after Asa, when the divine name appears in every king, both in Israel and in Judah. Among the kings of Judah it does not stop until the end. And in Chronicles there is almost no name without “Yah” at the end. It’s crazy.
To my mind there is a clear connection between the exceptional status of the name Judah among the sons of Jacob in this early period and the fact that the phenomenon begins at the start of the Kingdom of Judah. A real question: what is the significance of this? Why does it not appear even among the early worshipers of God—the patriarchs, their sons, the sons of Moses and Aaron, the judges, Samuel? Why do they have only “El” in their names? Is it just coincidence?