Old Testament Project
What's in a name?

Onomastics has long been prized for its linguistic wealth, and increasingly scholars are looking here for sociological knowledge as well. Given that the story of the Old Testament comes into contact with much of the ancient Near East, the entire region is of interest to biblical scholars.
Politics, economics, social structure and identity are all being uncovered in the study of the names of the ancient world
The Tyndale House Onomastics Project is currently cataloguing personal names from Alalakh, an Amorite capital in the Old Babylonian period. This project will produce an extensive database of biblical names and survey available data from a wide range of ancient Near Eastern corpora. We hope also to co-ordinate with other projects engaging in onomastics and prosopography, to enable multiple projects to ask broader research questions whose answers can only be found by comparing corpora from multiple places and time periods in the ancient world.


Dr Peter J Williams
Project advisor

Dr Caleb Howard
Research Fellow

Dr Kim Phillips
Research Associate

