THE SIGNIFICANT TITLES AND NAMES OF GOD To the Western mind very little (if any) significance is attached today to the meaning of a child’s given name, the determining factors most often being the parents’ personal preference or its phonetic compatibility with the family name. But this was not the case in the ancient Middle East. A given name often commemorated some great historical or religious event or denoted the parent’s hope for or assessment of a child’s character (see, e.g., Gen. 4:1; 4:25;