Adriana Is Not in the Bible — but the Adriatic Sea Is

Adriana is not in the Bible. But the sea it is named after is — and it is named in the middle of the worst fortnight of Paul’s life.

Adriana is the feminine of Adrian, from the Latin Hadrianus, “from Hadria.” Hadria was an Etruscan port on the north Italian coast, and it gave its name to the water beside it: the Adriatic.

What does the name Adriana mean?

“From Hadria.” Like most Roman names it records a place rather than a virtue — the town a family came from, carried forward long after anyone remembered the town.

The Romans used Hadrianus as a family tag; the emperor who built the wall across northern Britain bore it. It became a Christian name and stayed one, carried by several saints and six popes, and its feminine form spread through Italy, Spain and Latin America.

Is Adriana in the Bible?

Not as a person’s name, and there is no Hebrew form. But turn to the twenty-seventh chapter of Acts, and the word is there.

On the fourteenth night we were still being driven across the Adriatic Sea, when about midnight the sailors sensed they were approaching land.

The fourteenth night. Luke is counting, the way people count when they have stopped expecting the counting to end.

Fourteen nights on that water

Let us stay on the ship, because everything worth saying here happens on it.

They had been in a storm for two weeks. Earlier Luke records the moment the crew gave in: When neither sun nor stars appeared for many days and the storm continued raging, we finally gave up all hope of being saved.

No sun, no stars. That is not a weather report. In a world without instruments, the sun and the stars were how anyone knew where they were. To lose both for days is to be somewhere entirely unknown, moving fast, in the dark.

Most of us have had a season like that — not dramatic from outside, but with no fixed points to steer by. No sense of direction, only motion.

The man who slept badly and spoke calmly

And in the middle of it, a prisoner in chains stands up and tells the crew to eat something.

So keep up your courage, men, for I have faith in God that it will happen just as he told me.

Paul does not claim the storm will stop. He says they will come through it, and then he does the least spiritual and most useful thing available: he gets them to have a meal. Two hundred and seventy-six people, fed, on the fourteenth night, because the man in chains noticed they had not eaten.

Courage in Scripture is very often this practical. Not a speech. Bread, handed round, during the storm.

Every one of them reached the shore

The ship broke up. The cargo was lost. And the count at the end is one of the quiet joys of the book: everyone got to land — some swimming, some on planks, some holding pieces of the wreck.

Nobody arrived in the way they had planned. They all arrived.

That is worth holding for anyone in their own fourteenth night. The vessel we set out in may not be the thing that carries us ashore. Being carried on a broken piece of it still counts as arriving.

A blessing for Adriana

May she come through the nights when neither sun nor stars appear.

May she be the one who notices that nobody has eaten, and does something about it.

And may every person in her care reach the shore, however unglamorous the plank.

Related reading

• Adrian Is Not in the Bible — It Means “From Hadria”
• Julian Is Not in the Bible — but Julius Is, in Acts 27
• Is Your Name in the Bible? A Directory of 231 Names