Is Elizabeth in the Bible? Yes, She Is the Mother of John the Baptist

Yes. Elizabeth is the mother of John the Baptist, and Luke tells her story in the first chapter of his Gospel. Her name is the Greek form of the Hebrew Elisheba, “my God is an oath,” which the Old Testament gives to the wife of Aaron (Exodus 6:23).

What does Elizabeth mean in Hebrew?

Elisheba (אֱלִישֶׁבַע) joins el, “God,” to a word for an oath, and name references translate it “my God is an oath.” The Hebrew lexicon of Brown, Driver and Briggs gives “God is an oath,” in the sense that God is the one by whom a person swears. Strong’s concordance adds that the Hebrew verb for swearing is built on sheva’, the word for “seven,” as though to swear were “to seven oneself,” repeating a promise seven times. That is why the name is sometimes linked with the number seven, but its meaning is the oath.

The Old Testament Elisheba appears in one verse: “Aaron took as his wife Elisheba, the daughter of Amminadab and the sister of Nahshon, and she bore him Nadab, Abihu, Eleazar, and Ithamar” (Exodus 6:23). The priests of Israel descended from her sons. Luke says the Elizabeth of the Gospel was “from the daughters of Aaron” (Luke 1:5), so she shared her name with the wife of her ancestor Aaron.

The Greek Old Testament writes Elisheba’s name almost exactly as Luke writes Elizabeth’s. The King James Version spells the New Testament name Elisabeth, which is the usual spelling in German and Dutch, and Elizabeth is the common English form.

Who was Elizabeth in the Bible?

Elizabeth was the wife of Zechariah, a priest, and Luke describes the couple as righteous, childless and old (Luke 1:5–7). While Zechariah was serving in the temple, the angel Gabriel told him that Elizabeth would bear a son. Zechariah doubted it, and he was unable to speak until the child was born (Luke 1:11–20).

Luke records Elizabeth speaking three times. When she conceived, she kept herself hidden for five months and said, “Thus the Lord has done for me in the days when he looked on me, to take away my reproach among people” (Luke 1:24–25). In Elizabeth’s sixth month, Gabriel told her relative Mary of the pregnancy, adding, “For nothing will be impossible with God” (Luke 1:36–37), and Mary went in haste to visit her. When Mary arrived, Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, blessed her and the child she carried, and asked, “And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” She added, “blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord” (Luke 1:42–45). Mary stayed with her about three months (Luke 1:56). The third time was at the circumcision of her son, when the relatives wanted to name him after his father and Elizabeth insisted on John, the name the angel had given (Luke 1:59–60).

Luke names Elizabeth in eight verses, all of them in his first chapter, and the Bible does not mention her again. Her son grew up to preach in the wilderness and to baptize Jesus (Luke 3:2–3; Matthew 3:13–17).

How was Elizabeth related to Mary?

Luke calls Elizabeth Mary’s “relative” (Luke 1:36) without saying how they were related, so the Bible does not settle whether Jesus and John the Baptist were cousins. The King James Version calls her Mary’s “cousin,” but in older English that word could mean any relative more distant than a brother or sister. Orthodox tradition makes Elizabeth the sister of Anna, Mary’s mother, which would make her Mary’s aunt.

Elizabeth in Christian prayer and the calendar

Elizabeth’s words to Mary are part of the Hail Mary. The prayer opens with the angel’s greeting from Luke 1:28 and continues with Elizabeth’s “Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains: “After the angel’s greeting, we make Elizabeth’s greeting our own” (paragraph 2676).

The Catholic Church keeps the Visitation, Mary’s journey to Elizabeth, as a feast on 31 May. The Roman Martyrology commemorates Zechariah and Elizabeth together on 23 September, and the Orthodox Church on 5 September.

Elizabeth as a name

Early on, the name was more common among Christians in Eastern Europe than in the West. In medieval England the form Isabel, which came through Occitan and Spanish, was used more often than Elizabeth itself. Elizabeth became very popular in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I in the 16th century, and in the United States it has never ranked lower than 30th since records began in 1880, which makes it the most consistently popular name for American girls.

Many shorter names grew from it, among them Eliza, Elsie, Beth, Betsy, Betty, Libby, Liz and Lisa, and all of them share its meaning.

Related reading

• Is Lisa in the Bible? No, but Elizabeth, the Name It Comes From, Is
• Isabelle Is Elizabeth — and Elizabeth Is in the Bible
• Is Beth a Biblical Name? Not on Its Own, Though Beth Means House
• Were Jesus and John the Baptist Cousins?

Related reading

• Is Your Name in the Bible? A Directory of 231 Names