Henry Is Not in the Bible — It Means “Home Ruler”

Names and Their Biblical MeaningsSee all 223 articles in this series

Henry is not in the Bible. It is Germanic — Heimirich, from heim, home, and rih, ruler. A home ruler.

Eight kings of England carried it, ending with Henry VIII, and the gap between what the name means and what those men did with it is instructive.

Ruler of the home. The first element is the ordinary word for a household or a homestead; the second is the same rih behind Richard and Eric.

Not ruler of a country. Ruler of a house.

The Normans brought it over, and the English kept it for eight kings and a great many ordinary men. Henri, Heinrich, Enrique and Enrico are the same name.

No — in no language and no spelling, and there is no Hebrew form. Germanic names lie centuries beyond the close of Scripture.

But the household is a subject the New Testament takes with unusual seriousness, and it makes a claim most of us would rather not hear.

When Paul lists what to look for in a church leader, he includes one criterion that is not about teaching, courage or holiness in the abstract.

A leader must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him. And then the sentence that does the work: If anyone does not know how to manage his own family, how can he take care of God’s church?

That is a remarkable order of priority. Before the pulpit, the kitchen. Before the congregation, the people who have to live with him.

Paul is not describing a private matter that happens to be relevant. He is saying the household is the smaller version of the same task, and that competence there is evidence.

Which brings us back to the name, and to the irony.

Henry VIII ruled England with enormous energy. He also went through six marriages, executed two of his wives, broke with Rome largely over the first of those marriages, and left a household that no reasonable person would call well managed.

A home ruler who could not rule a home.

We should be careful not to make a cheap point of it. Most of us are better at the public version of our lives than the private one, and it is not usually because we are wicked. It is because the public version has an audience and the private one does not.

Scripture is not describing dominance, whatever has been done with these passages.

The same letters that talk about managing a household tell husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her, and tell fathers not to exasperate their children. The model of authority being handed over is somebody who washes feet and dies for people.

A home ruler in the Christian sense is the one who absorbs cost so that others in the house do not have to.

May we be as careful at home as we are in public, which is the harder assignment.

May the people who live with us give the same account of us as the people who work with us.

And may whatever authority we are given be spent the way it was modelled — downwards, on the people who cannot repay it.

• Richard Is Not in the Bible — It Means “Brave Ruler”
• Eric Is Not in the Bible — It Means “Ever-Ruler”
• 12 Prayers For Family Healing: Simple & Powerful

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