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Japanese Britney is not in the Bible. It is a respelling of Brittany, and Brittany is a place — named after people who had to leave home.
Where the name comes from
Brittany is the north-western corner of France. It carries that name because Britons crossed the Channel and settled there, largely in the fifth and sixth centuries, as their own island became unsafe. The region is Bretagne; their old home is Grande-Bretagne, Great Britain.
The place name became a given name in the United States in the twentieth century, and Britney, Brittney and Britany are respellings of it that spread in the 1980s and 1990s.
So the meaning, followed back far enough, is “from Britain” — said of people who were no longer there.
Is Britney in the Bible?
No. Neither Britney nor Brittany appears, and the languages behind the name are Celtic and French rather than Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek.
Displacement, though, is close to the Bible’s central subject.
Scripture is a book of people who moved
Abraham is told to leave his country and his father’s household for a land he will be shown (Genesis 12:1), and he never owns any of it except a burial plot.
Israel is formed in Egypt and defined by leaving it. The law returns again and again to the same argument for kindness to outsiders: you yourselves know how it feels to be foreigners, because you were foreigners in Egypt (Exodus 23:9).
Ruth is a Moabite widow who attaches herself to her mother-in-law’s people, and her sentence is one of the most quoted in the Old Testament: Your people will be my people and your God my God. (Ruth 1:16)
She ends up in the genealogy of David, and then in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus, named there along with three other women whose stories are complicated.
The New Testament keeps the image
Hebrews describes the whole line of the faithful this way: All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. (Hebrews 11:13)
And Peter addresses Christians as foreigners and exiles (1 Peter 2:11), writing to people scattered across Asia Minor who knew exactly what the word meant.
The idea is not that Christians should feel homeless. It is that the sense of not quite belonging, which most people have and most people apologise for, is treated in Scripture as accurate rather than as a failure.
For a name that came from somewhere else
A name taken from a region, respelled in another country, given to a child with no connection to either — it is easy to think of that as rootless.
It is worth noticing that the Bible’s own naming works much the same way. Names cross languages constantly. Jesus is the Greek form of Joshua. Peter is a nickname in Aramaic that got translated. Paul carried a Roman name alongside a Jewish one and used whichever suited the room.
Nothing in Scripture suggests that a name is diminished by travel. The people in it were mostly travelling too.
A blessing for Britney
May we be kind to those far from home, having been told to remember that we were.
May we hold where we live gratefully and lightly.
And may we find, like Ruth, that a place we were not born in can become ours.
Frequently asked
Is Britney a biblical name?
No. It is a modern respelling of Brittany, from the French region settled by Britons in the fifth and sixth centuries.
What does Britney mean?
“From Britain,” by way of the region of Brittany — a name given to people who had left the island behind.
Are Britney, Brittney and Brittany the same name?
Yes. They are spellings of the same name, which spread in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s.
What does the Bible say about being far from home?
A great deal. Abraham leaves his country (Genesis 12:1), Israel is told to treat foreigners well because it was one (Exodus 23:9), Ruth chooses a new people (Ruth 1:16), and Hebrews 11:13 calls the faithful foreigners and strangers on earth.
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