Carla Is Not in the Bible — Its Root Simply Means “Man”

Carla is not in the Bible. It is the feminine of Carlo, Carlos and Carl — all of them from the Germanic karl, a word that meant simply man.

Which makes Carla a sister to Charlotte and Caroline, and gives it the same plain, unglamorous root. There is something in that worth saying.

What does the name Carla mean?

Man, at root — a free man rather than a serf, in the later medieval sense that attached to the word. Carla is the Italian, Spanish and Portuguese feminine of Carlo and Carlos, and it travelled with them.

Karla is the same name. Charlotte, Caroline, Carlota and Charlene are cousins.

Is Carla in the Bible?

No — in no language and no spelling. The Germanic root postdates Scripture by centuries and there is no Hebrew form.

But a name that means “an ordinary person” is a better inheritance than it sounds, and Scripture is unusually interested in exactly that.

The Bible’s preference for nobodies

Let us look at who God actually picks, because the pattern is relentless.

The younger son, repeatedly, in a culture where the elder had everything. A shepherd boy so obviously unsuitable that his own father did not call him in from the field. A foreign widow gleaning leftovers at the edge of somebody else’s harvest. A teenage girl in a village of a few hundred people. Fishermen. A tax collector.

Paul states it as a principle, and he is blunt about it: God chose the foolish things to shame the wise, the weak things to shame the strong, and the lowly things and the despised things — and the things that are not — to nullify the things that are.

The things that are not. That is a startling phrase to find in a letter, and it is aimed at a church that was busy sorting itself by status.

Why this matters for an ordinary week

Most of us are not the exception to anything.

We do the work, keep the household going, show up where we said we would, and go unmentioned. There is a quiet pressure — in the culture and sometimes in churches — to feel that a life only counts if it is remarkable.

Scripture does not share that anxiety. Its heroes are largely people who would not have described themselves as heroes, and a great many of its most important actors are unnamed: the boy with the loaves, the woman who touched the hem, the servants at Cana who knew where the wine came from.

They knew. Nobody else at that wedding did.

A blessing for Carla

May we be content to be an ordinary person, which is what the name says and what most saints were.

May we do the work nobody records.

And may we be among the servants who know where the wine came from — which is a better position at the feast than sitting near the top of the table.

Related reading

• Charlotte Is Not in the Bible — and It Does Not Mean “Free”
• Caroline Is Not in the Bible — but Junia Is
• Is Your Name in the Bible? A Directory of 231 Names