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Summary
- No one named Hazel appears in the Bible. The name comes from the English word for the hazel tree and a light brown color, from Old English hæsel.
- The King James Version mentions the hazel once, among the peeled rods Jacob set before Laban’s flocks (Genesis 30:37); modern translations and the Douay-Rheims read “almond.”
- The Hebrew word there is luz, which lexicons define as the almond tree; Luz was also the old name of Bethel (Genesis 28:19). In modern Hebrew luz means hazel.
- The meaning “God sees” belongs to Hazael, a king of Aram (2 Kings 8:7–15), not to Hazel.
- Hazel reached 18th place for American girls in 1897, dropped out of the top 1,000 after 1975, and was 18th again in 2023.
- Julian of Norwich saw “a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut” in a vision of 1373 and was told, “It is all that is made.”
Bibliography (Click to show)
- Behind the Name, “Hazel” and “Hazael,” with United States popularity figures from Social Security Administration data. https://www.behindthename.com/name/hazel
- Strong’s Hebrew 3869, luz, with Brown-Driver-Briggs, Bible Hub. https://biblehub.com/hebrew/3869.htm
- “לוז (עץ)” and “אגוז לוז,” Hebrew Wikipedia, and Wiktionary, “לוז,” on the modern Hebrew word for hazel. https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%9C%D7%95%D7%96_(%D7%A2%D7%A5)
- Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, chapter 5, ed. Grace Warrack (1901), Christian Classics Ethereal Library. https://www.ccel.org/ccel/julian/revelations.ii.ii.html
- “Julian of Norwich,” Wikipedia, on her dates, visions and commemorations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_of_Norwich
- Scripture quotations: Genesis 30:37, King James Version and English Standard Version; Genesis 28:19, English Standard Version. Comparison with the New International Version, New American Standard Bible (1995) and Douay-Rheims. References: Genesis 30:31–34, 38; 2 Kings 8:7–15.
