Is Beth in the Bible? Not as a Name, but Beth Means “House” in Hebrew

No one in the Bible is named Beth. As an English name, Beth is a short form of Elizabeth. As a Hebrew word, beth means “house,” and it begins many place names in the Bible, among them Bethlehem, “house of bread,” and Bethel, “house of God.”

What does Beth mean in Hebrew?

The Hebrew word for a house is bayit. When it is joined to another word, as in “house of God,” it takes the shorter form beth, also written beit or bet, and that is the form English Bibles keep in place names. The word covers more than a building. It can mean a household or a family: the census in the Book of Numbers counts Israel “by clans, by fathers’ houses” (Numbers 1:2). It can also mean a royal line, and it is the word for the temple, “the house of the Lord.”

Several of these senses meet in 2 Samuel 7. King David tells the prophet Nathan, “I dwell in a house of cedar, but the ark of God dwells in a tent,” and wants to build a temple. God’s answer turns the word around: “Would you build me a house to dwell in?” Instead, “the Lord will make you a house” (2 Samuel 7:2, 5, 11), meaning a line of kings descended from David, and David’s son will be the one to “build a house for my name” (2 Samuel 7:13).

Beth in Bible place names

Scripture itself explains the name of Bethel. Jacob, on his way to his uncle Laban in Haran, slept at a place called Luz and dreamed of a ladder reaching to heaven. He woke afraid and said, “This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” The Hebrew for “house of God” in that verse is beth Elohim. Jacob then “called the name of that place Bethel” (Genesis 28:17–19), using El, a shorter Hebrew word for God.

Bethlehem is beth lehem, “house of bread.” It was David’s hometown (1 Samuel 17:12), the prophet Micah said a ruler of Israel would come from it (Micah 5:2), and Matthew records that Jesus was born there (Matthew 2:1). Bethany, the village of Mary, Martha and Lazarus about two miles from Jerusalem (John 11:1, 18), has a name of uncertain meaning, possibly “house of affliction” or “house of figs.” Bethesda, the pool in Jerusalem where Jesus healed a man who had been ill for thirty-eight years (John 5:2–9), is usually explained as “house of mercy,” though the manuscripts of John spell the name in more than one way.

Beth, the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet

Beth, also spelled bet or beit, is the name of the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet, ב. The letter is named after the word for “house,” and its shape may have begun as a picture of one. It also stands for the number two.

The Bible opens with this letter. The first word of Genesis in Hebrew is bereshit, “in the beginning,” and Jewish interpreters asked why Scripture starts with the second letter rather than the first. Genesis Rabbah, a rabbinic commentary on Genesis, gives several answers. One is that the letter is closed on three sides and open only toward what follows, as a sign that people may ask about the world from the day of creation onward but not about what came before it. Another is that it is the first letter of berakhah, “blessing.”

The letter also heads a section of Psalm 119. The psalm is an acrostic of twenty-two stanzas, one for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and in Hebrew all eight verses of a stanza begin with its letter. Verses 9 to 16 begin with beth, and many English Bibles print the heading “Beth” above them. The first of those verses asks, “How can a young man keep his way pure? By guarding it according to your word” (Psalm 119:9).

Is Beth short for Elizabeth?

Yes. Beth is a short form of Elizabeth, and occasionally of Bethany. Elizabeth is in the Bible: Luke names her as the mother of John the Baptist, and her name comes from the Hebrew Elisheba, “my God is an oath,” which was also the name of Aaron’s wife (Exodus 6:23).

As a name, then, Beth carries Elizabeth’s meaning. The “beth” at the end of Elizabeth only looks like the Hebrew word for house; it comes from sheba, “oath.” When Beth is short for Bethany, its meaning comes from the village, which English speakers began to use as a girl’s name in the 19th century in honor of Mary of Bethany.

Beth is a girl’s name. It has been recorded as a name in its own right in the United States since the 1880s and was most popular in the 1960s, when it ranked 65th among names for girls in 1961, 1964 and 1966. It fell out of the top 1,000 after 1997. A well-known bearer in fiction is Elizabeth “Beth” March, the third of the four sisters in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.

Related reading

• Is Elizabeth in the Bible? Yes, She Is the Mother of John the Baptist
• Lisa, another short form of Elizabeth
• Where was Jesus born: Bethlehem or Nazareth?