Richard Is Not in the Bible — It Means “Brave Ruler”

Richard is not in the Bible. It is Old German — rih, ruler or king, joined to hart, hard, firm, brave. A brave ruler, or a hard one, depending on how the day went.

Three kings of England have carried it, and their reputations make an unusually good argument about what Scripture actually asks of people in charge.

What does the name Richard mean?

Brave ruler. The first element gives us the same root behind Reich and behind the -ric in older names; the second is the hart we met in Leonard, “brave lion.”

The Normans brought it to England and it never left. Richard, Ricardo, Riccardo, Ricard and Rikard are the same name.

Is Richard in the Bible?

No — in no language and no spelling, and there is no Hebrew form. Old German lies centuries beyond the close of Scripture.

But the name makes a claim about leadership, and Scripture has a great deal to say about that, most of it unflattering to the people in charge.

Three Richards, and what England made of them

Richard I is remembered as the Lionheart, who led the Third Crusade — and who spent almost none of his reign in England, taxed it heavily to pay for wars abroad, and had to be ransomed at enormous cost when he was captured on the way home.

Richard II was deposed and died in captivity. Richard III lost his throne and his life at Bosworth and has been argued about ever since.

Brave rulers, by the standard of their age. It is not obvious that any of them was a good one, and that gap is exactly the subject Scripture keeps returning to.

What God asks of rulers

Not bravery. It is striking how little Scripture cares about courage in a leader compared with what it does care about.

The law’s instruction to a future king is not about conquest. He is to write out a copy of the law for himself, keep it with him, and read it all the days of his life — so that he does not consider himself better than his fellow Israelites.

That is the whole job description: read this daily, and do not start thinking you are above the people.

And the prophets measure kings by one thing almost exclusively. Not territory, not victories. Whether the poor were being crushed. Jeremiah says of one king that he defended the cause of the poor and needy, and all went well with him — and then asks pointedly, Is that not what it means to know me?

The hardness in the name

Let us be honest about the second element, because it cuts both ways.

Firmness is a virtue in a leader. A person who cannot hold a line is not kind; they simply hand the difficulty to somebody weaker.

But hardness has a failure mode, and Scripture names it constantly: the hard heart. Pharaoh’s is the definitive case, and the tragedy of that story is that hardness worked, repeatedly, until it destroyed everything he was protecting.

The difference between firmness and hardness is usually about who benefits. One holds a line for others. The other holds it for itself.

A blessing for Richard

May we be firm without becoming hard.

May whatever we rule — a team, a household, an hour of someone’s attention — be better for our having held it.

And may we be measured, as the prophets measured kings, by how the people with the least power fared while we were in charge.

Related reading

• Eric Is Not in the Bible — It Means “Ever-Ruler”
• Leonardo Is Not in the Bible — It Means “Brave Lion”
• Is Your Name in the Bible? A Directory of 231 Names