In Handel’s great chorus, the word is joyous, victorious, accompanied by trumpets and drums. “You can fill it with whatever you need to say or communicate.” “It’s this sound that is just so full of possibilities,” he said. For Grant Gershon, director of the Los Angeles Master Chorale, hallelujah is a perfect word because it can take on different meanings. The Oxford English Dictionary defines hallelujah as “a song or shout of praise to God,” but biblical scholars will tell you it’s actually a smash-up of two Hebrew words: “hallel” meaning “to praise” and “jah” meaning Yahweh, or God.īut that’s just the official meaning. We love that her name captures both a deep meaning and that it embodies a major theme of my life during pregnancy.But what does hallelujah mean, exactly? And why does it continue to resonate with us, untranslated, thousands of years after it first appeared in the Hebrew bible?Īnd what is it about hallelujah that inspires composers and songwriters to deploy it so frequently and reverentially from Handel to Ray Charles to Leonard Cohen? I asked my husband if he had thought anymore about a girl name and he said he had been thinking of Hallelujah! I hadn’t even told him I was thinking about that name!! I knew that would be the name of we had a girl and that we’d shorten it to Halle. I never really considered it as a name until randomly one day when I was 8 months pregnant.

This past year has been really hard and totally different than what I pictured my first pregnancy to be, so I’ve kept “Hallelujah”, meaning “praise God (Yahweh)!” written on a piece of paper on our mirror as a reminder to worship even when I’m discouraged and hurting. We didn’t know the gender, and the boy name was chosen quickly but we’d been going back n forth on a girl name.

As followers of Jesus, we wanted our kids to have a rich spiritual meaning, something we could pray over their lives.

What is the meaning of hallelujah