A common practice among the Jewish diaspora is to give a Hebrew name to a child that is used in religious contexts throughout that person's lifetime.
Most Christian usage is of the shorter suffix preferred in translations of the Bible to European languages: Greek -ιας -ias and English -iah, producing names such as Τωβίας Tōbias (Tobias, Toby) instead of Tobiyyahu and Ἰερεμίας Ieremias (Jeremiah, Jeremy) instead of Yirmeyahu.
Scholars of a century ago speculated that Judæo-Aramaic was the vernacular language of Israel at the time of Jesus.
[citation needed] Aramaic does survive on a minority of first-century funeral inscriptions,[citation needed] and it was also the language used to write parts of the Book of Daniel, the Book of Ezra, and the entire Jewish Babylonian Talmud.
Judæo-Aramaic names include עבד־נגו ʻĂḇēḏ-nəḡô, בר־תלמי Bar-Talmay and תום Tôm, as well as Bar Kochba.
Many of the names in the New Testament are of Hebrew and Aramaic origin, but were adapted to the Greek by Hellenistic Christian writers such as Paul of Tarsus.
Jews and Christians generally used the Arabic adaptations of those names, just as English-speaking Jews and sometimes Muslims often use anglicized versions like Joshua, rather than Yəhôšúªʼ, While most such names are common to traditional Arabic translations of the Bible, a few differ; for instance, Arabic-speaking Christians use Yasūʻ instead of ʻĪsā for "Jesus".
Some of these Arabic names preserve original Hebrew pronunciations that were later changed by regular sound shifts; migdal, recorded in the New Testament as Magdalene and in Palestinian Arabic as Majdala, which turned a in unstressed closed syllables into i.
James I of England commissioned a translation of the Christian Bible from the original languages, including a translation of the Tanakh, or Old Testament, from Hebrew into English, which became known as the King James Version of the Bible and is often referred to today by the abbreviation "KJV".
However, all KJV names followed the Greek convention of not distinguishing between soft and dāḡeš forms of ב bêṯ.