The baby name Kerith started popping up in the U.S. baby name data during the second half of the 1960s:
- 1969: 15 baby girls named Kerith
- 1968: 20 baby girls named Kerith
- 1967: 12 baby girls named Kerith [debut]
- 1966: unlisted
- 1965: unlisted
The source? The Source — a 1965 novel set in ancient Israel. It was written by James Michener, who had written Sayonara about a decade earlier.
Kerith was a character featured in the early chapter “Psalm of the Hoopoe Bird,” which was set during the reign of King David specifically. Kerith was the wife of the chapter’s central character, an engineer named Jabaal (but nicknamed Hoopoe, after the bird). Jabaal worshiped Baal, but Kerith, who was Hebrew, worshiped Yahweh. By the end of the chapter, she had given up her husband and children in order to live in Jerusalem.
“Kerith” is also found in the Hebrew Bible as a place name (sometimes spelled “Cherith”). It’s a wadi where the prophet Elijah hid during a drought. The word can be traced back to a Hebrew root meaning “cut.”
What are your thoughts on the baby name Kerith?
Interesting! I went to high school with a Cherith (born around ’77), and I always wondered where the name came from. She pronounced it like share-ith, so I suspect in her case it was Biblical rather than from the novel.
The name Cherith has seen more usage than the name Kerith…I guess “Cherith” must be the preferred spelling of the place-name across various versions of the Bible?
Michener writes about this in his autobiography. The Brook Kerith is a novel by the Irish writer George Moore. How it came to be a name in The Source is a bit convoluted, but it certainly inspired baby names.
Thanks so much for letting me know about that, Tom!
The 1991 memoir is called The World is My Home and, in it, Michener said:
Here are some online copies (in various formats) of George Moore’s 1916 novel The Brook Kerith: A Syrian Story in case anyone wants to check it out.