According to Brooke Lorren, a Yahoo! Voices contributing writer, the name Barack Obama potentially possesses some fascinating historical meaning:

The American President, Barack Obama, has gone through several different names in his lifetime. He was born Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. in 1961. For a while, he went by the name Barry Soetoro. In college, he chose to start using the name Barack Obama again. While the name Barack Obama has an African origin, it is also a name that has meaning in Hebrew. This name, and its Hebrew meaning, has potentially interesting implications…

…The name “Barack”, or בָּרָק means lightning in Hebrew. Other meanings for the word are bright or glittering. The horse the Mohammad supposedly rode before he went up to heaven had the name Barack as well… Interesting enough, Barack Obama’s rise to power seems to have been lightning fast. Even five years ago, most people did not know who Barack Obama was…

…Although Obama doesn’t have a direct translation to Hebrew, Bamah, or בָּמָה, does have an equivalent translation. Bamah could mean a few different things in Hebrew. It generally means “high place”, like on the top of a mountain, battlefield, or a place of worship. In the ancient Israeli times, people often did their worship at a literal high place…

…Barack Bamah is located in the Hebrew Bible. Luke 10:18 states: “And he said unto them, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from Heaven”. Luke 10:18 in Hebrew has the phrase בָּמָה בָּרָק, or Barack Bamah, in it (keep in mind that Hebrew reads from right to left). In other words, Jesus is saying “I beheld Satan as Barack Bamah”. He was probably actually speaking Aramaic at the time, which is based on Hebrew, so his actual words might have been slightly different…

According to unnamed About.com writers:

Barack Obama was reportedly named after his father, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr.

Obama’s first name, Barack, is a Swahili name that has its origins in the Arabic language. The original Arabic root of the name (B-R-K) means “blessed.” In Arabic, the root word is used in many other phrases to denote blessings and to describe people who are blessed: Barakah means blessings from God (feminine version of the name)

Barack Obama’s middle name is Hussein, which was his grandfather’s first name. The name, of Arabic origin, means “good” or “handsome one.” It is common in Muslim cultures for children (both boys and girls) to have a middle name which directly connects them to their father or grandfather.

Barack Obama’s surname is not uncommon among the Luo tribe, one of the three largest ethnic groups in Kenya.

This morning, while reading about Roman Emperors, the Roman Empire itself, and how closely its economic woes mirror our own now, I stumbled upon something interesting. According to Wikipedia:

A Barracks emperor (also called a “soldier emperor”) was a Roman Emperor who seized power by virtue of his command of the army. Barracks emperors were especially common in the period from 235 through 284, during the Crisis of the Third Century. There were approximately fourteen barracks emperors in 33 years, producing an average reign of a little over two years apiece. The resulting instability in the imperial office and the near constant state of civil war and insurrection threatened to destroy the Roman Empire from within and left it vulnerable to attack from without…

…The barracks emperors used state money to pay their troops — no emperor who had come into power by force of arms could afford to allow his soldiers to become disaffected, as those who live by the sword die by the sword — and public works and infrastructure fell into ruin. To accommodate the vast demands of buying off their soldiers, the state often simply seized private property, damaging the economy and driving up inflation…

…the phenomenon of the barracks emperors died out, to be replaced in the late imperial era by shadow emperors like Stilicho, Constantius III, Flavius Aëtius, Avitus, Ricimer, Gundobad, Flavius Orestes, and Odoacer, military strongmen who effectually ruled the empire as imperial generalissimos controlling weak-willed puppet emperors rather than by donning the purple themselves.

Is there historical and/or Biblical significance in the name of the current President Of The United States? Instead of his Muslim heritage, was our President’s family name actually derived from Roman history instead of Muslim?

News Reporter
RSOP is the co-founder & Executive Editor of Radical Survivalism Webzine, as well as a Family Preparedness Consultant with over seven years of personal experience in the self-reliance game. RSOP's many preparedness roles within his own group include team mechanic, head of security, electrician, and project designer/engineer.