A variant of Abraham, from Hebrew, meaning father of many or father of a multitude.
Abraam is the Greek and Coptic rendering of one of history's most foundational names — Abraham (אַבְרָהָם, Avraham in Hebrew), the patriarch whom Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all claim as their spiritual forefather. The name's meaning, as explained in Genesis 17:5 when God renames the patriarch from Abram, is traditionally given as "father of multitudes" (av hamon), though linguists debate whether the name may originally have meant "exalted father" or derived from a proto-Semitic root meaning "the father is exalted." Either reading points to patriarchal dignity and divine covenant.
The spelling Abraam (Αβραάμ) reflects the ancient Greek Septuagint transliteration, which became the standard form in Greek Orthodox and Coptic Christian communities. The Coptic Orthodox Church, the ancient Christian church of Egypt tracing its lineage to Saint Mark the Evangelist, has long used Abraam as a living baptismal name, and it remains common among Coptic diaspora communities in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Ethiopian Orthodox Christians also use this form, reinforcing the name's connection to the ancient African Christian churches that preserved pre-Islamic Semitic traditions.
The twentieth-century Coptic Pope Abraam I (Pope of Alexandria, 1883–1914) gave the name modern ecclesiastical presence. To name a child Abraam today is to reach past the more familiar Abraham into a specifically Eastern Christian and African stream of the tradition — it signals a family's connection to the oldest strata of Christian practice, to liturgies still sung in Coptic and Ge'ez, and to a faith that predates the European Christianization of the medieval period entirely.