Biblical variant of Adonijah, Hebrew for 'my Lord is Yahweh,' borne by a son of King David in the Old Testament.
Adonias is the Greek and Latin transliteration of Adonijah, a Hebrew name meaning 'my Lord is Yahweh' — a compound of 'Adon' (Lord, master) and 'Yah,' the abbreviated form of the divine name. In the Hebrew Bible, Adonijah was the fourth son of King David, born to Haggith, and his story is one of the Old Testament's most dramatic narratives of ambition and succession. As David aged, Adonijah declared himself king before his father's death, gathering horses, chariots, and supporters — only to be outmaneuvered when the prophet Nathan and Bathsheba secured Solomon's anointment instead.
Adonijah's subsequent attempt to claim the concubine Abishag as wife sealed his fate; Solomon saw it as a renewed bid for the throne and had him executed. Despite — or perhaps because of — this fraught scriptural origin, Adonias and its variants have appeared across Christian naming traditions in Latin America, Portugal, and among African Christian communities, where the Adonai root carries primary resonance as a devotional title for God rather than association with the flawed biblical prince. In Brazil particularly, Adonias appears as a given name with some regularity, carried by the celebrated 20th-century novelist Adonias Filho, born Adonias Aguiar Filho, whose regional fiction about the cacao-growing lands of Bahia earned him a place among the masters of Brazilian modernism.
The name's solemn, stately sound — four syllables with the accent on the penultimate — gives it a priestly gravitas that appeals to parents in religious communities seeking names that proclaim faith directly. In broader secular usage, its rarity and Old Testament grandeur make it a striking choice, evoking antiquity without the overexposure of more common biblical names.