Means 'my God is He'; a biblical figure who speaks in the Book of Job.
Elihu is a name of ancient Hebrew origin, composed of the elements "El" (God) and "hu" (he is), yielding the devotional meaning "He is my God" or "my God is He" — a declaration of personal faith compressed into a name. It appears in the Hebrew Bible most prominently in the Book of Job, where Elihu son of Barachel is the youngest of Job's companions, the one who waits respectfully while his elders speak before delivering a passionate defense of divine justice that bridges the human arguments and God's eventual response from the whirlwind. Elihu's speeches are among the most poetically intense passages in all of biblical literature.
The name entered Puritan and Calvinist naming culture in the seventeenth century, when English and American Protestants mined the Hebrew Bible intensively for names that carried scriptural weight and theological meaning. It flourished particularly in New England, where learned, biblically saturated names were markers of education and piety. Elihu Yale — the Welsh-American merchant and colonial governor whose donation gave Yale University its name in 1718 — is the name's most historically consequential bearer.
Elihu Root, the American statesman and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who served as Secretary of War and Secretary of State in the early twentieth century, gave the name a distinguished modern American legacy. Elihu is rare today — genuinely uncommon in a way that distinguishes it from mere vintage obscurity. It belongs to a cohort of serious, scripturally grounded names — Ezra, Amos, Silas — that parents are rediscovering, though Elihu remains considerably rarer than any of those. For a family drawn to names with theological depth and a direct line to ancient texts, Elihu offers something almost no other child at school will have.