From Hebrew 'Yehu' meaning He is God; a king of Israel in the Old Testament.
Jehu is a name of ancient Hebrew origin, biblical in its weight and fascinating in its cultural afterlife. In the Hebrew scriptures, Jehu (יֵהוּא, Yēhū') was a king of Israel in the 9th century BCE who overthrew the dynasty of Ahab in a coup of extraordinary violence — a figure remembered for his theological zeal and, perhaps most memorably, for his furious chariot driving. The name itself is understood to mean "Yahweh is He" or "He is Yahweh," a theophoric declaration of divine identity.
His story occupies substantial space in the Second Book of Kings, and he was the instrument through whom the prophet Elijah's pronouncements of judgment were fulfilled. The chariot association proved so vivid that "jehu" entered the English language as a common noun — a slang term for a coachman who drives at reckless speed. This usage appears in literary and colloquial English from the 17th through the 19th centuries, and it reveals how thoroughly biblical names once saturated everyday English culture that a king's personal trait could become a word for a type of person.
Jehu was used with some regularity in Puritan New England and among communities where the full biblical canon informed naming practices, but it has been rare in modern usage — which paradoxically makes it compelling to contemporary parents drawn to obscure scriptural names with genuine historical roots. It reads as bold, unusual, and unmistakably serious — a name with a story to tell and a character already written, waiting for a new bearer to claim it.