A Hawaiian form of Samuel, ultimately from Hebrew, meaning God has heard.
Kamuela is the Hawaiian rendering of Samuel, one of the most significant names in the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew Shemu'el is typically interpreted as either 'God has heard' (from 'shama,' to hear, and 'El,' God) or 'his name is God,' reflecting the story of Hannah, who cried out to God for a child and named her answered prayer accordingly. The biblical Samuel was the last of the great judges and the first of the great prophets, the kingmaker who anointed both Saul and David — a figure whose life sits at the hinge point between the tribal confederacy and the monarchy of ancient Israel.
When American missionaries arrived in Hawaiʻi in the early nineteenth century, they brought both Christianity and the practice of transliterating biblical names into the Hawaiian phonological system, which uses only eight consonants and five vowels. Samuel, rendered phonetically, becomes Kamuela — the 'K' replacing 'S' (which doesn't exist in classical Hawaiian), the vowels expanded and softened to fit the language's melodic, open-syllable structure. The result is a name that sounds entirely Hawaiian while carrying the full weight of its biblical origin.
Kamuela today is used both within the Native Hawaiian community as a mark of cultural heritage and, increasingly, by families outside Hawaii who are drawn to its warm, flowing sound. It represents a beautiful example of cultural translation — a name that crossed an ocean and was transformed by a new language into something that belongs equally to both worlds.