Lehi is a Hebrew biblical place name meaning jawbone or cheek.
Lehi appears first in the Hebrew scriptures as a place name rather than a personal one — it is the location in Judges 15 where Samson famously slew a thousand Philistines with the fresh jawbone of a donkey, a story so vivid it burned the name into biblical memory. The word itself likely derives from a Hebrew root relating to the jaw or cheek, giving the place its name from the landscape or perhaps from the event that made it famous. As a geographical marker in the ancient Israelite world, Lehi sat in the hill country of Judah, contested land that echoed with battles.
The name took on an entirely new life through the Book of Mormon, the foundational scripture of the Latter-day Saint faith, in which Lehi is a prophet of Jerusalem who receives a vision around 600 BCE and leads his family across the sea to the Americas. In this narrative, Lehi becomes one of the great patriarchal figures of LDS theology — a man of faith, vision, and sacrifice whose descendants would populate an entire scriptural civilization. Through this tradition, the name became genuinely beloved in LDS communities, and the city of Lehi, Utah — one of the fastest-growing cities in America — bears his name today.
As a given name, Lehi remains almost exclusively used within Latter-day Saint families, functioning as both a theological declaration and a form of cultural kinship. It sits within the broader tradition of biblical and scriptural naming that runs deep in Mormon culture, where names from the Book of Mormon — Nephi, Moroni, Alma — create a distinctive naming landscape. Lehi carries a pioneer gravity that parents in this tradition find deeply meaningful.