Raz is a Hebrew name meaning 'secret' or 'mystery.'
Raz (רָז) is a Hebrew and Aramaic word-name of haunting simplicity, meaning 'secret' or 'mystery.' In biblical Aramaic — the language of portions of Daniel and Ezra — raz appears when the prophet Daniel is called upon to interpret Nebuchadnezzar's dream: the king has a raz, a mystery or secret vision, that his own wise men cannot penetrate. Only Daniel, through divine insight, can unlock it.
The word thus enters the Western imagination carrying the weight of divine revelation, hidden knowledge, and the boundary between the human and the transcendent. In kabbalistic tradition, raz and its derivatives appear throughout texts dealing with mystical secrets and esoteric Torah interpretation. Sefer ha-Razim — the Book of Mysteries — is an ancient Jewish magical text whose title uses this same root.
The name consequently carries an air of the contemplative and the initiated, suggesting a person who dwells comfortably in depth and complexity. In modern Hebrew, raz remains a living word used in everyday speech for 'secret,' giving the name a quality that names drawn from archaic roots rarely have: immediate intelligibility to native speakers. As a given name, Raz is predominantly used in Israel, where its brevity and clean sound fit the modern Israeli aesthetic for short, punchy names (Tal, Noa, Or, Lior). In diaspora communities, it has recently attracted parents who want a Hebrew name that is genuinely brief, genuinely meaningful, and genuinely wearable across cultures — a name that says everything in three letters.