Note 195.1 — Chapter XI · The Religious Temperament of the Eastern and Western Peoples.

In Mesopotamia and in the other Semitic communities the fashion of naming a child after the high god or goddess was very common—commoner I am inclined to think than in Hellas, though in the latter country such names as Demetrios, Apollodoros, Zenon, Diogenes, point to the same religious impulse; but they appear to have arisen only in the later period. The Hellenic language did not admit, and Hellenic thought would not have approved of, those mystic divine names, which express as in a sacred text some quality or action of the divinity, such as we find in the Bible (“the Lord will provide”), and in pre-Islamitic inscriptions of Arabia, Ili-kariba, “My God hath blessed”; Ili-azza, “My God is mighty”; Ili-padaja, “My God hath redeemed.”195.1 Such names served as spells for the protection of the child, and are speaking illustrations of the close personal dependence of the individual upon the god.