I wonder how many of us here are named after someone.

Chances are that a good many of us carry family names. We are named for a parent, a grandparent, an uncle, or an aunt somewhere on the family tree. Others of us had parents who named us after a character in the Bible, or perhaps some other significant character from history.

All told, I expect a pretty fair number of us are named after someone else.

When Isaac and Rebecca had their twin boys, they took an unusual approach to naming their babies. They named the boys for the boys themselves. They took a look at each boy when he was born, and they gave him a name based on what they saw.

Typically, we don't get named for ourselves until much later in life, and then we call it a "nickname." There is some feature, some trait, some charact…