Benaiah
male given name
Benaiah (Hebrew: בניה, "Yahweh builds up") is a common name in the Hebrew Bible.
Etymology
In the etymology of the name, the first part of Benaiah comes from the root-verb בנה (bana), which is a common Hebrew verb meaning "to build". The second part of Benaiah is יה (Yah), which is not a derivative of the Tetragrammaton, but a contraction of it (ie, the first and last consonants of יהוה are contracted as יה).
Benaiah, son of Jehoiada
The most famous Benaiah referenced in the Tanakh is the son of Jehoiada, who came from the southern Judean town of Kabzeel.
According to the text, Benaiah was one of David's Mighty Warriors, commander of the third rotational army division; (2 Samuel 23:20; 1 Chronicles 27:5). He helped David's son Solomon become king, killed Solomon's enemies, and served as the chief of Solomon's army. On Solomon's instructions he was responsible for the deaths of Adonijah (1 Kings 2:25), Joab (1 Kings 2:34) and Shimei (1 Kings 2:46). He was in charge of the Cherethites and Pelethites. Several verses in 1 Kings 1 illustrate Benaiah's close association with Solomon's party and his exclusion from Adonijah's faction. He is also mentioned in 2 Samuel 8:18, 23:20–23, 30 and 1 Chronicles 27:5–6.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Benaiah” as male given name. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as male given name. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q56391124. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Benaiah” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.