It has sometimes been suggested that fear of persecution would have dissuaded polytheistic Israelites from invoking other deities in their children’s names, but this is unlikely since many of the inscriptional names come from the time of Manasseh, whose 55-year-long reign (698–42 B.C.E.) was the most hospitable to polytheism of any period in Judah’s history (2 Kings 21:1–18). It is of course possible that factors extraneous to meaning, such as fashion, tradition or aesthetics, influenced some parents’ choice of names, but what is important for present purposes is that the divine name within Hebrew personal names could not have gone unrecognized.