Means 'servant of God' or 'worshiper'; grandfather of King David in the Book of Ruth.
Obed is a name of ancient Hebrew origin, derived from the root 'abad,' meaning 'to serve' or 'to worship,' so the name itself translates to 'servant' or 'worshiper of God.' It appears in the Hebrew Bible with remarkable genealogical weight: Obed was the son born to Ruth and Boaz after Ruth's famous declaration of loyalty to her mother-in-law Naomi, making him the grandfather of King David and, by extension, an ancestor in the messianic lineage of both Jewish and Christian tradition. That single thread of descent makes Obed a pivot point of biblical history.
The name was embraced by Puritan settlers in 17th-century New England, who mined the Old Testament for names that felt both spiritually serious and distinct from the Catholic calendar of saints. Herman Melville immortalized it in a different register — the narrator of 'Moby-Dick,' Ishmael, passes through Nantucket, a whaling community Melville populates with biblical names that anchor the novel's theological undertow. Obed Mitchell Hussey, the 19th-century inventor who developed one of the first mechanical reapers, brought the name into the annals of American agricultural history.
Today Obed is genuinely rare in the English-speaking world, which lends it a quiet power. It is treasured in strongly religious communities — evangelical Protestant, Messianic Jewish, and certain Latin American Christian traditions — precisely because of its unbroken scriptural lineage. For parents seeking a name that is ancient, meaningful, and completely unencumbered by modern pop-culture associations, Obed offers all three.