Jonathan

Jonathan is from יְהוֹנָתָן (Yehonatan), combining יְהוֹ (Yeho-, the theophoric prefix of YHWH) with נָתַן (natan, gave). God gave. The name appears dozens of times in the Hebrew Bible: Jonathan son of Saul stripped off his robe and gave it to David in 1 Samuel 18, binding the two in a covenant of friendship that scribes have read and debated for three thousand years.

The name passed through Latin as Jonathanus, softened through medieval French, and arrived in English as Jonathan by the 13th century. It traveled the Puritan Atlantic: the phrase Brother Jonathan appeared by 1776 as a nickname for the archetypal New Englander, possibly referring to Jonathan Trumbull, governor of Connecticut, whom Washington reportedly consulted in moments of difficulty. The phrase preceded Uncle Sam as a national shorthand for American identity.

The apple called Jonathan was first noticed around 1820 on the farm of Philip Rick near Woodstock, Ulster County, New York. Jesse Buel named it Jonathan around 1826, after Jonathan Hasbrouck, a local man who had brought the tree to Buel's attention. The Jonathan apple — red, firm, slightly tart — became one of the most widely grown American varieties through the 19th and early 20th centuries. It is now largely replaced by the Jonagold, a cross with the Golden Delicious developed at Cornell in 1953.

In English the name has two independent lives: the biblical and the horticultural. They share nothing but the syllables. The Hebrew Yehonatan carried a theological claim — that a child is a gift from the divine. The apple called Jonathan carries only a man's name, borrowed casually, the way orchardists have always named their best trees.