Jayla is a beautiful, popular girl's name, but is it also a biblical name? The simple answer is no: there's no biblical character by the name Jayla. However, if you're a Christian parent and love the sound of Jayla but would also like to give your baby girl a biblical name, you're in luck: there's a name that sounds like Jayla and that is in the Bible, too!
We're talking about the pretty Jaala. Just one letter away from Jayla, Jaala can be pronounced the same way as the twenty-first-century favorite Jayla, but unlike its trendy cousin, it claims biblical roots. In Nehemiah 7:58, Jaala is mentioned briefly as one of the descendants of servants who worked for King Solomon. These descendants are mentioned in the Bible because they were among the Israelites who returned to the covenant land after years of captivity in Babylon.
The Jaala mentioned in Nehemiah 7:58 also appears in the Book of Ezra, another biblical book that recounts the story of the returnees, but in the latter, the name is spelled Jaalah (Ezra 2:56).
As of 2024, the name Jaala is the more popular one, but the variant Jaalah is also in circulation as a girl's name in the U.S. Though the biblical bearer of Jaala was a male, the name strikes a very feminine vibe in modern-day America, just like most other a-ending biblical names.
As for the biblical meaning of the name, the Jayla-alternative Jaala seems to derive its meaning from the old Hebrew word translated as "to ascend", "to climb" or "to go up", the same word the biblical name Jael comes from (see References). Now going up in life is obviously a good thing, so Jaala's upward meaning definitely lends luster to this J-beginning biblical girl's name!
Perhaps a little less appealing is its alternative meaning, "goat", which is also widely cited in literature analyzing meanings of biblical names.
To sum up, Jayla is a contemporary name that takes after the sounds of the twenty-first century favorites Layla, Kayla and Ayla, as well as Jay-names like Jada and Jaycee. As a modern creation, Jayla does not come with a biblical pedigree; however, soundalike Jaala does have biblical origins. So if you're saddened that Jayla is not in the Bible, consider Jaala instead. Its meaning—at least one of them—adds to its appeal, too!