Joel

Quietly, the name has been there the whole time. Joel descends from the Hebrew Yo'el — Yahweh is God — and belongs to one of the twelve minor prophets, whose short, percussive book moves from plague to promise in three chapters. The Puritan settlers brought it to New England; the name settled in, and unlike some of its biblical neighbors, it never went through a period of serious neglect.

Joel has held the American top 300 through nearly the entire twentieth century and well into the twenty-first. It sits now at rank 219, a name that reads equally well in Spanish-speaking families, Jewish families, evangelical households, and secular households with a grandfather to honor. Billy Joel helped; Joel Embiid helps now. The name doesn't require a celebrity to explain it.

One syllable, the J direct, the vowels doing quiet work — Jo-el landing in two beats soft as a hand on a shoulder. Tate, Knox, Kyrie, Louis, and Finn would all be natural siblings, compact names with old roots and easy modern bearing. The boy named Joel tends to be the one who actually reads the book, forms a considered opinion about it, and doesn't feel the need to announce this at every opportunity.