Jekamiah is a name found in the King James Bible, appearing 1 time in the text.
Who This Was
Jekamiah was a descendant of Judah whose name appears in the tribal genealogies recorded in 1 Chronicles. He is mentioned only once in the King James Bible, in a lineage that traces the family line of Jerahmeel, one of Judah’s descendants. The record is brief and purely genealogical: “And Shallum begat Jekamiah, and Jekamiah begat Elishama” (1 Chronicles 2:41). Beyond this single verse, Scripture tells us nothing else about him—no deeds, no words, no events from his life are recorded.
The setting of his appearance is the great ancestral record compiled for the tribe of Judah, preserved after the Babylonian exile to establish Israel’s tribal and family heritage. In these lists, each generation is linked by the repeated phrase “begat,” forming a chain from father to son. Jekamiah stands as one link in that chain: he was the son of Shallum and the father of Elishama. His role in the biblical text is simply to connect the generations before and after him.
What Scripture says of Jekamiah, then, is limited to his place in this lineage. He is not described as a king, prophet, warrior, or notable figure. He did not perform any recorded act, and no virtue or fault of his is mentioned. He appears only as a name within a family line, one of many ordinary descendants of Judah whose lives are summed up in the simple fact that they lived, bore children, and passed the heritage on to the next generation.
The Name
The name Jekamiah is a Hebrew name, and its meaning is generally understood from its component parts. It appears to combine a form of the verb *qum*, meaning “to arise” or “to stand up,” with the divine name *Yah* (a shortened form of Yahweh), yielding a sense such as “Yahweh raises up” or “the LORD will arise.” This kind of name, built from a verb plus the covenant name of God, is common in the Hebrew Scriptures and typically expressed a parent’s faith or hope that God would lift up, establish, or vindicate the child. While the precise nuance is debated among scholars, the broad sense of the name is reasonably well established as a theophoric name honoring the God of Israel.
A Closing Thought
Most of us will never be remembered in a history book, and that is not a failure. Jekamiah’s entire legacy in Scripture is one sentence linking his father to his son. Yet that single link mattered: it carried the line of Judah forward toward the coming of Christ. Faithfulness is often quiet and unseen. You may never know, this side of eternity, how the small, ordinary ways you keep faith and pass it on will shape generations you will never meet. Like Jekamiah, you can be a faithful link in a story far larger than your own.
At a Glance
- Gender: Male
- Testament: Old
- Mentions in the KJV: 1
Where It Appears in Scripture
- 1 Chronicles 2:41 — And Shallum begat Jekamiah, and Jekamiah begat Elishama.