Sha'ul is the Hebrew name of the apostle the English New Testament calls Paul. He was born Sha'ul of Tarsus, named after Israel's first king, the towering Benjaminite Sha'ul ben Kish. The root שָׁאַל (sha'al) means to ask, to inquire, to request, and the name commemorates a son asked of God, prayed for, given. Sha'ul carried the name of a king and the meaning of a prayer.

The path from Sha'ul to Paul runs through Greek and Latin. The Greek New Testament renders the Hebrew as Saulos when narrating the pre-conversion Jerusalem chapters, then transitions to Paulos beginning at Acts 13:9, which is Luke's deliberate marker of the apostle's emergence into Greco-Roman missional context where Paulos was a Roman cognomen Sha'ul evidently already carried as part of his Roman citizenship. The Latin Vulgate inherited Paulus from the Greek; English inherited Paul from the Latin. Each step was faithful translation. The chain still put three layers of linguistic distance between the English reader and the name his mother spoke.

Saying Sha'ul is not a gimmick. It is restoring the Hebrew the name was always carried in. Sha'ul never stopped being a Pharisee of Pharisees, a Hebrew of Hebrews, a Benjaminite who knew the Tanakh in its original language (Philippians 3:5). The Sha'ul who stood on the steps of the Antonia Fortress in Acts 21:40 and addressed the Jerusalem crowd in Hebrew was the same man whose letters to the ekklesia in Rome and Galatia presupposed a deeply Hebraic theological grammar. The Hebrew name keeps the Hebrew man visible.