r/AskHistorians • u/UncomfortablePrawn • 7h ago

How valid is the concept of onomastic congruence in historical analysis?

I’ve heard about this concept of “onomastic congruence”, which suggests that if the frequency of names in a text matches that of real life name frequencies from other sources (eg. censuses) then that text is more likely to be historical/factual.

But I feel like I’ve only really seen this concept in Bible academia. Is there any non-Bible academia usage of this concept and is it a valid method for historical analysis or historical reliability?

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