To what cause the island is indebted for its present name of Java[12] (or _Jáwa_ as it is pronounced by the natives) is uncertain. Among the traditions of the country (which are more particularly mentioned in another place) there is one, which relates, that it was so termed by the first colonists from the continent of India, in consequence of the discovery of a certain grain, called _jáwa-wut_,[13] on which the inhabitants are supposed to have subsisted at that early period, and that it had been known previously only under the term of _Núsa hára-hára_ or _Núsa kêndang_, meaning the island of wild uncultivated waste, or in which the hills run in ridges.
In the tenth chapter of Genesis we are told, that "the isles of the Gentiles were divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in the nations:" and in the twenty-seventh chapter of Ezekiel we find among the rich merchants, those of _Javan_ "who traded the persons of men, and vessels of brass, to the market of Tyre, and who going to and fro, occupied in her fairs, brought bright iron, cassia, and calamus." But we shall leave it to others to trace the connection between the _Javan_ of Holy Writ and the Java of modern times. It appears, that the Arabs, who had widely extended their commercial intercourse, and established their religious faith over the greatest portion of the Indian Archipelago, long before the Europeans had navigated round the Cape of Good Hope, designate the whole of the nations and tribes which inhabit those regions by the general term of the people of _Jawi_, as in the following passage taken from one of their religious tracts:--"The people of _Jawi_ do not observe with strictness the rule laid down for keeping the fast, inasmuch as they eat before the sun sets, while the Arabs continue the fast until that luminary has sunk below the horizon." _Jawa_ or _Jawi_ is also the name by which Borneo, Java, Sumatra, the Malayan Peninsula, and the islands lying amongst them, are known among the nations of Celebes, who apply the _Búgis_ diminutive _Jawa-Jawáka_, or Java minor, to the Moluccas, _Ámbon_, _Bánda_, _Tímor_, and _Éndé_. Jabadios Insulæ, from _Jaba_, and _dib_, _div_ or _dio_, has been employed in the largest sense by Europeans, and it is probable this was once generally the case among the Asiatics, with the terms _Java_, _Jawa_, _Jawi_, and _Jaba_,[14] which, as the appellations of people inhabiting the countries beyond the continent or distant, some have derived from the word _jaù_, of very general acceptation in eastern languages, and meaning _beyond_, _distant_.[15]