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“There is a real sense in which we are what we are called, at least from the Old Testament onwards, when God renamed Jacob Israel, which means that he struggled with God. Tolstoy, with his usual practicality, wrote an early draft of War and Peace in which Count Rostov was simply named Count Prostoy: prostoy means ‘simple, honest’ in Russian. So we have Becky Sharpe (in Vanity Fair) and Miss Temple (in Jane Eyre) and Felicite (in A Simple Heart) and scores of characters in Dickens like Crook and Pecksniff. . .Fiction is not being very fictional, really, when it resorts to such tricks. After all, in life people do seem uncannily to have become the names they have, or to be the opposite of those names (but still in some strange relation to the import of their names): Wordsworth is surely worth his words, and Kierkegaard means churchyard in Danish, and the late Cardinal Sin was Archbishop of Manila. . .”

From How Fiction Works by James Wood, a very practical guide to the novel. 

My name means “God is watching the sugar harvest” or “Behold muck” or “Clairvoyant drip-jar”. (Jessica is Shakespeare’s variation on the Hebrew Iscah, Abraham’s niece; zafra is a Cuban agricultural term).