Bogoslovni Vestnik (Dec 2022)
Symbolism of Names and of the Word “Name” in the Bible
Abstract
In every civilization, there is a clear tendency for people to find a proper name for things, places, human persons, angels and gods / God. Nearly 4,000 geographical and personal names can be found in the Bible of the Old and New Testaments. The main aim of the paper is to show aspects of the interpretation of the meaning of names as symbols, with special attention to the use of the word “name,” which appears in the Bible in very large numbers and in various roles in connection with God. Because the God of the Bible is the highest spiritual and personal being, working in intimate personal dialogue with individual human beings and with the chosen people as a whole, it is often emphasized that no individual name alone can capture and properly express God’s essence. Therefore, God’s names are enriched with many titles and attributes that express the fundamental attributes of God. The search for the meaning of names, titles and attributes is usually not carried out in isolation, but within the direct linguistic and literary context of the use of names. The second stage of the contextual approach in finding the meaning of names, titles, and attributes is an overview of intertextual relationships across all available sources within ancient Israel and in neighbouring cultures. The contextual approach enables the discovery of content and form relationships between related names, titles and attributes that form individual semantic fields. The most basic structure of associating related names, titles, and attributes is the stylistic form of parallelism. At the hermeneutic level, the search for the meaning of names, titles and attributes is based on the principle of analogy. The article is an introductory contribution to the long-term research of the material of biblical onomastics and the history of discussions on the fundamental role and symbolic value of names, titles and attributes. The originality is already shown in the fact that a comprehensive treatment of God’s names, titles and attributes has not yet been carried out.
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