Cover Page The handle http://hdl.handle.net/1887/20979 holds various files of this Leiden University dissertation. Author: Griffiths, Alan Title: A family of names : Rune-names and Ogam-names and their relation to alphabet letter-names Issue Date: 2013-06-18 PART 1 SOURCES OF NAME-FORMS AND MEANINGS Part 1: Sources of Name-forms and Meanings PART 1: SOURCES OF NAME-FORMS AND MEANINGS Names and interpretations of the names of letters, ogam characters and runes are found in homilies and epistles intended to expound on biblical texts, in grammatical tracts and in acrostic poems. I list the principal medieval manuscript sources of the interpretations of Hebrew, Greek and Latin names in Tables 1 (Hebrew) and 2 (Greek and Latin), and give the main sources of name-forms and glosses recorded for the ogam and runic systems in Tables 3 (ogam), 4 and 5 (runes). In the case of Hebrew, Greek and Latin names, I have taken into account only those sources which include interpretations beside the name-forms, since it would be impracticable to give a list of all manuscripts which reproduce letter-forms and names without interpretations. In the case of ogam- and rune-names, however, lists giving only names, i.e. without any further gloss, have been included as well as glossed lists, since ogam and rune name-forms are more debatable than their Hebrew, Greek and Latin counterparts. I present the interpretations given in these manuscripts without prejudice as to the plausibility of letter-names, ogam-names or rune-names having had any influence on each other. All comments at this stage have been restricted to describing the nature of the records, their contexts and, in the case of Hebrew letter-names, their introduction and treatment in early Christian manuscripts and their dissemination by later commentators. I reserve detailed discussion of possible relationships between the names for Part 2. 1.1 Hebrew letter-names 1.1.1 General features of the glosses by Eusebius, Ambrose and Jerome Knowledge of the Hebrew language was certainly not widespread in Europe during the early Christian period and the breakup of the Roman empire. However, in certain circles, i.e. among Greek- and Latin-speaking Christians, there was at least some knowledge of the Hebrew alphabet, if only in connexion with the study of Holy Scripture. In a Christian context, for instance, Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 263–339),1 in his Praeparatio evangelica (Preparation for the Gospel), book X, chapter V, provided Greek interpretations of the Hebrew letter-names, while two prominent disseminators of the names and interpretations of Hebrew letters to a Latin- speaking public were Ambrose (c. 334 or 339–97) and Jerome (c. 342 or 347–419/20). Another commentator in Greek whose glosses on Hebrew letters in Ps. CXLIV (CXLV) were not so well known as those of Eusebius, but will be referred to later, was Hesychius of Jerusalem (d. 450).2 In his Praeparatio, which he saw as an introduction to Christianity for pagans, Eusebius not only gives the Hebrew names in Greek transcription, together with a translation of their meaning into Greek, but also suggests that they can be grouped in sequences of two, three or five, connected syntactically, so that each sequence appears to form a sensible statement. In 1 Eusebius became Bishop of Caesaria c. 314 and is known in particular for his Ecclesiastical History. 2 See §1.1.6. 31 A Family of Names the case of the first five letters – a aleph (a1lf = ma&qhsij [act of learning, instruction]), b beth (bhq = oi1kou [of the house], gen. of oi1koj), g gimel (gi&mel = plh&rwsij [a filling up, becoming full]), d daleth3 (de&lq = de&ltwn [of writing-tablets, books], gen. plur. of de&ltoj) and h heh (h = au3th [it], fem. sing. of au0to&j) – he says: o(mou= de\ ta\ pa/nta a)parti/zei toiau/thn tina\ dia/noian [If you join all these together, you will form a sentence of some sort]. The sentence he then produces is: ma/qhsij oi)/kou, plh/rwsij de/ltwn au(/th [the teaching of the house,4 it itself (is) an abundance of books]. The whole passage is given in Table 6. Ambrose, who almost certainly knew no Hebrew, produced what appears to be a series of homilies in which he developed allegorical interpretations of the Hebrew letter-names that are reproduced at the head of each of the twenty-two octaves of verses comprising Ps. CXVIII.5 By contrast, Jerome went to great lengths to learn Hebrew and produced two sets of interpretations of Hebrew letter-names: one in a letter (Epistula XXX) written to Paula, who had asked him to explain the form of Ps. CXVIII;6 the other as glosses on the psalms (De psalterio) in his Liber interpretationis hebraicorum nominum,7 one of two onomasticons that he produced on Hebrew and Greek names occurring in the Bible. In his letter to Paula, Jerome begins by pointing to various biblical passages based on the Hebrew alphabet and concludes with a summary of interpretations in a form very similar to that of Eusebius, which he called connexiones. In his De psalterio glosses, on the other hand, the letter-names are not treated as names in an alphabetical series, but are integrated in the list of Hebrew names that he has gathered from the psalms. Also, unlike his solution in his letter to Paula, where he gives a one-to-one correspondence between letter-name and interpretation, his De psalterio glosses provide several alternatives for some of the names, expanding on the connexiones interpretations and in some cases including an interpretation that is found in Ambrose’s homilies. Consequently, it is important to emphasize that none of the interpretations of Eusebius, Ambrose or Jerome was initially produced in the form of straightforward lists of linguistic equivalents. For Ambrose, the names were a starting-point for his homilies, while Jerome either followed Eusebius in reading a connected meaning into the Hebrew alphabet as a whole or else treated the letter-names as part of his general etymological interpretation of Hebrew names. For this reason, it is worth presenting the 3 The Hebrew letter-name was most likely daleth, but Eusebius, and following him Jerome, treated it as though it was deleth [door, leaf (of a door or a codex)]. This latter form seems to have been preferred because, especially in Eusebius’s transcription, de&lq, it compared more closely to Greek de&ltoj, and the Greek letter- name delta (see below §1.1.3, s.v. Daleth). 4 ‘The house’ in this context most probably refers to the Church; Jerome translates the first two Hebrew names as doctrina domus, which he interprets as doctrina Ecclesiae, quae domus Dei est (see Table 6). 5 PL XV: 1283–598. Kellner (1893: 31–166) provides a summary of Ambrose’s hermeneutics (based on sensus naturalis, sensus mysticus or rationabils and sensus moralis or ethicus) and a discussion of his homilies on Psalm CXVIII , with an interpretation of some of the letter-names. However, Kellner attempts to explain some of Ambrose’s interpretations via Syriac and Armenian, which seems an unlikely source for someone lacking a knowledge of Hebrew. 6 PL XXIII: 441–5. 7 PL XXIII: 871. 32 Part 1: Sources of Name-forms and Meanings solutions of all three commentators in their contexts. Ambrose’s homilies are too long to be quoted in extenso, but relevant passages are given in Table 7, even though a digest of this nature risks distorting the author’s argument. Jerome’s connexiones are reproduced alongside the text of Eusebius in Table 6, and his glosses on letters-names in his onomasticon are given in Table 8 (a) in De Lagarde’s transcription,8 which is closer to Jerome’s own orthography than Migne’s normalized spelling (see below, §1.1.3). For convenience, these texts have also been excerpted to provide the lists given in Table 9 (a) (columns A and B),9 together with transliterations and transliterations of the Hebrew words on which the glosses may have been based (columns C and D); a list of these words in square Hebrew script (without diacritics) is added in Table 9 (b). The precise sources used by Ambrose and Jerome are difficult to determine. It is clear from Tables 6 and 9 (a) that Jerome’s connexiones arrangement in his letter to Paula (Jerome 1) are based on the Greek interpretations by Eusebius. However, in his De psalterio glosses (Jerome 2), Jerome gives several alternative interpretations to those in his connexiones, the exact source of which cannot be traced. In the preface to his onomasticon, Liber interpretationis hebraicorum nominum, from which the De psalterio glosses (Jerome 2) are taken, he explains that he has been encouraged by brothers Lupulus and Valerianus to improve on the work of the Greek authors Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BC– AD 50) and Origen (AD 184–254).10 He says he is able to do this because he has recently acquired other works on Hebrew ‘matters’ that he thinks will be new to Greek and Latin scholars. In the preface to his second onomasticon, De situ et nominibus locorum hebraicorum liber, he explains that he is elaborating on (as well as translating) the Greek work of Eusebius. There are indications that Eusebius based his interpretations on a source attributable to Origen. The Codex Marchalianus of the Septuagint, which used not only the Hexapla but also works by Origen, contains a series of marginal glosses with translations of biblical names, including letter-names relating to the first chapter of Lamentations.