구약 각 책의 한국어 이름을 어떻게 할 것인가?

Abstract

This article intends to propose new names for a few books in the Old Testament of the Korean version. The Korean versions of the Bible have kept the name tradition for more than 100 years since the first publication in 1911. It is high time, however, that the names of the books in the OT be changed in view of their relevancy.<BR> The traditional names have relied heavily upon the Chinese version by doing a thorough transliteration. In doing so, there have been many confusions. For instance, the name 申命記 implies “a repetition of the Torah” in Chinese. But Koreans can scarcely notice the meaning from its transliterated word 신명기. In order to achieve the purpose of this article, we first investigate how the Chinese version named the books of the OT, and find that the principles of classification and ending lacks consistency. Since the names of the books in the Korean version originated from those of the Chinese version, the same problems are shared. It is needed, therefore, to construct a principle for new names of the books in the OT, and a principle is suggested with five notes.<BR> We, then, move on to explore the principle on which books can gain new suitable names, and conclude that giving new names to some books, as suggested on 〈Table 15〉 in the text, might be more appropriate.