Nomination of God in Biblical-theological tradition of Eastern (Oriental) Christians

Abstract

The goal of this research is the philological examination of principles of nomination of God in the Oriental theological tradition of Christianity. The concurrent conceptual objective lies in comparison of Eastern Christian (Oriental) doctrine of nominations of God and the Cappadocian divine onomatology. The subject of this article is the so-called revealed nomination Other nominations of God are interpreted as replacements for the proper name of the Biblical God Yahweh, the profane usage of which was a taboo back in the Old Testament era. The research employs the methodological principles of Biblical exegetics and linguistic hermeneutics. The author differentiates the exegetic and hermeneutic approaches accepted in the theological science. It implies that that the firs is associated with the particular philological methods of interpretation of Biblical texts, while the second – with the theological generalizations and interpretations that are based on the results of exegetic explication. The conclusion is made that the key features of Syriac (and Eastern overall) divine onomatology consist in a distinct categorization of divine nominations, among which special status belongs to the proper name (nomen proprium) of God, which is inherited by Eastern Christians from the Old Testament Jewish traditions; as well as in preservation of the common to Old Testament religiosity sacralization of the name of God as a source of sanctifying power and symbol of God’s presence. Therefore, within the Syriac Christian tradition, which prompted the development of traditions of all Eastern (Oriental) non-Chalcedonian churches, was formed a special type of divine onomatology based on the Old Testament cult of the nomination of God, which is an attribute of semitic sense of the world, manifested in linguistic peculiarities of Biblical translations into Semitic languages (Targum and Peshitta).