Numele în Biblie
The Names in the Bible

Summary/Abstract: This essay is an attempt to analyze the process of naming in the Bible, especially complex and varied, having numerous implications of linguistic, conceptual type and profound spiritual consequences. 1. The author emphasizes the demiurgic power of the word, a particularity that can be constant in several cultures and spiritualities. In the Judaic spirituality, some of the words that designate different realities are by themselves those realities. 2. The process of giving a name is essential in all religions that show varied forms of one and the same ritual: the christening – purifying ritual of (re) naming and rebirth. One of the names that has constantly concerned the man is the name of the Divinity. The names of the Divinity that occur in the Bible are here presented. 3. Giving names is the prerogative of the master. God entrusted the animals to man, to be named. The word has the force to shape the reality. 4. There is tight relation between word and gesture. The gestures and words have the great role to create reality. 5. There is a relation between the demiurgic force of the word and man’s fears, manifested as taboos. A tendency to develop mechanisms to attempt avoiding the unfortunate consequences of the spoken name is, therefore, present. 6. The euphemism is not a consequence of the tendency to name what is forbidden, but of the need to manipulate that reality. Man searched for ways of calling the dangerous reality without crossing the interdictions. 7. All the above emphasize one of the fundamental features of the human being, which is the fact that man is a hermeneutic being.

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