Use of abbreviations for names?

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rgprice
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Use of abbreviations for names?

Post by rgprice »

We know that the name of the Lord was written using Tetragrammaton in many Jewish texts. Are there any examples of Jewish texts using Tetragrammaton or other types of symbiology for the names of prophets or other human figures, such as Moses, Noah , David, Abraham, etc?
StephenGoranson
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Re: Use of abbreviations for names?

Post by StephenGoranson »

Basically, no. At least not in TaNaK.
But there are very many abbreviations in other Jewish texts including in MT apparatus, given, e.g., in the intro to Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia editions.
And many abbr. in rabbinic texts and other Jewish texts, including of names of rabbis, e.g., Rashi for Rabbi Solomon (Sholomo) ben Isaac. For a helpful list, e.g., Aiding Talmud Study, by Aryeh Carmel.
Secret Alias
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Re: Use of abbreviations for names?

Post by Secret Alias »

Rashi is an acronym rather than an abbreviation (using gershayim). Abbreviation in Hebrew or Aramaic are rare (R for Rabbi from memory). I can think of a few (Qof ק for 'holy' Qadash). There's a short list here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_abbreviations Diminutives or short forms exist (Avi/Ava for Abraham, Mani for Menahem). Don't know of many abbreviations.
We know that the name of the Lord was written using Tetragrammaton in many Jewish texts.
"Lord" is not the name. Yahweh is the name. κύριος became the Greek equivalent or translation. Not sure that even Adonai was used originally as a substitute for Yahweh. It became a substitute as was "the Name" or "his Name" among Samaritans. Yahu was likely the original name. For some reason the early Israelites (and later Israelites) liked sacred names to end in he ה. Yahweh, the Name/his Name (the Jews and Samaritans preserve different versions, Moses, Marqe, I am that I am. Sacred names end in ה‎. Don't know why? Florentin apparently has a theory. No one knows why this is so.

I think the reason there are so few abbreviations in Hebrew and Aramaic is that you are really limited with how you many terms you can abbreviate when you use initialism. There are 22 letters. If you keep reusing letters for different ideas the initial makes no sense. Also eleven of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet are considered Otiyot HaShimush. These letters are Aleph (א), Bet (ב), He (ה), Vav (ו), Yud (י), Kaf (כ), Lamed (ל), Mem (מ), Nun (נ), Shin (ש), and Tav (ת). Maybe that has something to do with the limited number of initialized abbreviations.
StephenGoranson
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Re: Use of abbreviations for names?

Post by StephenGoranson »

An acronym is a subset of abbreviation. OED, etc.
rgprice
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Re: Use of abbreviations for names?

Post by rgprice »

What I'm getting at are potential distinctions between the writing of "divine names" and human names. We know that Yahweh was written in a special way that set it apart from other names. Were names like Moses also written in this manner?

For example, in NT manuscripts there is a nomen sacrum for David: δδ. Was there ever a Hebrew equivalent for this?

In P46, the only nomina sacra are for God, Lord, Holy Spirit, Father, Man, Son, Jesus, Christ, Crucifix.

There is no nomen sacrum for David in P46.

Is there precedent in Hebrew for the use of nomen sacrum for a name like Jesus?
Secret Alias
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Re: Use of abbreviations for names?

Post by Secret Alias »

An acronym is a subset of abbreviation
It's a kind of abbreviation certainly. But since the OP was heading in the direction of nomina sacra it's different.
Was there ever a Hebrew equivalent for this?
Not really. I've always had a problem with the idea of using abbreviations as 'sacred names.' I know that there are arguments against my concerns but to me God can't be abbreviated. His name is literally his identity. If we want to summon something - like Rumpelstiltskin for instance - we have to say the full name not an abbreviation. It's like entering a password on your computer or phone.

I have a hard time believing that 'Jesus' is 888 and sacred but the sacred Ogdoad can at once be abbreviated as two letters. So with the Jews a name can be substituted for Yahweh (like Adonai) but it by definition is not 'holy' or doesn't take on the sacredness of the original. As such 'Jesus' might be holy but not the nomen sacrum. So why call it a nomen sacrum. Jesus is the nomen sacrum i.e. the full spelling if it began as a holy name. Perhaps it's quibbling but there is something wrong to me. Adonai is a substitute not the 'holy name.'

Of course 'nomen sacrum' wasn't the original name given in antiquity to the abbreviations. It is a modern construct. But still.
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Leucius Charinus
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Re: Use of abbreviations for names?

Post by Leucius Charinus »

rgprice wrote: Mon Oct 03, 2022 3:36 am Is there precedent in Hebrew for the use of nomen sacrum for a name like Jesus?
Not that I am aware of however on the use of abbreviations here is an extract, which may or may not be useful to you, from Michael Avi-Yonah, Abbreviations in Greek Inscriptions



"The use of abbreviations is, on the whole, as foreign to the Greeks as it is congenial to the Romans and Byzantines.”


p.11

The main categories of words commonly abbreviated (by the Romans and Byzantines) are:


(1) Proper Names:

(a) of individuals: some greek and almost all Roman praenomina, names of Old and New Testament personages and saints, common Christian names.

(b) Collective: names of provinces, districts, towns, town-quarters, demotic names, names of phylai and Roman tribes, names of subdivision of synoecized towns.


(2) Administrative Terms:

(a) of individuals: titles of office, Roman, Late Roman and Byzantine, especially the imperial protocol; Late Roman and Byzantine honorific appellations of the various classes of officials, usually in superlative; provincial, municipal, and village functionaries; functionaries connected with local institutions, such as the prytanis.

(b) Collective: collective appellations of capital towns, towns, townlets, head villages and villages; generic appellations of town districts, town boundaries, etc; corporative municipal institutions, the assembly, the council; appellations of their resolutions.


(3) Military Terms:

(a) Individual: title of soldiers, lower and higher officers, commanders of irregular corps of auxiliaries.


(4) Commerce: Money in general, Greek and Roman denominations, weights and measures (of length and cubic), special signs used in the nilometers and in cadasters, names of goods, names of trades and professions, especially those of artisans.


(5) Religion:

(A) Pagan: names of gods, sacred functions and feasts, titles of priests, expressions of adoration and worship.

(B) Christian

(a) Individual: all degrees of secular and regular clergy, church servants and assistants, with their proper honorific appellations.

(b) Collective: religious bodies and institutions, churches and monasteries.

(c) Expressions relating to the Deity, divine attributes, the persons of the Trinity and the Virgin Mary, titles of saints, prophets and maryrs, phrases taken from prayers and liturgical formulae, terms referring to the Church and the Christian way of life and feelings.


(6) Funerary: expressions relating to the deceased, the fact of his decease, the length of his life; consoling words and phrases addressed to him; appreciations; terms refering to the tomb and burial.


(7) Dedicatory: expressions refering to the building; the act of building in general as refering to the building or the builder; special terms deonting the laying of the foundations or the completion of the structure; description of the architect, the founder or the construction; stock phrases used in dedication or on the lintel of churches or houses, especially the formula of Ps. cxxi. 8.


(8) General and various:

(a) Dating: terms connected with dating, general expressions for the divisions of time, names of days, months (Macedonian, Roman, Egyptian, and Attic), eras and other indications of period (eponymic regions, consulates or archonships, eras of provinces and towns, of Diocletian, era of indiction)

(b) Family relations and legal relations;

(c) common grammatical terms, pronouns personal and relative, conjuctions and prepositions;

(d) special technical terms relating to gladiators (...) their classes and prizes.


Michael Avi-Yonah,
Abbreviations in Greek Inscriptions
Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities in Palestine
(Jerusalem: Government of Palestine, 1940)

As reprinted in
Abbreviations in Greek Inscriptions
Al. N. Oikonomides
Professor of Classics
Loyola University
Chicargo. Illinois
ARES Publishing 1974

rgprice
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Re: Use of abbreviations for names?

Post by rgprice »

Secret Alias wrote: Mon Oct 03, 2022 7:58 am
An acronym is a subset of abbreviation
It's a kind of abbreviation certainly. But since the OP was heading in the direction of nomina sacra it's different.
Was there ever a Hebrew equivalent for this?
Not really. I've always had a problem with the idea of using abbreviations as 'sacred names.' I know that there are arguments against my concerns but to me God can't be abbreviated. His name is literally his identity. If we want to summon something - like Rumpelstiltskin for instance - we have to say the full name not an abbreviation. It's like entering a password on your computer or phone.

I have a hard time believing that 'Jesus' is 888 and sacred but the sacred Ogdoad can at once be abbreviated as two letters. So with the Jews a name can be substituted for Yahweh (like Adonai) but it by definition is not 'holy' or doesn't take on the sacredness of the original. As such 'Jesus' might be holy but not the nomen sacrum. So why call it a nomen sacrum. Jesus is the nomen sacrum i.e. the full spelling if it began as a holy name. Perhaps it's quibbling but there is something wrong to me. Adonai is a substitute not the 'holy name.'

Of course 'nomen sacrum' wasn't the original name given in antiquity to the abbreviations. It is a modern construct. But still.
Let me see if I have this straight.

What you seem to be saying is that "Jesus" or "Ἰησοῦς" could itself have been a substitute name, like Adonai? So the use of Jesus could have originated as a "speakable" version of Yahweh?

Romans 10: 2 For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, abounding in riches for all who call on Him; 13 for “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

From Joel:
30 I will display wonders in the sky and on the earth,
Blood, fire, and columns of smoke.
31 The sun will be turned into darkness,
And the moon into blood,
Before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes.
32 And it will come about that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord
Will be saved
;

Isaiah:
And on that day you will say,
Give thanks to the Lord, call on His name.
Make known His deeds among the peoples;
Make them remember that His name is exalted.”

Psalm 105:
1 Give thanks to the Lord, call upon His name;
Make His deeds known among the peoples.
2 Sing to Him, sing praises to Him;
Tell of all His wonders.
3 Boast in His holy name;

etc.

Presumably Isaiah is quoting from the Psalm, as do other writers. And presumably this read "Give thanks to YHWH, call upon His name," in Hebrew.

So there we many places in the scriptures that urged the faithful to literally "call upon the name" of Yahweh/the Lord. But how were Jews to do this when they were forbidden from speaking his actual name?

So was Jesus a "speakable" name for Yahweh? Or was "Paul" someone who disregarded the admonitions against speaking the name of the Lord and was using what he considered to be the actual holy name of the Lord? Was whatever "Paul" wrote a holy name that was considered to be the name of the Lord of the Jewish scriptures? If "Jesus" was written using some kind of abbreviation originally, then does that indicate that the figure being talked about was a "divine being" as opposed to a human prophet, i.e. a figure like Yahweh as opposed to a figure like Moses?
Secret Alias
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Re: Use of abbreviations for names?

Post by Secret Alias »

1. haShem (Hebrew)or shemah (Aramaic) became a substitute for Yahweh in Jewish and Samaritan cultures. FWIW they both add up to 345 = Moses. This likely happened before Christianity
2. Jesus/Joshua is a ordinary name. Unlikely (IMHO) to have ever been a substitute for Yahweh.
3. the nomen sacrum IS is taken to be an abbreviation for Jesus. But Christians have now uncertain or unclear notions of what is god how many there are. So for instance Jesus is at once 'the Son' the Son is not the Father (although this gets muddied). So IS is not necessarily Yahweh. He could be. I just don't see this working in Judaism given that Joshua is a figure in the Pentateuch and the name has no special significance for Jews or Samaritans.
4. Jews and Samaritans had 'two powers' traditions. Philo seems to be one. Yahweh/kurios is not the 'ultimate god' but a power, the 'god of bad men.'

I think the answer is that we don't know how Jesus/nomen sacrum IS related back to Yahweh. It's murky because there was a concerted effort in the third century to obscure what god was what and alienate Christianity from the kind of 'two power' system like Philo of Alexandria promotes (even though the early Alexandrian Fathers - Clement, Origen, Eusebius - where all indebted to him and used him to argue for a pre-Christian Christianity essentially).

Also scholars lack imagination typically. So no one wants to explore these dangerous murky waters. High probability of being wrong. So it is avoided.

a) you have 'Yahweh/kurios' and 'Elohim/theos' and another 'most high god' associated with the Greek word 'despotes'
b) you have in the late second century a Trinity with Father, Son, Holy Spirit which doesn't quite 'square' with Philo in any discernable way
c) you have an effort in the third century onward to speak of only 'one rule/ruler' with ever changing rules of orthodoxy

They don't want us to know the truth (whatever it was) by the fourth century. Just shut up and accept the rule (whatever it was that week) OR ELSE ...
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MrMacSon
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Re: Use of abbreviations for names?

Post by MrMacSon »

Secret Alias wrote: Tue Oct 04, 2022 8:16 am 2. Jesus/Joshua is a[n] ordinary name. Unlikely (IMHO) to have ever been a substitute for Yahweh.
3. ... Joshua is a figure in the Pentateuch and the name has no special significance for Jews or Samaritans.
Joshua became an increasingly reflected upon and perhaps even revered entity eg. the Book of Zechariah

In the first century CE, and perhaps later, Jews and early Christians likely reflected upon that

And, of course, other things were at play, as you note:
Secret Alias wrote: Tue Oct 04, 2022 8:16 am
4. Jews and Samaritans had 'two powers' traditions. Philo seems to be one. Yahweh/kurios is not the 'ultimate god' but a power, the 'god of bad men.'

I think the answer is that we don't know how [or even if] Jesus/Iesous/nomen sacrum IS related back to Yahweh.
It's murky because there was a concerted effort in the third century to obscure what god was what* and alienate Christianity from the kind of 'two power' system like [the one] Philo of Alexandria promote[d] (even though the early Alexandrian Fathers - Clement, Origen, Eusebius - where all indebted to him and used him to argue for a pre-Christian Christianity,* essentially).

a) you have 'Yahweh/kurios' and 'Elohim/theos' and another 'most high god' associated with the Greek word 'despotes'
b) you have in the late second century a Trinity with Father, Son, Holy Spirit which doesn't quite 'square' with Philo in any discernable way
c) you have an effort in the third century onward to speak of only 'one rule/ruler' with ever changing rules of orthodoxy

They don't want us to know the truth (whatever it was) by the fourth century. Just shut up and accept the rule (whatever it was that week) OR ELSE ...

* that things were obscure in the third century is, imo, support for a mid-late second century time period for the early genesis of orthodox Christianity
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