Jesus, that is hælend: Hebrew Names and the Vernacular Savior in Anglo-Saxon England

Jesus has no place in Old English literature. Such a statement will strike readers as odd, given that the vast majority of the texts that comprise surviving Old English are explicitly Christian in content and all extant texts were copied by members of Christian religious orders. Nevertheless, it is literally true: the word Jesus hardly appears in the corpus of Old English writings. Although this has been casually noted by scholars in the past, the reasons, implications, and cultural significance of this absence have never been fully explored. The absence of Jesus’s name can be considered in terms of the early medieval appreciation of Hebrew and sacred onomastics, that is, the tradition of Biblical name etymologies, as inherited from the Hebrew world of the Old Testament and most clearly transmitted to the Latin west by St. Jerome. While Jerome’s Biblical commentaries were read widely throughout the Middle Ages, the Venerable Bede’s championship of Jerome’s Hebrew truth played a more direct role in the spread of the Hebraic tradition of name etymologizing in Anglo-Saxon England. Bede also clearly connects the importance of name etymology and the name of Jesus in particular, articulating its implications for a Christological understanding of scripture at the literal level. Bede provides a methodology that allows Latin readers to find Jesus by name throughout the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, thereby revealing the immediate connections between the Old and New Testaments. Bede’s influence is seen in the Old English homilies of Ælfric of Eynsham, who understands the significance of the name Jesus and its universal replacement by the Old English word hælend. Ælfric’s frequent discussions of the names Jesus and hælend in his homilies reveal the importance of the idea of Hebrew throughout the Anglo-Saxon period as well as its implications for the role of the vernacular in the promulgation of Scripture.

As Fred Robinson has shown, the literal meanings of proper names are of great interest to Old English authors, and indeed to authors throughout the Middle Ages.¹ Robinson primarily locates the impetus of Anglo-Saxon interest in name etymologies among the Church Fathers, who in turn were inspired by the Bible.² The Hebrew text of the Bible—especially Genesis—is full of onomastic paronomasia; many names are explained in terms of their significance. Of course, much of the wordplay in this ancient text is based on aural connections that are not necessarily etymologically valid, but this was not a concern for the authors of the Bible or its Jewish or later Christian commentators. Man (’ā d ām) is so called because he is made from the earth (’ă d āmāh, Gn. 2:7); woman (’îššah) because she is made from man (’îš, Gn. 2:23); and Eve (ḥawwāh) because she is the mother of all the living (ḥāy, Gn. 3:20). Abraham, we are told, is given his new name because he will be “father of many” (’a b -hămôn, Gn. 17:5); Moses’s name refers to the fact that he was “drawn (verbal root mšh) from the water” (Ex. 2:10). Now many of these “etymologies” are founded on weak aural connections—especially names like Abraham and Moses, which in origin are not Hebrew names at all—which would have been obvious to the earliest Hebrew readers of the Bible.³ Nevertheless, the presence of these explanations inspired the midrashic tradition of seeking out further etymological significance throughout the Bible.⁴ Greek and later Latin commentators follow this tradition, but their translations of Hebrew necessitated separate lists of names and their meanings so that readers could appreciate the wordplay found in the original.⁵ It also opens up the Biblical text and its names to rampant allegorical interpretation. For the Latin west, the most important of these lists was Jerome’s Liber interpretationis hebraicorum nominum.⁶ Although Jerome transmitted this information, he was wary about philologically suspect etymologies and their allegorical value; at the same time, he and his medieval followers were keenly...