Hermenia as a genre of coptic liturgical literature

This article deals with a genre known as hermenia and attested in early Coptic religious literature. Hermenia represents a compilation of verses from Psalter (with a rare addition of verses from other Biblical books) that are picked according to the occurence of the same keyword, i. e. it was a predecessor sui generis of Biblical concordance. The most extensive hermenia preserved is contained in the manuscript M 574 from the collection of Pierpont Morgan, dated to the 9th century; it serves as a source for this study. There arises the question why this genre has this particular name, literally meaning “defi nition, translation”. Comparing it with the biblical “literature of Wisdom”, we see its succession with regard to the numerical parable, where a certain number of objects and phenomena mentioned at the beginning are classifi ed according to the shared property or characteristic. In the Jewish exegesis of Tanakh, the numerical parable is transformed into a numerical midrash, where the source of material is Scripture, while the complilation is made by the shared keyword or root. A variety of a similar explanation, expanded and elaborated in a detailed way, is employed in the Manichean literature. The Coptic hermenia is presumably an abridged variant of the numerical midrash, employed by the early Coptic church with liturgical aims