Abstract

The paper presents the exegetical role that the Old Testament names of places and persons have in Augustine’s exegesis of the Psalms within his commentary Enarrationes in Psalmos. It presents the vocabulary used by Saint Augustine within the Enarrationes in Psalmos to talk about the different meanings that Scripture has. It suggests that for Saint Augustine everything within the Scriptures has a meaning, and so also all the names of persons and places that are in the texts of the Psalms - or within their titles - have a meaning for the believer. It also makes a brief presentation of Augustine’s sources for this exegetical work, underlining the influence of Jerome’s work Liber Interpretationis Hebraicorum Nominum. Finally it presents briefly the main theological ideas that Saint Augustine derives in his Enarrationes in Psalmos from his exegetical work with the names of persons and places, having as a leitmotiv the idea of the peregrinatio. The believer is a pilgrim that goes from the Earthly Babylon to the heavenly Jerusalem, name that is interpreted as uisio pacis.