Teknonymy in the Old Testament

Extract

The term teknonymy is applied to the custom of naming a man after his son. It is unusual in Western Europe, where the name received at birth is rarely changed, but as a practice of primitive peoples it has long been known to anthropologists. Indeed the term is of anthropological devising, apparently invented by Tylor, the father of the craft, and duly noted in Sir James Frazer's great repertorium of anthropological data, The Golden Bough. But neither Frazer nor Tylor seems to have referred to the teknonymy of a civilized people, the Arabs, who have developed the system as fully as could well be done. Almost every Arab has a personal or direct name, the ism, and an indirect one, or surname, taken from his child, the kunyah. He may have a number of other names as well, derived from his tribe, his rank, a sobriquet, a common pseudonym, or a patronymic. But it is the name and kunyah that most closely correspond to the given, or Christian, name and the surname of Western Europe. This kunyah contains the Abu, ‘father,’ indispensable to all Western writers who seek to establish an oriental background for their stories, culminating in the literally preposterous ‘Abou Ben Adhém’ of Leigh Hunt's famous poem. As a matter of fact kunyah may mean ‘patronymic,’ but the kunyah that contains Abu, ‘father of’, is so much the most common that ordinarily, when the word kunyah is used, we think of the teknonymic system rather than the other.