Have you ever heard of Josephus? He was a famous first century Jew who wrote a whole bunch of history books about the Middle East and the Holy Land.
Much of what we know about the world that Jesus grew up in comes from Josephus. He was one of the most important historians when it comes to us learning about the Intertestamental Period (the time between the end of the Old Testament and the birth of Jesus).
Well, like Josephus, the Christian historian Eusebius is the main reason why we know so much about the first three centuries of the church.
For this reason, Eusebius is commonly called “the father of church history”.
One of his most famous works is something called the Onomasticon. This is from a Greek word meaning “place names”. It’s where we get the English word “onomastic”, which means “relating to a name”.
The full name of Eusebius’ work was “On The Place Names In The Holy Scripture”. It is a big list briefly describing a lot of the places mentioned in the Old Testament and the Gospels.
Scholars call this kind of book “a gazetteer”. It’s like a dictionary for place names.
For example, in the Onomasticon, this is Eusebius’ entry for the word “Bethsaida”:
Bēthsaida
City of “Andrew and Peter” and Philipp (the apostles). Located in Galilee on (near) the Lake of Gennesareth.
Some entries are even shorter, like:
Amam
(In) the tribe of Juda.
There are also longer, more in-depth entries, but most are short.
In total, there are about 985 entries in the Onomasticon.
Originally, it seems that Onomasticon was the fourth part of a four part series of works by Eusebius, all detailing the geography of the Holy Land. However, the first three works are lost. The only one that survived, more or less intact, was the Onomasticon.
One of the other three parts was probably just giving the Greek version of the Hebrew place names. Another was a description of the geography of the tribes in Ancient Judea. And the third one was about the layout of Jerusalem.
Date
Now, we don’t know for sure when Eusebius wrote this book. But, most people think it was probably around 325 AD, plus or minus a few years.
Latin
A few decades after Eusebius died, Jerome (the man who compiled the Latin translation of the Bible, called the Vulgate) decided to translate the Onomasticon from Greek into Latin.
Jerome did this probably about 388 AD or so.
In Latin, he changed the title to “Book on the Sites and Names of the Places of the Hebrews”. He also added some entries and did some light editing of Eusebius’ work.
Nowadays, “Onomasticon” can be a general term to talk about a gazetteer, a list of names.