For the first time in the Ukrainian medieval studies an attempt was made to comprehensively study the place and role of biblical hermeneutics in the works of ancient Ukrainian literature of the 11th - 18th centuries.
The issues of the formation, development and functioning of biblical hermeneutics in ancient Ukrainian literature are considered in four sections of the paper.
Biblical hermeneutics is analyzed as the object of historical and literary studies. The paper studies the formation and development of biblical hermeneutics as a science. The level of study of biblical hermeneutics in Ukrainian literary studies has been established.
The ways of borrowing and stages of the development of biblical hermeneutics in the Ukrainian translation and original literature of the Old Testament period are explored. The first translations of the Bible are described as the first stages of the development of its exegesis. The works of translated Old Kyiv literature are outlined through the prism of biblical hermeneutics. Their influence on the further development of the original Old Kiev literature is investigated. The paper defines that two main methods of biblical hermeneutics, literary and allegorical, formed in the first theological schools, were brought to Kyiv Rus along with translated literature. First of all, the author connects this process with patristics, where the theologians, on the one hand, outlined the literal method of exegesis (Antiochian school), on the other hand, with allegorical interpretation of Scripture (Alexandrian school), and on the third hand, the synthesis of two opposing exegetical methods (the Cappadocia school), within which the literal sense of reading the Bible was allowed, as well as a symbolic meaning when it was about biblical parables, riddles, dark places, etc.; with translated tales and novels, where the interpretation of the Bible vanished in the form of allusions, paraphrases and allegorical figures.
The results of the study suggest that the use of Biblical hermeneutics in the original genres of ancient Kyiv literature is the first stage of its development even in the absence of its scientific and theoretical basis in the ancient Ukrainian literature of the 11th-13th centuries.
Biblical hermeneutics in polemical and baroque literature is presented as a synthesis of eastern and western hermeneutic schools, taking into account the basics of ancient and Jewish rhetoric; the reception of Western four-part biblical hermeneutics with Ukrainian polemical literature is analyzed on the example of creativity of the representatives of controversial confessions by Meletii Smotrytskyi and Iov Zaliza from the side of Orthodoxy, Petro Skarha and Ipatii Potii by Catholicism.
The study revealed that in the structure of biblical hermeneutics, Ukrainian writers-polemists from the Orthodox, Catholic and unicameral churches favoured noematics and heuristics, showing a special attitude to language as a sign system, given that during the interpretation of the Bible it was not enough to use the linguistic sign as the name of a thing. With its help it was also necessary to transmit the sensus plenior discovered in Scripture.
This study demonstrates that the final stage of the development of biblical hermeneutics in the ancient Ukrainian literature was the Baroque era, which united in itself the traditions of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
