“This is my name forever” (Exodus 3:15)
It is said that Muslims understand that there are 100 names by which Allah is known, ninety-nine of them known to humans, the hundredth, according to nomads, known only to camels. I once read a science fiction short story in which a group of archaeologists discovered an ancient document that contained that hundredth name. At the moment they deciphered it, the stars began to disappear from the night sky. The name of God has always had an element of mystery associated with it. That is no less true of the names given to God in the Old Testament.
God is known by several names in the Old Testament, and even later translations of some of those names have led to even more mystery and misunderstanding as we shall see. The name (title?) given to God in Genesis 1 is the Hebrew word ‘elohîm. It is translated “God” with capital “g”. While this translation is fairly consistent in the Old Testament we should note that already the writers are marking the word ‘elohîm in a special way. It is actually a plural noun, used in places to mean “gods”, but in many other places the context makes it clear that the word does not refer to several gods but to Israel’s one God. The word is related to the singular noun ‘el, “god”, a very ancient word going back beyond the time of ancient Israel and related to the name of the Canaanite high God ‘ilu. That same root word lies behind the Arabic Allah. ‘el appears in a number of personal names of biblical characters in both Testaments, often at the end of the name as in, for example, Samuel, Daniel, Gabriel and Nathaniel.
The name of God which still contains an element of mystery even for modern scholars appears first in Genesis 2, the story of the Garden of Eden. It is the name often translated in modern Bibles as Lord written in small capitals. It translates a name expressed in Hebrew only by four consonants YHWH. This name has been regarded as sacred from late biblical times. In many early biblical and other manuscripts it was only represented by the four consonants and when vowels were added to the Hebrew text in general they were not included for this name so that readers in the Synagogues would not accidentally say the sacred name. In some of the Dead Sea Hebrew manuscripts the scribes would even use ancient forms of the four letters, which looked quite different to later letters, so that the name would not be read. Another way scribes tried to avoid people accidentally or thoughtlessly pronouncing the divine name was to add the vowels of another word used for God so that when the divine name YHWH was encountered it was read as ‘adonay, which means “my Lord”. The vowels from ‘adonay were superimposed on the name YHWH in written manuscripts. This has led later readers, largely unfamiliar with biblical Hebrew, to mispronounce the word entirely. The vowels of ‘adonay, when placed with the consonants YHWH, can be pronounced as Yehowah, with the “w” pronounced as a “v”, that is, Yehovah. Further complications relating to the pronunciation of Hebrew “y” as “j”, the latter not being a Hebrew sound, arose through early modern scholars. This led to the development and wide adoption of the divine name as Jehovah, used frequently in earlier translations of the Bible, hymns, prayers, and other writings. The truth is that Jehovah is not a biblical name at all.
Scholars debate where the name YHWH came from. One theory is that it relates to the Hebrew verb hayah “to be” and could have meant originally something like “he causes to be” or “he creates”. But that is not certain. It is interesting that in Exodus 3 when Moses demands to know who the God is who speaks to him from the burning bush, he is given an explanation involving the verb to be. God says: “I AM WHO I AM”, again in small capitals in the NRSV and other Bibles (Exodus 3:14).
Another variant of this divine name, much shorter, appears in a number of names of biblical characters including, for example, Elijah, and Adonijah. The “jah” syllable at the end is a shortened form of the divine name. It was possibly a variant in the name due to differences of dialect in different regions of the country. The name Elijah is interesting in that it contains two divine titles/names. “Eli” translates “my God” and “jah” is the divine name. So Elijah’s name literally translates “Yah is my God”.
Revd Dr Howard Wallace April 2019