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Offlinemorrowasted
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The origin story of YHWH
    #28387933 - 07/07/23 04:37 AM (6 months, 19 days ago)

When Moses asks God his name, God first answers by saying “I am what I am” and even follows this up with “tell them Ehyeh (I-Am) sent you.” The word ehyeh (“I am”) sounds very much like YHWH, and is meant as a play on words, explaining that YHWH’s name means “he will be” or “being.”[3] Thus, God follows up this implied etymology with the Tetragrammaton.

3:15 And God said further to Moses, “Thus shall you speak to the Israelites: ‘YHWH, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, AND the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This shall be My name forever, this My appellation for all eternity.”

Based on Egyptian records dating to the 14th century B.C.E., we know that the Midianites were not the only ethnic groups living this these areas.[10] In the geographical list in Amunhotep III’s Soleb Nubian temple, the people of the Aravah and the southern Transjordan are called Shaswe (or Shasu), a generic term meaning something like “nomadic tribes.”

The word shaswe, šꜣsw ()[11] is written after the Egyptian determinative for “land” tꜣ (), showing that the Egyptian text is describing different geographical areas inhabited by various shaswe. One area listed is called Nomad-land Seir, which is identical with the Mount Seir region in Edom. The following name in the list, and thus nearby or contiguous with Seir, was Nomad-land Yehwa, yhwꜣ(w) ().[12] The pronunciation of this name is uncertain, since like Hebrew, hieroglyphics do not include vowels, but the term seems to be related to the name of the Israelite deity, YHWH, whose precise ancient pronunciation is also unknown.

A Deity and a Land
In the list, Yehwa is the name of a land. Just as one nomadic group lived in a land called Seir, another lived in a land called Yehwa. But in antiquity, a name could sometimes be both a toponym and a theonym. The name Assyria (Aššur) illustrates this clearly: it is both the name of Assyria’s chief deity and of their ancient capital city. Eventually, it also became the name of their empire. Another example would be the Greek goddess of wisdom, Athena, who began as the patron goddess of Athens.[13]

YHWH Comes from the Edomite South

Song of Moses (Deut 33:2)
יְ־הוָה מִסִּינַי בָּא וְזָרַח מִשֵּׂעִיר לָמוֹ הוֹפִיעַ מֵהַר פָּארָן וְאָתָה מֵרִבְבֹת קֹדֶשׁ… YHWH came from Sinai; He shone upon them from Seir; He appeared from Mount Paran, and approached from Ribeboth-kodesh…
Song of Deborah (Judg 5:4)
יְ־הוָה בְּצֵאתְךָ מִשֵּׂעִיר בְּצַעְדְּךָ מִשְּׂדֵה אֱדוֹם אֶרֶץ רָעָשָׁה… YHWH, when You came forth from Seir, advanced from the country of Edom, the earth trembled…

Scholars call such exclusive worship of one god “monolatry.” While monotheism claims that no other gods exist, monolatry assumes loyalty and exclusive connection to one god, while allowing for the existence of other deities. In fact, many biblical passages that we read nowadays as monotheistic are really monolatrous. A classic example is in the Decalogue itself:

דברים ה:ז-ט לֹא יִהְיֶה לְךָ אֱלֹהִים אֲחֵרִים עַל פָּנָיַ… ה:ט לֹא תִשְׁתַּחְוֶה לָהֶם וְלֹא תָעָבְדֵם כִּי אָנֹכִי יְ־הוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ אֵל קַנָּא…. Deut 5:7 You shall have no other gods besides Me… 5:9 You shall not bow down to them or serve them. For I YHWH your God am an impassioned God….
The text does not say that no other gods exist, only that they should not be worshipped in addition to YHWH, because YHWH is an impassioned God who would naturally become jealous and agitated at such behavior. YHWH’s relationship with his followers is like that of a husband to a wife; he loves his worshipers but is dangerously jealous of any “worshipping around.” As the book of Proverbs states about husbands:

משלי ו:לד כִּי קִנְאָה חֲמַת גָּבֶר וְלֹא יַחְמוֹל בְּיוֹם נָקָם. Prov 6:34 The fury of the husband will be passionate; He will show no pity on his day of vengeance.
YHWH is just such an impassioned husband to his espoused people and just as vengeful if his people are disloyal.





https://www.thetorah.com/article/yhwh-the-original-arabic-meaning-of-the-name


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Offlinemorrowasted
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Re: The origin story of YHWH [Re: morrowasted]
    #28387948 - 07/07/23 04:56 AM (6 months, 19 days ago)

https://www.thetorah.com/article/yhwh-the-god-that-is-vs-the-god-that-becomes

YHWH: The God that Is vs. the God that Becomes

The meaning of God’s names, especially YHWH, is central to Jewish theology. Two approaches have dominated: the philosophical, focusing on God’s essence (“being”) and the kabbalistic, focusing on God’s evolving relationship with Israel (“becoming”). Some modern thinkers such as Malbim and Heschel have looked for new syntheses or formulations.

The canonical texts subtly shift between such epithets as Elohim, El, Adonai, Shaddai, Zevaotand, of course, the Tetragrammaton, YHWH, the four letter name that was paradoxically termed, the unpronounceable, “articulated name” (shem hameforash).[3] Whatever sense this phrase actually conveys, so sacrosanct was it considered that its explicit vocalization became taboo.[4]



YHWH: The God that Is vs. the God that Becomes
The meaning of God’s names, especially YHWH, is central to Jewish theology. Two approaches have dominated: the philosophical, focusing on God’s essence (“being”) and the kabbalistic, focusing on God’s evolving relationship with Israel (“becoming”). Some modern thinkers such as Malbim and Heschel have looked for new syntheses or formulations.

The Multiple Names of God

The Bible has multiple names for God. Jean Astruc (18th cent.), one of the founding fathers of biblical criticism, used the pattern of divine names YHWH and Elohim in Genesis and early Exodus to explain the contradictory accounts in the Bible. He suggested that they derived from two different sources that made use of one or the other of these names for God.[1] This insight laid the groundwork for what eventually matured into the Documentary Hypothesis.

The multiplicity of divine names—and not just YHWH and Elohim—are equally crucial for the development of Jewish theology, or, more correctly, theologies. After listing all the names used for God in his classic study of them, the Jewish theologian Arthur Marmorstein (1882-1946), who was both a yeshiva trained rabbi and a professor at Jews College, observed:

Here a wealthy sanctuary of the most treasured religious ideas and doctrines is opened to us, which invites entrance to all who want to come nearer to God. Nowhere is the creative genius of the pious scribes more at its best than in this long list.[2]
The canonical texts subtly shift between such epithets as Elohim, El, Adonai, Shaddai, Zevaotand, of course, the Tetragrammaton, YHWH, the four letter name that was paradoxically termed, the unpronounceable, “articulated name” (shem hameforash).[3] Whatever sense this phrase actually conveys, so sacrosanct was it considered that its explicit vocalization became taboo.[4]

Lost in Translation
Readers familiar with the Bible solely through translation, even the most devoted ones, remain unaware of this critical dimension in the biblical and rabbinic biography of God. Years in the classroom teaching the Hebrew Bible to undergraduates with no background in Hebrew have taught me this first hand. Distinctions between the different names are often blurred by their indiscriminate renderings as “God,” “LORD,” or “Lord.”[5]


Jewish Theology vs. Biblical Theology
Historical criticism is immensely important for reconstructing the complex formation of an ancient text, or even for excavating modes of divine encounters in an ancient Near Eastern context. From a historical-critical perspective, the different names of God may signal the disjointed fragments of a layered text offering clues to the disentangling a multi-authorial composition spanning many centuries.

Even so, as one prominent Jesuit scholar of the Old Testament put it, historical-critical research may only provide a “foundation of sand” for understanding any theological development.[6] If such is the case for Christian theology, it is even more apropos the evolution of Jewish thought. Since the Hebrew Bible became canonized, it has been read and intricately reread starting with the Second Temple works such as Jubilees, and continuing with the rabbinic sages in antiquity, and on. The Bible, on its own terms, therefore is a rich source of Jewish theology, but cannot be divorced from its long ensuing history of interpretation.

Of late, contemporary Jewish biblical scholars have expressed much greater interest in biblical theology.[7] However, Jewish theology, i.e., the approach of rabbinic Judaism throughout its long history, as opposed to biblical theology, i.e., the attempt to understand the Bible in its original context, emerges out of encountering the text holistically in its final redacted version. Approached this way, the alternating divine names offer clues, not to authorial construction, but to deific construction, leading to wholly different notions of a deity.

Theological Approaches to Understanding the Divine Names
For some, the names coalesce to produce austere philosophical abstractions of an immutable characterless God, lacking anything related to personhood. For others, they individually manifest different attributes that parallel human characteristics such as compassion and rigor. And for yet others, they indicate the elusiveness, the dynamism, of a God evolving, in tandem and reciprocally, with his creation and his creatures.

All of the Jewish intellectual traditions—rabbinic/midrashic, rationalist/ philosophical, and kabbalistic/mystical[8] — have profoundly engaged these different appellations, exploring and determining their meanings, significations, and precise roles within the diverse biblical contexts in which they appear.[9]

Maimonides – Names Derived from Actions

Moses Maimonides or Rambam (1138-1204), Judaism’s chief exponent of the rationalist tradition, holds that all divine names, except the Tetragrammaton, “correspond to the actions existing in the world,”[10] which reflect the different characteristic the name designates. As he states, they “derive from actions.”[11] Simply put, since a fundamental premise of his negative theology is that God possesses no attributes, the referent of these names is not God but rather phenomena in the natural world. Since nature is linked to God by virtue of it being His creation, a particular name or attribute is then semiotically reoriented toward God in His capacity as the remotest cause in the long chain of natural causation.

These names, in one sense, play a practical role for the sake of providing some linguistic referent for the purposes of religious worship such as prayer. Yet, if taken literally, they are simply false, and it is done at the cost of philosophical coherence

Philosophical Interpretation of YHWH: Being
Philosophically abstract conceptions of God originate with the ancient Greeks, and have influenced the development of philosophical theology through the Middle Ages to the present day. The Greek Septuagint version of ehyeh asher ehyeh as “I am the One who is” (ego eimi ho on), overwhelmingly influenced the history of biblical translation. It overshadowed all ensuing interpretation with a present tense that is amenable to Greek metaphysics and ontology of pure Being.[19] Subsequently, there emerged:

Philo’s “the Being who Is,”[20]
The New Testament’s “the Was, the Being, and the Is to come,”[21]
Maimonides’ “necessary existent,”
Aquinas’ “true being, immutable, simple self-sufficient,”
Moses Mendelssohn’s “Eternal Being” (ewige Wesen).
These understandings take this present tense metaphysics to its logical conclusions.[22]

This seemingly innocuous grammatical inflection set the agenda for all future onto-theological notions of divine perfection in their respective religious traditions.[23] Jewish theology has consequently been torn between the perfect immutable impersonal God that is,and the personal, relational God that is not static and fixed but rather becomes.

For Maimonides, YHWH is the one name of God that signifies pure divine essence stripped of all attributes. As such it signifies a wholly abstract being unrelated to the world. In fact, it is so detached from history and humanity that Maimonides draws on a midrash which considers God and the name YHWH to have preceded the creation of the world as an endorsement of this proposition.[24]


Mystical Interpretation of YHWH: Expressing a Relationship
While the rationalist movement attempted to purge the Bible of all its mythic dimensions, classical rabbinic thought, continuing through its midrashic genres, and on through kabbalah, actually picked up on that myth, developing, expanding, and enhancing it even further.[28]

How else can one characterize God wearing tefillin(phylacteries), accompanied by a debate that appears early on in the Talmud, as to what biblical passages are inserted in the divine tefillin compartments![29] It turns out that God’s tefillin are the mirror image of their human counterpart. Just as the latter contains the passage declaring God’s uniqueness so the former contains an analogous declaration:

Jew’s tefillin (Deut 6:4)
שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל יְ-הוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ יְ-הוָה אֶחָד. Hear O Israel YHWH is our God, YHWH alone (eḥad).
God’s tefillin (1 Chr 17:21)
וּמִי כְּעַמְּךָ יִשְׂרָאֵל גּוֹי אֶחָד בָּאָרֶץ… Who is like your people Israel, a unique (eḥad) nation on the earth…
As such, YHWH conveys more of a relational being in a partnership of reciprocity with Israel. It connotes a God of endless becoming, as the imperfect I will be indicates, a deity who cannot but be elusive, continually shaped and reshaped by the respective partners with whom it establishes a relationship. Other divine names then derive naturally in this respect from the core relational name YHWH. They correlate to various dimensions of God such as compassion, mercy, or justice, which are all manifest in relationships.

As opposed to Maimonides’ detached, unaffected, necessary existence, Rashi exquisitely captures this God of relationship by fleshing out the meaning of ehyeh asher ehyeh as,

אהיה עמם בצרה זו אשר אהיה עמם בשעבוד שאר מלכיות. I will be with them during this affliction as I will be with them during their oppression by other kingdoms.
God provides the comfort, assistance, and empathy expected of any partner in a meaningful relationship.

An Atbash (Transposed Anagram) Interpretation
Kabbalistic reinventions of ehyeh asher ehyeh, push this relational mutuality between God and human beings to striking extremes. For example, employing a traditional anagrammatic technique of transposing letters in words to create new words, in this case the last letter of the alphabet for the first (atbash), the Name becomes I will be what you will be [30] אהיה אשר תהיה.

Midrashic Interpretation of Yah – A Broken Relationship
Midrashic traditions further deepen the interdependence required by authentic relationships. For example, a partial appearance of the name YHWH such as YH (Exod. 17:16) indicates for the Rabbis a “partial” God, signifying a deity whose imperfect state of brokenness, alienation, and even exile, especially in the face of substantive evil in the world, can only be remedied by the restorative acts of human beings.[31] The kabbalistic notion of a broken fragmented deity in need of repair became a staple of mystical theology since the Middle Ages.[32]

Kabbalistic Interpretation – Closer to the Biblical Original
Rabbinic and mystical interpretations of an evolving, impressionable, at times fragmented and suffering, God, emerge more naturally from the original sense of a personal interventionist God subject to emotions and affectation in the Hebrew Bible as well as its rabbinic overlay.[33]

Thus, a mythic continuum stretches from the Bible through rabbinic midrash, kabbalah, and onward. Conversely, the philosophical abstractions consistent with notions of divine perfection actually require a violent distortion of the original text, imposing a notion of the deity that is foreign both to the written text and its voluminous oral traditions.



YHWH: The God that Is vs. the God that Becomes
The meaning of God’s names, especially YHWH, is central to Jewish theology. Two approaches have dominated: the philosophical, focusing on God’s essence (“being”) and the kabbalistic, focusing on God’s evolving relationship with Israel (“becoming”). Some modern thinkers such as Malbim and Heschel have looked for new syntheses or formulations.

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Prof.James A. Diamond
YHWH: The God that Is vs. the God that Becomes
Burning bush sculpture by David Palombo (1966) at the entrance of the Knesset, Jerusalem

The Multiple Names of God
The Bible has multiple names for God. Jean Astruc (18th cent.), one of the founding fathers of biblical criticism, used the pattern of divine names YHWH and Elohim in Genesis and early Exodus to explain the contradictory accounts in the Bible. He suggested that they derived from two different sources that made use of one or the other of these names for God.[1] This insight laid the groundwork for what eventually matured into the Documentary Hypothesis.

The multiplicity of divine names—and not just YHWH and Elohim—are equally crucial for the development of Jewish theology, or, more correctly, theologies. After listing all the names used for God in his classic study of them, the Jewish theologian Arthur Marmorstein (1882-1946), who was both a yeshiva trained rabbi and a professor at Jews College, observed:

Here a wealthy sanctuary of the most treasured religious ideas and doctrines is opened to us, which invites entrance to all who want to come nearer to God. Nowhere is the creative genius of the pious scribes more at its best than in this long list.[2]
The canonical texts subtly shift between such epithets as Elohim, El, Adonai, Shaddai, Zevaotand, of course, the Tetragrammaton, YHWH, the four letter name that was paradoxically termed, the unpronounceable, “articulated name” (shem hameforash).[3] Whatever sense this phrase actually conveys, so sacrosanct was it considered that its explicit vocalization became taboo.[4]

Lost in Translation
Readers familiar with the Bible solely through translation, even the most devoted ones, remain unaware of this critical dimension in the biblical and rabbinic biography of God. Years in the classroom teaching the Hebrew Bible to undergraduates with no background in Hebrew have taught me this first hand. Distinctions between the different names are often blurred by their indiscriminate renderings as “God,” “LORD,” or “Lord.”[5]


Jewish Theology vs. Biblical Theology
Historical criticism is immensely important for reconstructing the complex formation of an ancient text, or even for excavating modes of divine encounters in an ancient Near Eastern context. From a historical-critical perspective, the different names of God may signal the disjointed fragments of a layered text offering clues to the disentangling a multi-authorial composition spanning many centuries.

Even so, as one prominent Jesuit scholar of the Old Testament put it, historical-critical research may only provide a “foundation of sand” for understanding any theological development.[6] If such is the case for Christian theology, it is even more apropos the evolution of Jewish thought. Since the Hebrew Bible became canonized, it has been read and intricately reread starting with the Second Temple works such as Jubilees, and continuing with the rabbinic sages in antiquity, and on. The Bible, on its own terms, therefore is a rich source of Jewish theology, but cannot be divorced from its long ensuing history of interpretation.

Of late, contemporary Jewish biblical scholars have expressed much greater interest in biblical theology.[7] However, Jewish theology, i.e., the approach of rabbinic Judaism throughout its long history, as opposed to biblical theology, i.e., the attempt to understand the Bible in its original context, emerges out of encountering the text holistically in its final redacted version. Approached this way, the alternating divine names offer clues, not to authorial construction, but to deific construction, leading to wholly different notions of a deity.

Theological Approaches to Understanding the Divine Names
For some, the names coalesce to produce austere philosophical abstractions of an immutable characterless God, lacking anything related to personhood. For others, they individually manifest different attributes that parallel human characteristics such as compassion and rigor. And for yet others, they indicate the elusiveness, the dynamism, of a God evolving, in tandem and reciprocally, with his creation and his creatures.

All of the Jewish intellectual traditions—rabbinic/midrashic, rationalist/ philosophical, and kabbalistic/mystical[8] — have profoundly engaged these different appellations, exploring and determining their meanings, significations, and precise roles within the diverse biblical contexts in which they appear.[9]

Maimonides – Names Derived from Actions
Moses Maimonides or Rambam (1138-1204), Judaism’s chief exponent of the rationalist tradition, holds that all divine names, except the Tetragrammaton, “correspond to the actions existing in the world,”[10] which reflect the different characteristic the name designates. As he states, they “derive from actions.”[11] Simply put, since a fundamental premise of his negative theology is that God possesses no attributes, the referent of these names is not God but rather phenomena in the natural world. Since nature is linked to God by virtue of it being His creation, a particular name or attribute is then semiotically reoriented toward God in His capacity as the remotest cause in the long chain of natural causation.

These names, in one sense, play a practical role for the sake of providing some linguistic referent for the purposes of religious worship such as prayer. Yet, if taken literally, they are simply false, and it is done at the cost of philosophical coherence. (On Maimonides’s understanding of the Tetragrammaton, see below.)

Nahmanides – Dimensions of God’s Dynamic Being
On the other end of the Jewish theological spectrum is Moses Nahmanides or Ramban (1194-1270), one of the most prominent medieval rabbinic exegetes and Kabbalistic expositors of the Bible. For him, God is far more reactive and personal than some remote first cause of existence, and thus the names capture different dimensions of God’s dynamic being. In fact, they are such paramount divine ciphers as to form the algorithmic keys to the Torah since it can be read in its entirety as an elongated continuous thread of divine names.[12]

In other words, the Bible only superficially records historical events, depicts human characters, and normatively regulates human conduct by mitzvot. All that comprises simply an external shell that masks an entirely different story. That story is an esoteric narrative pulsating beneath the surface that charts the life of God, via the medium of names. The transition from a solid block of names to an individuated one of discrete words is for the sake of human intelligibility. It marks a transition from “the supra-legal to the legal, from a primordial Torah to the written and oral Torah, from the invisible to the visible.”[13]

The Name YHWH
Essential to the development of all divine name theology is the name YHWH, which, occurs repeatedly throughout the book of Genesis, but is only introduced formally, in direct response to Moses’ request for it, in Exod. 3:13 at the burning bush theophany. Exod. 6:3 corroborates its unprecedented disclosure to Moses-

וָאֵרָא אֶל אַבְרָהָם אֶל יִצְחָק וְאֶל יַעֲקֹב בְּאֵל שַׁדָּי וּשְׁמִי יְהוָה לֹא נוֹדַעְתִּי לָהֶם. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as E-l Shad-dai, but I did not make Myself known to them by My name YHWH.
Although its apparent meaning is “cause to be,” it remains unclear what precisely the name means. Cognate Semitic roots inventively render alternatives ranging from “blow” (thus a storm god), to “fall” (thus the one who destroys), to “roar” (thus the god of thunder), to “passionate,” to name but a few.[14] The interminable debates regarding its meaning are so wide-ranging one scholar claims they form a separate academic discipline of “hayyaology.”[15]

Ehyeh asher Ehyeh
Whatever the historical meaning of the name, the Torah’s first communication of it to Moses includes an etymological nod towards its meaning in the seemingly tautological and seductive play on the root “to be” of ehyeh asher ehyeh (Exod. 3:14) “I will be who I will be” or “I am who I am.”

וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים אֶל מֹשֶׁה אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה וַיֹּאמֶר כֹּה תֹאמַר לִבְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל אֶהְיֶה שְׁלָחַנִי אֲלֵיכֶם. And God said to Moses, “Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh.” He continued, “Thus shall you say to the Israelites, ‘Ehyeh sent me to you.'” (NJPS)
This enigmatic phrase, evasively formulated in the first person imperfect form of the root “to be,” rather than the third person of the name itself, has provoked an endless stream of translations, interpretations, and scholarship, from the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation, to the twentieth century philosopher Martin Buber, and beyond. This contentiousness itself attests to what I believe is its deliberate ambiguity and irresolvable open-endedness.[16]

Enigmatic as it may be, ehyeh asher ehyeh remains the sole overt exposition of the divine name YHWH in the entire Hebrew Bible.[17] Thus, it is also of utmost importance to comprehend the narrative context from which it emerged to become a mainstay of any Jewish theology, philosophical or otherwise.

Franz Rosenzweig considered the attempt to understand this phrase paramount for what he felt is the “task” of Jewish theology since this encounter and dialogue between Moses and God out of which the name emerges is that moment which foundationally envisages all future divine/human encounters. Rosenzweig credited Moses Mendelssohn with pioneering the “task” of understanding the full import of this inaugural encounter, of “connecting the name to the moment at which the name was revealed.”[18]

Philosophical Interpretation of YHWH: Being
Philosophically abstract conceptions of God originate with the ancient Greeks, and have influenced the development of philosophical theology through the Middle Ages to the present day. The Greek Septuagint version of ehyeh asher ehyeh as “I am the One who is” (ego eimi ho on), overwhelmingly influenced the history of biblical translation. It overshadowed all ensuing interpretation with a present tense that is amenable to Greek metaphysics and ontology of pure Being.[19] Subsequently, there emerged:

Philo’s “the Being who Is,”[20]
The New Testament’s “the Was, the Being, and the Is to come,”[21]
Maimonides’ “necessary existent,”
Aquinas’ “true being, immutable, simple self-sufficient,”
Moses Mendelssohn’s “Eternal Being” (ewige Wesen).
These understandings take this present tense metaphysics to its logical conclusions.[22]

This seemingly innocuous grammatical inflection set the agenda for all future onto-theological notions of divine perfection in their respective religious traditions.[23] Jewish theology has consequently been torn between the perfect immutable impersonal God that is,and the personal, relational God that is not static and fixed but rather becomes.

For Maimonides, YHWH is the one name of God that signifies pure divine essence stripped of all attributes. As such it signifies a wholly abstract being unrelated to the world. In fact, it is so detached from history and humanity that Maimonides draws on a midrash which considers God and the name YHWH to have preceded the creation of the world as an endorsement of this proposition.[24]


A window featuring the tetragrammaton at St. Charles’s Church in Karlskirche, Vienna.
Significance of the “God of Being” in Christianity
Despite Maimonides and the school of Jewish rationalism of which he is the leading exponent, this view of a pure unchanging perfect necessary existence, devoid of any characteristics associated with personhood, known as “Being,” was far more endemic to Christianity. All the evidence indicates it is a foreign intruder to the rabbinic tradition. Etienne Gilson best sums this up with his assertion that

Exodus lays down the principle from which henceforth the whole of Christian philosophy will be suspended… There is but one God and this God is Being, this is the cornerstone of all Christian philosophy.[25]
A recent exhaustive study of Western Christianity’s reception of the Name similarly asserts,

For some fifteen centuries from the Fathers to Leibnitz and Wolff, the God of Moses’ religion and the Being of Greek philosophy met without confusion at the heart of the Christian faith.[26]
Yet, God’s declaration ehyeh, as a form of the root “to be,” in addition to its open-endedness, does not explicitly disclose the name YHWH. It seems to be an intentional evasion of Moses’ request for a name that uniquely identifies someone or something. It thus defies the kinds of definition and classification that are the hallmarks of philosophical reasoning. Even Philo himself, the ancient pioneer of philosophical theology, admits this when he supplements the meaning of YHWH as Being with the lesson that “no name at all can properly be used of Me, to whom all existence belongs.”[27]

Mystical Interpretation of YHWH: Expressing a Relationship

While the rationalist movement attempted to purge the Bible of all its mythic dimensions, classical rabbinic thought, continuing through its midrashic genres, and on through kabbalah, actually picked up on that myth, developing, expanding, and enhancing it even further.[28]

How else can one characterize God wearing tefillin(phylacteries), accompanied by a debate that appears early on in the Talmud, as to what biblical passages are inserted in the divine tefillin compartments![29] It turns out that God’s tefillin are the mirror image of their human counterpart. Just as the latter contains the passage declaring God’s uniqueness so the former contains an analogous declaration:

Jew’s tefillin (Deut 6:4)
שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל יְ-הוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ יְ-הוָה אֶחָד.
Hear O Israel YHWH is our God, YHWH alone (eḥad).
God’s tefillin (1 Chr 17:21)
וּמִי כְּעַמְּךָ יִשְׂרָאֵל גּוֹי אֶחָד בָּאָרֶץ…
Who is like your people Israel, a unique (eḥad) nation on the earth…

As such, YHWH conveys more of a relational being in a partnership of reciprocity with Israel. It connotes a God of endless becoming, as the imperfect I will be indicates, a deity who cannot but be elusive, continually shaped and reshaped by the respective partners with whom it establishes a relationship. Other divine names then derive naturally in this respect from the core relational name YHWH. They correlate to various dimensions of God such as compassion, mercy, or justice, which are all manifest in relationships.

As opposed to Maimonides’ detached, unaffected, necessary existence, Rashi exquisitely captures this God of relationship by fleshing out the meaning of ehyeh asher ehyeh as,

אהיה עמם בצרה זו אשר אהיה עמם בשעבוד שאר מלכיות.
I will be with them during this affliction as I will be with them during their oppression by other kingdoms.
God provides the comfort, assistance, and empathy expected of any partner in a meaningful relationship.

An Atbash (Transposed Anagram) Interpretation

Kabbalistic reinventions of ehyeh asher ehyeh, push this relational mutuality between God and human beings to striking extremes. For example, employing a traditional anagrammatic technique of transposing letters in words to create new words, in this case the last letter of the alphabet for the first (atbash), the Name becomes I will be what you will be [30] אהיה אשר תהיה.

Midrashic Interpretation of Yah – A Broken Relationship
Midrashic traditions further deepen the interdependence required by authentic relationships. For example, a partial appearance of the name YHWH such as YH (Exod. 17:16) indicates for the Rabbis a “partial” God, signifying a deity whose imperfect state of brokenness, alienation, and even exile, especially in the face of substantive evil in the world, can only be remedied by the restorative acts of human beings.[31] The kabbalistic notion of a broken fragmented deity in need of repair became a staple of mystical theology since the Middle Ages.[32]

Kabbalistic Interpretation – Closer to the Biblical Original
Rabbinic and mystical interpretations of an evolving, impressionable, at times fragmented and suffering, God, emerge more naturally from the original sense of a personal interventionist God subject to emotions and affectation in the Hebrew Bible as well as its rabbinic overlay.[33]

Thus, a mythic continuum stretches from the Bible through rabbinic midrash, kabbalah, and onward. Conversely, the philosophical abstractions consistent with notions of divine perfection actually require a violent distortion of the original text, imposing a notion of the deity that is foreign both to the written text and its voluminous oral traditions.

Modern Critiques of the Philosophical Approach
Contemporary Jewish theology continues the assault on rationalist understandings of YHWH as “pure Being.”

Buber – The Need for a Vital God
Martin Buber (1878-1965) forcefully challenged the philosophical notions of God, both on philological grounds, and on the claim that they are abstractions of a kind that do not usually arise in periods of increasing religious vitality. According to Buber, “religious vitality” gives rise to a vital and dynamic being, a God of presentness, rather than a static definitive one. For him, “It means happening, coming into being, being there, being present, being thus and thus; but not being in an abstract sense.”[34]

Hertz – Active Manifestation not Passive Being
Earlier, Rabbi Joseph H. Hertz (1872-1946), in his commentary on Exod. 3:14, until recently, the standard edition of the Pentateuch used in most Modern Orthodox congregations, had noted that the name “must not be understood in the philosophical sense of mere ‘being’, but as an active manifestation of the Divine existence.”[35]

Malbim’s Compromise
God further qualifies the announcement of His name to Moses in the verse following the disclosure of Ehyeh asher Ehyeh by historically contextualizing YHWH to enhance the name’s recognizability for the wider community:

יְ-הוָה אֱלֹהֵי אֲבֹתֵיכֶם אֱלֹהֵי אַבְרָהָם אֱלֹהֵי יִצְחָק וֵאלֹהֵי יַעֲקֹב שְׁלָחַנִי אֲלֵיכֶם. YHWH the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob sent me to you. (3:15)
He then supplements it further with an assertion about its temporal intelligibility:

זֶה שְּׁמִי לְעֹלָם וְזֶה זִכְרִי לְדֹר דֹּר.
This is my name for all time And this is my memorial for successive generations.
The nineteenth century exegete, Meïr Leibush ben Yehiel Michel Wisser (d. 1879), known as Malbim, hybridizes the traditions about the name’s meaning. He parses what is patently an emphatic avowal of durability into a proclamation of two different dimensions to the human encounter with God, resulting in different perceptions of God:

שלעולם מציין הזמן התמידי הבלתי מתחלק, ולדור דור מציין הזמן המתחלק לפי הדורות,
For le’olam expresses time that is continuous and indivisible while dordor expresses time that is periodic, segmented according to each generation.
By distinguishing between different senses of temporality conveyed by the terms “forever” (le’olam) and “every generation” (dor dor), the phrase conveys two facets of God’s being, one closer to the philosophical eternal immutable God, and the other a relational God persistently in flux. Accordingly, the first term signifies,

והוא שמי העצמי זה לא ישתנה בשום דור והוא עומד לעולם בהנהגה קבועה בלתי משתנה.
This is His essential name, it does not change in any generation, and He stands constant for every period and conducts Himself in a fixed and immutable manner.
At the same time, the second term connotes that,

שבכל דור ודור יש הנהגה חדשה וזוכרים את מעשיו באופן אחר כמ”ש אלהי אברהם אלהי יצחק, שבדור יצחק נשתנה ההנהגה האלהית ממה שהיה בימי אברהם.

Each generation experiences a novel mode of governance and remembers His ways differently as it states “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac,” meaning that divine governance in Isaac’s generation was different than in Abraham’s.

A Generation-Specific God

Each generation, in a sense, relates to a different God who is transformed by the particular encounters engendered by unique temporal and human contexts. That “memorial” associated with “successive generations” is associated with the flux of history, conditioning any knowledge of God on Israel’s experiences of God at different junctures within history. Preserving those memories of how each generation experiences its own version of God’s name thus presents a prime instance of Yosef Haim Yerushalmi’s evaluation of the role of memory in the life of Israel as “crucial to its faith, and ultimately to its very existence.”[36]


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OfflineLucisM
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Re: The origin story of YHWH [Re: morrowasted]
    #28388195 - 07/07/23 09:28 AM (6 months, 18 days ago)

So, does YHWH covet, does YHWH want love so badly from his followers that he covets attention given to other deities by being jealous and vengeful? 

Is YHWH like a jealous spouse who sees his wife (followers) flirting with another deity and then covets the lack of attention?

Is this going against a commandment? 

I am in no way trying to be rude to Christians or Jews since I was born and raised in a non-denominational Christian household I have no hate towards Christians, it's just an honest question.

Thank you for the information Morrowasted, great stuff, very informative!  I like to study comparative religion and the origins of such things!


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Re: The origin story of YHWH [Re: Lucis]
    #28388396 - 07/07/23 12:52 PM (6 months, 18 days ago)

You're not misreading anything. YHWH is literally the jealous husband.


He is the embodiment of hypocrisy.

He is jealous of isis because she fell in love with Osiris

As a result of that he very much needs to be needed and therefore creates monolatry

The full embodiment of manometry as a mental virus shows up in the form of suicide bombers who believe they are going to fuck 70some virgin irises if they kill stubborn non-monolatrists


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Re: The origin story of YHWH [Re: morrowasted]
    #28388398 - 07/07/23 12:55 PM (6 months, 18 days ago)

What the kabbalistic tradition does is to simply say no that word Eyeh doesn't mean I am it means I will be.


They take the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet and transpose it against the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet and in doing so every resulting word is a derivative name of their El


Muslims openly confess that their God is the same God but simply insist that it is called Al rather than El.


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Re: The origin story of YHWH [Re: morrowasted]
    #28388401 - 07/07/23 12:58 PM (6 months, 18 days ago)

You will find there is a neologism called hayyaology transliterates to the study of the one that happens


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Re: The origin story of YHWH [Re: Lucis]
    #28388729 - 07/07/23 07:22 PM (6 months, 18 days ago)

Quote:

Lucis said:
I am in no way trying to be rude to Christians or Jews since I was born and raised in a non-denominational Christian household I have no hate towards Christians, it's just an honest question.




I too grew up under a christian mother. I was forced to go to church each sunday. It was a
particularly nasty, damp and dark church, and I fainted from lack of oxygene three or
four times, and had to be carried outside. When I was old enough to make my own decisions,
I decided not to do this anymore.

I asked my mother if all those gold statuettes and coloured window panes don't divert from
the true purpose of religion, which is to provide a path to enlightenment. She replied
that it is meant to give a glimpse of heaven, on earth. I said that if heaven looks like
a church, I don't want to go there.

I think Christianity sucks, plain and easy. I don't believe in a soul. I much prefer the
Buddhist idea of anatta.

As it is said in one of the Highlander movies:

"Nothing is for eternity."

Christians usually have a serious problem with drugs - except alcohol, which is even
considered holy. I think this speaks of a particularly narrow mindset. On the other
hand, psychedelics fit well with Buddhism. After all, ego death is what Buddhism is all
about. There is a book called "Zig Zag Zen", which is about the usage of psychedelics
in the Zen tradition. I didn't read it yet, but it sounds interesting.


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Re: The origin story of YHWH [Re: AnattaAtman] * 1
    #28388921 - 07/08/23 12:47 AM (6 months, 18 days ago)

Quote:

AnattaAtman said:
I don't believe in a soul.





I think that the soul can be a trap, if you subscribe to a particular belief structure that believes in a soul then that belief structure might tell you that you have to do such and such in order to have your soul protected and saved from the belief structures opinion about what is wrong with the world.

When viewed in this context, it can open people up for being abused by people that prey upon those who believe in a soul or are looking for the redemption which a soul might offer.

But the word soul is something created to describe something, a state of mind, being, consciousness, etc, one doesn't need a soul to believe in some afterlife if that's your cup of tea. 

One only needs to believe in consciousness, how we experience the world and qualia both play a major part in what consciousness is since it seems like maybe we're flesh suits which are like a radio and consciousness is the power/signal (life) which animates us.

It's sort of like flat money (US dollar) which isn't backed by gold, the money is an illusion, something which allows certain types of transactions to transpire but is not backed by anything. 

The soul when in a religious setting allows certain transactions to transpire yet those transactions are illusions that bind us to a certain state of being, so are really without true worth if that makes sense. 

One cannot sell their soul because you're selling a definition of something and not the actual thing which doesn't need to exist in order to have a liberating spiritual, religious, etc, experience.  Does that make sense?

I believe the concept of a soul to be rather strange because it can be used to harm as well as inspire hope.

You have people that claim they can sell a soul for something yet it's just a show, people selling illusions to pull the wool over your eyes, the "sold soul" idea is based on fear-mongering that some devil is going to get you if you don't do what you're told, this is a lie because the devil would just be an emanation of consciousness like you are so how can you sell your soul to a dark aspect of the same thing you are? 

If everything is emanating from consciousness, arising from consciousness, etc, then there's nothing out to get you, and the true gift one can give the world, the most meaningful, is peace, since if everything is arising from the same place you are then to give peace, or actively promote it, is being rather selfless. 

I think the largest egregore on earth is peace, it's just a lot of people try to have it their way only which breeds selfishness because it doesn't bring about true peace, but rather only certain groups' ideas of what peace is which isn't always best for everyone. 

Maybe those coexist stickers have it correct, lol!

The soul seems like a strange and controlling yet also genius creation.

I hope this makes sense, I have to go to bed!


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Re: The origin story of YHWH [Re: Lucis]
    #28388987 - 07/08/23 05:21 AM (6 months, 18 days ago)

Sol in Latin and Spanish means sun. Likely a doublet of So -L(a). From So - El.


Ah and Eh as well as L and R get easily confused and transposed throughout history of language diffusion.

Ra ~ La



The phoneme ra was most commonly depicted as a ⭕, often with a dot/point at its center, and was the name for the sun god... Other time "Ra" is depicted as a bird.



This bird is the son of the sun, Ra.

Sa Ra ~ Pharaoh
Eventually these were compressed into one logogram:




Semitic languages lacked vowel symbols; the vowel used was frequently not even important and the meaning of the word was derived from context and consonants: simply interruptions of air moving.

L seems to be consonant personal to the canaanites, who later became the tribes of Judah (is ra El ) and the tribes descending from 'esau" (Ish ma El).

At mount Horeb, far north of where Israelites had been prior, God 'reveals' his new name: Eh yeh "I am/I will be"


From so(u)l you get solo/sole, solar, soliloquy, desolate, solitary, solipsism....


u = epsilon


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Re: The origin story of YHWH [Re: morrowasted]
    #28389194 - 07/08/23 10:03 AM (6 months, 17 days ago)

Alternatively

Sól is a goddess in Norse mythology. 'Sol' means Sun.


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