What's in a Holy Name?

The Burning Bush by Marc Chagall

Of course, God isn’t God’s name. It’s a proper noun, but no more the divine name than Elizabeth II’s name is Queen. Speak it aloud or start a sentence with it, and you have a tossup or an interpretation from context. The English word derives from an old Germanic one that referred to Thor, Frey, and Odin and appears in texts of living religions as a translation of deus in Latin, theos in Greek, el in Hebrew, and deva in Sanskrit. All have been used by polytheists and adapted to mean a supreme god such as Zeus. Even Allah, revered from pre-Islamic times as the high god (if not the only god back then), is a Semitic term meaning “the god.” In the Vedantic tradition (which predates the Hebrew Bible by 500 years), ultimate reality (often called Brahman) is a single being expressed by many names and images, human and nonhuman, but transcending all possible names or representations.

In contrast, the god of Moses has a true name, one dictated from a burning bush on Mount Horeb. Moses is grazing sheep on the mountain when God commands him to return to Egypt and rescue the Israelites from slavery. “Who shall I say sends me.” Moses asks, and God declares, “I am what I am" and gives his name as YHWH, supposed to be derived from the Hebrew verb “to be.” He says something like, "My name is I Am." In the Jewish tradition, this is is no ordinary description, but a sacred sound. “This will be my name forever." Hebrew writing originally used only consonants, so that written name hid the customary pronunciation, which came to be so revered—not to be taken “in vain” according to the Third Commandment—that in the temple eras it was pronounced only at Yom Kippur by the high priest in the inner sanctuary. 

After the destruction of the temple in 70 CE, most Jews don’t pronounce the name at all. However, YHWH appears many times in the Torah, which is read aloud in synagogue, so the word adonai (the Lord) is traditionally spoken in its place, its diacritical marks written over the tetragram. This led to the hybrid Jehovah made by superimposing adonai vowels over YHWH consonants, a usage popular in English Protestant translations after William Tyndale’s, through the King James version of my childhood. Scholars today reconstruct the tetragram’s ancient pronunciation as Yahweh, but pronouncing the name aloud is still discouraged by Judaism.

All language evolves through time. One spectacular case is the name of Jesus, so evolved that the English pronunciation today differs from the original Aramaic in every detail: a different number of syllables and no shared sounds. Obviously, a deity who knows the secrets of our hearts is also multilingual, but if you called the historic son of Joseph Jesus, nobody around him would understand you. If you called him Joshua, they might. His name was a popular one in his day—shared with the chieftain who fought the battle of Jericho and by the first high priest of the Second Temple. The Aramaic form was Yeshua (transliterated to Roman alphabet), pronounced approximately Yay-shoo-ah. Centuries before he was born, the name was shortened in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament. Since Greek lacked the sh-sound, sh became s, and a masculine Greek suffix made it Yay-soo-us, which Latin smoothed out to Yay-soos (spelled Jesus). The Latin pronunciation, preserving the initial consonant and two out of three vowels, prevailed in England until the mysterious Great Vowel Shift (1250-1700) changed the pronunciation of most English words, erasing all overlap. The y-sound became a hard j, the long e shifted from ay to ee, and the unstressed oo flattened to a slack uh, giving us Gee-sus, a new name sharing zero, zip, and no speech sounds with Yay-shoo-ah, what the Nazarene was called.

This recapitulates Plutarch’s ancient paradox of identity, Theseus’ Ship. If the ship sailed by Theseus is preserved in Athens as a museum piece, its boards replaced one-by-one as they decay, is it still Theseus’ ship when every board has been replaced? Closer to home, the fact that every cell in our bodies is replaced about every seven years undermines our personal identity, especially since research suggests that even memories are lost if they aren’t periodically renewed, making adult identity a copy of copies, any original content lost. If we claim to still be ourselves after cells have been replaced, memories lost or copied over, why not accept all of Jesus's names? But maybe there’s a difference. I’d gladly swap my aging body for the one of fifty years ago (my memories and pension would be more problematic), and we can indeed rejuvenate the name of Jesus. We can pronounce it nearly as he did, so why not try? If it's disrespectful to mispronounce an ordinary person's name, how much more the name of a Person of the Trinity? The Bible attributes salvific powers to calling upon the name. Why butcher it?

I’m reminded of Alice’s conversation with Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass. When Alice says she doesn’t understand what he means by a word, he smiles contemptuously, “Of course, you don’t—till I tell you.” He claims that when he uses a word “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” The idea that silently intending something other than a word’s received meaning changes that meaning is ridiculous here, but it might work in prayer. If you could condition yourself in all piety to pray to God as Mr. Leroy (after all, that does mean "Master the King"), would that become a holy name? In fact, stand-ins for the holy name, used often enough, may acquire such an aura of holiness that Jews revere Adonai and The Name as divine names, and even the Anglo-Saxon noun, when capitalized, is sometimes written G-d to avoid sounding it out. Regularly used nicknames evolve from descriptives into true names. 

We regularly answer to nicknames, and Jesus has an important one, Christ, another descriptive mutated into a name. It comes from the Latin Christus, which is borrowed from the Greek Khristos, which is a translation of the Hebrew mashiah, all meaning "anointed". It’s used often in the Old Testament to refer to kings, priests, and prophets (even dishes) that have been consecrated with holy oil, and especially to the kings of David’s line, reflecting Samuel’s anointing him as king of Israel, whereupon the spirit of the Lord came powerfully onto him (1 Samuel 16:13). Of course, after Judea fell to Babylon, the Davidic line died out. Prophets predicted the return of new David (the Jewish King Arthur), an Anointed One or Messiah who would reestablish David’s kingdom. When Jesus’ followers saw him as a fulfillment of this prophecy, titles meaning "anointed" became his names. Latin Christos was vowel-shifted and shortened into Christ—which at least retains the framing consonants, a pretty good record for a holy name.

Of course, all this etymology may be irrelevant to contemporary experience of a name, even if it’s only a capitalized descriptive. A tall thin fellow may answer so often to Slim that people forget his legal name is Mr. Leroy, and though the Queen is not Elizabeth II’s name, she rightly hears “God save the Queen!” as a tribute to her in London (but perhaps not in Stockholm). Context matters. Meaning is a cultural construct. Even if Humpty Dumpty can’t alter a word’s meaning by intending to, a community of speakers can. Dog and God mean what they do, not because of any essential connection between the sounds and canine or divine nature, but because of habitual use by a group of speakers. 

Etymology can be traced to some degree but ultimately disappears into arbitrary fact. In use, words appear not to be arbitrary sounds, but rather windows into meanings if not magical embodiments of them, so that disrespectful use of “God,” a capitalized common noun including Zeus and Odin, is heard as blasphemy against Yahweh. Representations of words, whether auditory or written, tend to be privileged. They seem to be what they represent. Holy words are uttered or listened to worshipfully in traditions that prohibit the worshipful carving or gazing at holy statues. But words are human-made no less than statues are--no less the artifacts of human scribes and speakers than idols are of human sculptors. The prohibition of images in Abrahamic tradition exempts letters naming God. Otherwise, silent reading of scripture would be idolatry.

Words are arbitrary whorls in the river of etymology, but once they have been attached to holy ideas, they acquire within a speaking community a holy aura that doesn't easily transfer to even exact synonyms such as El, Yeshua, and Anointed. They become, for worshipper, the thing itself. It’s a little like the QUERTY keyboard, a design popularized by Remington in the 1800s, which is worse than arbitrary--designed to slow down typing to prevent key jams. Other key layouts allow faster typing, but we already know QUERTY, so it remains standard because we don't want to learn a new set of habits. It’s cultural inertia like the Great-Vowel-Shift's butchering of the Nazarene’s name, and I won't hold my breath for either one to change. The correct pronunciation of Jesus has been restored by small Hebraic groups such as Messianic Judaism and the Sacred Name Movement, but don't expect the Jehovah’s Witnesses to reincorporate as Yahweh’s Witnesses. After all, if words are arbitrary, why not stick with the ones we know?