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 ...