Can God Exist Without a Name?
Cultural relativism of language is a historically new idea. Rabbinic Judaism taught that Hebrew was the language of Adam, God, the Angels, and all humanity before the Tower of Babel—a view accepted by Christian scholars through the Renaissance, though Adam’s naming the animals suggests that the divine tongue was incomplete. In the Book of Genesis, words are God’s tools of creation, and his coeternal Word (allegorically, at least, a unit of speech) is a person of the Christian Trinity. Language is in God's innermost nature. Ptah, the Egyptian craftsman god, also created the world using language. He spoke words and the world came into being. Sacred words—sound patterns perceived as instruments of power rather than just as tokens for ideas—are deeply imbedded in religion. YHWH really is God’s name in orthodox Judaism, not a noun like the other words he is called by. Vedic tradition considers Sanskrit the language of the gods, and an Arabic Quran is believed to co-exist with God i...