Names of God in the Old andNew Testament

Koot van wyk (DLitt et Phil; ThD)

Visiting Professor

Department of Liberal Education

Kyungpook National University

Sangju Campus

South Korea

Conjoint lecturer of Avondale College

Australia

First Semantics or Meaning

Some rules apply:

a.     It is not important that a word mean exactly the same thing each time it is used. What is important is that unless a word has essentially the same meaning from one utterance to another, two people speaking the same language could not understand each other.

b.     The meaning of a word is specified by a set of semantic properties. Lewis Carroll took advantage of these semantic properties to create his humor. The turtle used the word “purpoise” instead of “purpose”. Lewis is linguistically performing but we are linguistically competent because we know what the true spelling is: purpose not purpoise. Correct spelling is the competence all share but slips of the tongue by substitution is performing and that is what the artist is doing.  

c.      Semantic properties can sometimes be predictable, you know the one and can predict the other.

d.     Most morphemes have their own meanings but we composed them and string them together to make a word.

e.      Learning a language includes the learning of “agreed upon” meanings of certain strings of sounds and how to combine these meaningful units into larger units to convey meaning.

f.       We are not free to change the meaning of words at will.

g.     Homonyms or Homophones are the same words with different meanings.

h.     Synonyms are different words with similar meanings.

i.       Antonyms are different sounds with opposite meanings.

j.        

What about Names?

1.     W. Shakespear said: “What’s in a Name? That which we call a rose. By any other name would smell as sweet” (Romeo and Juliet, II, ii)

2.     A dog is also called a canus domesticus. Your friend will use the first. A zoology professor will use the second.

3.     “My name is Alice . . .”

“It’s a stupid name enough!” Humpty Dumpty interrupted impatiently. “What does it mean?”

“Must a name mean something?” Alice asked doubtfully.

“Of course it must,” Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh: “my name means the shape I am – and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost” (Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass).

4.     Some think that all words name some object though that object is sometimes abstract.

5.     Proper names can refer to objects, are definite, cannot generally be pluralized, are sometimes linguistically creative.

6.     Words, other than proper names, can have a reference and a sense. This difference was stressed by the German Philosopher Gottlob Frege. Words (a) have a meaning and (b) can be used as a reference. The “evening star” and “morning star” are two references to the same meaning: Venus.

7.     “You mentioned your name as if I should recognize it, but beyond the obvious facts that you are a bachelor, a solicitor, a Freemason, and an asthmatic, I know nothing whatever about you” (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Norwood Builder”, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes).

8.     Phrases can also have a reference and a sense.

9.     There are fixed phrases in a language, consisting of more than one word, which meanings cannot be derived from knowing the meanings of each individual word. It is called an idiom.

10.                Some idioms can be changed internally with no unusual effect.

11.                Hector is my maternal uncle and Hector is my mother’s brother are synonymous and the first is a paraphrase of the other.

12.                Lexical ambiguity is “The pastor married my sister”.

13.                Structural ambiguity is

14.                Knowing a language means knowing the implications inherent in the meaning of words and certain sentences.

15.                The property of a name can show up in another form in the sentence. John can become a pronoun “He”.

Name Dogmatism for the Name of God in the Bible

There are those who try to insist that the name of God is Jehovah and nothing else.

Let us look at some problems with this dogmatic attitude.

God has many names in the Old Testament:

a.     God is Eloah, El and Shaddai for Job.

b.     God is Yahweh for Moses.

c.      God is Eyehe waeyehe for Moses at the burning bush in Exodus 3

The list can go on but we need to point out certain problems here:

i.                   Words have meanings, but also sounds, and letter forms or shapes.

ii.                 Why must one be dogmatic about one sound (which is impossible humanly speaking) but slack on the meaning or forms and shapes of that name?

Shape or Form of Yahweh

Yahweh is written with three consonants YHWH in the Old Testament. It is sometimes abbreviated: YH.

It is sometimes attached to proper names Obadyah “servant of the Lord”.

However, God’s name is also Elohim (plural) and El (singular).

The Structural Form or Shape is thus a long-form and a short-form meaning that structurally the name of God displays variety.

The Orthographical Form or Shape is another issue:

If you want to be dogmatic to one form or shape of the name of God, you have to be dogmatic also to the orthographical shape of it. What do we know about the shape of the name YHWH in the Old Testament?

a.     It was not the cursive Hebrew shape we see in the Hebrew Bible.

b.     It was for a long time since Solomon a Phoenician-like shape.

c.      In the days of Moses, we do not know whether Hebrew was written like Ugaritic with simplified cuneiform characters and later switched to a Phoenician style? Very little is known about the shape of Hebrew letters before the days of Solomon. Proto-Canaanite script is not very helpful due to lack of proper evidence.

d.     The fact that YHWH is still YHWH whether it is YHWH or YHWH or YHWH or YHWH or YHWH or YHWH means that God permit us to accept variety here.

The Morphological shape is another issue:

A morpheme has either two or three letters together: CV or CVC meaning consonant-vowel or consonant-vowel-consonant. To say the name of the Lord is only Yehovah is to make three morphemes: ye-ho-vah. Provided you have the vowels. However, the earlier you go with the Hebrew text, you have to remove all vowels included by the Rabbis in the Middle Ages or the Masoretes. The original texts were only with consonants and one can see it at Qumran.

What was it then? Yah-weh or Ye-ho-vah? No-one knows.

God and His revelation and the Names of God

What God looks like, is not possible to know since He is a glorious God beyond creature inspection. However, according to the Bible, God chose to reveal Himself to humans in anthropomorphic and anthropopathic terms: He loves, He sees, He speaks, He listens, His hand is helping, His heart, His eyes, etc.

God permits us to relate to Him in sets of human agreed meanings because He incarnated human language in His Word before Jesus incarnated a human body. The Word became human language before the human became flesh.

Shaddai means “powerful One” because one of the attributes of God is His unrestricted power. My Shaddai can be used as substitute for Elohim or El or YHWH.

It appears as if YHWH is an abbreviation of the covenant name that God revealed Himself to Moses in the burning bush: eyehe wa-eyehe.

Note that there are almost ten translations of this phrase: “I am what I am”, “I shall be what I shall be” etc.

Our question is whether YHWH is an abbreviation of eyehe wa-eyehe?

God meaning in the Old Testament

The God entity in the Old Testament has a character and personality with humanlike passions and humanlike actions and we are permitted to identify and relate to this living God “image” or the “picture in our minds” of Who and What God is for our own salvation. This entity also has many names but all pointing to the same saving entity. If the doctrinal aspects of the entity and the entity’s history with this world do not correspond to the name we give the entity, then it is a false or pseudo God. If I pray to the “Higher One” meaning God and His entity, then my description of Him must coincide 100% with that revealed in the Old Testament and New Testament or His Word.

If I say his name is God but a German says it is Gott and a South Korean says it is Hananim then all of us are speaking the same language if our entity we are talking about, match the doctrinal and explicative qualities described in His Word about Himself. A mere “tag” change on an entity cannot change the entity.

If I take a BMW tag and put it on a Volkswagen, the Volkswagen is still a Volkswagen and not a BMW. I may refer to my BMW but all are going to understand that I am talking about my Volkswagen.

There is no restrictions spelled out in the Old and New Testament for the “tag” that we put on the God-entity that each one of us experience in the Word of God.

Source:

Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, An Introduction to Language (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978), 163-194.