About God’s name
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- July
- 22
I’ve gotten quite a lot of reaction to an article in yesterday’s Journal News/LoHud about a Westchester rabbi who believes he has some insight into the meaning of God’s name.
More than a decade ago, Rabbi Mark Sameth hit on this theory: that the Tetragrammaton—the Hebrew, four-letter name of God in the Hebrew Bible—has something of a secret meaning. If you take the four Hebrew letters (Yud-Hay-Vov-Hay) and reverse them, the new word makes the sounds of the Hebrew words for “he” and “she.”
Based on his study of Jewish mysticism, Sameth concluded that this hidden name of God shows that God has a dual-gendered nature. In other words, God is not masculine.
Sameth, the spiritual leader of Pleasantville Community Synagogue, spent the last decade researching commentaries on the Torah and Talmud—particularly those with a mystical bent—to build a case for his theory.
The result will be an article in the upcoming issue of the CCAR Journal (the journal of Reform rabbis) called: “Who is He? He is She: The Secret Four-Letter Name of God.”
By the way, the four-letter, Hebrew name of God is held by Jewish tradition to be unpronounceable (although others have pronounced it as Yahweh or Jehovah). Sameth does not intend to speak the reversed name or have others speak it.
The reaction I’ve gotten has been tremendously positive (not always the case, believe me). People from all sorts of religious backgrounds seem to be finding some appeal—meaning, solace, the oddness of it all—in Sameth’s ideas. It’s hard to tell from emails, but many of these folks seem to be on spiritual quests of various types.
And what of those who disagree with Sameth’s conclusions?
Someone asked me why I didn’t include any comments from a religious authority who thinks it’s all nuts. The answer is simple: Because few people have actually seen Sameth’s article, which will be published over the next few weeks. I wasn’t going to ask someone to respond my brief summary of the article (yes, something that journalists do all the time with courts decisions, etc.).
But if anyone reads it and wants to offer a critique, I would ask the editorial board to print it. And I would certainly put it on my blog.
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 10:27 am by Gary Stern.
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The world of religion, we don't have to tell you, is vast. The purpose of this blog is for Stern to note, flag and comment on some of the more interesting religious developments on the scene – weighty and quirky, somber and laughable, far away and just down the road. He won't interpret Scripture, take sides in conflicts or judge anyone. But he will take advantage of the journalist's license to observe.
The basic problem here is that the author had to do some “juggling” of the Hebrew letters to arrive at his theory, and there is no indication in primary literature that such an arrangement of the four letters of the Ineffable Name ever constituted a “Divine Name.” Hence we are being faced with another theory which, while certainly interesting, is actually more unlikely than the claim that the letters comprising the Ineffable Name are referring to four vowels I-A-O-E, pronounced EE-AH-OH-EH. We certainly know the letters Yod, Heh and Vav are employed in Hebrew to indicate vowels, specifically Yod – Ee; Heh – Ah and Vav – Oh, which is curiously enough the exact order of vowels comprising IAO (Ee-Ah-Oh), a popular Divine Name used by the Gnostics, which they derived from a Hebrew original as they did “Sabaoth” (Hebrew: Tzva’ot), etc. Also, the Sefer Yetzirah refers to the six permutations of YHV, and curiously enough the exact permutations of the name IAO or YAO can be found in the Greek magical papyri. We also know that the Ineffable Name, or at least portions thereof, are incorporated in Hebrew personal names, and there are also angelic names which incorporated the letters of Tetragrammaton, e.g. the very important angel Iaoel, etc.
As we can never be absolutely sure that these deductions are right, even in the case of such convincing evidence, how much more so when one has to read the Ineffable Name in reverse in order to deduce its correct pronunciation? Especially when there is a decided lack of historical evidence in this regard. In fact, the reverse of the four letters comprising the Tetragrammaton is actually said to be the name of the “Evil One”....spit…..spit!!