What’s in a name?

Naming has a special relevance in the early books of the Old Testament, and developing an awareness of what’s at stake in naming might help you understand some of these stories a little better. A good way to start would be to think of the creation story, in which God brings all the creatures before Adam to be named, and where Adam is given dominion over all those creatures. There’s a sense in the Old Testament that the one who names has power or authority over the one named. And although this custom doesn’t translate exactly into our own modern culture, we can make some sense of it. We don’t choose our own names, for example; our parents or guardians name us, because in that infant state they have guardianship over us.

This presents some problems in the Old Testament for the name of God. If to name something is to claim authority over it, then naming God becomes a tricky proposition. How could we humans claim naming authority over God? Indeed, even to this day, the name that was just revealed to Moses in our reading today, the so-called tetragrammaton (which means ‘the four letters’) of YHWH remains an unsayable word for Orthodox Jews. When reading the bible and encountering those four letters, YHWH, Orthodox Jews will not pronounce the name, they will simply say, ‘the Lord.’ We cannot name God.

This anxiety over naming God isn’t a concern at first, mind you: early on in the Old Testament, in the first chapters of Genesis, God tends to be referred to as ‘El,’ or as some variant of that. ‘El’ happens to have been the name of the highest God in most of the religions of the middle east at the time. The Canaanites, Babylonians, and other local peoples/competitors of the Israelites named God ‘El,’ and so did the Israelites at first, too. But things get tricky later. Think of Jacob wrestling with the angel/God back in the book of Genesis. Once they’ve stalemated, the angel asks, ‘what is your name?’ And Jacob replies, ‘Jacob.’ Then the angel gives Jacob a new name, Israel. Jacob tries to return the favor, saying, ‘what is your name?’ But the angel/God will not be named, and refuses to reveal any name, offering Jacob a blessing instead.

 Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, Alexander Louis Leloir, 1865

This is the same thing that Moses encounters in today’s reading. The Israelites in Egypt have lived for years without worship of their God, the God of their ancestor Jacob. And this God is revealed to Moses in the burning bush. So Moses asks a reasonable question: ‘What name shall I give the people?’ In other words, whom should they thank, to whom should they pray, whom should they worship? Who is their God? And the voice gives a name that’s not a name, those four letters that did not then nor do they now constitute a legible word: YHWH.

Charlton Heston doing his best impression of Moses.

YHWH is derived from the Hebrew verb ‘to be,’ so it’s linked to the statement we hear the voice say: I am that I am. This God cannot be named anymore than existence can be named. Indeed, this God just is ‘is-ness,’ so to speak.

I was talking with some friends the other day. They, like us, have small children, and we were talking about the ironic difficulty of deciding upon a name for our kids. Because, to a certain degree, all the thought that goes into baby naming is needless. For example, one of the main troubles we had with a lot of our nominated names was that someone in our life – an uncle, an old friend, the child of a colleague, etc. – had ‘already taken’ the name. There’s a great episode of Seinfeld in which George wants to hold onto the name ‘Seven’ as a baby name and goes to ridiculous lengths to keep a couple from stealing it before he has the chance to use it.

But when your child is born, all that evaporates. Because it doesn’t matter how many other John Smith’s there are in the world, when your child is born, if that’s his name, it belongs entirely to him. The child doesn’t belong to the name, the name belongs to the child. No matter how common that name may be, it immediately acquires an immeasurable uniqueness, because forever after there is no other John Smith like this one. Love does that, it makes the ordinary extraordinary.

Our little Sam, for example, isn’t any other Sam. There is no Sam like him, he has transformed those three little letters which we thought were just a name into something precious and particular. God isn’t named anything, God just is. But love works the same way with God. God just is, but God makes the ordinary is-ness of everyday life extraordinary because it all comes from love.

Enjoy the story of Moses,

Matt