The Name of God: History and Meaning - Part 1

Filed Under Ancient, History, Philosophy, Religion

By Julian E. Ortiz

Introduction

I have chosen, as my first article for my web page (www.thenamehut.com/blog/) , the history and meaning of the name of God. I do not pretend to start an in-depth analysis of the subject , for it would be doomed to become an endless task. Indeed, there are books written on just some aspects of what I attempt here.

As a humble mason trying to work in the never ending construction of this universe according to the plans traced by the Great Architect, I wish to dedicate this blog to His greater Glory. It seems fitting that I write my first article on an important aspect of His nature to us: His name, and what It has meant to us throughout ages.

The Meaning of Names

As man evolved from his lower cousins and was able to communicate by mean of language, he found it imperative to give names to things in his immediate surrounding that somehow meant something to him. These names were created in basis of the thing function, and the function itself was synonym to the name. For instance, if the saber tooth tiger was first called "unga," then "unga" also became to be the term used for "danger" and/or "run," for these would have been the normal reactions or mental pictures that this animal elicited in the minds of our very early ancestors.

As the frontal lobes of the brain expanded, and mind found new horizons beyond the basic necessities of his daily life, man stumbled upon reason. The onset of thought created the need to establish continuum to communication, and language evolved into pictorial forms like hieroglyphs and cuneiform writing.

Symbols, as we know them, came to be with pictures and writing. A symbol -in the accepted term- is a pictorial representation of an idea or object. It is accepted that words themselves are formed by symbols, as such are the letters in the alphabet. Numbers are also symbols, representing something outside of themselves. We can grasp and master ideas by way of symbols, and in such vein create science and art.

In a way that is not expounded as the aforementioned picture/letter/number symbology, names can also be symbols, and were much more so in the remote past.

A characteristic of a symbol is that even though being always less than the object it represents, it gathers a value of its own, sometimes becoming as important as the represented item. A flag is much less than the nation it represents (the name/symbol "nation" also being much less than the compendium of people and culture it comprehends) However, the symbol "flag" can arise significant emotions in people that may not even care half as much for the mass of persons it represents.

We can witness the same phenomena with names. As we have said, most names are given on basis of function. If I say "bowl," a picture comes to mind of a very particular object, half a sphere and hollow, with the purpose of being filled, usually with food. Now, I think I know about bowls, with the peculiarity that all bowls become the same in my mind, because their function is fixed to the name "bowl." "Russia" still elicit a certain amount of negative emotion in some countries because of the many years of cold war, in which the name "Russia" was associated with a powerful enemy and a near Armageddon, and all Russians are but an extension of the category "Russia," carrying within them the characteristics that we have learned about "Russia."

In the remote past, when names were given to people and higher beings, it was always with meaning -whether hoping that those characteristics would come into being (newborns) or depicting traits feared or desired in higher beings. Names carried a high value throughout the life of a person: it was equal to his existence, and its removal was as much as a death sentence or a denial of his birth and life. This is best illustrated by how some Egyptian dignitaries who fell in disfavor got their name stricken off every stone, as was the case with the pharaoh Akhenaton (or Akhenaten).

People used to believe they knew a person by knowing their name. And worse yet, to know the real name of someone -or a supernatural entity- meant you could control them, but only if matching somehow this party’s power. Otherwise, if this being’s nature was of the aggressive sort, your well being was severely jeopardized. The magic arts was then mostly about the proper use of words and names in order to achieve the purpose sought, developing with time in the knowledge and use of symbols which highest expression was the study of Geometry. We would be correct to deduce that these powers were to be administered only by an elite class within any community, and these learnings would become a secret tradition, to be taught to the initiate by stages that took many years to master.

The ineffable Name of God grew to be unutterable. Only the Kohein Gadol (High Priest) could speak the proper name once a year inside the Holy of Holies (inner sanctum), during Yom Kippur.

But before this came to pass, humankind would have to evolve from the many to the Almighty One, from polytheistic to monotheistic culture. This was part of the ongoing process in changing consciousness, and the first large step in the human race toward a new concept of being in relation to the spiritual realm, the world, and the individual as center.

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