Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Irene Riegner <iriegner AT concentric.net>]

Will,
 
> >A name is an arbitrary sign
> >tacked onto something but is not the thing itself---
>
> It may be, but the ancients and the Bible obviously felt otherwise.
> Names were, in fact, thought to be the essence of the thing.

The ancients thought that names had power---e.g. that by naming the animals, Adam was given power over the animals.  I'm not sure about other texts but at least with Deut., we see a separation between the name and the thing named.  The name still has power but it isn't the same as the thing that it names.  "Ha-shem," the name, dwells in the temple but the deity does not dwell there;  likewise, the deuteronomist in the name of Moses reminds the people that they heard a voice at Sinai but did not see Yaweh.  The voice isn't Yaweh but only a representation, a sign, of Yaweh.  In these passages, the Deuteronomist, I think, is moving away from a more physical, anthropomorphic understanding and representation of the deity, a deity with physical attributes, (e.g. Gen 2, where Yahweh-elohim is forming man from dust---as if the deity had hands;  Gen 3, where the deity is walking in the garden) to that of an abstract conceptualization.
    The targumim push the abstraction even further---perhaps in response to polytheistic religions or to Christianity or to the imagery in some of the Jewish pseudepigraphical writings.  But note that in a pseudepigraphic writing such as 4 Ezra, the deity does not speak directly to Ezra but speaks only through intermediaries.  Like words, these intermediaries are signs of the deity but are not the deity itself.

LLOYD:  Have you considered that Genesis, especially Gen 2 , where the deity is a hyphenated name, Yahweh-Elohim, Yahweh-Elohim represents the interface of the El and Yah traditions?  (Maybe you mentioned this already!)  Later, for instance in Deut., elohim is a general category of deity and Yahweh is the proper name of a deity, so that a favorite Deuteronomic phrase is "Yaweh (is) your god."

irene riegner