>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
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