The Significant Name of God (2)
To be proclaimed everywhere and not to be kept secret!
André H. Roosma 8 May 2020 (NL original: 10 Nov. 2014)
As I said in Part 1 of this series, on this website I already had the
privilege to publish various documents about
the glorious Name of the God of Isra’el: YaHUaH - The Name above all
names.1 Over the past few weeks, I have read a number of Bible passages dealing
with that glorious Name and have been reading several scientific publications.
This allowed me to discover even more, which I would like to share with you.
The Name of God: to be magnified over all the earth
In Part 1 of this
series, I quoted a text from 2 Shemuel 7. A
little further on in that chapter, David declares what was essential to him,
why this Name was so important to him:
And let Your Name be magnified for ever,
that it will be said, YaHUaH of the multitudes is God over Isra’el;
... 2 Shemuel 7:26 (read it in full context!)
And in the Psalms he often sang texts such as:
YaHUaH lives, and bless my Rock, and exalt
the God of my salvation! ... Therefore I will praise You, YaHUaH, among the nations; and I will
sing praise to Your Name. Psalm 18:47, 50
David was concerned with all the nations getting to know that wonderful
God of Isra’el and worshiping Him for His greatness and grace, as He had so
clearly demonstrated to His people Isra’el. YaHUaH was so completely different from all those so-called gods of
those other nations! In all those religions it was all about pleasing the
idol by following exactly all kinds of regulations and performing the right
sacrifices. Then you would have won the idol for you and then you could exploit
him (or her, many of those idols were female) for
your own causes. But with God YaHUaH everything was and is different. He is the
Creator of heaven and earth. He is full of grace and truth. He is not into
power games, not into human achievement, but into a love relationship! And
that relationship starts from Him! He does not ask that we ascend to Him, but
out of self-sacrificing love He descended to live with us!
Hallelu YaH !
Where concealing God’s glorious Name leads
Then one of the other scientific articles I came across.2 The author,
Guy G. Stroumsa, talks about it, how the Jewish leaders made God nameless in
the last centuries before Christ. After the Babylonian captivity, the Jewish
religious leaders3 decided to stop praising and proclaiming the glorius
and significant Name YaHUaH, and even to forbid the utterance of this
great Name. The prophet Jirme-yahu already warned
strongly against this practice (Jer.23:27). Stroumsa states in his article that this decision among the Jews strongly
stimulated the idea of mystery and thus the mystical thinking around the
glorious Name. In Judaistic mysticism this flourished. In the later history of
Judaism, for example, we find several leaders, who strictly forbade
pronouncing the glorious Name of God, but who, at the same time, used (read: abused) the same great Name themselves as if it
were a kind of magic formula.4 So what happened under the guise of pure religion actually turned out to
promote involvement in occultism. We recognize the tree by the fruits.
This is in line with what I was led to discover last summer about the
background of this terrible ban (see my article ‘Why
Rabbinic Judaism Does Not Want to Name THE NAME’, Part 18 in this series,
forthcoming): It stemmed from Babylonian idolatry, in which the
glorious Name of the God of Israel was known, but not to be mentioned, out of
superstitious fear! Against the background of what I already wrote in Part 1 of this
series, this is understandable. Those spirits of idolatry didn’t want the
living God to reside with the people.
Unfortunately, stimulated by Greek thinking, the early Christian church
soon adopted this horrible ban from Judaism! And a few years ago, the Pope
once again decreed that it is forbidden in the Roman Catholic Church to speak
the glorious Name of God. For Whom Solomon built a great and very beautiful
temple, is no longer allowed to be mentioned ... The RC church thus excludes
God’s presence from its churches! And in most Protestant and Evangelical
churches, unfortunately, it is not much different in practice ...
Apparently, they do not believe in those two words, which they often do
know, at least superficially:
Hallelu YaH !
Notes
1 |
The names in the Bible have meaning. That is why I
transliterate them carefully so that they remain recognizable. Especially
the glorious Name of God I represent here as accurately as possible from the
oldest Hebrew original, instead of replacing this grand personal Name of The
Most High by a common word, such as ‘Lord’. For more background
information see: André H. Roosma, ‘Life, security and belonging in joyful adoration,
from the hand of God’ , brief Hallelu-YaH article about the Biblical Name of God in the earliest
Hebrew (old Semitic) script, January 2011. André H. Roosma, ‘The Shema‘ – the First Testament declaration of faith (1)’, Hallelu-YaH! web article, February 2012. André
H. Roosma, ‘The
wonderful and lovely Name of the God Who was there, Who is there, and Who
will be there’ , extensive Accede! / Hallelu-YaH! study, July 2009. |
2 |
That was: Guy G. Stroumsa, ‘A
nameless God: Judaeo-Christian and Gnostic ‘theologies of the
Name’’ in: Peter J. Tomson and Doris Lambers-Petry (Eds.), The Image of the Judaeo-Christians in Ancient
Jewish and Christian Literature, (Papers Delivered at
the Colloquium of the Institutum Iudaicum, Brussels 18-19 November, 2001 Mohr
Siebeck, Sonderausgabe, 2003; ISBN 978 3 16 148094 2; p.230-243). |
3 |
Concerning those leaders, see my article on ‘The פְּרוּשִׁים - Perushim / φαρισαιοι /
Pharisees’, nr.12 in the series: Names in the Bible (forthcoming). |
4 |
One of those people even was named after this:
the Ba‘al Shem Tobh - literally the Good Lord or Master of the
Name, or in Yiddish: der heyliger Baal Shem - the holy Lord of the
Name. His Jewish name was Yisroel ben ’Eli‘ezer - Israel,
son of Eliezer. He lived in the 18th
century, in an area where Judaism florished in south-eastern Poland and western
Ukraine. Many stories are told about him, how he performed magic and occult
healing, even before he became conscious of his Jewish background. Later he
added to that the abuse of the glorious Name to that and received recognition
as rabbi and gained a lot of fame. He earned his nickname by abusing the
glorious Name of God so ‘good’ (tobh) in his magic. He became the
founder of Chassidism, a mystic (occult) movement within Judaism. Within
Chassidism more people thereafter got the title Ba‘al Shem. |
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