Hallelu-YaH - all honor to YaHUaHNL versie
  

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.pdf document, 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.pdf document, 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.

Reactions

Name: *
E-mail: * (will not be revealed)
Website: (optional)
Reaction:
I would like my reaction to be included here yes / no.
* = mandatory


 
home  home ,  news index  ,  articles index

  
flower-decoration 

Thanks for your interest!

flower-decoration