Names of God
You Can’t Go Home Again
New to the column? We’re doing a close reading of Genesis, which started in September 2022. Visit the Archive and plunge in, or look here to get oriented.
We’ll pick up on Tuesday with v. 26 of our story, the last verse of Genesis 4 and also of the story I’ve called “You Can’t Go Home Again.” Because v. 26 is going to invoke the Tetragrammaton — YHWH, the 4-letter personal name of the Israelite God — I want to use this week’s free Sunday post for a broader discussion of divine names in the Bible.
You’ll remember that the names of the 5th and 6th of the seven generations between Adam and Lemekh (per Gen 4:18) were Mehijael and Methusael. As I pointed out when we looked at that verse, these are names that incorporate the divine name El. Our quick look at the 10 generations between Adam and Noah in Genesis 5 showed Mahalalel in Generation 5 of that genealogy, more or less the same name as Mehijael/ Mehujael in Generation 5 of Genesis 4.
It’s worth talking a bit about these names; first, though, let’s recap the names for God that we’ve seen so far:
Gen 1:1–2:3 אֱלֹהִים elohim
Gen 2:4–3:24 יְ׳הוָ֥ה אֱלֹהִ֖ים YHWH elohim
- exception: the conversation between the woman and the snake in 3:1–5, which drops YHWH
Genesis 4 יְ׳הוָ֑ה YHWH
- exception: 4:25, when Adam’s wife uses elohim in the explanation of Seth’s name
Sneak preview: Genesis 5 will return to using elohim until the Tetragrammaton is invoked in v. 29, an apparent reference to the story of Genesis 3. The names will be a key element when we begin to think about the intertwined voices in the Flood story.
Now some basic information, no doubt a refresher for some of you.
אֱלֹהִים elohim is not a name, though it is sometimes used that way in the Bible. It’s simply the word for “god,” and foreign gods can be called by this same title, as when Ahaziah, the king of Israel near the end of the 850s BCE, sends messengers to ask “Baal-zebub, the god [אֱלֹהֵ֣י] of Ekron” whether he will recover from an injury (2 Kgs 1:2). Though elohim has the -im ending of a plural noun, it is normally treated like a singular noun unless it’s specifically referring to multiple “gods,” as in Exod 20:3. (There is a singular form of this noun, אֱלוֹהַּ eló’ah, which occurs about 60 times in the Bible, almost always in poetry and mostly in the book of Job.)
י׳הוה YHWH is the personal name of the God of Israel, just as Baal-zebub (“Lord of the Flies”) was the name of the god of Ekron or Chemosh was the personal name of the god of Moab (see, e.g., Num 21:29). Because Jewish tradition is that this name is sacred, I always mark it with a ׳ separating the י from the rest of the name to “desacralize” it, and I transliterate it with the four letters YHWH rather than spell out the name as some people do. (When I quote those writers, I desacralize the name with a hyphen: Y‑hweh.)
Here we get into an interesting question about Israelite history. Names that end with -jah or -yahu or the like are “theophoric,” that is, they incorporate the Tetragrammaton into a person’s name, e.g. Ahaziah = “YHWH has seized / grasped.” Such names are common in inscriptions from the First Temple period — which is when they become common in the Bible as well. They’re very uncommon in the Torah. Compare the names of Aaron’s two sons, Nadav and Avihu (‘he is my father’) with those of Jeroboam — the other biblical character who set up golden calves — Nadav and Avijah (‘YH is my father’).
We’re about to be told, in 4:26, that the use of the name YHWH begins after the birth of Seth. That’s an issue because in Exod 6:2–3 elohim speaks to Moses and tells him:
I am YHWH.
I was not known to Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob by that name.
Now for some names we won’t encounter any time soon:
El Shaddai, the name that YHWH tells Moses he used in his interactions with the patriarchs. It actually occurs only five times in Genesis; once in the Exodus verse; once in Ezekiel; and three times in Job. Shaddai itself occurs almost 50 times, and two-thirds of those are in Job as well.
El — separately from Shaddai — is most famous from its use in the name Bethel (בֵּית אֵל), literally “house of El.” We know the name El from Ugaritic literature as the name of the head of the council of the Canaanite gods. When “God stands in the divine assembly” (Ps 82:1), it is really YHWH standing in the Assembly of El. (More on this will have to wait for the book on biblical poetry I may yet one day write.) Presumably Mehujael and Methusael were named after this Canaanite god. I hope to talk more about this when we get to Gen 5:12.
Finally, we should mention another divine name that never appears in the Pentateuch:
י׳הוָ֥ה צְבָא֖וֹת yhwh tz’va’ot ‘YHWH of Hosts’. That’s “hosts” in the antique sense of “armies.” This name occurs some 250 times in the Bible, but if you sit down to read the Bible you will not encounter it until you get to 1 Samuel 1 — as if the Pentateuch, Joshua, and Judges had all somehow had that name scrubbed out of them. It’s strange as well, since a proper name should not be in construct form. We say “Lord of Hosts” to avoid using God’s proper name, but the Tetragrammaton should not be a Name “of” anything. Very puzzling.
And, of course, there is one famous divine name that never appears anywhere in the Bible:
Jehovah. The Hebrew text of the Bible sometimes looks as if it does mention this name, but that’s due to human confusion of the text. Many words in the Hebrew text are written one way but supposed to be pronounced a different way — we’ll come back to this when we reach Gen 8:17 — and the Tetragrammaton is always pronounced differently than it is written, almost always as אדני adonay ‘my Lord’. If you combine the vowels of אדני with the letters י׳הוה, as some texts confusingly do, you get “Jehovah,” a name that never existed. (Sorry, Witnesses.)
We’ll have more to say about the Tetragrammaton at the end of v. 26, and more to say about the names of God in general as we continue our reading.