There is a long-standing tradition that no person, no mere mortal, should presume to possess the name of God. The Name, as the reasoning goes, is a holy thing, a handle on the divine not to be trifled with. We hear concern about its misuse in the ancient biblical commandment, "Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD in vain."
But what is that name? The short (but incomplete) answer is that it's the four-letter word that God introduced to Moses -- a Hebrew word that played on the verb "to be": "I am who I am." Transliterating those four Hebrew letters yields some variation of YHWH or JHVH.
In an effort not to mess with the name, early biblical texts showed its presence with four simple dots. Some people today will use Ha-Shem ("the name" in Hebrew) or Adonai ("lord" in Hebrew) rather than risk tampering with the real thing. "Jehovah" is a hybrid composed of the consonants of the Hebrew four-letter name plus the vowels of the Hebrew title "lord." Many English translations represent the four-letter name with "LORD" (not to be confused with "Lord," a translation of the Hebrew adonai or of the Greek kurios.) It's the four-letter Hebrew name that's behind the commandment quoted above.
Efforts not to take the Name in vain have extended also to the description-word "God." So we get the charming "gosh darn," "good golly," even "for goodness sakes." "Sheesh," of course falls into the same category, this time to avoid "Jesus," along with "criminy" and my personal favorite "jiminy cricket."
A new translation of the Bible just came out: "The Voice." It's wildly unconventional insofar as it attempts to realize a profound theological belief: that God's Word can be loosed from the constraints of traditional translation AND that its version is neither the only nor the last word. By employing different creative writers to render individual books (and scholars to vet the results), "The Voice" models the Bible's diversity of voices, a quality that most translations flatten. But its departure from strict translation supposes the value of other, more traditional ones, too.
Among the plethora of new Bible translations, "The Voice" stands out for its courageous effort to make biblical texts sensible to today's readers in new ways. Predictable styles, vocabulary and idioms are absent. In their place: interpretation that illuminates and clarifies terminology that can be misleading or opaque to modern readers. In some cases, that traditional terminology may be so familiar that we don't even know what we're missing.
Such efforts are bound to be misunderstood. For example, the book's release elicited this sensational headline: "Christ Missing From New Bible." Ah, the beauty of punctuation: Christ is not missing from the new translation; "Christ" is. Few people know that the word "Christ" is actually a transliteration of a translation of a word with an ancient meaning that itself is multivalent. Its use today, however, is monotone at best and sometimes dead wrong. (Christ is not Jesus' name, first or last, but a descriptive title). "The Voice" reaches out to draw back the curtain on such terms, providing poetic interpretation and fresh description.
Despite the liberty "The Voice" editors gave to the creative writers who worked on the different biblical books, they standardized monikers for God. I don't agree with every choice they made, but I applaud the effort. They sought to render the various names and descriptions for God that appear in the Bible in ways that get at the theological implications of those Greek and Hebrew terms.
In a stroke of theological brilliance, Leonard Cohen sings in "Hallelujah," "You say I took the name in vain./ I don't even know the name./ But if I did, well, really what's it to ya?/ There's a blaze of light in every word./ It doesn't matter which you heard/ the holy or the broken hallelujah."
"The Name" as it functions in the Bible is in some mysterious way an aspect of a dynamic and living God. It suggests that in some powerful and mysterious way, God's Name makes the presence and being of that God somehow accessible, somehow know-able to human beings. In other words, by revealing the Name, God made Godself vulnerable. Human beings have the capacity to misuse the Name, and that goes far beyond any expletive. It extends to our treatment of others, of the planet, of anything or anyone that falls within the purview of God.
Now, I'm not sure how to reconcile the freedom of God with the accessibility of the Name, but I am pretty sure that "the Name of God" is far more dynamic and multifaceted than any single word. Maybe, as Cohen's song suggests, every single word can carry something of the divine within it or otherwise evoke the holy and make it real. Think logos, Holy Writ and all that.
Biblical theology suggests both that human beings cannot fully possess the Name of God with all that it implies and at the same time that we nevertheless bear responsibility for how we wield the Word. The sum of those prescribes humility in the face of profound knowledge, openness to what my challenge and even change us, and unceasing restraint.
Full disclosure: I translated three books for 'The Voice' and consulted on a couple of others. I was paid for my work but will receive no royalties.
Follow Kristin M. Swenson, Ph.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/kristinswenson
'For whoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.' - Romans 10:13
'And it shall come to pass, that whoever shall call on the name of the LORD shall be delivered: for in mount Zion and in Jerusalem shall be deliverance, as the LORD hath said, and in the remnant whom the LORD shall call.' - Joel 2:32
'Let the Lord be praised. O you servants of the Lord, give praise to the name of the Lord.' - Psalm 135:1
'I will give praise to the Lord for his righteousness; I will make a song to the name of the Lord Most High.' - Psalm 7:17
Good "luck" being saved....
The magic of Python...
The Lord is not on trial here today.The trial in Illinois.. 1945 A challenge against teaching religion in Public Schools brought by a courageous woman that ended up in the Supreme Court of the United States in 1947-48. Ruled unconstiutional eight to one. Chief Justice Hugo Black presiding. Re-enforcing the First Amendment Establishment Clause. and William Jeffersons direct statement this was "to establish separation of Church and State." This is a long video. Save it for others. Watch it one night when you can't sleep. But do watch it.
Other information ITVS.org
So that we may all be free it is important to keep religion out of our government.
http://www.kristinswenson.com/swenson-media.htm
So it's only appropriate those who rule every organized religion (and the occasional cults which spring up) strive to keep their flocks locked in a perpetual state of childhood 'logic.' "You know, children who don't believe in Santa don't get presents!" "Those who don't believe in Jesus don't get Everlasting Life!" "Those who die killing infidels get a passel of virgins at their next stop!"
How does anyone take any of this seriously?
It is a contraction of the two Arabic words al, the definite article “the,” and ilah, god. Thus, linguistically Allah is The God.
The Arabic word Allah was spelt before as al, uluh, ilahia, el, eloha, elohim by Moses and eloi , alaha by Jesus.
Of all these derivatives, the word el, God, is both prefixed and suffixed to so many Biblical names familiar to us today. El-i-jah (my-God is Jehovah. So, -i is my.), Ishmael (God hears.), Israel (Prince of God.), Bethel (House of God-Genesis 28:19.), Peniel (Face of God-Genesis 32:30.) Gabriel (Strength of God.) and finally Immanuel (God be with us.) are just some examples of it.
The very first edition of The New Scofield Reference Bible explains the word elohim to us: “Elohim (sometimes El or Elah), English for “God,” the first of the three primary names of Deity, is a uni-plural noun formed from El-strength, or the Strong One, and Alah, to swear, to bind oneself by an oath,
Just in the book of Genesis only, elohim is repeated 156 times and 2570 times throughout the whole Old Testament.
The suffix –im that means we or us in Hebrew is used to pluralize a name as a sign of respect, honor, majesty, grandeur and magnitude, not of numbers.
That doesn't sound right.
The Semitic languages are a group of related languages whose living representatives are spoken by more than 270 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa.
They constitute a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. The most widely spoken Semitic languages today are Arabic (206 million native speakers), Amharic (27 million), Hebrew (about 7 million) Tigrinya (6.7 million), and Aramaic (about 2.2 million).
Semitic languages are attested in written form from a very early date, with texts in Eblaite and Akkadian appearing from around the middle of the third millennium BC, written in a script adapted from Sumerian alphabets
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Semitic_languages.svg
"In the pre-Islamic era, Allah was the supreme creator god of the Arabs, a moon god who lived in a rock located in the Ka'aba. [1] Yet he was still only one god among the many others they believed in.[2] The goddesses; Allāt (the feminine form of “Allah”, meaning 'the goddess' ),[3][4][5] Manāt, and al-‘Uzzá were Allah's daughters.[1]"
I quote the verse from the Quran for the benefit of
less knowledgeable readers who may be misguided by what you have stated.
Chapter 53 of the Quran
53:19 Have ye seen Lat. and al-uzza
53:20 And another, the third (goddess),
53:21 What! for you the male sex, and for Him, the female?
53:22 Behold, such would be indeed a division most unfair!
53:23 These are nothing but names which ye have devised,- ye and your fathers,- for which God has sent down no authority (whatever).
They follow nothing but conjecture and what their own souls desire!- Even though there has already come to them Guidance from their Lord!
53:24 Nay, shall man have (just) anything he hankers after?
53:25 But it is to Almighty God that the End and the Beginning (of all things) belong.
The Quran draws out attention to the false symbols( lat etc.) which men often choose to invest with divine qualities or powers.in this instance by way of example to the blasphemous imagery of the prophets pagan contemporaries in the triad of Al Lat, Manat and Uzza.
These three goddesses were regarded by the pagan Arabs as God’s daughters side side with angels, were worshipped in most of the pre-Islamic Arabia .
One may have been the prototype of the Greek semi goddess Leto one of the wives of Zeus and mother of Apollo and Artemis
"His are the best (or most beautiful) names." (17:110; 20:8; and 7:180)
Contrary to popular belief, the word Allah is NOT a contraction of al-ilah (al meaning 'the', and ilah meaning 'god').
1. David prophesied:
"Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord" (Psalms 118:26).
This is also repeated in the Gospels (Matt. 21:9, etc.), and was fulfilled by the Holy Prophet Muhammad whose first revelation was "Read in the name of thy Lord" (the Quran, 96:1).
2. Zechariah prophesied:
"And the Lord shall be king over all the earth, in that day there shall be one Lord, and his name one." (Zech. 14:9)
All Muslims, anywhere on the earth, speaking totally different languages, recognise the name "Allah", thus fulfilling this prophecy, "his name one". (All Christians, to take an example, do not recognise a single name of God, and therefore do not fulfil this prophecy.)
3. Isaiah prophesied:
"And in that day shall you say, Praise the Lord, call upon His name." (Isaiah 12:4)
So Muslims say repeatedly exactly this: al-hamdu li-llah, and call upon His name Allah.
Islam merely demands that its followers use Arabic. That's not evidence of the fulfilment of prophecy, just inflexibility. Much like Latin was once demanded in Xtianity. And Mo obviously was aware of the bible, Judaism and Xtianity, so it wasn't too difficult to spin it into his version.
What's in a name, after all?
In order to do that one must know God's NAME.
Nearly 7,000 times that NAME was inspired by God himself to be written in the Scriptures.
Of course it was removed for various reasons over time. But, today there are a people who are humbled to carry the Sovereign of the Universe's personal NAME as their own.
They,of course are, Jehovah's Witnesses.
How's that working out for you door-to-door pests?
Hmm. That sounds kinda interesting. Living things are more interesting than unchanging inorganic grains, even though sand crystals have their charm. But doesn't that mean that if it changes today, it might change tomorrow? You mean I might have to keep thinking about it? That it has possibilities? Hmm. That might be interesting.
Most of the religious need a God made in the image of man, sometimes a woman but rare that it is a God made in the image of a woman.
It gets worst, most religious believe their beliefs are the beliefs of this God made in their image. the human ego is that deceptive.
For the christians Jesus has become their God. A human they can worship.
Or as my favorite preacher states: Jesus is the only way, there is no other way and every voice in the church states: amen.