Names of God

See the Blue Letter Bible page here. “God knows us by our name, shouldn’t we know Him by His?”

The Names of God in the Old Testament

From the BlueLetterBiblMicahe.org

The information below relates to the names used for God as presented here.

YHWH: Meaning and Etymology of the Tetragrammaton

YHWH: Meaning and Etymology of the Tetragrammaton written by Joshua Schachterle, Ph.D

  • In modern synagogues today, you will never hear the name “YHWH.” Instead, if someone reads aloud from the Hebrew Bible, they will substitute one of several acceptable words for the name of God, usually Hashem (English: “The Name”), Adonai (English: Lord), or Elohim (English: God).
  • non-Jews then mistakenly combined the vowels of “Adonai” with the consonants of the Tetragrammaton, accidentally inventing the name “Jehovah.”
  • Anne Marie Kitz argues that the word may come from a verb that means “to be,””to exist,” “to bring into being,” or “to occur.” This makes sense given the name God tells Moses his name in Exodus 3:14: ’ehye ’ăšer ’ehye. Here, the word ’ehye directly relates to the word Yahweh, meaning “I am”. The Hebrew phrase can be translated as either “I am who I am,” or “I will be what I will be.”

Extract from Literature and History Episode 15

The highlands of what’s today Israel and Palestine were inhabited for a long time. Long before Egypt raised its first pyramid, seminomadic settlements thrived there, in the Mountains of Judaea, and for that matter all of the rugged parts of Israel and Palestine where herding was more feasible than tilling crops. And communities of highlanders thrived not just to the north of Jerusalem, but also to the east and south of the Old City, in the lands of Ammon, Moab, and Edom. The cultures of these various highland regions were largely interchangeable. Archaeology shows that they worshipped conventional Canaanite deities, among them El, the distant patriarchal god of the Levant, symbolized by a bull and later incorporated into Biblical Hebrew names like Bethel “house of God”, Elohim “God” or “Gods”, and Israel “The one who struggles with God.”

Christine Elizabeth Hayes’ book, Introduction to the Bible (The Open Yale Courses Series). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition extracts below.

Biblical writings regularly use four distinct terms to refer directly to the Israelite deity (I include here terms of consistent direct address only and not more occasional and descriptive epithets): El, Elohim, Yahweh, and (with less frequency) Adonai.

  • El is the name of the chief god of the Canaanite pantheon. Elohim is a grammatically plural form (“gods”), but in reference to the god of Israel, it takes singular verbs and thus may be understood as another name for this specific god.
  • Yahweh is a divine name attested in archaeological finds from regions to the south of biblical Israel and applied to the Israelite god in biblical writings.
  • Adonai, literally “my lord,” is used as a reference to the deity in a few biblical books.

Many English translations of the Bible adopt the convention of rendering El and Elohim as “God” (with a capital G) and Yahweh as “the LORD” (in capital letters). The latter rendering is a pious substitution made in deference to a postbiblical reluctance to pronounce the name Yahweh. Unfortunately, all of these renderings are misleading. On the one hand, they obscure the historical connections between Israel’s god and the gods of surrounding peoples (specifically the Canaanite deity El and the southern deity Yahweh). On the other hand, the rendering “God” causes readers to confuse the deity of the Hebrew Bible with the deity constructed by the much later tradition of western theology, a deity commonly referred to as “God” (with a capital G). As any astute reader of the Pentateuch will immediately discern, the biblical character El, or Elohim or Yahweh, is not represented by the biblical writer as possessing the attributes attributed to the deity referred to as “God” by the later tradition of western theology (for example, in many narratives he lacks the attributes of omniscience [the quality of having or seeming to have unlimited knowledge] and immutability [the state of not changing]). It is best that the reader keep these two constructions (the biblical deity and the theologian’s “God”) distinct in order to fully appreciate the biblical texts.

The above bullet formatting and emphasis are mine.

Parsing the Divine Name by Ronald S. Hendel

That link is to the full article at BAS. Extracts are below.

Articles in BAR often write “Yahweh” as the name of ancient Israel’s God. This concerns some readers, as occasionally expressed in letters to the editor (see Queries & Comments). Here, I explain why many—but not all—biblical scholars and archaeologists use this name.

Yahweh might originally be a dynamic form of the verb “to be,” meaning something like “he moves, blows,” or it could be a causative form, meaning something like “he makes.” But the name’s meaning seems to have been forgotten in classical Hebrew. At Mt. Horeb, when Moses asks God to reveal his name, God says ’ehyeh ’ăšer ’ehyeh (“I am that I am,” or “I am he who continually exists”), which is a wordplay on the not-yet-revealed name Yahweh. Then God tells Moses that his true name is YHWH (remember, not fully vocalized in the consonantal text), concluding his speech with a touch of poetry: “This is my name forever; this is my designation for all generations” (Exodus 3:14–15). Notice that God’s name is both concealed and revealed in this scene. The name is hinted at with “I am” because ʾehyeh sounds like Yahweh.

The vocalization of the first syllable is actually preserved, mostly in liturgical expressions and personal names. “Halleluyah,” a frequent refrain in the Psalms, means “Praise Yah.” Yah is a short form of God’s name, as it is in Exodus 15:2, “Yah is my strength and my might.” The same short form is found in many personal names, such as Obadiah (“servant of Yah”) and in the names of many well-known biblical figures, including Isaiah, Jeremiah, Josiah, Micaiah, Zedekiah, Zechariah, and Nehemiah. This is obvious evidence for the ancient pronunciation of the first syllable of the name of YHWH as Yah.

The paragraphs below were extracted from Living with Faith here and relate to the 12 Disciples.

Kephas/Petros:  Peter’s original name was Simon (next on this list), but the disciple was renamed – or more accurately, given the additional name Kephas or Peter by Jesus (John 1:42).  The Aramaic name Kephas and the Greek name Petros both mean “stone” or “rock.” Interestingly, Jesus told Simon, “You will be called Peter” (emphasis added), and the gospels show that Jesus continued to call him Simon with only one exception. The name Peter seems to have been widely used of the disciple only after the establishment of the early Church.

Shimon:  The name of Simon (both Simon Peter and Simon the Zealot) was the Hebrew name Shimon meaning “He has heard.”  In Jewish culture the one who had heard was understood to be God, and this name was often given when a child was conceived as a result of prayer – though Shimon became a popular Jewish name, without reference to its original meaning.

Yakov: The disciple we call James was named Yakov after the patriarch we call Jacob.  The meaning of the name is “heel” or “he who supplants,” and although this might seem somewhat negative, the name was extremely popular due to it being the name of the famous grandson of Abraham.

Yochanan: The name John that we read in the gospels is an English approximation of the Aramaic or Hebrew name Yochanan which means “Yahweh is gracious.”

Bar-Talmai :  Bartholomew’s name was actually a fusion of Aramaic and Greek. He was called Bar-Talmai in Aramaic which means “the son of Talmai” (Talmia being an Aramaic form of the famous Greek name “Ptolemy”).  The disciple is also called Nathanael in the Gospel of John because his full name in Aramaic was probably Natanel Bar Talmai – Nathanael son of Talmai. The name Natanel meant “God has given.”

Mattityahu:  The tax-collector turned disciple we know as Matthew is called Matthaios in the gosples – which was a Greek form of the Hebrew name Mattityahu meaning “gift of Yahweh,” from the roots mattan  meaning “gift” and yah “God.” This is yet another Hebrew name, like Shimon and Yochanan, that acknowledged the gift of children to God. Mattiyahu was also called Levi after the founder of the Israelite tribe of that name.

Tau’ma or Ta’om: This was the name of Thomas – an Aramaic name that means “twin.” In the gospels, the disciple is also called Didymus which is the Greek name with the same meaning. Early traditions state that the disciple’s full name was Judas Thomas.

Theudas:  The name of the disciple called Thaddeus in the gospels was a variant of Theudas – a Greek version of the name Judas. The fourth-century scholar Jerome called Thaddeus “Trinomious,” meaning “the man with three names,”  because in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark the apostle is listed as Thaddeus, in some versions of Matthew 10:3 he is called “Lebbaeus, whose surname was Thaddaeus,” and Luke replaces the name Thaddeus with “Judas son of James.” The apostle John also calls Thaddaeus “Judas (not Iscariot)” (John 14:22).

Andraus :  Also a Greek name, Andraus was the disciple we call Andrew. The New Testament does not mention any Hebrew or Aramaic name for this disciple so he was probably from a region of Palestine in which Greek was widely spoken. The  Greek name means “manly” or “masculine.”Philipos:  This was yet another Greek name. Although it meant “friend of horses,” it was given to many male children in honor of the great Macedonian king Philip, father of Alexander the Great.  Clues in the gospels suggest that it is likely that Andrew and Philip were Grecian Jews.

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