The Invention of God

Thomas Römer, Raymond Geuss

• Éditeur: Harvard University Press
• Année: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780674915756
• Sujet: Theology & Religion
• Sous-sujet: History of Religion

Who invented God? When, why, and where? Thomas Römer seeks to answer these questions about the deity of the great monotheisms—Yhwh, God, or Allah—by tracing Israelite beliefs and their context from the Bronze Age to the end of the Old Testament period in the third century BCE.That we can address such enigmatic questions at all may come as a surprise. But as Römer makes clear, a wealth of evidence allows us to piece together a reliable account of the origins and evolution of the god of Israel. Römer draws on a long tradition of historical, philological, and exegetical work and on recent discoveries in archaeology and epigraphy to locate the origins of Yhwh in the early Iron Age, when he emerged somewhere in Edom or in the northwest of the Arabian peninsula as a god of the wilderness and of storms and war. He became the sole god of Israel and Jerusalem in fits and starts as other gods, including the mother goddess Asherah, were gradually sidelined. But it was not until a major catastrophe—the destruction of Jerusalem and Judah—that Israelites came to worship Yhwh as the one god of all, creator of heaven and earth, who nevertheless proclaimed a special relationship with Judaism.A masterpiece of detective work and exposition by one of the world's leading experts on the Hebrew Bible, The Invention of God casts a clear light on profoundly important questions that are too rarely asked, let alone answered.

1

THE GOD OF ISRAEL AND HIS NAME

IF WE LOOK AT TRANSLATIONS of the Bible in English and other languages, we find various expressions used for the god of Israel, such as “the LORD,” “The Eternal One,” or, in certain Catholic Bibles, “Yahweh.” Does God then have a name? And why is there a prohibition in Judaism about pronouncing his name? In order to clarify this question and explain why, in what follows, we use the transliteration Yhwh to designate the god of Israel, we must start our story at its end, at the point in time when the Hebrew Bible did already exist as a collection of “holy” books. This anticipation will allow us to answer a question that might appear to be merely technical but is actually also extremely important, the question of the name of God, a question that has left a profound mark on Judaism, and subsequently on Christianity and Islam.

THE ENIGMA OF THE NAME OF GOD

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Both the Hebrew and the Christian Bibles open with this well-known statement. In the first chapter of Genesis, “god” has no proper name. This might seem completely unsurprising if we assume that the Bible is a monotheistic book. If there is only one god, why would he need a proper name?

Upon closer inspection, however, we encounter our first surprise. The Hebrew word that is translated as “god”—ʾĕlōhîm—has a plural ending and could also be translated as “(the) gods.” One god or several gods? The same word may express both the singular and the plural, and only the form of the verb indicates which is intended. This ambiguity may perhaps be intended to prevent us from making a firm decision on one of these possibilities to the exclusion of the other. Could the author perhaps be suggesting that the one god subsumes in himself a diversity of gods?

If we move on to the second narrative in Genesis, which relates only the creation of the first human couple and of animals, the translators propose various further ways of designating god. In most Catholic Bibles and also in some Protestant ones, the narrative relates what “the LORD” did. In other Bibles this becomes a narrative about what “The Eternal One” did, and still others speak about a god called “Jehova.” Although this is not at all evident from the translations themselves, these terms are in fact renderings of the same proper name, the precise pronunciation of which is a mystery to us. Why?

When scribes began to write down the texts that, much later, were to be put together to form the Bible, they wrote only consonants, just as is the case today in modern Hebrew or Arabic, languages with purely consonantal alphabets. In versions consisting only of consonants, the proper name of the god who appears in Genesis 2 and then very frequently in subsequent passages is written “Y-H-W-H,” and these four letters are the origin of the term “tetragrammaton,” which is used to refer to the name of the god of Israel. Only much later, between the third and tenth centuries of the Christian era, did learned Jews called the “Masoretes” (an Aramaic word meaning “guardians”) elaborate systems of vocalization to ensure the correct pronunciation of the sacred texts. Finally one of these systems—that developed by the family Ben Asher—succeeded in establishing itself as the standard one.

This is how scribes came into possession of a system with sufficient sophistication to allow them to add appropriate vowels to the words in a given text, of which only the consonants had initially been written down.¹ To illustrate this procedure, imagine an English word written gllws. We would easily recognize that this word was “gallows,” and so we could represent what the Masoretes did as adding vowels like this: g_allows. A written expression like fclt could be vocalized in at least two different ways: f_ac_ult_y or f_acilit_y. In certain cases like this, therefore, the Masoretes had to make a decision about the meaning they wished to attribute to the word or phrase. For the proper name of the god of Israel they encountered a problem: starting in the third century, Judaism had begun to prescribe that the name was no longer to be pronounced. This prohibition is already attested in the translation of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) into Greek, where one finds in place of the tetragrammaton Yhwh either the word theós (“god”) or in most cases kúrios (“lord”).

There are several reasons for this prohibition. Within the framework of a monotheistic view it is inappropriate for the one god to have a proper name, because if he had one, this might suggest that there was some need to distinguish him from other gods. Of course, it was also thought important to discourage magical practices in which the name of God might be used. One of the Ten Commandments in fact demands, “Thou shalt not take the name of thy god in vain,” which can be interpreted as placing an interdict on the magical invocation of God.

It seems clear that this prohibition of pronouncing God’s name was imposed gradually but progressively. In the Mishna, the collection of rabbinical interpretative texts from the first and second centuries of the Christian era, we find the idea that the high priest may pronounce the divine name on the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) in the Holy of Holies, the inner sanctuary of the Temple (Treatise Yoma 6:2). This was perhaps a practice current in the last decades before the Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed in AD 70. A Samaritan tradition states that the high priest transmits the pronunciation secretly to his successor.²

Thus the Masoretes found themselves confronted with a huge problem when it came to writing the divine name. They could not change the consonants Yhwh because the consonantal text was considered sacred and invariable. At the same time they could not introduce the vowels that would have permitted a pronunciation of the divine name because that would have been contrary to the developing theology of Judaism. In order to have the possibility of correcting the consonantal text, they invented a distinction between Kĕtîv (“what is written”) and Qĕrê (“what is to be read”). Having done that, they then applied to the tetragrammaton the vowels of ʾădōnāy, “my Lord” (which is in fact probably a plural form), in order to indicate that one was to pronounce the word ʾădōnāy when the text contained the name of God, Yhwh. This resulted in the forms found in biblical manuscripts: Y_ěHW_aH or Y_ěHoW_aH,³ depending on which manuscript one consults. This substitution corresponds to the replacement of Yhwh with kúrios (“Lord”) in the Greek Bible.

It was, then, a mistake to try to pronounce Yhwh by using the replacement vowels of ʾădōnāy, which had been introduced into the text by the Masoretes, and inserting these vowels between the consonants of the tetragrammaton. This error resulted from a failure to understand this scribal practice. It produced the pronunciation that the Dominican friar Raimundus Mari in the thirteenth century rendered as Yěh(o)wāh. This form was then reproduced extensively in translations of the Bible and persists especially among Jehovah’s Witnesses.

In Judaism one also finds another replacement used in addition to ʾădōnāy, namely haš-šem (“the Name”), and this is used also by the Samaritans. For this reason some scholars have suggested that vowels used to create the substitute for Yhwh are actually those of the Aramaean šĕmā (“the name”), but for various reasons this is not plausible.⁴

So the most probable view is that the first form of vocalization used the vowels of ʾădōnāy, but that certain Jewish scholars who had come to mistrust the Septuagint (the Greek translation), especially in view of the Christian appropriation of kúrios in the New Testament to refer to Jesus, decided to use “The Name” in place of Yhwh. Recall, too, that certain Greek manuscripts use theós (“god”) in place of kúrios (“lord”). This might also indicate that there was some desire to substitute ʾĕlōhîm for the tetragrammaton. In the beginning, therefore, there will have existed a number of different ways of indicating that the tetragrammaton was not to be pronounced.

YHWH, YHW, YH

Curiously, and despite the prohibition, the biblical texts retain some traces of a pronunciation of the divine name. In addition to the tetragrammaton Yhwh, the Masoretic vocalization of which goes back to the substitute “Lord,” there are numerous attestations of a short form Yhw, which is found particularly in theophoric proper names—that is, names constructed with an element derived from the name of the god of Israel, such as Yirmĕyāhû (Jeremiah), Yĕša῾yāhû (Isaiah), Yĕhônātān (Jonathan), and so forth. This suggests that the short form of the divine name was pronounced “Yahu/Yaho.”⁵

To these two forms Yhwh and Yhw, should be added a third, Yh (Yāh), which is found primarily in the liturgical exclamation hallĕlû-yāh (“Praise Yāh”), but also in such biblical texts as Exodus 15:2 (“Yāh is my strength and my song”), Isaiah 12:2 (“Yāh, Yhwh is my strength”), Psalms 68:19 (“You have mounted up the heights … to make there your dwelling-place, Yāh, Elōhîm”), and so on. We can also find this combination of Yhwh and Yh outside the Bible, in an inscription probably dating from the end of the eighth century that was discovered at Khirbet Beit Ley,⁶ a place about 35 kilometers southeast of Jerusalem. Although the beginning of the inscription is difficult to decipher, it is possible to make out the following prayer: “Intervene on our behalf merciful Yhwh; acquit us, Yāh, Yhwh.”⁷ Both in the Bible and outside it, then, the short form “Yāh” appears, particularly in prayers and hymns. This indicates that Yāh is a liturgical variant of the tetragrammaton that can in certain cases appear together with Yhwh, no doubt because it creates a pleasant alliteration. The two short forms Yahû and Yāh agree in that the vocalization of the first syllable is an “a,” and this makes it likely that this was equally the case for the tetragrammaton Yhwh. There remains then the question of the vocalization of the second syllable in the long form Yhwh and of its relation to the short form Yhw.

To answer these questions we must start from the only biblical text that gives a kind of explanation of the divine name. This is the episode of the calling of Moses in Exodus 3. According to this text Moses was called by Yhwh while he was pasturing the herd of his Midianite father-in-law, who was a priest. Yhwh appears to Moses in a burning bush and tells him to return to Egypt, from where he had fled, and to announce to the Hebrews their liberation and their imminent departure for a land flowing with milk and honey. Moses first objects that he is not in a position to carry out this task, but Yhwh promises him his help (“I am/I will be with you”).⁸ Then Moses asks about the identity of the god who is speaking to him:

(11) Moses said to God (ʾĕlōhîm): “Who am I to go to Pharaoh and bring the sons of Israel out of Egypt?” (12) He said: “Truly I shall be with you/I am with you (ʾehyeh ῾immāk), and this will be a sign for you that it is I who have sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt you will serve God on this mountain.” (13) And Moses said to God: “I shall, then, go to the sons of Israel and shall say to them: the god of your fathers has sent me, and they shall say to me: What is his name? What shall I say to them?” (14) God said to Moses: “I shall be who I shall be/ I am who I am (ʾehyeh ʾašer ʾehyeh). And he said: “You shall speak thus to the sons of Israel: ‘I shall be’ has sent me to you.” (15) God spoke again to Moses: “You shall speak thus...