Names of God

How would God sign himself?

The oldest form of the name of God seems to be Elohim, which was abbreviated to EL. In the transliteration we are using here (which drops the pointing) EL becomes alef-lamed (AL) אל. The mainly poetic singular forms of Elohim, ELH and ELWH, are also included. From about the same era there is ^cL (Ayin-L), על, which means Most High, and was pronounced somewhat similarly to AL.

But probably the most significant names derive from Moses’ encounter with a burning bush and his return to Egypt where the Hebrews were enslaved. Moses (Ex 3:14) asks the Bush who he shall say sent him to the Children of Israel. God replies, “I AM what I AM; you should say I AM has sent me to you”. We may immediately think this must be YHWH, the famous Name, also called the Tetragrammaton יהוה meaning “I AM what I AM”, but it isn’t; it is HYH היה. This is a unique name for God used nowhere else in the Bible – elsewhere it simply means “exists” or “is” and of course there are a vast number of such uses not connected with God. This is therefore also in one way the name of God. It seems to mean in some way “I am the one who exists”, the implication being the other claimed gods don’t. But it may also mean in some way that everything that exists has its root in God, though is not God himself. Without the vowels present it contains a curious echo of meaning, HY, הי which is “woe, ruin”. Either something exists, or is destroyed and becomes nothing? Perhaps we can choose the outcome?

I retain HYH because apparently Ahayah has become a popular colloquial name of God in modern Israel. In modern Hebrew we may find at the head of a letter, BH (Baruk Hashem, Blessed is the Name). This is often abbreviated still further to H, but H is not included in the present study.

The YHWH name (I AM what I AM) appears in Exodus 3 and is important three chapters later in Exodus 6:2ff when Moses is back in Egypt. “ And God spoke to Moses and said,"therefore say to the children of Israel I am the Lord (YHWH). I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians ... So Moses spoke thus to the children of Israel; but they did not heed Moses because of anguish of spirit and cruel bondage.”

In Exodus 6 it also says that by his name YHWH he was not known to the Patriarchs. However he was: see for example Genesis 28:16. What it probably means is that by his miraculous rescuing power, i.e., from Egypt, he was not known to them.

In Exodus 20 God writes his name into the commandments given to the Hebrews, "I am YHWH your God... The Biblical records says the tablets of stone were “written by the finger of God”. This seems to be the only tangible unique written signature of God in Biblical writing!

But eventually (mainly in the Promised Land) they began to use YHWH in the abbreviated form of YH (Yah) in names, as already they did for EL. There is a sprinkling of such names from the Exodus on, and one early one is Abijah which means worshipper of Yah. (Abijah was the son of the prophet Samuel). In our Hebrew without vowels, Yah would be abbreviated further to YH. I also added to the Names of God, AB for father, ^cL, for Most High, HSM (The Name), YSW^c (Jesus), and all two letter names of biblical characters I could find. To be fair (?) I included Baal, and Bel, as rival deities.

Lord, Adonai, ADNY, is certainly a name of God but equally the master of a slave, etc., so that many uses in the Old Testament are not the name of God. AB (Father) is also a Name of God; its earthly use is a shadow of the name.

Late in the piece I came across another little-known written name, which is an abbreviation of Adonai, ײ - a pair of the tiny yod letters, hence in one sense the most compact abbreviation possible! It is not biblical, but found in Jewish prayer books, which have been around a long time. Probably the oldest one, handwritten and still in its original binding, is 1200 years old, and the first ones probably dated to the end of the Second Temple Period, i.e., before 70 AD. An even older abbreviation is YYY. It seems even that got abbreviated with time to YY, but there are some clues scholars cite, which may indicate YYY could exist as early as 300 BC, the start of the Septuagint translation into Greek.

Even later in the piece I found the name QNA קנא. In Exodus 34:14 we find,"For you shall worship no other God, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God." Which seems to mean he is jealous of our love.

YY is a good candidate for being the most popular name of God to be found, because y is the most common letter which will appear in transcribed genes.

I added in ALLH, which is the Hebrew version of “Allah”.

The results from 100,000 amino acids were: