YHWH meaning

Meaning

He Who Causes "That-Which-Is" To Be, Whilst Causing "That-Which-Can't-Be" To Fall

House Of Information Technology, House Of The Alphabet, House Of The Great Human Library

Etymology

From the verb הוה (hawa), which both means to be and to fall.

From the Hebrew "name" of the alphabet, formed from the three Hebrew vowels, plus an artificial suffix of locality.

Related names

• Via יהוה (yhwh): Dabar-YHWH, YHWH-jireh, YHWH-nesi, YHWH-shalom

• Via יה (yah): See the 'browse by form' menu for a long list of yah-names.

The name YHWH is very old and it's generally assumed that the source texts of the Torah already contained it. It is similarly likely that the Book of the Covenant, which Moses read aloud to the Israelites, contained it too (Exodus 24:7).

We will get further into the details below, but the whole idea behind pronouncing any name is that this allows us to identify a thing and distinguish that thing from its environment and other things: those things that our thing is not. When we compress the bellows of our lungs and thrust air through our vocal cords and over our tongue and lips, and so produce a "word", a virtual "object" that comprises vibrating air molecules, we do something very similar to making a cast or graven object from liquid metal (Psalm 12:6). Every spoken word is a cast or carved object, which is why in Hebrew, the word for "word" is the same as the word for "thing", namely דבר (dabar). When we say a name, we define the boundary where the environment ends and the thing begins (or vice versa), which works with every and all things but not with YHWH. When we ignore the impossibility of imposing locality upon the Creator, and pronounce the name YHWH anyway, we localize the thing-called-YHWH and at once turn him into an idol, which is the mother of all bad ideas.

But since in antiquity texts were mostly read out loud, the occurrence of the unpronounceable name caused a challenge. Hence, wherever the text said "YHWH", a reader would pronounce the Hebrew word for "lord" or "sir" or "mister", namely Adonai. In the Middle Ages, the Masoretes began to fear that the traditional pronunciation of the written text might become lost and inserted symbols to help preserve it. That caused the pronunciation of the word Adonai to be linked to the spelling of YHWH, which in turn resulted in the hybrid term Jehovah, which, as we will see below, is no better or worse than Yahweh or Yahoo or whatever.

Other Jewish traditions avoided the vocalization of YHWH by interjecting the term השם (hashem), which is the Hebrew word for "name", namely שם (shem), plus the definite article ה (ha): The Name. The dual form of this word שם (shem), name, is שמים (shemayim), or "[two] names", which is spelled identical as (albeit pronounced slightly different from) the noun שמים (shamayim), meaning "[two] heavens". The prefix ש (shin) means "which is [like]", and our word for heaven without the leading ש (shin) results in מים (mayim), meaning "[two] waters", which implies that the "[two] heavens" are "that which are alike the [two] waters", in a "as above, so below" sort of sense (Exodus 25:40, Psalm 49:4, Matthew 6:10).

All this means that in Hebrew — long before the story has even started and long before anybody has explained anything: long before any theology or philosophy is called upon, and baked within the very fabric of the language itself and expressed wherever these words are used in whatever context — there exists an innate relationship between the Creator, the heavens in which the Creator natively resides, the waters that reflect the heavens, and the fractal of broken symmetry that results, via which the elements of this chain interconnect, in a dynamic union that is guaranteed by the Spirit of Unity that hovers over the waters.

This Hebrew word for "name", "shem", also became the name Shem, which in turn means that Semites are literally Name-ites. And since the word "noun" also literally means "name", the Semites are the Noun-ites. And since in Greek, the word for "word/noun/name" is ονομα (onoma), whilst the word for law is νομος (nomos), Semites are Lawyers, in the sense that they study natural law, and so are Scientists. And they specifically study the natural law that makes consciousness tick, which is language, and so are Linguists. And since one's language and one's reality are very closely linked, the Semites are most of all Realists, who primarily study existence: what it is like to exist, and what it is like to not exist.

Leave it to the Greeks to explain the obvious into obscurity, but here it goes. The term "existence" describes the whole Zusammenspiel, the whole kit and caboodle, the whole circus and goings on of all things that exist and interact with all other things that exist. Existence is a collective and interactive enterprise. And all things that partake in existence, do so in subject to the whole of existence. Existence is always bigger than any thing that exists. And only those elements of any existing thing that communicates with (and can be observed by) other things, actually exist and play their respective part in the interactive game of existing. If the thing has any secrets, then those secrets don't actually exist, because no other thing that exists (save, inevitably, the person whose secrets they are) interacts with them. That is, unless those secrets come out and engage and hence affect the rest of existence, but then they are not secrets anymore. Bottom line: whatever has no effect, does not exist (1 Corinthians 3:15).

Now then, if God existed, he would depend on existence and existence would be greater than he. That's not going to fly. Instead, existence depends on him and he is greater than it. God does not exist, he super-sists (1 Corinthians 8:6).

God is Truth, and truth is nothing other than a seamless union of all things that exist. God is One, and from his oneness, all things come: the entire universe but also laws of preservation of energy, momentum, charge, baryon number, and so on. You might say that the singularity from which the universe Big Banged forward was never compromised, and all things never stopped being one. But at quantum level, things are not quite seamlessly unified and things are rather chaotic. The same is true for the atomic level, the biological level and even our own human level, although our human world (compared to the animal or material realms) is surprisingly peaceful and uniform and organized. That means that between perfect unity and absolute chaos, there sit intermediate ranges, and since humans handle other humans but also animals and objects, it seems reasonable to assume that there is some interaction between these levels (and the study of six degrees of separation tells us that an entire horse-pervaded society can be stabilized by a mere few talented horse-whisperers, and that likewise a mere few righteous folks can stabilize an entire urban population: Genesis 18:20-32).

The ancient Hebrews imagined the unknowable (and hence not existing but super-sisting) God seated on a throne, which is the oneness of the physical, biological and mental universes. And around this "solar" throne of oneness, there are concentric circles (or spheres, rather), which comprise elements that are in seamless correspondence with each other: a matryoshka doll of spiritual Dyson spheres, so to speak. The same structure appears in the design of the tabernacle, with its innermost sanctum between the wings of the cherubim on the Ark of the Covenant, where God meets humanity (Exodus 25:22), around which extends the Holy of Holies, around which sits the Holy (the outer walls of the Holy also encompass the Holy of Holies), around which sits the Inner Court of the priests, around which sits the Outer Court of the nations, around which sits the outer darkness of the desert. Simply by extrapolating the patterns via which the human world relates to the animal world, and the animal world to the material world, we can confidently assume that close to the throne-of-oneness, there are circles of massively powerful entities who each sing their individual part in the same symphonic song and although autonomous, have no secrets for each other.

These spiritual Dyson spheres are transparent in the direction away from the throne but opaque toward it. Think of one of those milky white spherical lamps that hang over dinner tables in fancy apartments. The light comes from the glowing filament, that sits in a glass bulb, that sits in a larger milky white glass sphere. But to anyone seated at the table below, the light comes from the entire milky white glass sphere, and that person is unable to see any structures further in. A passerby down on the street can only see the light that comes through the windows high up, but not what's going on inside the apartment. But a bug that slips through the window, into the apartment, and then into the lamp's outer sphere will see the inner bulb. Anyone outside the outer sphere won't, and will only see the outer sphere in its entirety bursting forth with spectacular radiance from the filament layers deep within its inner core.

This is how the prophet Zechariah could write: "In that day the Lord will defend the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and the one who is feeble among them in that day will be like David, and the house of David will be like God, like the angel of the Lord before them" (Zechariah 12:8, see Revelation 21:23). And to paraphrase this for clarity: to any non-Jew who knows what they are looking at, any Jew has the appearance of God or the messenger of YHWH. This conversely means that anyone who looks at a Jew and only sees a scrawny fellow in weird clothing does not know God or the angel of YHWH.

Not all Christians like to hear this, but Hebrew-reading Jews live natively upon the inner priestly court, whereas non-Hebrew-reading non-Jews live natively on the outer court (where Jesus walked and talked: Matthew 21:12). This is why to Jews, salvation (ישועה, yeshua) is only from YHWH (Isaiah 12:2), whereas to non-Jews, salvation is only from the Jews (John 4:22). This in turn means that to non-Jews, the literary character called Jesus (and note that a literary character is a character whose reality derives solely from its context within the story, and not from events in history that may or may not have "really happened") sums up the whole of Jewness and is in fact the very Temple that non-Jews natively see only from the outside. It's also why "ten men from all languages and nations will take firm hold of one Jew by the hem of his robe and say, 'Let us go with you, because we have heard (שמע, shama') that God is with you'" (Zechariah 8:23).

When one turns one's face away from the solar throne and looks down into the outer abyss, one is able to see all the spheres that comprise the vast infinite below, all the way down to the subatomic level. But a thought can see a quark, whereas a quark can't see a thought. When one faces toward the throne, one can only see the outside of the next circle in. A quark cannot see a soul, but still can see that there is something going on. A quark can see that souls increase entropy much more than all the quarks of the soul's body combined, so that there is something within the scope of any quark that exceeds the scope of any quark. Said otherwise: the language of the physical laws of the material universe can comprehend the observation that a living thing (a thing with agency that makes it travel without there being a mechanical impulse to explain its path) causes much more thermodynamic chaos than an inanimate thing of the same mass would, and can even comprehend that despite the absence of any proof, this suggests that there may be a corresponding area of otherwise inexplicable reduction of entropy, some strange "area" of harmonic unity. This means that the material universe is unable to prove to itself that soul or mind exists, but it might be able to believe it simply by accepting the reality of its mystery (Matthew 11:4, Colossians 4:3).

A mind (looking down) can tell the difference between a rock and a potato, but a kernel of sand (looking up) cannot tell the difference between a eukaryote and a philosophy major. When one looks upward, one can only see the next sphere up, but one cannot partake in the language that is spoken there, and learning to approximate that language may take a lifetime's worth of dedication.

The further away from the throne one's native Dyson sphere sits, the more elements there are in that sphere, and the less stable the sphere gets because the differences begin to outweigh the similarities. If the elements of one's language don't form a completed sphere, then it cannot convey truth, because truth is always full-circle complete. A small but complete sphere compares to a large but incomplete arc the way a small seed compares to a large wooden beam. The drumroll-bottom-line of all this is that Biblical Hebrew has been long known to make a closed circle around the throne, and is complete and alive and life giving. The English language (as all modern languages) is much larger but incomplete, because its words don't cover everything and leave cracks of unnamable truths wide open and also has names for things that don't exist in any closed circle: entities whose fabric is void, ungodly creations that embody un-reality and which are only experienced in fractured and incomplete semi-circles.

All modern human languages relate to Biblical Hebrew the way animals relate to humans. Some animals have become domesticated and some haven't, but Hebrew never stopped being the world's shepherd and future king (Zephaniah 3:9). Many modern thinkers scoff at the idea of reincarnation, but its core idea is a well-accepted principle in Hebrew mysticism, and has been contemplated for centuries under the name Gilgul. The basic idea of Gilgul is that "soul" or "consciousness", or whatever you call it, is as primary, or even more primary than energy, so that "soul", like energy, doesn't get more or less and only changes form. And because we're talking about autonomous clusters of data (you "are" what you know), in some weird way, a million or so bugs amount to one confused human. And one member of the lowest angelic sphere amounts to two or more humans (hence texts like Daniel 10:13, Zechariah 8:23, Ephesians 6:12 and of course Matthew 18:20; it's also one of the reasons why a covenanted marriage is so very sacred: 1 Corinthians 11:10, Matthew 16:19).

In the system of Gilgul, the members of any sphere can bind themselves to the goings on of the next one up, so that upon death, their souls "reincarnate" in the next sphere up. This is of course entirely parallel to the more familiar idea of dying and going to heaven to be with the angels (or to hell to be with the demons). Less recognizable is the necessary extension of this, which suggests that dogs and horses that somehow learn their own version of the language of humans, and thus become able to perform tasks that the humans charge them with, are hence considered by the humans as good dogs and good horses: dogs and horses who are obedient to the human commands given (Genesis 15:6). Entirely likewise, when humans somehow manage to learn the language of the next level up, which would be the lowest angelic sphere, and via their own human thought processes manage to obey whatever commands reach them, are considered obedient to said angels (hence the controversial Galatians 3:19).

Philosophers have long pondered the curious nature of spontaneous inspiration, via which complex ideas, scientific theories, songs or entire symphonies pop into someone's head as good as fully formed: Mozart, Paul McCartney, Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, Alan Guth, Ramanujan all reported such events; then there are so-called Autistic Savants who appear to have continuous access. Particularly pressing has been the question whether these ideas came from without or within the recipient: if from without, then from where? And if from within, well, again from where? Most sudden revelations occur in the language in which the recipient is fluent (music for Paul McCartney, mathematics for Stephen Hawking), but savants sometimes manage to download an entire language or hitherto unfamiliar skill in a plug and play sort of way (Genesis 15:1).

It's still a mystery how all this happens, but several Hebrew sages have claimed that, since the Torah works on the same fundamental principles as the universe (fractals, tunneling, entanglement, entropy; all that), the Torah in essence "contains" the whole universe, and any mind that contains the Torah does too. And since the Torah attained its human form from the insights of people who obviously didn't have it, there are evidently still people among us who are natural mystics and, although not formally familiar with the Torah, somehow intensely sensitive to a layer of harmonic information that is beyond the rest of us. Remember that when Abraham arrived in Canaan, he found a whole collective of local kings who were already experimenting with the righteousness of YHWH: most notably Melchizedek and Abimelech (see Genesis 20:4; compare Genesis 20:17-18 to Revelation 22:2, but also see 1 Kings 19:10 and Acts 7:52).

The whole idea of Gilgul is that, upon death, these righteous humans "reincarnate" in said realm of angels (Matthew 22:32, Luke 16:22), whereas those good dogs and horses "reincarnate" among us humans (Romans 8:22, Colossians 1:23). This might help to explain why some of us are such excellent horse- and dog-whisperers. Contrarily, a fallen angel who becomes a human-whisperer might actually trigger tribalism and fascism. This in turn may help to explain the curious idea that Jesus, who obviously didn't "fall", descended willfully to earth to incarnate among us humans (Philippians 2:7), and even went to "hell" to preach to the prisoners there (1 Peter 3:19), which may very well have included our modern generations today (Psalm 102:18), of people fettered by the illusion that nothing exceeds rationality (Ephesians 3:19, Philippians 4:7).

This further implies that there are people among us who are in fact fellow descenders with Christ, who are native to the inner court (Philippians 3:20) but walk the outer one in search of people to inspire (Hebrews 13:2), after which they go back up again. The name Jared means Descender and belongs to the father of Enoch, who famously walked with God and was taken up (Genesis 5:24). Same story.

Such descenders, such Jaredi, are human-whisperers, and share that skill with fallen angels, but differ from the latter in that they are loath to inspire to tribalism of any sort (including all forms of orthodoxy) and only to global unity and universal law. For an outstanding meditation on the relationship between formal scholars and clergy on the one hand and angelics-among-us on the other, see the most excellent 1984 film Amadeus. The name Amadeus is the Latin translation of the Greek name Theophilus (Acts 1:1), and means Lover of God or He Who Loves God (and God, of course, is harmonic perfection of any and all kinds). And while Amadeus Mozart is as eternal as Abraham (Matthew 22:32), people like God "loving" Salieri will never be more than a profiteering footnote to the former.

Dogs, horses and humans who feel that they have better things to spend their precious lives on than learning the language of their next levels inward, will, upon death, head outward into the realms of insects and such, to spend their eternity in perpetual panic, forever on the run from predators.

Particularly the New Testament is adamant that in the near future, the outer court will stop to exist and become a chasm that can no longer be crossed, so that the inner court plus the temple itself will lift off like a UFO from the earth and settle down again but now as an entirely separate entity, like a baby that emerges from within the mother and is then placed back into her arms but now as a whole separate individual — in this metaphor, the outer court is the placenta.

This event will coincide with a massive extermination of outer-court residents. Non-Jews who didn't attach themselves to the outer wall of the inner court, and somehow survive the collapse, will revert back to the Stone Age and be one with the animals. The non-Jews who did attach themselves to the outer wall of the inner court will go with it, like domesticated animals upon the agricultural revolution. And among those domesticated animals there will be a donkey. Not all Jews like to hear this, but that gentile donkey is certainly something to be looking out for (Zechariah 9:9, Genesis 49:11).

The seemingly casual command to 'write' something on all doors (Deuteronomy 6:9) and hands and foreheads (Exodus 13:9) calls in fact for the invention of a writing system that could be mastered by everybody. This is a very big deal, and it resulted in the most powerful tool of data preservation up to our present age.

We moderns are so inundated by information and administration and all sorts of records that we sometimes forget that this was once not so. Well it was. And the Bible meditates on the transition between a chaotic, unpredictable, recordless, lawless and unscientific animal world to an ordered, administrated, predictable, lawful and scientific human world. The Bible is also about the struggle that is suffered by people who have invented something paradigm-shattering and world-changing, namely their struggle with the authorities who own and run the old world and don't care much about innovations of any kind (Ephesians 6:12). True innovation, therefore, invariably comes from people who have very good reasons to want to change things and not from people who are solidly invested in the perpetuation of the status quo, who control people's movements and the media and hence the narrative. This is why true innovators invariably end up on crosses, vilified as enemies of the state (עץ, 'ets, means tree; עצה, 'etsa, means counsel, עצם, 'etsem, means bone or noun: again, this correlation is baked into the Hebrew language long before the story even starts).

The Bible is about the struggle of the Firstborn Record (the cluster of what's been called "the First Signs"), that endeavored to teach general record-keeping, in a be-like-me sort of way, to a world that was used to reacting to life as it came, and didn't even have the insight to appreciate this Firstborn Record as it showed up within ancient human reality. But it was the seed from which all modern-human civilization sprang, whether by natural emergence, panspermia or some other mechanism — all we really know for sure is that it showed up and terraformed the human world, adapting and mutating, diversifying and largely degrading as generations went by in concentric circles around the place of its original impact (John 1:5).

The Hebrew word for record is ספר (sepher), hence our English word "cipher", and hence also the familiar plural "Sefirot", ten of which (or so explained the Jewish mystics), sit like a series of servers or data nodes — that all talk to each other, up and down and sideways (Genesis 28:12) — in between the Creator and creation as a vast "Tree of Life", which is thus a "Tree of Interactive Records".

The canonized Bible, in turn, speaks of the "Book of Life", which too is a record. In that Book are recorded the names of people and their deeds down to their every spoken word (Matthew 12:36) and the very number of hairs on their heads (Matthew 10:30). But although exhaustive administration was not wholly novel in the late Bronze Age, this Book of Life comes with an unprecedented eraser that erases things (Exodus 32:33, Isaiah 1:18, Philippians 4:3). One of the few qualities that sets the Hebrew Creator firmly apart from other gods is his ability and willingness to forget, whilst never compromising his own omniscience. And this means that the omniscience of God is one data set, and the knowledge of man is another data set, and as long as the two don't line up, the human one does not exist. This is because the data set of God is One (and is a singularity, or a unified Theory of Everything: Romans 8:28), and as long as the data set of man is fractured, and full of holes, lies and disagreements, it's a delusion: the Man Delusion.

We English speakers like to believe that God hears us when we pray to him in English, but there's a problem with that. God has no ear-drums, or any way to detect vibrations in air. So however he does it, he has to rely on some kind of translation, or even an entire chain of translators, between our spoken words and his understanding of them (Matthew 18:10). Fortunately, our English language works because of rules, and those rules can (in theory) be transcribed into whatever "language" in whatever medium (other than air) by which God communicates. Unfortunately, if our best-intended human law (i.e. any set of rules, including those of English grammar) is not the same as God's Law, then our human law is the same as anything lawless. It doesn't matter what we set up in place of God's Law: anything that replaces God's Law is indistinguishable from lawlessness. And that is a problem because nothing good (i.e. stable and predictable and hence relatable) can come from lawlessness, and the two can't communicate or even exchange information, because for that, we need mutually accepted regularities, or a common law, no matter how rudimentary.

We can only communicate with any second party, including God, by means of shared nuggets of understanding or words we both understand, while the bits that are different are indistinguishable from noise. Sometimes our human reality is so full of death and psychotic nothingness, which simply cannot be translated into something that resembles anything in God's reality (Ephesians 2:1), that the gap between God's perfectly solid reality and our own mushy, fractured and uprooted one becomes too wide to cross (Luke 16:26). In that case, we might think we are real but God doesn't, and that's a problem for us, not for God — and to understand this, mediate on Genesis 18:22-33 for a bit and imagine that "the city" is in fact your mind.

Darkness is not the opposite of light but the absence of it and not the presence of something else. Likewise, foolishness is the absence of wisdom, and not the presence of something else. Likewise, chaos is the absence of order, and not the presence of something else. God is and he cannot not be: he cannot lie because a lie is the absence of truth, but not the presence of something else. Truth exists, but a lie does not. God cannot lie (1 John 1:5, Hebrews 6:18), so he can also not see something that isn't there. Not even when that thing that isn't there thinks it is (Genesis 3:9, 11:5, 18:21, 19:12). Instead, only when we pray in his Name, does he hear us and react appropriately. When not, then not (Deuteronomy 6:13, 1 Kings 18:24, Zechariah 10:12, Matthew 12:21, John 1:12, James 5:16), and if this alarms you, then you should probably not have a look at our article on Mesopotamia (but see Romans 8:26-27, Song of Solomon 5:2, Ezekiel 11:19, Ecclesiastes 5:2, Psalm 46:10, Matthew 6:7, Psalm 139:2, 1 Thessalonians 5:17).

God created the world by speaking it into being. That means that he first had to have produced the words for things. But words don't exist on their own and always as members of an entire language. That means that before there was a universe, there was a language that described the universe. And since that language was before anything but God existed, that language was with God and was God, in the beginning (John 1:1).

When God said, "Let there be light," he had already created the word light, and a software environment that could process instructions. Before the Creator created things, he created the words for things, so that words came first and things were the effects of words. This not only means that information has primality over energy (and thus consciousness over matter), it also means that the old idea that words represent things is not correct, and that instead, things represent words (i.e. manifestations of information are secondary to the information, which is primary: "it from bit" instead of the other way around). That in turn means that human language was not constructed ex nihilo, but rather emerged as a reflection of a layer of information that had always existed within observable reality, as its very foundation.

Things degrade, which is how the universe digests things that aren't there (which is a facetious way of talking about a misalignment between information and manifestation: things for which there are no foundational words do not exist within the informational foundation, which is superior and ultimately the only one that counts). That means that any occurrence of low entropy (i.e. oneness, harmony, alignment) must be maintained, which requires effort. This is why the Bible insists to practice הדברם האלה (hadvarim ha-elle), these words: not other words, not translated words, not something "better" than these words, not even "these words" but הדברם האלה. The further away from הדברם האלה we drift, the less aligned our reality becomes with God's reality, and the less visible God's reality becomes for us (and ours to him).

When we know the Bible stories but not the Bible language, then we are like the deaf-mute man who yearned for health and righteousness but couldn't even call out to Jesus when he stood in front of him: see our article on the enigmatic term εφφαθα (ephphatha), which Jesus uttered when he healed the deaf-mute man in Mark 7:34. Also realize that "the name of Jesus" (Acts 2:38, Philippians 2:10) is not "Jesus" but rather the Name within which Jesus acted and operated, namely his Father's name, which is far above every name that can be evoked (Ephesians 1:21, Philippians 2:9-10).

In order to align man's data set with God's data set, God commanded man to comprehend the principle of covenant, which is a supernatural — i.e. not electromagnetism, gravity or either of the two nuclear forces, but rather deriving from respect, fidelity and brotherly love, for which there are no equations: Galatians 5:23 — but very real force that binds humans together into societies based on regulation. With the principle of covenant (and regularity) under the belt, man was commanded to develop script, and number their days (Psalm 90:12), which comes down to creating a calendar, which not only let man plan their daily life, but also to take a day off (which was entirely unprecedented in the Bronze Age), so as to have a weekly foretaste of what utter freedom-by-law feels like (see our articles on Sabbath and the word ελευθερια, eleutheria, freedom-by-law).

We moderns are so used to reading and writing that we often forget what an incredible miracle the alphabet is. It took many peoples many millennia to develop it and the main contribution of the Hebrews was the invention of vowel notation. Vowel notation was the capstone that completed the alphabet, and which made the previously esoteric art of writing and reading available to the masses. Prior to vowel notation, script was basically a mnemonic tool that helped specifically trained priests to memorize sacred texts. After it, script allowed anybody to be a priest, and give an entire nation a collective living memory (Exodus 19:6).

The alphabet quite literally allowed nations to become alive and be endowed with a singular living and thinking mind, in precisely the same way in which the Creator had once collected the dust of the earth into a viable body and infused into that body the breath of life (Genesis 2:7). Much later, the Creator would do that exact same thing once again when he gathered believers into a viable body and infused into them the Holy Spirit (compare Genesis 13:16 to Galatians 3:7 and Acts 2:2). YHWH is the second creation name of God, as the Creator's name "changes" from Elohim, the Maker of Elements, to YHWH Elohim, the Applier of Elements, in Genesis 2:4 (see for a closer look at this our article on the Chaotic Set Theory).

And sure enough, modern information theory (starting with Claude Shannon in 1948) tells us that, indeed, the universe is basically a data-processing device that began its core business of storing and processing information as soon as there were particles to combine and arrange.

If you have ever wondered why the Mona Lisa looks the way it does, then realize that Leonardo da Vinci never saw a photograph. We moderns are surrounded by photographs, which is why we sometimes forget that Leonardo never was, never thought of one, and never would have imagined why anyone would want to duplicate observable reality and print it on a piece of paper. If Leonardo (or his customers) wanted realism, they could look out the window. Paintings that people wanted and paid for were not designed to duplicate observable reality, but instead conveyed otherwise invisible mental impressions and stories far beyond the bare depiction, and that by means of telling compositions, symbols and symbolic objects, the faint hint of a smile or a painful frown that is forming behind a now smooth brow, color codes, the roughness of brush strokes, sometimes layers beneath the visible paint, often in reference to characters and events from known literature or history or legend. Nobody wanted a window on the world, and everybody wanted a window on the mind. Nobody in Leonardo's age had ever seen or imaged a photograph, and photographic realism was not something that anyone had in mind when they looked at the Mona Lisa.

Likewise the Bible.

The Bible was written in a time when nobody had ever thought of journalistic realism, of documentary-style reproduction of "what really happened". That's not what text did. Instead, a classical text was like a Renaissance painting: loosely based on the recognizable world but otherwise informative of entirely true and most crucial information by means of composition, patterns and links between words and scenes, layers beneath layers and circles within circles — visions within visions within the minds of the most brilliant people who have ever contemplated the fabric of consciousness, the mind-body problem, the link between time and space, between the multiple iterations of a single fractal pattern, and between the chaos of desert dust and the organizational qualities of planetary attraction: the reality beneath the reality beneath the reality that we humans share with creatures like dogs and parsnips and kernels of sand.

The vast majority of Hebrew words derive from some three letter basic code (called a root). There are 22 letters, but not all combinations are possible, and so there are about 2,000 of those three letter basic codes from which all the words in the Bible derive. Individual words are formed by sticking all sorts of bells and whistles before, after and within the three letters base. That means that there are entire tribes of words that mean widely different things, but share a basic core, like a kind of verbal DNA, that gives them all a somewhat comparable meaning or at least a shared character.

That in turn means that the Hebrew language automatically groups the real world objects that these words refer to, into "invisible" clusters that correspond to the roots of the words for these objects. Hebrew comes with a baked-in organizational structure that orders the things in the world long before the story starts. It also means that where in English, two words side-by-side form a mere very short sentence, in Hebrew two words side-by-side bring along their roots and hence all other words from that root: like two whole gangs of cousins and nephews that meet at some wedding, and while the bridal couple formally unites, form a vast world of informal goings on in the informal background. That means that any Hebrew text consists of a explicit component (the words you see on the page), and a huge implicit component that buzzes about in the background of the mind of the reader, forming an unspoken living fundament for the happy bridal couple to stand upon and exist within. You might say that the Bible has both words and thoughts, the former clearly visible and the latter only to people who are intimately familiar with the speaker of the words, and so can "hear" the thoughts behind the words. The explicit component of a Hebrew text can be translated but the much larger implicit component is inevitably lost in translation.

As said, any combination of three Hebrew letters has unique qualities, but any combination of two letters does to, and that is because every single atomic Hebrew letter has unique qualities and meanings and effects within the molecule that is a word. That in turn means that any tribe of words derived from some three letter base, has specific subliminal qualities in common with some other tribe that shares two of the three, in whatever combination. That means that the 2,000 roots that are used in Biblical Hebrew can be further reduced to super-roots, and super-super-roots. All those links and associations inevitably get lost in translation, and none of these roots and super-roots corresponds to some object in the world, but anyone with those roots available in their mind, can organize the world by simply meditating on the letters of the Hebrew words that describe objects in the world. And all this long before any story starts. These structures are baked into the very fabric of the Hebrew language.

In Biblical times, there were no specialized words for things like nouns, verbs or adjectives, and these words had names that also described other things (the word for noun also meant bone, and the word for verb also meant to be active). There were no dictionaries or grammars. Instead, the qualities and operations of language was demonstrated by the text. The primary purpose of any literary text was not to convey a message but to demonstrate the language. Scribes standardized these texts and bards went about the local water places to proclaim these standardized text (Judges 5:11, Genesis 16:7), precisely so as to standardize the language of all hearers and inspire them with things to talk about. Everybody conversed but common stories standardized entire regions, and streamlined interactions and so boosted the economy and promoted peace. It's no exaggeration to say that these common stories created the modern world.

As mentioned before, Hebrew was originally written only in consonants (say, M-L-K or K-B-D), and any reader would have to interject the vowels from memory. But since the written words were all the same size (three letters, plus pre- and suffixes to indicate things like gender and number and possession and such), the combinations of vowels that someone had to interject were as limited as the combinations of written consonants (say, aa-oo-ee, or ee-aa-ee, or ee-aa-uu). That means that a whole separate "alphabet" of atomic vowel-sounds existed, that likewise combined into predictable molecular patterns, that combined with the consonants like two sides of a zipper.

As said, two differently sounding words (like, say, M_aL_eK_u and M_uL_aK_e) derived from the same consonantal combination (M-L-K), were similar in meaning. But two differently written words could very well have the vowel combination in common (like, say, M_aL_eK_u and K_aB_eD_u), and hence were similar in spirit. In Hebrew, there is an entire world of meaning expressed by the associations between words that share their vowel patterns, and this whole spiritual consistency of the Hebrew language, this whole secondary aspect of text, is entirely absent from any translation and any consideration of these texts that is performed in a language other than Hebrew.

Finally, there is a third element that is crucial to the Hebrew language and that is rhythm, intonation and melody, and that element too contains worlds of intimacy that are lost in any translation.

Together, these three elements (consonants, vowels and melody), form the dry land, the air and the water of the Hebrew world. And every time the text tells of dry land, air and water, it also talks about consonants, vowels and tone. Particularly the many iterations of anything air-related combining with anything earth-related (usually closely relative to anything water-related) is manifestly celebrated in the Bible (Genesis 2:7, Matthew 3:16).

But all this means that within the combined minds of all Hebrew speakers alive today, there exists a single living planet, complete with a dynamic atmosphere and circulating oceans, whereas translations of the Bible (including English ones) depend on generations upon generations of speakers of languages that have long since died, and whose memories are little more than valleys of dry bones. If, by the grace of God, you have managed to catch a glimpse of heaven from that deep floor of that deep valley filled with all those dry dead bones, then imagine what you might in Hebrew.

When the ancient Hebrews (pretty much from Abraham up) began to develop what would become the Hebrew language, they had begun to tap into the very language of consciousness: the language that unifies the entire universe and gravitates upon the Oneness who is the Creator of it all. And when they began to learn the first words of that universal language, God began to speak back (Genesis 15:1).

The Hebrew scribes who invented vowel notation (around the time of David) didn't create new symbols for vowels but instead used symbols that already existed and until then had only represented consonants, namely the letters י (yod), ה (he), and ו (waw). And to give an example: the word דוד is either the monosyllabic dod, meaning beloved, or it is the disyllabic dawid, which is the name David.

That means that the name יהוה (YHWH) may not be unlike the familiar Hindu mantra AUM, which also represents the whole of everything whilst consisting of the three basic phonetic components of speech.

The Phoenicians had invented the consonantal alphabet to which the Hebrews added the vowels, and the story of Solomon and Hiram's mostly Phoenician temple in which YHWH came to dwell obviously reflects the birth of modern script (1 Kings 8:10-11). When people began to write on paper and parchment, the preservation of records no longer depended on the perishable human brain, which is why the Psalmist triumphantly exclaimed: "You will not allow your Holy One [i.e. the Word] to undergo decay" (Psalm 16:10, 49:9, Acts 2:27).

The word אל (El) was the name of the prominent Canaanite god, whose name was either derived of or became the common word for god in general. We photograph- and journalism-loving moderns are so very used to people using the word "god" in all sorts of contexts that we forget that whoever first started using the word "god" (in whatever language) did not have in mind what we moderns do when we use that word. Our name YHWH obviously relates to the word "god", so in order for us to understand this name YHWH, we should first try to understand the word "god". In our article on the Greek word for god, namely θεος (theos), we have a long look at what a god is, but to summarize: a god is anything, real or imagined, upon which one's life is centered, which governs one's life and directs one's every move.

The Bible acknowledges a vast multitude of such existential anchors (Exodus 15:11, Psalm 82:1, 1 Corinthians 8:5). Many people in the past and today have the sun, and thus the hours of the day, as their god (people obsessed with planning, data, computation and other such elements of "rational enlightenment"). Probably a majority of people have their belly as their god (Philippians 3:19), and since the belly is the seat of one's lower emotions (contrasting the noble heart and the rational brain), these people navigate the world by means of he compass of their feelings, fears, angers, intuitions, prejudices and so on. There is of course nothing wrong with proper planning (which is why people invented the calendar), and only a fool would ignore their intuitions, but if these things overrule any other data or concern, then these things are one's god. There are people who believe that any and all sorts of competition is the dominant force in the world, which means that their god is a war-god (like Mars and Ares). Then there is Baal, whose name simply means Owner or Master or Lord, who is still celebrated today by millions who call upon their "Lord", their "sweet Lord", or even "the Overlord(s)" or otherwise vaguely defined Powers That Be like the Illuminati, or "the 1%", or the Bilderberg Group, who are either assigned blame or else honors by people who have no further clue as to what's going on.

Another famous god, both in past and present times, is Mammon, who is usually referred to as the god of money, but who is more precisely the god of perfect bookkeeping (who never forgets or forgives or does anything for free). There's nothing wrong with bookkeeping, but if the perfect balance of one's ledger is more important than anything else, Mammon is your god. Many people have some emperor or their country's government as their god, and many of those hate their god with passion but can't stop it from completely dominating their existence. Many people have gods that are simply clueless humans like themselves (ancestors, musicians, influencers), who don't know them and couldn't care less about them. And of course there are people who have things and objects as their god which are dead chunks of material that don't do anything at all (magic crystals, icons, amulets, idols).

The authors of the Bible operated in a world where everybody still understood what gods are. Gods were everywhere and everything, and all social and private goings on were consciously and publicly understood to relate to some clearly identified god: gods of one's household, within gods of cities, within gods of professions, within national deities — very much in the way in which our modern world operates by means of brands, companies, political parties, musical genres, schools of thought, lifestyles and leanings; all with associated and widely recognized symbols and sayings, terms and phrases, creeds and manifestos, dogmas, mannerisms; the works.

The authors of the Bible introduced to that very particular world of gods everywhere and for everything, the idea that language emerges from organic and spontaneous social interaction, because humans simply love to imitate each other and find common ground, wherever that ground may be and whatever might come to stand on that ground. Rough natural language, in turn, is honed over time like a bag of polished gems that are common standards (words, then sayings, then tropes, then legends), which in turn reflect the innermost heart of humanity — the way many bees make one hive, without any individual bee knowing what's going on or what the finished building might come to look like, but whose cooperation reveals something that all bees privately long for, and that in terms of a language that none of them can begin to image could ever exist, but in which they all come to feel entirely at home.

Human language emerges from deep within humanity, and is like a quantum pattern that appears when vast multitudes of particles are shot at a recording screen, and which ends up revealing the innermost potentialities of any individual particle. From the language, in turn, emerge folk stories, which in turn loop back onto the broader audience to ever further the standards of human contemplation and consciousness. The stories made by populations (rather than a single author) are still part of the language, like a second floor of the human beehive. From those stories emerges a language-wide Oneness, which in turn loops back down the hive-levels and informs the builders and all the workers about the common purpose and ultimate design of the whole hive, which continues to emerge from the unified heart of all of us.

And that, the Bible writers declared in the vernacular of their times, is a proper god, and ultimately the strongest one of them all, and most assuredly the one who's going to guide humanity onto modernity and beyond. And if you wonder whether indeed God created humans or instead humans created God, or whether this is a chicken-and-egg situation, see our article on the verb υφαινω (uphaino), to weave. And if you wonder what, exactly, God created when he created the humanity that defines the human, then see our article on Adam.

All animals are, to some degree, conscious, both of themselves and of their environment. This dual consciousness culminates when animals look for a mate, and even a creature as small as a fruit fly won't settle for anything other than another fruit fly. So yes, strictly on a data-management level (i.e. data goes in and gets processed, upon which other data is compiled and gets broadcast in the form of pheromones, behavior, cat-calls and whatever else fruit flies do), even fruit flies in their own way "know" what it is like to be a fruit fly and look for those same qualities in their potential mate. But for conscious thought, words are needed. Without words, the consciousness of animals comprises subconscious thought. The subconscious thought of animals, and especially those with brains, hormones and biodomes closely comparable to ours, is identical to human subconscious thought, that is thought without words (and which is usually accompanied by vocal expressions other than words: Huh? Wah? Hey! Ah! Woohoo!).

Conscious thought is thought in words, and for that we need to know the names of things (Genesis 2:19-20). When we know names for things, it becomes much easier to organize our observations. And that makes it much easier to navigate our visible world.

When two people walk through the yellow woods, and one knows the names of all the dozens of different trees whereas the other knows only the word "tree", the first person will enjoy an exciting journey full of wonder and diversity, whereas the second will see only a big yellow wall of similar "trees". The first one will discern much more of the forest's ecosystem and will easily remember the paths she walked, whereas the second will feel miserably alien and lost in a world without landmarks. Conscious thought is dry land; subconscious thought is water (hence scenes like Genesis 1:9, 7:17, Jonah 1:12, Micah 7:19, Matthew 14:25-31 and Revelation 21:1).

Knowing the names of things is literally the same as speaking a language. When we don't know the names of things, we are like tourists in a country whose language we don't speak. We hear the words but we don't know their meaning, and we stand there lost and helpless.

When we have language, we know the names of things. But only the names of visible things, because just like we need names to keep things apart, so we need names to keep thoughts apart. Without the visible things to try our words to, our words get jumbled in our head until they disappear in the mist of meaninglessness. Words are like muscles: we use them or lose them. That means that peoples who have no script, have no words for abstract concepts.

You can't see "things" like war or virtue or love and so people who have no written words, have no words for abstract things, and therefore have no conscious thoughts about any of these things. That means that the written word "love" functions in exactly the same way as a visible object: it gives a "tangible" body to an incorporate entity, so that a contemplative mind can juggle it around as if it were a physical thing (hence John 1:14). That's not to say that people without script have no thoughts about abstract ideas. They do, but they have thoughts about abstract ideas the way the wordless-walker walks though the yellow woods: mostly incapable of keeping things apart and seeing paths and seeing depth.

• Consciousness requires a brain of some sort: all animals are conscious to some degree. Consciousness is that which allows a brain to manage data and literally imagine the world at large. All consciousness is imagination, i.e. making an image, making a "portable" map-like reproduction of a much greater original.
• Conscious thought is thought-in-words; it requires language. Language is like an island of dry land that sits atop the vast ocean of consciousness. A "word" is a symbolic cue, an instruction or a bit of code. Its function is to tell the mind what to imagine. When the mind detects the word, it generates the corresponding picture.
• Abstract thought is thought about real-but-invisible concepts. Abstract thought requires script, which means quite literally that script provides a kind of augmented reality view that's layered on top of the world that animals can see, and that makes visible the reality that is invisible to animals. Script gives incorporate entities a "real" body, and allows incorporate entities to live among corporate entities, in a vast landscape that is peopled by words. In a world made of text, real things and abstract things live in harmony, side by side. Abstract concepts are labels for invisible and unmeasurable categories, whose effect are measurable (concepts like covenant, war, love, soul, God, faith: see Hebrews 11:1).

The great library of humanity's scientific knowledge could not have been produced without abstract thought, which required a hyper-efficient script, which required the alphabet. Said otherwise: the Alphabet is the Father of the Word.

The less physical, the more abstract. The less physical and measurable presence a concept has, the more abstract it is. A "thought", for instance, is usually expressed by spoken words, which means that a "thought" is mostly real and not so abstract. Slightly more abstract, "war" is a complex phenomenon that happens when very physical soldiers clash. You can measure the damage and noise, but not the anger and grief, so "war" is already rather abstract. Then, say, "virtue" is nearly wholly abstract because not all virtue immediately leads to a measurable advantage.

The more abstract an entity is, the more sophisticated our words need to be to describe them and give them a body for our minds to handle. God (and here's the grand unveiling), has zero physical presence in our world, which means that God is a hundred percent abstract. Even without script, God can be intuitively perceived (Genesis 4:26), but only the way the wordless-walker experienced the forest. God can only be consciously known, and thus interacted with, by means of the written word (hence John 14:6, and see Hebrews 1:3 and Colossians 1:15).

This means that in a weird and marvelous way, all text is like a magic mirror in which we readers don't see ourselves but the very Creator (Psalm 12:6, 2 Timothy 3:16, 1 Corinthians 13:12).

We humans can get to know our Creator by simply reading; by simply walking through the wonderfully colorful world of text while practicing our words and following the paths of our choosing wherever they may lead. We humans do not get to know our Creator by repeating the sayings of some dude with a degree. It's certainly not a bad idea to listen to people with degrees, but our Creator is revealed by many voices, never just one.

God is utterly abstract and cannot be known by a mind that doesn't know how to think in abstract terms, which is an ability that we obtain by reading and by reading only (Romans 10:17). God is not in orthodoxy, not in instructions, not in methods, not in rituals, not in feelings and certainly not in blinding ecstasy. God is certainly not in a reversion back to hieroglyphs (modern icons and emojis), certainly not in YouTube clips, certainly not in sterile virtual realities or gaming environments. God is revealed by the unfathomable diversity and unpredictability of living nature (Romans 1:20), and in a constant exposure to the names of things.

God cannot be revealed by a limited data set, even if there is only one bit missing. God cannot be represented by any graven image, not even when that graven image is sculpted from the best teachings by the most gifted visionaries. God can only be known by living, by having a living mind that walks and runs and plays and dances.

All private things are part of the body: all flesh, all blood, all observations, all sensations, all feelings no matter how elated. Spiritual "things" are things that only exist in two or more minds at once. Spirituality has nothing to do with our own sensations or private feelings, no matter how "spiritual" they may seem. Spirituality has to do with words, with the agreed names of things, with a shared experience of created reality, calm and composed. Love, ultimately, is a unified state of many minds, and minds only unify via words.

Paths are formed when people find their way, and others follow and begin to pave that way and build inns and restaurants and secondary infrastructures and all that. The Bible is a path that was formed over many centuries from the millions of footsteps of writers and editors and readers. A single human mind that exposes herself to the Bible (and that includes her peer's private perspectives on the Bible) is like a quantum particle that always covers all possible trajectories, or like water that continuously flows in and out of all pores and pathways. A mind like that is transformed according to the fabric of the Bible, and becomes one with it, with all others, and ultimately with God (John 17:20-26, 2 Peter 1:4, 1 Corinthians 6:17).

All effort that teaches anything but how to find one's own unique way on that ancient path is pagan. All religions are pagan, and all churches who teach people dogma are pagan. The Bible is a conversation. It's a conversation that started in deep antiquity and continues to today, by people who frequently disagree (Galatians 2:11), but who all submit themselves whole heartedly to the rules of the language they converse in. When we "believe" in Jesus, we don't believe in him as an object but an environment: love believes all things (1 Corinthians 13:7), and can only do so within the environment of perfect liberty provided by Christ (Galatians 5:1). Real churches of God urge people to read their Bibles, without trying to shoehorn some theology into it. Real churches organize Bible readings, and maintain a kind of oral tradition by having people verbally retell the stories they read, and by organizing group discussions that explore the action, depth and applicability of the Bible stories.

The name YHWH may be an artificial construct of the Hebrew language's available vowels, י, (yod), ה, (he), and ו, (waw), which would be equivalent to our A-E-I-O-U. Better yet, the name YHWH may actually be YHW-H, where the final H is an artificial suffix that indicates formation (ever-growing place of, ever-expanding house of). A similar final H occurs with the name פערה (parao), that is Pharaoh, whose final syllable "-Oh" derives from the Egyptian word for "great" or "greatness". This means that only the first three letters YHW form the actual Name, which in turn may have originated as the term by which the alphabet was known in Hebrew, equivalent to our English "name" for the alphabet: the alpha-beta, or the ABC.

Many people don't pronounce the Name, and some commentators insist that this is because the ancients somehow "forgot" how the Name sounded. That is nonsense. Take the name Zedekiah (in Hebrew: Tsid-kee-yahoo), or Nethanyahu (Nay-tan-yahoo). The final part of these names, namely Yahoo, is the Name. Here at Abarim Publications we strongly suspect that the final -H of the tetragrammaton was added to the Name so as to ostensibly contrast the name Pharaoh (i.e. Para-Oh, from פרע, para', to confederate), and to declare that "Confederate-Oh" was out and "Yahoo-Oh" was in. Like Bitcoin (not a coin) or a sea-horse (not a horse), so "Yahoo-Oh" was not an "Oh" that was named after the name or title of some guy whom you could point at and call by name, but rather the Yahoo who emerges like a vast and boundless Oneness from the vast and boundless conversation between all human speakers. If Phara-Oh was the nucleus of a centralized Empire, then Yahoo-Oh is the operative principle of a global Republic, without a static and observable king and defined by an ever dynamic senate.

Among the many explanations of the nonsense term abracadabra is that it is a contraction of עבר ('abar), to transpire, כ (ke), like, and דבר (dabar), to speak, so that it means "done as said" or "as said, so done". But it may also very well be a contraction of a-ba-ca-da-(bra), or ABCD-hee, the Latin way of saying alpha-beta, possibly even as some unholy approximation of YHW(H).

If YHW is indeed the Hebrew way of saying ABC, the reason why the pronunciation of the Name was lost becomes immediately clear: it was never lost because it never existed. Since each of the three letters Y-H-W can either be pronounced as a vowel or as a consonant, the Name has eight possible basic pronunciations (including EEAAOO and Yahoo and YahaWa), and by choosing one we deny the other seven and simultaneously demonstrate that we don't actually know the Name.

YHW(H) ultimately describes Meaning, or better yet: Known Meaning, in the sense of Formally Known Meaning. And even if the name YHWH existed before the Hebrews began to note vowels (which is probable), they may have chosen for their vowel-symbols the letters that made up the already existing name of their deity. That means that the name YHWH may be a proper word, derived of some verb, which subsequently came out existing of only vowels. If that is so, the etymology of YHWH is utterly unclear, and therefore subject to much debate.

The key scene in this respect seems to be Exodus 3:13-15, where God names himself first: אהיה אשר אהיה (I AM WHO I AM), then אהיה (I AM), and finally יהוה (YHWH) and states that this is his name forever and a memorial name to all generations.

It has been long supposed that YHWH was derived from the verb that is used to make I AM, namely היה (haya), meaning to be or to become, or rather from an older form and rare synonym of haya, namely הוה, hawa, hence y-hawa or yahweh, the proper imperfect of the verb, thus rendering the name HE IS BEING or HE IS BECOMING, quite literally implying that our Name is not the Name by which God knows himself, but rather the Name by which we humans know him. God (i.e. the Oneness of Everything) is not changing and cannot change, but our knowledge of the Oneness of Everything is certainly waxing. Also note that the Hebrew language is far more dynamic than our modern languages. The Hebrew verb "to be" indicates an action that intimately reveals the nature of the one who is doing the acting. For more on this, see our article To Be Is To Do:

HAW Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament goes even further as it states, "...there is a problem with the pronunciation Yahweh. It is a strange combination of old and late elements.[...] In view of these problems it may be best simply to say that YHWH does not come from the verb hawa at all. [W]e may well hold that YHWH [...] is an old word of unknown origin which sounded something like what the verb hawa sounded in Moses' day. However, if the word were spelled with four letters in Moses' day, we would have expected it to have had more than two syllables, for at that period all the letters were sounded". Meaning: if people in the time of Moses indeed wrote the Name as יהוה, and they would have still pronounced it, it would have sounded like Yahay Wayhay.

The Zohar even states: "This is the secret that the beings testify about Him, that He was (היה, haya), is (הוה, howe), and will be (יהיה, yihyeh)" (Zohar III, 257b), so that the name YHWH results from a perspective that includes and thus transcends past, present and future. At this point it's prudent to note that past and future are qualities of language (past and future tenses), which means that animals who have no complex language also have no conscious idea that there are such things as past and future. These things only exist in minds that run on languages that have those features.

In other words, the name YHWH looks like a hybrid of times, as if it cannot be localized but spans centuries of evolving grammar. Then it also looks very much as if it was derived of a verb that means to be, but which is spelled differently than the regular verb to be, and similarly to a verb that means something very bad. Perhaps all this confusion, or rather, this wide pallet of negotiations is what this Name most essentially conveys: existence in its broadest sense, yet unlike any regular human perspective; a blessing to the wise, but the undoing of the wicked.

On the other hand, perhaps the name YHWH means Tom, Dick or Harry in a language that has slipped out of the collective human consciousness and we are left with the echoes of a revelation that was as sincere and confidential as the word abba: daddy.

After all this it should be clear that the name YHWH can't be readily interpreted.

If we're dealing with an expression of the verb הוה (hawa II), and we maintain that this verb means to fall, then YHWH would mean Falling, or He Will Fall or He Will Cause To Fall. This line of reasoning may seem to lack any trace of sound theology, but the divine name Shaddai reflects a similar negative, and may mean My Destroyer. The prophet Isaiah writes, "Wail, for the day of YHWH is near. It will come as destruction (shad) from Shaddai" (Isaiah 13:6).

But perhaps we have the verb הוה (hawa II) all figured wrong, and הוה (hawa II) is the same as הוה (hawa I), meaning to be or to happen. Then YHWH would comfortably mean Being or He Is or He Will Cause To Be.

Here at Abarim Publications we are most charmed by this particular explanation. Time and again the Bible urges its readers to focus only on that which is real — whether physical or abstract — on "That Which Is", and steer clear from superstitions and nonsense. To the modern world, Yahwism may seem like just another religion but to the ancients it wasn't. The Jews were known as the people without a god (meaning without an effigy) and it appears that Christians in the Roman empire may have been accused of atheism (again meaning without a visible deity; see Cassius Dio 67.14).

Even though the name YHWH is etymologically difficult to explain, to a Hebrew audience it may have looked very much like He Who Causes "That Which Is" To Be.

Yahwism, therefore, can be most aptly viewed as a kind of proto-science; it's the syntax of science and focused on reality first and foremost. And no, Yahwism is not a religion that appeared to work really well; it's the syntax of science that worked really well which received the name Yahwism.

The term is somewhat vague but "the Western World" is undeniably linked to European Christianity, which in turn is rather obviously founded upon the principles of Judaism — with its councils of equals rather than tyrannical overlords, its reverence for all sorts of learning and cleverness, its insistence on honesty, justice and everybody's equality before the law, its protection of the weak and its conscientious serving and blessing of Jews and non-Jews alike — and Judaism is basically the study of the Torah, and the Torah is basically a demonstration of the Hebrew language, which in turn demonstrates the laws of the whole of nature, from those of physics to those of psychology and statecraft. The opposite of all this is any kind of tyranny or dominance, the glorification of stupidity, the romanticizing of crime and bullying and competition, and of course the idea that superiority (whether real or not) necessarily results in the oppression and exploitation of the inferior. The former is based on collective covenantal law, the latter on the whims of the biggest bully. The former is law. The latter is lawlessness.

This is the reason why people like Hitler hate Jews, not because Jews might produce some competing tyrant but because their desire for a collective law might produce an environment in which no tyrant can flourish. And if a tyrant is all we are, then a governed liberty is our prison (Revelation 20:3).

Where the vast majority of pagan religions venerate society's stratification, Yahwism emphasizes the importance of the individual (hence the idea of YHWH's Christ being Jesus of Nazareth; the quintessential Average Joe). Pagan religion wants blind obedience; Yahwism wants insight and responsibility. Pagan religion wants a reverential and essential gap between the holy and the profane; Yahwism dictates that God wants to fellowship with mankind and invites mankind into his eternal reality.

There are over a hundred references in the Old Testament alone of the Lord stating that he will or wants to be with us (Genesis 26:3, Exodus 3:12, 1 Chronicles 28:20, Isaiah 53:5, Job 29:5), and although we moderns are probably used to that idea, there is nothing like this to be found in any of the cultures that surrounded Israel during Biblical times. The name Immanuel expresses purely a Yahwistic concept (Isaiah 7:14), as obviously does the Word of the Lord becoming flesh, dwelling among us (John 1:14), and appointing disciples "that they might be with Him" (Mark 3:14).

Here at Abarim Publications we love science (and if you haven't already, check out our articles on quantum mechanics and chaos theory) but we are privately convinced that there is a greater source of knowledge than science. Or let's rephrase that: it seems to us that Yahwism in its natural form is the great unrecognized foundation of science and any kind of veritable knowledge. We know beyond doubt that there are Yahwists among us who know far more than any scientist; they don't publish and that's why the general public doesn't know about them, but they are there.

Our brains are made up of particles that have been around since the beginning of time, and just like ants must build an ant-hill in obedience to ant DNA, so must mankind come up with a model of reality in obedience to human DNA. In other words: the whole picture lies in our hearts, and that which we call inspiration or having a hunch, or even simply an idea for a hypothesis, comes straight from our heart of hearts (Deuteronomy 30:14, Jeremiah 31:33, Romans 2:15, Hebrews 10:16). The trouble humanity faces is that we've been believing and teaching each other the wrong things; we look in a mirror dimly, so to speak (1 Corinthians 13:12), and our thinking has to be renewed (Romans 12:2).

A mind which is trained in Yahwism will automatically be good at science, whereas a mind which is trained in paganism will automatically jump too quickly to conclusions and will base these conclusions on emotions rather than observations. Whether science will lead to bliss or to destruction depends wholly on whether man worships his knowing self or the Creator (for more on this, see our article on the familiar word Amen).

Dogs don't bake bricks or draw blueprints of lay pipe or link cables, and while dogs wander happily about human houses and cities, they are not equipped to comprehend that all these things were willfully constructed by humans. Dogs see humans, but they are not equipped to see beyond the animal and observe the "humanity" that sets humans apart from dogs, and lets humans build an entire human world with shopping malls and hospitals and space stations and the Internet and Large Language Models: things that no dog has ever seen, and which no dog can ever begin to imagine could ever exist, but which exist right there in their real and physical world, forever out of the reach of their comprehension.

That's not to say that dogs don't have language because they obviously do. But dog-language does not allow the dog mind to consider space stations. Like a dog, a child that begins to speak cannot begin to imagine what a language holds in store, and what windows that language might open, and upon what world its speakers wander. It takes many years, and a lot of love and persistence, but do yourself a big favor and study Hebrew. If you haven't already, then start today.