The Name of God in Jewish Thought

A Philosophical Analysis of Mystical Traditions from Apocalyptic to Kabbalah

Michael T Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781138944053
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317372127
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología judía

One of the most powerful traditions of the Jewish fascination with language is that of the Name. Indeed, the Jewish mystical tradition would seem a two millennia long meditation on the nature of name in relation to object, and how name mediates between subject and object. Even within the tide of the 20th century's linguistic turn, the aspect most notable in – the almost entirely secular - Jewish philosophers is that of the personal name, here given pivotal importance in the articulation of human relationships and dialogue.

The Name of God in Jewish Thought examines the texts of Judaism pertaining to the Name of God, offering a philosophical analysis of these as a means of understanding the metaphysical role of the name generally, in terms of its relationship with identity. The book begins with the formation of rabbinic Judaism in Late Antiquity, travelling through the development of the motif into the Medieval Kabbalah, where the Name reaches its grandest and most systematic statement – and the one which has most helped to form the ideas of Jewish philosophers in the 20th and 21st Century. This investigation will highlight certain metaphysical ideas which have developed within Judaism from the Biblical sources, and which present a direct challenge to the paradigms of western philosophy. Thus a grander subtext is a criticism of the Greek metaphysics of being which the west has inherited, and which Jewish philosophers often subject to challenges of varying subtlety; it is these philosophers who often place a peculiar emphasis on the personal name, and this emphasis depends on the historical influence of the Jewish metaphysical tradition of the Name of God.

Providing a comprehensive description of historical aspects of Jewish Name-Theology, this book also offers new ways of thinking about subjectivity and ontology through its original approach to the nature of the name, combining philosophy with text-critical analysis. As such, it is an essential resource for students and scholars of Jewish Studies, Philosophy and Religion.

1 Presence and speech Rosenzweig's ontology and the rabbinic doctrine of creation via the Name

DOI: 10.4324/9781315672090-2

He chose three simple letters and fixed them in his great name. And he sealed with them the six edges (of the universe).

(Sefer Yetzirah §15)

In his contribution to the text 20th Century Jewish Thought, Josef Stern claimed that Genesis is a commentary on the nature of language as much as creation. What was previously the ‘amorphous lump’ of reality emerged into discrete objects through a process which we might call articulation:

[C]reation is their [objects’] emergence through separation and division. But by integrating acts of speech and naming into the sequence of creation, the Torah suggests that how the world presents itself, divided into objects and structured into kinds, is also inseparable from language.

(Stern, 2009, 543)

In this reading, names are not just descriptors, applied to ontologically pre-existent objects, but are ‘the expression of criteria of individuation and identity, without which there would be nothing to be named’ (ibid., 544). In God's hands, words do not merely describe but determine the world.

This chapter will examine some early rabbinic traditions regarding the linguistic nature of creation and how it relates to naming and the Name of God.¹ As mentioned above, Scholem located the beginnings of Jewish language-mysticism at the point where the creative word used in Genesis became identified with God's Name. Certainly, this is a common idea found explicitly in many late rabbinic texts, in the lead up to the Kabbalah. Scholem did not specify the point at which this identification occurred, but some years later Jarl Fossum offered an answer in the form of his monograph The Name of God and The Angel of the Lord. Through the use of rabbinic, Samaritan and apocryphal writings, Fossum (1985) attempted to show that the tradition of the Name of God as a creative tool or agent stretched back into the Second Temple period. This claim was defended successfully in the book, and has since become a basic precept of much work done in the field of Jewish theology in Late Antiquity. That from the earliest period the rabbis held to some kind of doctrine of creation through the Name YHWH is now largely accepted.²

I will present a new consideration of the evidence, arguing that while some of Fossum's interpretations are flawed and should be rejected, there is in fact a persistent association of the Name with not generation, but completion. This will involve a degree of textual scholarship in order to reconstruct exactly what the rabbinic and Samaritan texts claim they believed, and what has been passed down in the texts they compiled – a process which may be tiring for those interested in more metaphysical issues, but which is important nonetheless; the source of this study, and the root of Jewish tradition is text, and so analysing text to find what traditions it contains, as opposed to those it denies, is crucial. Doing this will help to refine the question being discussed, and may even bring us more into line with Scholem's precise statement: ‘it is this [God's] name which brought about the creation, or rather the creation is closely affixed to the Name – i.e., the creation is contained within its limits by the name’ (1972, 69, my emphasis). This shift in emphasis from the initial conditions or the elements of creation to the final form those elements take and the nature of how they are bound together highlights an important philosophical principle, one which I will demonstrate using Rosenzweig's work on ontology and epistemology and the relationship between them.

The textual evidence

While there is certainly no doctrine of creation via the Name in the Hebrew Bible, we do find suggestive passages such as ‘the name of YHWH who made heaven and earth’ (Ps.124:8) and by the second century BCE we read in Jubilees, of ‘the glorious and honoured and great and splendid and amazing and mighty name which created heaven and earth and everything together’ (Jub.36:7).³ These and several other passages have been used by scholars who claim that there is a long-standing Jewish doctrine of ‘creation through the Name’.

The rabbinic texts

In several passages, the early rabbinic writings refer to the involvement of individual letters in creation. In b.Menachot 29b, R Judah the Patriarch asks R Ammi about the passage: ‘Trust ye in YHWH forever; for in Yah YHWH is an everlasting rock’ (Is.26:4). Ammi refers to R Judah b.R Ila'i who interprets the second part of the verse as ‘for by [the letters] yod heh, YHWH formed the worlds’. The letters yod-heh, he claims ‘refers to the two worlds which the Holy One, blessed be He, created; one with the letter heh and the other with the letter yod’. The two worlds, this world and the world to come, were created through the use of letters; heh and yod, respectively. This is explained via a rereading of Genesis 2:4, the word behibbaram being divided to read be-H baream: ‘by heh He created them’.

Genesis Rabbah 12:10 begins with this reading of behibbaram but goes on:

R Abbahu said in R Johanan's name: He created them with the letter heh. All letters demand an effort to pronounce them, whereas the heh demands no effort; similarly, not with labour or wearying toil did the Holy One, blessed be He, create His world, but By the word of the Lord.

(Ps.33:6)

The passage then continues to parallel b.Menachot 29b. These passages should be seen in the context of Genesis Rabbah 39:11. Here, R Abbahu states that the letter heh which God added to Abram's name is from the word hashamayimah: ‘It is not written: ‘Look now hashamayim’, but ‘Look now hashamayimah.’ [God said:] ‘with this heh I made the world’.

So we have three texts all citing the involvement of the letter heh and possibly yod in creation. It is logical and tempting to see in these references a suggestion of the Tetragrammaton, especially given the emphasis on the letter heh, which has long been a rabbinic abbreviation of the Name.⁴ Utilising these three texts (b.Men.29b, Gen.Rab.12:10 and Gen.Rab.39:11), Fossum argued that there was both a rabbinic and initial pre-rabbinic tradition of the Name YHWH as ‘an instrument used by God when he was engaged in the creation of the world’ (1985, 254). However, there is no indication of this in the texts themselves – in fact they offer two different explanations for the use of that letter, and neither mentions the Tetragrammaton. In Genesis Rabbah 12:10 creation via heh is understood to imply a lack of effort on God's part. Although the Biblical passage cited in b.Menachot 29b is clearly using the Name of God, the rabbis appear rather to be reinterpreting the text to find a method of creation using the letters yod and heh, without themselves making any explicit reference to the Name.⁵ In Genesis Rabbah 39:11, the heh is not from God's Name, but from Abraham's.

Another text frequently used in connection to the Name and creation is the following, referencing the creation of the tabernacle in light of God's creation: ‘Rab Judah said in the name of Rab: Bezalel knew how to combine the letters by which the heavens and the earth were created’ (b.Ber.55a). Again, this text does not make any assertion that these letters are of the Name, but that has not stopped scholars reading a nominal doctrine into the text.⁶ Similarly, the story of the creation of a calf (b.Sanh. 65b and 67b), which does not mention the Name at all, has often been cited in this context.⁷

On the other hand, there is explicit evidence that the letters of creation are not limited to yod and heh. In a passage from the yerushalmi, we read:

R Jonah said in the name of R Levi: ‘The world was created by the letter bet’. As bet is closed on all sides except one, so you have no right to investigate what is above, what below, what went before or shall happen afterward, only what has happened since the world [and its inhabitants were created].

(p.Hag.2:1, 16a)⁸

Bet of course has no connection to the Divine Name YHWH (it is rather here a reference to the initial letter of the Torah).

So we have three separate traditions all tying into the analysis of Isaiah 26:4 and the letters YH. The three separate appearances of the passage which analyses Isaiah 26:4 (in both the Bavli and the Yerushalmi) mean this latter passage is highly likely to predate the appended traditions, which offer a more refined analysis of the use of the letters yod and heh. But crucially, never do the rabbis claim the letters are from God's Name and nor are they claimed to represent it; and meanwhile, other letters with no association to the Name are also mentioned in terms of creation.

The Samaritan texts

Fossum's argument regarding the rabbis found a lot of support in contemporary Samaritan texts, which would then suggest a common tradition. The Memar Marqah ⁹ contains several interesting passages, discussing ‘the great name by which our Lord brought the world into being’ (VI.11), ‘the name by which the world was created’ (VI.11), and ‘the name which brought all created things into being’ (IV.2). Perhaps most suggestive, however, is the passage ‘ה is the name by which all creatures arose’ (IV.2).

However, there is more to these passages than the sections above, and while Fossum cites several passages from the liturgical texts in support of his argument,¹⁰ several passages of MMarq itself point unequivocally away from that assumption – including even the passages above, as used by Fossum, once we take them in context. So, where the text mentions ‘the great name by which our Lord brought the world into being’, the preceding line establishes that this name cannot be the Tetragrammaton, for the speaker here is the letter alef, who says, ‘I was made the first of the letters and the first of the great name by which our Lord brought the world into being’ (VI.11). In his edition of the MMarq, Macdonald – logically – relates this as the name ALHYM of Genesis 1:1 (1963, II, 243n119). Slightly later the letter heh, however, claims:

My number was made the number of the name by which the world was created. It was repeated in both great names AHYH and YHWH, and I sealed your name, O prophet; by me Abraham and Sarah were made great.

(VI.11)

Again I am fully in agreement with MacDonald that the ‘number of the name by which the world was created’ indicates the name ALHYM, which is composed of five letters – the numerical value of heh. Thus we have two separate passages which explicitly cite the name Elohim as the creative name, one of them directly relating the letter heh to that name.

The third passage is that which contains the crucial line: ‘Heh is the name by which all creatures arose’ (IV.2). Shortly before this we find the statement, ‘the name which brought all created things into being sealed the whole. Therefore He said, “ALHYM finished”’ (Gen.2:2). So even in the same passage which Fossum used to claim that heh was representative of the Tetragrammaton as agent of creation, we find the agent stated as Elohim. A few pages later, we find a discussion of several letters which claims: ‘Alef is the great name which teaches that it is one, His scripture and His name are one, just like another’ (IV.4). As for heh: ‘there...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Presence and speech Rosenzweig's ontology and the rabbinic doctrine of creation via the Name
• 2 Losing the Name Derrida's rejection of Logos theology
• 3 The intentional Name Husserl and the Talmud on Metatron as a phenomenal object
• 4 The seventy faces of God Kripke on names, identity and the angels of the Hekhalot
• 5 The tree of names The source of logic and emanation in Wittgenstein and Gikatilla
• 6 Name and letter Deconstructing language with Abulafian prophecy and Levinasian othering
• 7 Redemption in the Name Walter Benjamin's kabbalistic Messianism
• 8 Conclusion The metaphysical meaning of the Name
• Appendix Hagiga 15a manuscript variations
• Index