MYSTERY -- Daily Images of God--Lent 2022 Day 38 April 9

 

Daily Images of God--Lent 2022

Day 38

April 9

MYSTERY 

 

The Greek word μυστήριον (mysterion, from which we get the English word “mystery”) comes from the verb μύω “shut the mouth, be silent, be an initiate to sacred rites about which one vowed to remain silent,” related to our word “mute.” A mystery was something about which you had to remain silent, either because you were forbidden to speak of it, or because of its surpassing depth unable to express.

One of “the ten words” written on the tablets of the law given to Moses on Horeb was “You shall not lift up the name of YHWH your God falsely” (Exod 20:7). This was originally simply a prohibition on using the Deity’s name in an oath sworn falsely, but early on was understood with “You shall not carve idols for yourselves in the shape of anything in the sky above, the earth below, or the waters under the earth” (Exod 20:4) and understood as a prohibition of pronouncing the tetragrammaton (the four-lettered name of God). It was ineffable, unspeakable. 

 

YHWH (יהוה) was written using only consonants as in most Semitic language writing systems, and read from right to left. It is based on the Semitic three-letter root HWH in the simple measure or verbal inflection meaning “to be,” “to exist,” or in in the causative measure “to cause to become”, or “to bring into existence.” The letter י (yod) at the start of the name is a typical marker of the “he is, he will” conjugation of a verb, where an א‎ (’aleph) in the same position marks “I am, I will”: this form of the name shows up in Exod 3:14, אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה [’Ehyeh ’asher ’Ehyeh] “I am what I will be.” Given words in the Hebrew Bible that use shortened forms of the name with preserved vowels such as “Hallelujah” (hallelu-Yah “Praise Yah”) and forms preserved in Greek that wrote down the vowels (some LXX and Old Greek versions of the Hebrew Scripture as well as 3rd century CE Christian theologian Theodoret), almost all scholars today believe the name YHWH was, when said aloud, voiced “Yahweh.” The “a” in the first syllable (with the Y) indicates the causative measure, having the sense “the One who brings everything into existence.”

 

Because the Tetragrammaton was not to be pronounced, when the books of scripture including it were read aloud, pious substitutions like “my Lords” (’adonai) or “Our God” (’eloheynu) were used. When vowel points were added to the text centuries later, the Tetragrammaton was pointed with the vowels for “’adonai,” slightly altered due to the phonetic rules of written Hebrew. This resulted in the otherwise impossible consonant/vowel combination of YeHoVaH , from where the English word “Jehovah” arose, though this was never a name for God before ignorant Christian readers of the Hebrew scripture took it as such, not knowing how the orthography arose. In common Jewish usage today, Ha Shem (“the name”) is used instead of the Tetragrammaton in ordinary speech, and the orthodox often will not even write the word “God,” preferring “G*d” as a pious substitution to maintain the ineffability of the references to the Deity. 

 

The basic idea of God as mystery—as ineffable, beyond our ability to understand, picture, or adequately express—remains a steady feature of most God-talk world-wide. Even in traditions as far removed from the monotheism of the ancient Near-East as Taoism, you have such sayings as 道可道非常道,“The Dao (pattern, reason, way) that can be Dao’ed (expressed, or reasoned), is by no means the ever-present Dao.” And you have in Buddhism the trope that expresses the idea in graphic, even horrific, terms: "If you see the Buddha walking toward you on the street, kill him."