Names for God - Page 3
Written by Rabbi Professor Jonathan Magonet Sunday, 01 June 2003
A Prayer Book in the Making
| Article Index |
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| Names for God |
| How Do You Translate YHWH |
| A Radical Proposal |
| So Where Does That Leave Us? |
| All Pages |
A more radical proposal came from the American Reconstructionist Movement. The editors did a pilot volume in which whenever YHWH appeared they would write YAH with a line beneath it, and under the line, one of the qualities attributed to God. In including these attributes, all different aspects of the divine name, they were following an old Sephardi practice, and they argued that YAH is an ancient name for God – preserved in the word ‘Hallelu – yah’. However in the final version they dropped ‘YAH’, but retained the different names and attributes of God appropriate to the context, written in capital letters. Behind this practice lies the rabbinic tradition that the two principal names of God, YHWH and Elohim (God) reflect two different divine qualities: the former is used to indicate God’s qualities of mercy and compassion, while the latter refers to God’s quality of strict justice, the two existing in tension with each other in the governance of the world. In the RSGB Festival Prayerbook we experimented with this approach, translating the name as Creator, Teacher or other term as appropriate, But also using ‘Eternal’, especially where Biblical texts were quoted. Sometimes we simply used the word ‘God’ for either Hebrew term.
One further problem arises where, especially in Psalms, the verse having mentioned God goes on to talk of ‘His people’, ‘His holy place’ etc. which once again raises gender issues for those sensitive to the issue. One solution has been to use ‘who’ or ‘whose’ where possible, which sometimes works comfortably but is sometimes clumsy, especially if the word order of a sentence becomes contorted. A final, desperate, ploy of many translations has simply been to forget about translating literally and turn the third person singular references to God into the second person and instead of speaking about God, address God as ‘You’.| < Prev | Next > |
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