The Positively Cornucopian Number of Names Ascribed to God in the Tanach
He who reads the Torah for the first time may well be astonished by the number of names that those who wrote it – and perhaps the scribes who copied the authors’ texts when publishing had not yet been invented – that these writers and scribes gave God.
If he, the novice reader, seeks an explanation from a scholar who believes in the authority of the Torah, the scholar may explain the changing of God’s name with the passage of time by pointing to the different societal, political and other needs of the times.
The scholar may know each name’s etymology and thus be an expert in his field – the field of knowledge pertaining to the names of God.
The scholar may again surprise the novice with his extra-mural knowledge by referring to the different names ascribed to God in the New Testament and the Qur’an.
If our scholar is a theologian, he may well add that those who wrote and copied the Torah, and he may include the New Testament and the Qur’an, did so for a purpose.
That purpose, he may say, was to propose the theory that the Torahic (and the Qur’anic and the New Testament’s) ascriptions of the many names to God were antimonious – that the different interpretations of His nature and the different attributes they describe, though they may be contradictory, were the “approaches” to, the “fringes” of, His essence. An example of the contradiction of the meaning of God’s names is the meaning of YAHWEH which is that He is indescribable and the meanings of all His other names, with the exception, perhaps, of HaShem, a
which are all descriptive.
Upon enquiring further into the history of the Torah, and upon further consideration, our novice may neither accept the scholar’s acceptance of the authority of the Torah, nor the explanations of his theory.
The newcomer may be a theist – a believer – or he may be an atheist – a non-believer. Both theist and atheist may protest and say, for example, either that the Tanach was not written by Moses – that it may have had one or more different authors; or that the script was written by both Moses and others.
Why should Moses, on the same few pages – in the same breath – use so many names? If it was he who wrote the Torah, he wrote describing the encounter on Mount Sinai, between God and those he had shepherded to the mountain. Why, then, should Moses have thought it necessary to go into descriptive detail by giving Him different names, thus providing more than the 14 attributes he later begrudgingly gave as the only attributes God had? Was the revelation not, in itself, enough?
Moses claimed that God said “I am that I am”. Why did Moses offer different descriptions of what He was by giving Him different names?
Further – was Moses a theologian? Was the antimonic nature of God’s differing names intended? Or did the concept and the word, antimony, emerge later – for example in the works of writers such as Martin Buber?
In other words, the antimonic nature of God’s many names may well have been the unintended serendipitous result of the insistence on so many names.
Were Moses’ motives societal and political rather than those requiring him to be consistent? Can the driving force of those who wrote the rest of the Torah similarly be explained as the wish to fulfill the non-religious needs of subsequent generations?
