YHWH and the idea of breath of life?

[DMcFadden]

OK, Hebrew nerds, help an old guy out.

Today one of my children sent me the following question written by an associate pastor of his church. I was tempted to say, "Never draw theological conclusions from Christian concerts." However, here is the question and my reply. Has anyone ever heard of this stuff?

The other night at the Jason Gray gathering, I sure loved his insight on the "breathing" letters of the Hebrew alphabet...Y-H-W-H...Yahweh...first breath speaks the name of God and last breath cries out to God, while each breath we take is a reminder of Yahweh as our life giving source.

Here was my reply:

Sure, those letters are "breathy" but so what? So are words that talk about all kinds of immoral behavior, etc. The Hebrew is laded with so many "breathy" letters that you would be hard pressed to say anything without strong "breathy" sounds. That has no more exegetical meaning than trying to count letters and generate theological conclusions out of the middle word in a sentence, chapter, or book! You might just as well comment on the gutturals in German and try to make theological points out of words with gutturals in them.

There are words in every language that are onomatopoetic (e.g., "**** a doodle do," "baa baa," or "sizzle"). All languages have words that carry sounds that connect with their meanings. In Greek we have the wonderfully colorful splagchnizomai (splawnk-NITZ-oh-my). On Valentiine's Day you will tell your wife that you love her and feel it in your "heart." The ancient Greeks would say that they feel it in their bowels/guts. Even today we talk about our emotions (e.g., anxiety) tying our bowels up. Say spagchnizomai rightly and it is very "gutteral."

Arol, as far as I know (WARNING ALERT: as Sargent Schultz would say on Hogan's Hero's, "I know nothing, nothing!"), there is no theological significance to be attached to the "breathiness" of the Hebrew consonants. As far as I can tell, this all got popular in a 2008 book, by Rabbi Stuart W. Gershon, YHWH: God’s Name is a Breath of Life. Rabbi Gershon is a Rabbi in a Reformed liberal (?) congregation in New Jersey. They boast of their “sisterhood” groups and call themselves a “warm, dynamic Reform Jewish congregation that welcomes members from all religious backgrounds and all phases of life.”

There are plenty of mystics and syncretists who try to read into the Tetragrammaton all kinds of nonsense. Look at this quote from the same Rabbi on the aspirated nature of the word to prove that God is not a person, he is process, energy, evolution itself! He also suggests that if you really get it (e.g., the Jewish Buddhist mentioned), then you will go to a higher level of consciousness and discover a "higher and deeper place."

God’s Hebrew name suggests God is not a person but a process. God is not a noun but a verb. God is not a being but all being itself, the whole kazoo. God is the name we give to the process that animates all life. God is the energy that powers the universe and its ongoing evolution. God is not the creator of the big bang. God is the big bang. God is not the creator of evolution. God is evolution.

God’s Hebrew name teaches us a better way to know that God is present in our lives. Focus on your breath. As every runner, meditator, yoga practitioner, and Jewish Buddhist knows, breathing is what takes us simultaneously to a higher and deeper place.

Here is another example of the same kind of stuff from a blogger familiar with Rabbi Gershon's ideas:

Recently, I have had the wonderful opportunity to begin the journey of learning and practicing Hatha Yoga. My instructor has studied, for over 35 years, with one of the most highly revered and deeply loved Yoga Masters of our time, His Holiness, Reverend Sri Swami Satchidananda. The word “hatha” comes from the Sanskrit terms “ha” meaning “sun” and “tha” meaning “moon”. Thus, Hatha Yoga is known as the branch of Yoga that unites pairs of opposites, referring to the positive (sun) and negative (moon) currents in the system.
During our Yoga exercises, we will take intermittent “cleansing breaths.” At these times, we will inhale deeply through the nose (bringing in seven times more oxygen than in normal shallow breathing), and then exhale “ha” through the mouth (as we release tension and stress). “Ha” or Divine Breathing, is a method of accumulating Mana (life force or spiritual energy) into one’s being. The Hawaiian word Mana has much the same meaning as Chi (Chinese), Ki (Japanese), or Prana (Sanskrit).

The word Spirit is derived from the Latin Spiritus, which means breath. Likewise, in both Hebrew and Greek, the word for Spirit (Ruah and Pneuma, respectively) is the same as the word for breath. Yahweh is derived from the tetragrammaton, the four Hebrew consonants, YHWH, a name so sacred that it is unpronounceable. When God spoke His name to Moses (Exodus 3:14), it sounded to Moses like the breath of God. The Hebrew letters, YHWH, when coupled with the appropriate vowel points, sound of whole-hearted breathing (“Yod, Heh, Vav, Heh”).

My advice, without something substantive from a real Hebrew or Christian scholar, was to advise the associate pastor to skip the idea as most likely far-fetched and fanciful, if not outright connected to some very scary things.

Have any of you heard of Christian teachers parroting this kind of thing? Evidently it was an "insight" attributed to Christian artist Jason Gray. I do not know the claimed provenance of the idea, having only found it in the writings of the aforementioned New Jersey rabbi.

 

[py3ak]

Certainly not a Hebrew nerd, but the essentially analphabetic impulse to try to derive a deeper significance from syllables has been around for a long time, in various forms. Here is John Wesley taking down Jacob Behmen (who also gave an explanation of every syllable of the Tetragrammaton, as well as every [German!] syllable of the Lord's Prayer):

Journal for February 27. 1747

He, and one or two more, since I saw them last, had been studying the profound Jacob Behmen. The event was, (as might easily have been foreseen,) he had utterly confounded their intellects, and filled them so full of sublime speculations that they had left Scripture and common sense far behind.

Works, 9, pp.567,568

Whoever desires it, may read the rest of this explanation at his leisure. I will only add the conclusion of it: —

“Amen:
“95. A is the first letter, and presses forth out of the heart, and has no nature; but we clearly understand herein, the seeking, longing, or attracting of the eternal will, without nature, wherein nature is generated, which has been from eternity.
“96. Now, as the A is generated out of the heart, that is, out of the eternal will, so out of A afterwards comes the whole alphabet with four and twenty numbers; for the A begins to number, and comprises the whole number in the syllable men.” (Behmen’s Works, Vol. II., p. 165, etc.)

Now here I fix my foot. Upon this ground I join issue with every admirer of Jacob Behmen in England.

I appeal to every candid man, every man of piety and common sense, whether this explanation deserves those violent encomiums contained in the Advertisement. I ask any person of understanding, First, whether any man in his senses, from the beginning of the world, ever thought of explaining any treatise, divine or human, syllable by syllable. Did a more absurd imagination ever enter into a madman’s brain? Is it possible by this means to make sense of any text from Genesis to the Revelation? Must there not be a very high degree of lunacy before any such design could be formed? I ask, Secondly, If any scripture could be thus explained, if any meaning could be extracted from the several syllables, must it not be from the syllables of the original, not of a translation, whether German or English? I ask, Thirdly, whether this explanation be any explanation at all; whether it gives the meaning of any one petition; nay, whether it does not reduce the divine Prayer, all the parts of which are accurately connected together, into an unconnected, incoherent jumble of no one can tell what! I ask, Fourthly, whether we may not pronounce, with the utmost certainty, of one who thus distorts, mangles, and murders the word of God, that the light which is in him is darkness; that he is illuminated from beneath, rather than from above; and that he ought to be styled a demonosopher, rather than a theosopher!

 

[Peairtach]

http://www.puritanboard.com/f40/correct-pronunciation-lords-name-71438/

We don't know whether the Lord's name should be pronounced Yavay or Yava. Neither sound very "breathy" or "windy", unlike the Hebrew "ruach", for breath, wind or spirit, or even the Spirit of the LORD.

 

[Elimelek]

I really think that "breathing" the letters of the Tetragrammaton only "works" with and English pronunciation. The pronunciation would be foreign to Ivrit (Modern Hebrew) and there is a good indication that while the Romanised languages pronounces the letter waw as "when" or "what", the "w" in most Semitic languages (especially Northwest Semitic Languages like Hebrew, Aramaic, Ugaritic, Phoenician and Moabite) pronounced the letter waw as "v". Thus the best reconstruction of the pronunciation fo YHWH would be Ya-Ve (Yah-veh). Etymologically the name of the Lord probably comes from the root H-W-H or H-Y-H (to be). In Ugaritic and some of the other older Semitic Languages we find a waw (v-sound) instead of a yod (y-sound) in many words. When the Lord tells Moses He is called "ehyeh asher ehyeh" (I am that/what I am), the root H-Y-H is the basis to which the word can be relayed.

In my humble opinion it is more likely that YHWH simply means "He is" than that it has anything to do with a mystical meditational understanding of the name of the Lord. Furthermore the name YHWH using the older root H-W-H instead of H-Y-H hints at how ancient the Lord's name is. (I find it interesting that the Qumran community's scrolls had the Lord's name written in the older Paleo-Hebrew alphabet while the rest of most scrolls were written in Aramaic block script. It might be that Jews in the time of Jesus did not only hold the name of the Lord in high esteem by refraining from pronouncing it, but also recognised the ancientness of the Name with the mentioned practise.)

The shorter version of the Lord's name is Yah as in hallelu-Yah. It is very easy to make something insubstantial but "awe"-inspiring about this version. It probably could be chanted like the "Aum" in Hinduism, but it is foreign to the Lord. I am actually wondering if such a use of the Lord's name as that which "awed" your associate pastor is not against the 10 commandments. Isn't it a way of taking the Lord's name in vain?