Who do you say that I am? Circumlocutions for God in the Hebrew Bible

Chris Heard remarks on issues related to the name of God in the Hebrew Bible, the Tetragrammaton. A key graph:

I find it just plain awkward to talk to or about someone without using his or her name. Perhaps more importantly, from a translator’s perspective, I think that substituting titles for proper nouns obfuscates things for readers not cognizant of the substitutions, and readers who are cognizant of the substitutions shouldn’t need printed clues to swap in the Qere perpetuum if they feel the need to do so. Also, I find it very difficult to talk about Israel’s (chief) national deity in relation to other ancient Near Eastern deities without using proper nouns all around.

Indeed. Ancient Israelites, to judge from the Hebrew Bible, could not imagine speaking of, praying to, or praising their God without naming him as YHVH.

There are a number of Psalms that avoid the use of YHVH (in particular, Pss 42-83). A satisfactory explanation for the phenomenon has not been found. It does not appear to have anything to do with a tradition that began to take hold as early as the third century before the current era, to judge from the translation of the Torah into Greek from that time, in which the Tetragrammaton is replaced by ‘Lord’ or similar (in a few manuscripts, intriguingly, the Tetragrammaton appears in old Hebrew script surrounded by Greek).

It is possible that the substitution policy took root in Aramaic and Greek first, where use of the name YHVH may have seemed jarring, before becoming the norm in Hebrew later. In the book of Daniel, the Tetragrammaton is absent from the Aramaic section, but Daniel invokes YHVH as YHVH in the Hebrew section.

Ancient Israelites “nicknamed” YHVH with a host of expressions I treat in this series. The nicknames tell us a great deal about who the Israelites understood their God to be. They deserve more attention than they’ve been given heretofore. YHVH is addressed and invoked by means of them on a frequent basis.

In Muslim tradition, 99 short circumlocutions for God are committed to memory by the faithful. I present 144 similar names for God from the Hebrew Bible In the series of which this post is a part, introduced here.

This post sources, contextualizes, and translates four names of the 22 name acrostic I introduce here. The first four in the acrostic were discussed here. Here are the four names I discuss following:

הפכי הצור אגם־מים

ואל מסתתר

 
זקף כפופים

חפץ חסד

 

הַהֹפְכִי הַצּוּר אֲגַם־מָיִם

חַלָּמִישׁ לְמַעְיְנוֹ מָיִם

Who turns rock into a pool of water,

flint to a fountain of water.

Ps 114:8

Psalm 114 is a compact hymn of extraordinary beauty. The events of the exodus are contemporized, in accordance with a self-understanding of the people of Israel already evident in the book of Deuteronomy whereby every generation regards itself as the generation rescued from Egypt. Unusually, YHVH as YHVH  is not invoked in Ps 114.

The psalm is all about contemporization. It is therefore fitting to translate who ‘turns’ rock, not who ‘turned’ rock, even though the reference is to Moses drawing water from the rock in Exod 17. I am not the only one to see this. NRSV, NJB, and now Alter translate accordingly.

אָכֵן אַתָּה

אֵל מִסְתַּתֵּר

אֱלֹהֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל מוֹשִׁיעַ

You are truly

    a God who hides himself,

        o God of Israel, Savior!

Isa 45:15

 The prophet responds to the divine oracle regarding Cyrus reported in Isa 45:14. The aniconic God who hides himself is unlike all other so-called gods. A great theological truth comes to expression here. Isa 45:14-17 is poorly translated in versions I’ve run across, so I offer a translation of the whole here:

YHVH said as follows:

    Egyptian weath, Cushite commerce,

        Sabeans long of limb

    to you shall pass,

       to you belong;

   you they will follow,

       pass over in chains,

   before you lay prostrate,

       and you pray:

   with you is God,

       no other,

           no God at all.

 

You are truly

     a God who hides himself,

           o God of Israel, Savior!

Put to shame, confounded, all of them,

    to a man off they go in disgrace,

           carvers of images!

Israel got the victory through YHWH

      victory everlasting.

You shall not be shamed or confounded

            for all time to come.

יהוה פֹּקֵחַ עִוְרִים

יהוה זֹקֵף כְּפוּפִים

יהוה אֹהֵב צַדִּיקִים

YHVH, healer of the blind,

YHVH, lifter of the bowed,

        YHVH, lover of the innocent.

Psalm 146:8

Literally, ‘opener of the blind’; ‘the eyes of’ is understood.

The syntax of Psalm 146 is disregarded by all translations I’m familiar with. All of verses 6-9 in the Hebrew function as a syntactic complement to ‘YHVH his God’ which concludes verse 5. If this fact is preserved in translation, the power of the psalm’s poetry comes through much clearer.

מִי־אֵל כָּמוֹךָ

נֹשֵׂא עָוֹן

 

וְעֹבֵר עַל־פֶּשַׁע

לִשְׁאֵרִית נַחֲלָתֹו

 

לֹא הֶחֱזִיק

לָעַד אַפֹּו

כִּי־חָפֵץ חֶסֶד הוּא

Who is a god like you,

     a forgiver of sin,

who overlooks transgression

      of the remnant of his heritage?

He does not hold onto

      his anger forever,

           for he takes delight in kindness.

                                                         Micah 7:18

 The keyword here is חסד. It is variously translated here: ‘clemency’ (NRSV); ‘mercy’ (REB); ‘faithful love’ (NJB), ‘steadfast love’ (ESV), and ‘unchanging love’ (NASB). But NJPSV catches the nuance best with ‘kindness.’ God, it is confessed, is more than faithful to his promises. He goes beyond them, and in fact ignores them, for he shows kindness where, according to his promises, he was to have shown rigor.