An Identifying Name

It would be reasonable that any god who has personality would need a personal name to distinguish him from other gods with names of their own. It would preferably be a name designated by the god himself, rather than a name coined by his worshipers.

In this regard, however, a very puzzling fact emerges. While most well-established religions ascribe personal names to their gods, Jews and mainstream churches of Christendom have failed to identify by a distinctive personal name the god that they worship. Instead, they resort to such titles as Lord, God, Almighty, and Father.

Writing in the publication Theology, author David Clines stated the following: “Somewhere between the fifth and the second centuries B.C. a tragic accident befell God: he lost his name. More exactly, Jews gave up using God’s personal name Yahweh, and began to refer to Yahweh by various periphrases: God, the Lord, the Name, the Holy One, the Presence, even the Place. Even where Yahweh was written in the Biblical text, readers pronounced the name as Adonai. With the final fall of the temple, even the rare liturgical occasions when the name was used ceased, and even the knowledge of the pronunciation of the name was forgotten.” However, no one can say for sure exactly when orthodox Jews ceased to pronounce God’s name out loud and instead substituted the Hebrew words for God and Sovereign Lord.

It seems, then, that the very first essential in any quest to identify “the only true God” would be to get to know him by name. Such a search is not at all difficult, for the name of Almighty God, the Creator, is clearly and simply stated at Psalm 83:18: “That men may know that thou, whose name alone is JEHOVAH, art the most high over all the earth.”—King James Version.

Does It Really Matter?

Some may argue that it does not really matter whether you address Almighty God by a personal name or not, and they are content to speak of and address God as Father or simply as God. Both these terms, however, are titles rather than names and are neither personal nor distinctive. In Bible times the word for God (ʼElo·himʹ, Hebrew) was used to describe any god—even the pagan Philistine god named Dagon. (Judges 16:23, 24) So for a Hebrew to tell a Philistine that he, the Hebrew, worshiped “God” would not have identified the true God whom he worshiped.

Of interest is a comment in The Imperial Bible-Dictionary of 1874: “[Jehovah] is everywhere a proper name, denoting the personal God and him only; whereas Elohim partakes more of the character of a common noun, denoting usually, indeed, but not necessarily nor uniformly, the Supreme. . . . The Hebrew may say the Elohim, the true God, in opposition to all false gods; but he never says the Jehovah, for Jehovah is the name of the true God only. He says again and again my God . . . ; but never my Jehovah, for when he says my God, he means Jehovah. He speaks of the God of Israel, but never of the Jehovah of Israel, for there is no other Jehovah. He speaks of the living God, but never of the living Jehovah, for he cannot conceive of Jehovah as other than living.”