Jump to content
Goodbye Jesus

God's Name(S)


Joshpantera

Recommended Posts

  • Moderator

I'm revisiting something that I came across around 04' while trying to get to the bottom of a study on the name of God that my grandfather died leaving unfinished. 

 

According to yhwh.com (YHWH's site! lol), I discovered a deeper layer: http://www.yhwh.com/asimple.htm

 

And here to see textual analysis: http://www.yhwh.com/godsrealname.htm

 

"I am that I am" is actually "I will be what / who I will be." 

 

AHWH

 

Apparently that made people nervous enough to translate AHWH to YHWH. Instead of "I will" be they preferred "I am" because it puts God in the present instead of yet to come. This makes me think of the late Bible writings periods. I wonder if the writers, knowing that they were projecting the stories backwards into the distant past did this on purpose because they knew that the God myth they were creating was to the effect of gathering the many Gods of old into one. "I will be who I will be," makes some sense from that angle. This God is El Shaddai, EL Elyon, Elohim, El whatever, because they were working on merging everything into one universal God. That makes sense with AHWH as the original tetragrammaton. And also I don't know if you can even pronounce AHWH? They have to add vowel points to say Yahweh. In this case it would be Ahweh. Since the name of God is supposed be unpronounceable maybe that's just do to it's original form? I'll have to look into that. 

 

Of course the web master at the site is way out there grasping at straws to come up with some type of Christian interpretation of the data. But I wonder if any one else around here has more info on the subject or knows of what secular scholarship has done with the data, if any thing at all?  

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Fascinating… first time I've heard that.

 

I always thought it was a little suspicious when Yahweh says to Moses that he didn't reveal his name to Abraham… I'm thinking it's because he had a different name (El.. etc…) and was at that time being merged with the tribal storm god, Yahweh.

 

This would make that statement more coherent.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yes, I thought that those names go back to different Canaanite gods.

 

I've noticed that there seems to be a growing sector of fundy/charismatic Christianity that makes a big deal of using Hebraic names and words. Instead of Jesus, they gush about Yeshua or Yehoshua, and they throw in references to Yahweh or yah or even Elohim and Adonai. And they write "G-d" instead of "God." I mean, what the fuck is with this wannabe Jews thing?

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest Furball

It makes them feel more intellectual. Really i don't know but i know what your saying, some jewish people just released a bible where they removed all the places that say jesus, and replaced it with yeshua. -yawn

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I never understood why more Christians didn't care about the Jesus vs Yeshua issue. He would have never heard the name Jesus in his lifetime. Shouldn't people care about what name their savior actually used?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Moderator

What got my Grandfather into this had to do with SDA doctrine. The whole seventh day Sabbath on Saturday and not Sunday is the foundation of the entire belief. To the point where the founder decided that the entire end times scenario will boil down to one issue - Sunday worship as the mark of the beast and Saturday Sabbath as the "Seal of God."

 

My grandfather realized that the Seal of God, per scripture, is the name of God and not a day of the week. So he launched an investigation into God's name as YHWH and he thought that he'd warn everyone at the conference about this error to do with salvation. In this thinking barely anyone knew God's real name, aside from these gentile adaptations rendered as Jehovah, Lord, and so on. This was before it became fashionable to use Hebrew terminology. Deeper yet, Yeshua rendered as Jesus concerned him as well because people are praying and believing in some 'Greek' name that the real Hebrew Jesus up in heaven, in my grandfathers thinking, wouldn't even recognize. All the verses about 'all who call on the name of Jesus will be saved,' and the seal of God as the name of God (YHWH) reinforced the idea that the names Yahweh and Yeshua are center stage important and the SDA conference has it all wrong.

 

Long story short, they ex-communicated him and kicked him out of the church that he had built with his own money and donated to the SDA conference. 

 

He went to the grave thinking that he needed to tell me all of this before he died. And he placed me as responsible for telling all of the grandchildren about this unknown message of salvation. I told him that I'd look into it just because it seemed important for him to have this Bible study. And by the next weekend when I was going down to let him tell me all about it, he didn't wake up that morning. He had merely scratched the surface the weekend prior by telling that YHWH is the key to everything. 

 

So I was curious about what it was about YHWH that he thought I needed to know and pass on. Over the following year I went through his personal library reading what he was reading. This is where it got interesting. He had a Bible from Bethel Pennsylvania printed by a modern Yahwist community of Christians. They're fundamentalists who realized the scriptural importance of YHWH - the pure Hebrew YHWH without the pagan gentile influence that they think resides in names like Jehovah and so on. In this Bible all of the original Hebrew names are given where names like Lord, lord, God Almighty, and other gentile based renderings occur in the King James Version and others. I didn't know what to make of it at first. But I realized that I was penetrating into deeper waters, and being interested in intellectual knowledge I continued digging down further.

 

I ran into Gospel Truth by Alexander S. Holub and that pretty much introduced me to Biblical criticism. It was there that I first heard the accusation that YHWH was originally a pagan deity. There I learned of archaeological minimalism and how ancient Israel was polytheistic and what all of these other God's mentioned in the Bible really were. Ta da! I already had the Yahwist's Bible which rendered all of the names in the original Hebrew as they appear. These various Gods were then easily identified in the revised edition, something the Yahwists probably didn't anticipate. As this went on, I found the YHWH website linked at the top of the thread and learned of the AHWH original tetragrammaton.

 

I don't know if my grandfather would have taken it that far, but it is the logical conclusion if you hold the course and investigate deep enough and long enough. The Bible reveals itself. And as the supposed spiritual leader of the grandchildren, I've shared my knowledge of Biblical criticism with those who will listen. Not exactly what my grandfather really had in mind, but hey, I've taken the reigns as leader and decided that the truth is worth telling, even if it ends in non-belief. 

 

1) Biblical salvation depends on calling on the name of Jesus, which is Yeshua, whose name points back at YHWH because it means "YHWH is salvation" or "YHWH saves." Whoever calls on the name of Yeshua (YHWH saves) will be saved. 

 

2) YHWH is an anagram for the statement, "I am what I am," which, is secondary to, "I will be what I will be," in the original texts.

 

3) "I will be what I will be" appears to be part of a political / religions motivated plan aimed at claiming that all of the formerly mentioned Gods were really the tribal God of Israel all along, who will be who or what he chooses to be at any given time.

 

4) Biblical salvation is founded on belief in a pagan God who was later exalted to universal and transcendent.

 

5) The Bible slams pagan Gods as false.

 

6) Biblical salvation is a self contradiction.  

 

7) Atheistic Sabbath. A rest from further belief. 

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 4 weeks later...

"I might start a thread on that subject: the portrayal of Jesus the literary character as a rival to Yahweh"

 

​Wow… in all my time stating that YWWH was a usurper to El (and the Canaanite pantheon in general).. and other related deities/mythologies, and all the connections with Jesus and the dying/reborn god themes in mythology I never reached this point. Wow…. That's brilliant, and worth exploring.

 

Thanks, Human!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Scripts…. yes, but in an archetypal way.  I'll be watching for the thread!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Moderator

Yes, we need to explore this beyond anywhere we've gone before with it. It rings as valid based on the usurping tendency that we know plays out through the Bible writing periods. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Guidelines.