Category Archives: language

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What in God’s name is God’s name?

Jesus. No other word in our culture packs quite the same punch. Use it (or invoke it, if you will), and the dynamics of a conversation change, one way or another. Sides are drawn, in some cases. Rhetoric and passion bubble up to the surface.

But nobody so much as bats an eyelash if someone starts using the name Joshua. They don’t realize, perhaps, that the man from Nazareth who the Christians revere was called something much closer to the latter than the former.

The name Jesus is an English transcription of a Latin transcription of a Greek transcription of an Aramaic transcription of the Hebrew name Yehoshua. The man himself would have been called Yeshua, which is the Aramaic — the common tongue of the Middle East during the Age of Rome. Doesn’t sound much like Jesus, does it? So how did we get there?

Folk who would have called him Yeshua were using a transcription of a Hebrew word meaning “Yahweh is salvation.” Who’s Yahweh? The Christian god, of course. You thought his name was just “God”? Yeah, so do most Christians.

Anywho, people in the post-Babylonian sunshine belt spoke Aramaic, but they wrote Greek — common Greek, called κοινη (“coin,” eh?), a leftover of the Alexandrian empire that persisted well into the seventh centry, or thereabout. The New Testament of the Bible (“library”) was all written in common Greek, and the spoken “Yeshua” was transcribed into the written Ιησοΰ (“ee yay Sue”).

Around A.D. 400, the upswing of Roman Christendom, Pope Damasus I had the Latin Vulgate (“common,” as in “vulgar”) commissioned. The Vulgate was the Latin translation of all accumulated scriptures, editions of which are still in use today. It was the first Latin version that translated the Old Testament from the Hebrew, rather than from the Greek Septuagint (“seventy”).

Funny story about that: Egyptian king Ptolemy II Philadelphus was said to have put 72 Hebrew scholars in 72 separate rooms and told them each to write the Septuagint, sure that God would make all the translations exactly the same. Of course, whether the translations actually came out the same or were just reported the same so the translators wouldn’t get flayed or whatnot, who can say?

Anyway, the Church used the original Hebrew for the Old Testament and gathered as much material as they could for the New Testament, filtering out all the stuff they didn’t like. Voila, Ιησοΰ was now Iesus (though not Yeezus).

Well, from there, it just takes John Wycliffe in the 15th century translating the first English Bible directly from the Vulgate to go to Jesus. Easy Peasy. Of course, at the time, this version included footnotes in the borders proclaiming anti-Catholic sentiments. The Church, always eager to turn the other cheek, proclaimed him a heretic, burned several of Wycliffe’s followers, and exhumed and burned his corpse as a response.

Back to Yahweh. You’ve probably heard the word Jehovah, from the third Indiana Jones movie if nothing else, where Indy has to walk across the stones marked with letters and he steps on the “J” by mistake and almost falls in. (“Jehovah starts with an ‘I,’ boy!”) Jehovah is the (once again) anglicized version of the Hebrew tetragrammaton (יהוה), or YHWH, approximately. The word’s roots are Canaanite: roughly, “creator of hosts” (meaning armies).

The word Elohim is also used (usually translated as “God”), which sort of means king of the gods, or leader of the gods. That’s right! He used to have his own pantheon, including Asherah (his very own wife) and Baal. I imagine the wife of God must have been pretty overworked most of the time. Anyway, she later filed for divorce and moved to Sumeria.

Yahweh had a brief time as more of a fuzzy, all-thing, animistic deity due to Eastern influences. Then, around the sixth century BC, he was canonized by the Deuteronomist (“lawyer”) priesthood of the Hebrews into being the only god in existence, and all previous scriptural material was either excised or revised accordingly. Bada-boom: Monotheism.

(You may also choose to believe that God was always the same, and Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible, with or without plenary, the direct God’s-mouth-to-scripture-writer’s-hand method … or you can believe both origins at once! It’s a free country.)

So why doesn’t anybody call him Yahweh anymore? After all, the Hindus still call Shiva “Shiva,” and Vishnu “Vishnu.” You see, you may have heard the admonition against taking God’s name in vain. Turns out, that doesn’t mean saying, “God damn it!” or “Jesus Christ!” anytime you smack your thumb with a hammer. No, it means pronouncing the word “Yahweh” aloud, under virtually any circumstances. The Hebrews still scribed the name, but speaking it was forbidden. Leviticus 24:16 states, “He that names the name of Yahweh shall surely be put to death.” Oh. Well, that explains why nobody went around saying it. But why shouldn’t he be named?

Again, harkening to animistic spiritualism, the true name of something, as it were, was believed to give someone power over it. I think that’s true today as well from a cognitive-language perspective, but we’ll save that for another article. Suffice to say, the priests didn’t want people to think they were in control, so they guarded the use of God’s name, well, religiously. Only the high priest ever said the name Yahweh aloud, once per year, at the temple in Jerusalem, in the “holy of holies,” the super-secret shrine in the center of the temple. In the English Bible, the name is replaced with “THE LORD,” in all caps.

Some churches have recently started using the name Yahweh out of respect and the desire to, you know, correctly address their deity. But the Catholic Church and many other sects have decided that they won’t advertise it widely. Whether that’s because they like the idea that “God” almost universally means the Christian god, or because they don’t want to cheese off the Jews by blabbing God’s name around everywhere, or because they maybe don’t want to incur his wrath by being careless, I couldn’t say. Perhaps you could, though, if you’re feeling a little cheeky.

So next time somebody asks if you know Jesus, you can say, “I know his real name, at least.”

thor

Thor wants his day back

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It startles me sometimes to look back on my public education and realize that no one ever bothers to explain why some words, even ones we use every day of our lives, look so bizarre and unfamiliar if separated from their context.

Days of the week are a great example. Okay, “Sun-day,” I could get on my own. No problem. But what about “Tues” or “Thurs?” If you’ve ever spelled the word “Wednesday” wrong because you have no idea what a Wednes is or why it gets its own day, read on, my friend (or, if you do know, you’ll probably read on anyway, because this kind of thing fascinates you already).

So it all started with the Babylonians (those cheeky bastards), and maybe the Hebrews, but mostly the Babylonians. They marked their holy days (holidays) based on the lunar cycle. The first day after the new moon, predictably, was referred to as the Moon’s Day. They had one holy day every seventh day, which was roughly a quarter of the lunar cycle, with the big’un occurring on the 28th day. Seven-day weeks were thus born (borne?). They spread like wildfire from there. You know, the kind of wildfire that takes thousands of years to spread.

It was the Greeks and later the Romans who were largely responsible for setting our current format. They named the days after planets — specifically, the five planets visible to the naked eye: Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn (as well as the moon and the sun).

They took on the seven-day week with the onset of Christianization in Constantine’s rule, since the Christians were using the Hebrew system already, and from there it caught on (or was forced on) throughout Europe, including the United Kingdom (not yet united, but known as Breton, Wales, Celtland, etc.) and parts of Asia.

In some regions of China, these five planets were associated with the five Chinese elements: fire for Mars, water for Mercury, wood for Jupiter, metal for Venus, and earth (small “e”) for Saturn. So you’d have a “Fire Day” or “Metal Day.” Iron Maiden fans would approve of that, I should think.

The northern Europe folk — Germanic tribes, Saxons, and Scandinavians — did their conversion a little differently, though. Instead of naming the days after the planets, like China, they named the days after corresponding pagan deities from the Norse pantheon.

  • Latin solis became Germanic Sunna, their sun goddess.
  • Latin luna became Germanic Máni, an equivalent moon god.
  • Warlike Mars most closely related to Norse Týr, a one-handed god associated with one-on-one combat and the fulfillment of oaths. (All of the Norse gods are pretty warlike, though, so they might have stuck anyone in there.)
  • Fleet-footed, mischievous Mercury somehow turned into Wodan (or Odin), the wise, one-eyed father of the Norse gods who, while a bit on the mischievous side, seems somewhat an ill fit to the wing-footed Roman. A much better analog would’ve been Loki, the trickster — at least in my opinion. I’ll elaborate more once we get through the rest. In Iceland, they just called the day “mid-week day,” which seems to be coming back into fashion with “hump day.” I’m not sure that Odin approves, but you never know. It’s hard to tell with Odin.
  • Mighty Jupiter, leader of the Roman pantheon, became Thor, whom you might recognize from his recent appearance in one or two comic book films. While Thor is something of a leader among his peers, he defers to his father Odin. The main connection between Thor and Jupiter is their mutual control of thunder. Indeed, the words Thor and thunder are very closely related.
  • Goddess of love and passion, Venus, translated into Fríge, an Anglo-Saxon goddess of sex and fertility based on Norse Freyja and/or Frigg. (The distinction between the two is not particularly strong; in mythology, like in contemporary popular culture, women were often lumped together and grossly underrepresented.) Fríge is part of the root for the word “freedom,” so if you’re feeling very patriotic, you could get away with calling Friday “Freedom Day,” were you so inclined. It is for us nine-to-fivers, anyway, amirite?
  • Saturn, the Roman god who fathered most of the major players on Olympus and subsequently tried to eat them, didn’t get a pagan equivalent. He just got fast-tracked through into keeping his day name in Old English. What probably happened was that the Germans called the day “Day before Sunday,” and the Scandinavians called it “laundry day,” so nobody bothered to update the Celts and the Bretons, who were still using the Roman names during the various Viking conquests. There’s no Norse god of laundry, after all. Still, seems like Odin would be a natural fit here instead of subbing in for Mercury, don’t you think?

So my theory is that Odin, using the future sight he gained from carving out his eye and throwing it into Mímir’s Well, saw this whole seven-day-naming thing coming. He saw that his natural analog, Saturn, fell on laundry day, of all days, and groaned. “But I don’t want to be the laundry god!”

Sneaky bastard that he is, Odin strolled on up to the ambitious Loki and said, “Hey, boy, I’ve been thinking. You seem headed for great things, and I wanted help you out. There’s a new kind of week heading our way, and low on the totem as you are, you’d be lucky to get, say, the third day out of seven, if even that.”

“Oh no, not hump day!”

“Precisely, m’boy. Precisely. So, I’m willing to trade with you. I’m slated to take on the big spot. The one currently held by the biggest, most ferocious, hungriest god of the Roman pantheon. But, I can let you switch with me for a very modest price. What’s the name of that horse you, uh, birthed? Sleipnir, was it?”

After the deal was made, Loki read the fine print, and decided that no day was worth being the laundry god.