Lent Day 3: The Genderqueer Names of God

Scripture (Exodus 6:1-13) can be found here.

Yesterday, we read a New Testament deacon's account of the call of Moses; today we go to the source, the book of Exodus, and read as God lays out more detail for the ways in which God will rescue the Israelites from slavery.

God begins by establishing relationship:

“I am the LORD. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as "God Almighty," but by my name ‘The LORD’ I did not make myself known to them. I also established my covenant with them, to give them the land of Canaan, the land in which they resided as aliens." ~Exodus 6:2b-5

The "Tetragrammaton"-- Four letters, the Unspeakable Name

God reminds Moses of God's name: the LORD. When we read LORD in the Hebrew Scriptures (in small caps, which is not a feature available here, but you can see it at the link at Bible Gateway), we are reading four letters revealed to Moses as God's name: they translate, roughly, to YHWH. They are a Hebrew word, which means "I am who am," or "I am who I am," or "I will be who I will be." This is the name God revealed at that burning bush, and in Jewish tradition it is so holy as to be unpronounceable. It is so holy, that a Hebrew word meaning "Lord" (in the medieval, lord of the manor sense, or the sense of someone of higher social status than most everyone else) is substituted when passages containing the four letters are read aloud.

It is so holy, that Jewish Theological Seminary (Conservative), the seminary located across the street from the seminary I attended, had a room into which were placed all written versions of the name when the papers or books that contained them were being discarded. It is so holy, you cannot even throw away or recycle a piece of paper on which it is written in the usual way.

But God also reminds Moses of the name "God Almighty," which, footnotes will tell you, "is the traditional rendering of the Hebrew El Shaddai." El Shaddai literally means either "God of the Mountains" or "God with Breasts/ Breasted God." *

El Shaddai is a name that insinuates female function, if not gender; while YHWH is a name that is traditionally understood (and certainly pronouned) to have male gender.

It would seem that God takes on genderqueer naming in scripture. This is hidden to anyone who doesn't hear or read the original Hebrew and understand it. This, we might infer, has been carefully hidden.

I'll address the second discover in tomorrow's post.
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* Though I had learned the meaning of El Shaddai while studying Hebrew in seminary, I was grateful to the Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney for affirming this reading of the name during my study leave this winter.