Why the God the Ancient Hebrews Worshipped Is Different from that of Christianity and Islam (Part 1)

The Sacred Name

Long ago, in the quiet corners of ancient Israel, there was a secret so powerful that it could not be spoken aloud. The prophets whispered it, the scribes guarded it, and the people trembled at it. This was the mystery about God’s name.

Isaiah 52:6 tells us: one day, God’s people will know His name—and in that moment, they will see that it is He Himself who speaks.

Ezekiel 39:7 warns: God will make His holy name known, and He will not allow it to be desecrated.

Even the scriptures themselves shiver with the weight of this mystery.

HaShem and the Four-Letter Mystery

In the Hebrew tongue, God is called HaShem, which simply means “The Name.”

But behind this simple title lies a terrifying mystery. In the oldest Hebrew texts, God’s name is written with just four letters: יהוה (YHWH). These letters, known as the Tetragrammaton, hide more than they reveal. Ancient Hebrew used only consonants—no vowels. The exact meaning of each word is known only to the initiated.

Eventually, Hebrews developed written vowels, which appeared as small marks called vowel points and were placed above and below the consonants of a word. In the sixth or seventh century, some Jews began to place the vowel points for “Adonai” over the consonants for the Tetragrammaton to remind the reader of Scripture to say “Adonai” whenever he reads the Tetragrammaton.

Acoirding to the website, Catholic.com,  the term “Jehovah” first appeared in the 13th century C.E., when Christian scholars transliterated the Tetragrammaton as “YHWH” and, ignorant of the Jewish custom mentioned above,  took the consonants  “YHWH” and pronounced it with the vowels of “Adonai.”  This resulted in the sound “Yahowah”, which was abbreviated as “Yahweh”.

After then, a Spanish Dominican monk, Raymundus Martini, latinized the word “Yahowah” when he pronounced it as “Jehovah” in 1270 C.E., even though scholars at the time know very much that the Hebrew Alphabet have no letter that can be pronounced as  “J”. Even the name Jesus was originally pronounced by the Hebrews as Yeshua or Yehoshua.

Unravelling the Meaning of the Tetragrammaton

Over thousands of years of Jewish history, many have asked the same question. Now pay full attention to the following analysis. Here lies the answer.

Let us start with this Statement:  “The One whose Name ‘Ehyeh’ shall reveal”.

When you translate this statement into Hebrew, this is what you get: 

את אשר יגלה שמו אהיה

 

Now comes the shocking part. The Tetragrammaton—YHWH—is not a sentence or a sequence of letters. It is a code, a symbol, a shorthand for a secret sentence:

“The One whose name Ehyeh shall reveal”

(אֲשֶׁר שְׁמוֹ אֶהְיֶה יְגַלֶּה)

The letters of YHWH, present in the sentence above, were not taken in order. They were picked deliberately, hiding the secret sentence from plain sight.

Why? To protect the most sacred questions:

1. Who is Ehyeh?

2. What is the name He will reveal?

The Tetragrammaton is a puzzle. Only those who dare to look deeper can uncover its hidden truth.

 

We read in the book of John chapter 17 from verse 3 that Jesus revealed the Name of  “the God of the Jews”  as

האל האמיתי היחיד

which means “the Only True God” when transliterated into English.

In other words, HaShem, “the Name” of the God of the Jews is “the Only True God” or “the Only God”— He bears no other name. [Zechariah chapter 14 verse 9].

 

Who Is Ehyeh? 

We read in the book of Exodus chapter 3 from verse 13 that Moses asked the one who appeared to him as a burning fire in the midst of the bush, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name? ‘ what shall I say to them?”

Exodus 3 chapter 14 reads: “  ‘Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh has sent you to them.”

The Represented And the Representative

The one who appeared to Moses as a burning fire identified himself as “Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” which means,  “ Either I am or I will be”. We could assume that he went further to explain explain to Moses that he is the representative of “the One whose Name  he (Ehyeh) shall reveal (in the future) ”. He could assume that he explained to Moses that the one who is being represented is  “the God of your fathers”. Then Ehyeh is the Representative and “the God of your fathers” is the Represented.

Why do we make this assumptions?

Here is the logic: the Only True God can never be seen. This is so because all of creation emerged by separation from Him. Bases on this picture, common sense tells us that God cannot be a part of the multiverse because the multiverse came out of God. For example, a carpenter cannot be a part of the chair he constructed; an engineer cannot be a part of the engine he invented; a sculptor cannot be a part of the sculpture he built. That is why we know that God is not, and can never be, anything which is part of creation (Numbers 23:23), and thus must remain unseen forever.

Conclusion: God exists outside all creation, even though he can influence it.

Ehyeh explained that, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father” [John 14 verse 9] because he is the Representative of the Father, John writes, “No one has [actually] seen God at anytime” (John 1 verse 18). This is because God exists as a separate essence from all creation, and it is impossible that He becomes a part of the creation which emerged out of Him. That is exactly what we mean when we say that God is “holy”. The word “holy” means “separate”.

In summary, now we know that the Tetragrammaton is a code, a puzzle, that represents a statement. The complete statement is “The One Whose Name ‘’Ehyeh’  Shall Reveal”. Since, we know the one who revealed the name as Jesus, then Jesus is Ehyeh, or Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh.

The Representative of HaShem

Jesus claimed to be the representative of HaShem when he said to his disciples, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father”. This is exactly who Jesus claimed to be. Jesus neither claimed to be God nor did he claim to be “the Christ”. The one who shall be “the Christ”, the “anointed one”, from the blood lineage of David who comes to reinstate the throne of his forefathers, is a different person—not Jesus.

Moses wrote that he saw God and he was right only in the sense that he saw the Representative of God, who, indeed, is a personality distinguishable from God. And it is this Representative that appeared to Moses, and he who sees the representative has seen the Father. In another article [check the menu], we explained properly that Jesus is Not the Christ.

 

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