Freedom in the Name of God

The liberal and libertarian ideas, that people have certain natural and/or God-given rights, put a great emphasis on the individual, as opposed to the whole of social body. Such natural rights, as the right to personal autonomy and property rights, and the right to the utilization of previously unused resources, emphasize self-centered individual consumption oriented behavior as a “natural right” thus trying to find grounds for individualistic values in the laws of nature.  There are also claims that such rights are “God-given” and that “freedom” is one of the essential characteristics of God and since Man was created in the image of God it is intrinsically a human characteristic, too. Hence the idea of the “metaphysical” freedom which is generally backed by perceptions based upon subjective personal meditative and emotional experience of its adherents. Both such claims are fundamentally wrong. Neither the laws of nature, nor the laws of God, teach us that freedom, as an absolute category, can be ascribed either to the characteristic features of relationships between any given set of natural elements, as parts of a certain system, or to the essential characteristics of God, according to the names by which the supernatural entity is referred to.

That is why freedom as a philosophical category has not been fully appreciated. Both in extra-Biblical antiquity and within the Bible, freedom is mentioned in the context of the philosophy of power and power relationships within a given community. Mostly it refers to issues pertaining to the relations between slaves and their masters. There is no reference to the idea of freedom as such in the names or titles of God. There is something more fundamental in the way the ancient Hebrew thinkers thought about God.

There are many names of God in Hebrew in the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament. The name has a fundamental importance in the Scriptures. As it is known, in the Hebraic mindset, naming and being are linked together to form a unity. Naming denotes the essential characteristic of the named and the right use of a name establishes a right relationship with the thing named. Thus is the traditional sacred nature and a very special treatment of the names of God.

According to the Rabbinic tradition, the number of divine names that require special care is seven: El, Elohim, Adonai, Yhwh, Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh, Shaddai, and Ẓeba'ot. The sacredness of the divine names has always been especially recognized by the professional Hebrew scribes who wrote the Scriptures, or the chapters for the phylacteries. Before transcribing any of the divine names a scribe would first prepare mentally to sanctify them and after that, once he begins a name, he would not stop until it is finished. He must not be interrupted while writing it, even to greet a king. If an error is made in writing it, it may not be erased, but a line must be drawn round it to show that it is canceled, and the whole page must be put in a genizah ("storage") and a new page begun.

Of all the names of God in the Old Testament, Yhwh occurs most frequently (6,823 times) and is considered to be the distinctive personal name of the God of Israel. The name Yhwh, as the Name proper, was known in the earliest rabbinical works simply as Hashem (the Name); also as Shem ha-Meyuḥad ("the Extraordinary Name"); as Shem ha-Meforash ("the Distinguished Name"); as Shem ben Arba' Otiyyot ("the Tetragrammaton" or "the Quadriliteral Name"); and as Yod He Waw He (spelling the letters of Yhwh). The pronunciation of the written Name was used only by the priests in the Temple when blessing the people. Outside the Temple they used the title "Adonai". The restriction upon communicating the Name proper probably originated in Oriental etiquette. In the East even a teacher was not to be called by name.

The word Yhwh, according to the Jewish Encyclopedia (1906), in appearance is the third person singular imperfect of the verb "to be", meaning, therefore, "He is," or "He will be," or, perhaps, "He lives,". The root idea of the word being, probably, "to blow", "to breathe". Therefore, the meaning of the name given in Ex. 3:14, where God is represented as speaking in the first person, is "I am" or "I who lives". The overall meaning of the name would be "He who is self-existing, self-sufficient", emphasising the idea of existence as such, without any cause, beginning, and ending. More precisely, it means "He who lives", since the abstract conception of pure existence was mostly foreign to Hebrew thought at that time.

The idea of life was intimately connected with the name Yhwh from early times. God of many Semitic tribes was regarded to be an essentially living entity, as contrasted with the lifeless gods of the heathen. Living God is Himself the source and author of life.  Thus is the common formula of an oath: "Hai Yhwh" ("As Yhwh lives") as in Ruth 3:13. Unfortunately, life was viewed as closely tied to the deities, which were guarding particular  tribes or nations. Once a tribe was convinced that their El (“God”, “The Strong One”) had deserted them or turned out to be too weak to protect the people from other “gods” and their people, there were only two ways to deal with the situation. Either find and pay allegiance to another divine creature to be protected by them or give up and resign yourself to your miserable fate, hoping at the mercy of your captors. According to ancient beliefs, no one was immune to possible discontinuation of harmonious relationship with their gods and supernatural powers, and the relationship between the latter ultimately determined the fate of the people, divided among the respective divine entities.

Yhwh contains the idea of a perpetual existing reality. It is something, which is a supernatural fabric of the existence itself, personified in a Supreme Being of such nature and characteristics that it knows not a fragmented, itemized, or disjointed state but only a state of unique oneness, unparalleled exclusivity and unity. What was revealed to Moses while he was living with the Midianites in the desert, after he had left Egypt to save his life and before he returned to Egypt to lead his people out, became a groundbreaking prophetic insight into the nature and character of God. That insight ingeniously combined various ancient Semitic and Egyptian religious concepts and philosophical worldviews. As a result, the name Yhwh ("He who is the only one who is truly and eternally self-existing and self-sufficient, essentially alive") became the proper Name of God denoting the most essential characteristic of God. Existence itself became validated as a thing worthy in itself. Yhwh, being the God of Israel, also has all the other divine names, previously used by the Hebrew people, beginning from Abraham, combined in the Name. It was built upon traditional religious beliefs but also brought about the category of pure existence to the forefront of the Hebrew thought and on the wake of this intellectual and spiritual revival validated the people’s will to obtain liberation from slavery, the national survival and faith in their inevitable future prosperity. 

One might think that the liberation of the people from the Egyptian slavery would need to be heralded by proclamations of freedom and liberty, or that certain natural or God-given rights needed to be invoked by Moses to stir the national urge to live and exist. But, no, that was not the concept that Moses had drawn from his contemplation of the natural as well as supernatural phenomena in the desert. Combined with all the other ancient Semitic characteristics of God, what saved the Jews from national demise in Egyptian captivity and led them throughout their history was no other idea or notion but the notion of the reality of existential being.