The Name of God (I): YHWH in the Old Testament

The Hidden Name: YHWH in the Old Testament and Why It Could Not Be Spoken

A study in five parts on the theology of the divine Name, the prayer of the heart, and the third commandment

---

"This is My name forever, and this is My memorial unto all generations."
(Exodus 3:15)

---

I. The Question That Opens the Whole of Theology

At the burning bush, Moses does not ask for a doctrine. He asks for a Name. "Behold, I will go to the children of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you.’ But if they say to me, ‘What is His name?’ — what shall I say to them?" (Ex. 3:13).

God’s answer is famous for its density and for the silence that follows it across the centuries. In Hebrew it sounds: אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה — Ehyeh asher Ehyeh. The Septuagint — the reference text of the Orthodox Church — translates it ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ὤν (Ego eimi ho ōn), "I am the One who is." And then, immediately, God adds the third-person form, the one that will become the proper Name itself: יהוה — YHWH.

Here the enigma begins. God gives a Name — and yet that Name will come, in time, to be almost never pronounced. God makes Himself known through a Name — and yet Israel will live, especially in the period of the Second Temple, in an ever stricter liturgical silence around it. How is this tension to be explained? Why does a Name revealed precisely to be known become a Name almost forbidden to be spoken?

The answer is not ritualistic or superstitious, as it sometimes appears in superficial accounts. The answer is theological, and it opens the whole economy of the Incarnation. By understanding why the Name of God could not be uttered under the Old Covenant, we understand what changed ontologically when the Word became flesh — and why, only after Christ, the Name could be not merely spoken but placed in the very heart of man as unceasing prayer.

II. What a Name Is in the Biblical World

We must begin with an observation that may seem simple but is fundamental: for Hebrew thought, a name is not a conventional label. A name is the very being of a person made known. To know someone’s name is to have access to that person’s reality, to a measure of power in relation to them, to a real relationship.

Hence, in Genesis, Adam shows his dominion over creation by naming the animals (Gen. 2:19-20). Hence the changes of name at moments of ontological transformation: Abram becomes Abraham (Gen. 17:5), Jacob becomes Israel (Gen. 32:28), Simon becomes Peter (Mt. 16:18 — "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build My Church"). The name is not a convention; it is a reality that changes when the being itself changes.

This is the premise we cannot bypass: when God gives His Name, He is not labeling Himself. He is making Himself known. He grants us access to Himself through His Name — not to His incomprehensible essence, but to His presence, glory, and operation. The divine Name is not a mere label about God; it is the way in which God makes Himself known and called upon by those who invoke Him in faith.

Here lies a first key for the entire subsequent theology of the Name — from the burning bush to hesychast prayer. And here lies, equally, the reason why the prohibition of utterance is not a cultural curiosity but a theological necessity.

III. The Revelation at the Burning Bush: Ehyeh asher Ehyeh

The formula Ehyeh asher Ehyeh has received, throughout the history of interpretation, several translations: "I am who I am," "I will be who I will be," "I am the One who is." Hebrew does not sharply distinguish between present and future in this verbal form, and the ambiguity is intentional. The Septuagint settled the matter through an option of philosophical weight: ho Ōn — "the One who Is" — written to this day on the cruciform halo of Christ in Orthodox iconography.

The Fathers of the Church saw in this answer not a mere name but a revelation of the very being of God. Saint Gregory the Theologian formulates it precisely: God cannot be named in the proper sense, for every name uttered by man is borrowed from the created order, and God is not part of creation. Ho Ōn is not one name among others — it is the indication that He alone is from Himself, and that everything that exists exists by participation in Him.

Saint Gregory of Nyssa carries the thought further: the Name He who Is shows that God, in comparison with whom all else is, is the only one who exists in an absolute sense. All else exists through Him. Any other name we might give God — Almighty, Merciful, Just — is true, but these are names relative to creation. Ho Ōn is the Name that shows He is prior to any relation with creation.

Saint Gregory the Theologian, in the Fourth Theological Oration (§18), confirms the same point: as far as we can reach with our minds, "He who Is" and "God" are names that point to the divine essence itself — but especially "He who Is," because this is how God named Himself before Moses. Being belongs in the proper sense only to God, not bounded by past or future.

A further clarification must be made, without which the whole patristic theology of the Name remains misunderstood. The Fathers of the Church read the revelation at the burning bush christologically — that is, not as Moses’ encounter with God "in general," but as a theophany of the pre-incarnate Logos. Saint Justin Martyr, in his Dialogue with Trypho (chs. 56-60), shows that the One who reveals Himself to Moses in the bush — called at once "Angel," "God," and "Lord" — is the Son of God, since the Father, according to Saint Justin’s theology, does not appear directly but through His Word. Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, in Against Heresies (III, 6), cites Exodus 3:14 and links the revelation of ho Ōn directly to the Son, through whom the Father is made known: the One who said to Moses "I am the One who is" is the One who would assume flesh in the fullness of time. Saint John Chrysostom strengthens the same point: "I am" indicates eternal being, without beginning — and this being belongs equally to the Father and the Son (Homily 15 on John).

This means that the Name revealed in the Old Covenant is not a name of the Father alone, but the Name of the Trinitarian Godhead which is yet to be revealed in Christ. The silence of the Old Testament was not guarding an impersonal reality but the One who would make Himself utterable through the Incarnation. We will develop this thread in the second part.

This is the first reversal of thought we must make: the Name of God is not information about Him, but an opening of Himself toward us. And if the Name is the way in which He who Is makes Himself accessible to invocation, then it becomes clear why to take it in vain is sacrilege. Not because words would be "magical," but because He who is Ho Ōn cannot be treated as an object.

IV. The Name and Apophaticism: Between Revelation and Silence

In the Orthodox tradition, every discourse about the Name of God must be held between two boundaries: revelation and silence. God names Himself — therefore man does not remain in absolute unknowing. But God does not allow Himself to be contained by any name — for His essence remains beyond every word, concept, or definition.

Saint Dionysius the Areopagite, in On the Divine Names (chs. I-II), formulates exactly this tension. The Godhead is, in itself, anōnymos — "nameless," beyond every name. And yet it is polyōnymos — "of many names," glorified through the names which Holy Scripture gives it. These names do not exhaust the mystery; they make it accessible to the measure in which God Himself is revealed through them. To confuse the Name with the very essence of the One named is to enclose the mystery in a word; to refuse every name is to enclose man in muteness before God. The truth lies in holding both together.

Saint John of Damascus, in his Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith (Book I, ch. 9), states clearly that "He who Is" is the most proper Name of God, since God "holds all being in His embrace" like an infinite ocean of being. But he also warns: the positive names we give God do not show what He is in His essence, but what is around His nature — that is, the relation, operation, and glory through which He makes Himself known. The essence itself remains incommunicable.

The Palamite distinction: essence and energies

This tension would receive its full dogmatic form in the fourteenth century, through Saint Gregory Palamas and the decisions of the hesychast Councils of Constantinople (1341, 1347, 1351). In God we must distinguish — without separating — the essence (ousia) and the energies (energeiai). The essence remains forever incomprehensible, incommunicable, beyond every knowledge. The energies are God Himself going forth toward creation, His real, active, communicable presence — the uncreated glory beheld by Moses on Sinai, by the three disciples on Tabor, by the hesychast saints in the light of prayer.

This distinction is the key that opens the entire Orthodox theology of the Name and guards us from two opposite collapses:

• On the one hand, from cold nominalism, which reduces the Name to a mere conventional sign, an arbitrary label that man assigns to God. If the Name is only a word, prayer becomes a monologue, and invocation becomes empty ritual.
• On the other hand, from the simplistic identification of the Name with God’s essence — an error that would arise in Christian history in the Athonite imiaslavie controversy of 1913, of which we will speak in the fifth part of the study. If the Name is God’s essence, then the syllable becomes a sacred object in itself, and utterance becomes magical technique — exactly the deviation that Judaism guarded against through liturgical silence.

The Palamite solution is simple and deep: the Name of God reveals His real presence but does not exhaust His incomprehensible essence. Through the invocation of the Name, God Himself becomes present — not in His essence, which remains forever beyond understanding, but in His energies, through His glory, through His operation. The Name is a real channel of divine presence, not a container that holds God.

This is the perspective from which we will read the entire history of the Name — from the silence of the Old Covenant, through the Incarnation of the Word, to the prayer of the heart that will invoke the Name as an energy of the Holy Spirit working within man.

V. The Tetragrammaton: The Proper Name

Immediately after Ehyeh asher Ehyeh, God gives the written form by which Israel will invoke Him: יהוה (Y-H-W-H), the Tetragrammaton — "the four letters." It appears 6,828 times in the Hebrew Bible, more often than any other name or title. Etymologically, it is linked to the same verbal root — hayah ("to be"). The Tetragrammaton means, according to the most widely accepted grammatical analysis, "He is" or "He causes to be." The scholarly reconstructed pronunciation is Yahweh — a probable but not certain form, as we shall see below.

In the Old Testament, the Tetragrammaton is not the only divine name. Others appear:

• Elohim (אֱלֹהִים) — a generic name for divinity, plural of majesty, used also for pagan gods;
• El Shaddai (אֵל שַׁדַּי) — "God Almighty," the name under which God revealed Himself to the patriarchs (Ex. 6:3);
• Adonai (אֲדֹנָי) — "my Lord," a title of address;
• El Elyon (אֵל עֶלְיוֹן) — "God Most High."

(A note on pronunciation: in Biblical Hebrew the stress generally falls on the last syllable; the Hebrew letter ש is read as English "sh." The transliterations above are approximate.)

Among these, only YHWH is held to be the proper Name — the personal Name of God, by which He is distinguished not only from pagan gods but from any other reality. The others are titles or attributes. The Tetragrammaton is the Name.

VI. Why the Name Could Not Be Uttered

Here we arrive at the central question of the first part: why could YHWH not be pronounced?

It must first be made clear that the silence was not always there. From the time of Moses until, approximately, the time of Nehemiah (5th century B.C.), the Tetragrammaton was used in everyday speech. The books of Ruth and Judges attest its use in ordinary greetings — "YHWH be with you." The Lachish Letters, archaeologically discovered and dated to the time of Jeremiah (6th century B.C.), use YHWH freely as a common formula.

The change appears in the Second Temple period, gradually, between the 5th and 3rd centuries B.C. Rabbinic tradition links it to the death of Simeon the Just, the last high priest who pronounced it in the daily priestly blessing. After him, the Name was withdrawn from common liturgical use. Maimonides (Mishneh Torah, Avodat Yom haKippurim, ch. 2) records that the high priest pronounced the Name ten times during the service of the Day of Atonement — in the confessions for himself, for his house, and for all Israel, as well as at the casting of lots for the goats. In the last generations before the fall of Jerusalem, according to the Talmud (Yoma 39b), he uttered it in a low tone, "swallowed" in the chant of the other priests, so that it would not be heard by the unworthy.

Philo of Alexandria (ca. 20 B.C. — A.D. 50), commenting on Leviticus 24:15, writes plainly: he who dares to utter the Name "improperly" must expect the penalty of death. Philo calls it arrhēton — "unutterable." The Talmud confirms: the pronunciation became guarded as a sacred mystery transmitted by the priests, lest the Name be learned by those unfit to bear it.

Why this withdrawal? At the foundation of it lie four interwoven theological motives, which sustain one another. None of them is superstition — though, in the ordinary devotion of the people, superstitious meanings did over time attach themselves to the practice.

1. The holiness of the Name as participation in God’s holiness

The third commandment of the Decalogue — "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain" (Ex. 20:7) — uses the Hebrew verb nasa (to take, to bear, to lift up) and the expression lashav (in vain, falsely, without ground, idly). It is not merely the prohibition of false oaths, though it includes that. It is the prohibition of any frivolous utterance, free from holy fear, lacking the gravity owed to the reality of the One invoked.

Rabbinic tradition read this commandment in the key of "a fence around the Law": better not to utter the Name at all than to risk uttering it in vain. Just as a sacred vessel of the Temple could not be touched without ritual preparation, so the Name — holier than any vessel — could not be uttered without an inner preparation that ordinary man could not guarantee. Silence was the "fence" that guarded the Name from profanation.

2. The ontological distance between Creator and creature

This is the deepest reason, and it explains why silence is not merely prudence but theological necessity. Fallen man does not have the proper organ to utter the Name. Not because as a syllable it would be too small, but because man himself is too far from the One whom the Name reveals.

For Hebrew thought, to utter a name is to invoke a presence. And the presence of ho Ōn is a consuming fire (Deut. 4:24; Heb. 12:29). Just as one cannot approach embers with unclean hands without being burned, so one cannot utter the Name with an unprepared mouth without bringing judgment upon oneself. Communion with God in the Old Covenant was not yet open from within. It was mediated through the priesthood, through sacrifice, through the Temple — and most of all through distance.

Silence around the Name is not a lack; it is a form of adoration. It is the recognition, in silence itself, that between creature and Creator there is a gulf which the creature cannot cross of itself.

3. The Name as presence (Shekhinah) and the problem of localization

In Deuteronomy a recurring expression appears: the place "which the Lord your God shall choose to make His Name dwell there" (Deut. 12:11; 14:23; 16:2 etc.). The Temple is not the dwelling place of God in a material sense — Solomon himself says, at the consecration of the Temple: "Heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain Thee, much less this house" (1 Kings 8:27). The Temple is the place where the Name dwells.

This is a subtle theology: God does not live in the Temple, but His Name lives there. The Name is the way in which God makes Himself present without circumscribing Himself. Later rabbinic tradition called this presence Shekhinah — indwelling. And Orthodox terminology, later still, would use for the same concept the term glory (in Hebrew kavod, in Greek doxa).

If the Name is the very mode of presence, then to utter it is to invoke the presence. And the presence of God requires mediation, sanctification, hierarchy. It cannot be summoned anywhere, in any way, by anyone. This is why the utterance of the Name is concentrated in the service of the Day of Atonement, performed by the high priest within the cult of the Temple — culminating in the unique entrance into the Most Holy Place. The rest of the year, the rest of the people, the rest of the world — silence and substitution.

4. The prophylaxis against magical drift

The world of the ancient Near East was full of the magic of names. In Egypt, in Babylon, in Canaan, knowing the true name of a god or a demon was held to be equivalent to power over it. Spells, incantations, the Greco-Egyptian magical papyri — all worked on the principle: he who knows the Name has the power.

Israel had to be guarded from this reduction. The Name YHWH is not an instrument; it is a Person. To utter it is not a technique that triggers an effect; it is an address to Someone who answers freely, according to His will. The liturgical silence, the substitution of the Name with Adonai or Ha-Shem ("the Name"), the extreme care in transmitting the pronunciation — all were also a form of prophylaxis. Israel was not to fall into the illusion that, knowing how to pronounce the Name, it would have leverage over God.

This magical drift would reappear, paradoxically, even in Christian history — and we shall encounter it in the fifth part of the study, in the form of the Athonite imiaslavie controversy of 1913. The Orthodox balance between adoration of the Name and refusal of the magic of the Name is one of the subtlest things in tradition, and it has direct roots in this Old-Testament prophylaxis.

VII. How It Was Pronounced: Adonai, Ha-Shem, qere/ketiv

The practical solution of Second Temple Judaism was substitution. When the reader of the Torah reached יהוה in the text, he would utter Adonai (אֲדֹנָי), "my Lord," in its place. If in the written text Adonai and YHWH appeared together (as in Habakkuk 3:19 or Psalm 71:16), to avoid repetition, Elohim would be read instead.

Later, in everyday speech and commentary, Ha-Shem (הַשֵּׁם) was used — "the Name" simply. This circumlocution underscores the very point at the heart of our argument: the Name is so holy that not even a direct substitute can be uttered; one speaks of it as the Name par excellence, without saying it.

In the 6th to 10th centuries A.D., the Masoretes — the generations of scribes who fixed the text of the Hebrew Bible with vowels — did something remarkable. They placed under the consonants YHWH the vowels of Adonai. Not because that was how the Name was pronounced, but as a signal to the reader: "Here, do not pronounce what is written, but what is indicated by the vowels" — that is, Adonai. The qere/ketiv system ("read/written") preserved, for posterity, both the original consonantal text and the liturgical instruction to substitute it.

The hybrid form that resulted — Jehovah — does not represent the original pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton. It is an artificial medieval form, arising in Latin transcriptions of the 12th-13th centuries through the combination of YHWH’s consonants with the vowels of Adonai — that is, through the mechanical reading of the Masoretic notation, ignoring the fact that the vowels there were a liturgical signal, not a phonetic indication. There is no evidence that any ancient Jew ever pronounced it thus; the form was carried into Western texts and, later, taken up by a neo-Protestant group in the late 19th century.

The reconstructed pronunciation Yahweh (mentioned in the previous section) also remains approximate — a few Fathers from the 4th century (Saint Epiphanius of Salamis, Theodoret) transcribe pronunciations heard from Hellenistic Jewish sources, but with variants.

And here is yet another stratum of the silence: the exact pronunciation was lost. After the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70, after the cessation of the cult in the Most Holy Place, after the dispersion of the priesthood, the chain of oral transmission of the Name was broken. The silence of the Old Covenant was sealed also through forgetting. The Name He who Is became, literally, unutterable — because no one knew any longer how to pronounce it.

VIII. The Name in the Prayer of David: The Psalter as Anticipation

So far we have followed the silence: the Name revealed and withdrawn, the Name uttered once a year by a single man, the Name replaced by Adonai in public reading, the Name whose pronunciation was lost. It would seem that the Old Covenant is a time of muteness before the divine Name.

And yet, in the very heart of the Old Testament, there is a place where the Name is cried out, praised, invoked, remembered day and night — the Psalter. Liturgical silence in temple and synagogue did not mean muteness before God. It meant something else: the Name was invoked in the personal prayer of those who loved God, under the guidance of the Spirit. And David — the prophet-king — is the one through whom this invocation takes its full form.

In the Psalter, the Name of God is never treated as a magical formula. It is the personal presence of the One invoked. And around the Name there gather, already in the Old Covenant, all the dimensions of prayer that Christians would later recognize in the invocation of the Name of Jesus.

The Name as salvation

"Save me, O God, by Thy Name… behold, God helpeth me." (Ps. 53/54:1, 4)

The Name is invoked not as a syllable with intrinsic power, but as the ground of trust that God Himself is coming. "For Thy Name’s sake, O Lord, Thou shalt quicken me" (Ps. 142/143:11) — the Name is the reason for deliverance, because God is faithful to Himself. Likewise: "Let those who know Thy Name hope in Thee" (Ps. 9:10).

The Name as power and help

"Some glory in chariots, and some in horses, but we will glory in the Name of the Lord our God." (Ps. 19/20:7)

"Our help is in the Name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth." (Ps. 123/124:8)

For Israel, the Name is mightier than weapons, than horses, than armies. Not because it is an incantation — but because, through the Name, the One who made heaven and earth becomes present. The Name is energy working in the world, in Palamite language, before the term was dogmatically formulated.

The Name as cosmic praise

"O Lord, our Lord, how wonderful is Thy Name in all the earth!" (Ps. 8:1)

"From the rising of the sun unto the going down thereof, the Name of the Lord is to be praised." (Ps. 112/113:3)

"All nations whom Thou hast made shall come and worship before Thee, O Lord, and shall glorify Thy Name." (Ps. 85/86:9)

Here is already, prophetically, the universality of the Name. Although in historical liturgical use the Name was withdrawn, David sees through the Spirit a time when all nations will praise the Name. This is an anticipation of Pentecost and apostolic preaching — the Name comes down from the seal of the Most Holy Place to the whole world.

The Name as remembrance in the night and in the heart

"I have remembered Thy Name in the night, O Lord." (Ps. 118/119:55)

"Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless His holy Name." (Ps. 102/103:1)

Here is the greatest depth. The Name comes down into the inmost part of man. No longer only on the lips, no longer only in the Temple — it is in "all that is within," that is, in the mind, in the heart, in the whole being of the one who prays. "I have remembered Thy Name in the night" is the first biblical formulation of what the Fathers would later call the unceasing remembrance of the Name — mneme tou Theou, the remembrance of God, root of the prayer of the heart.

David does not yet know the Name of Jesus — he cannot, because the Word had not been incarnate. But he knows the working of the Name in the depth of man. And when the utterable, incarnate, saving Name comes, it will find a place already prepared in the inwardness of the one who has been trained, through the Psalter, to remember the Lord in the night.

The Name as prophet of Christ

One place deserves particular attention: Psalm 21/22:22 —

"I will declare Thy Name unto my brethren; in the midst of the church will I praise Thee."

In the Epistle to the Hebrews (2:12), Saint Paul places this verse directly in the mouth of Christ. David speaks — but through him, prophetically, speaks the One who will come to reveal the Name of the Father to the end: "I have manifested Thy Name unto the men whom Thou gavest Me" (John 17:6). What David did through the Spirit, Christ will do through the Incarnation.

This is the christological bridge we shall develop in the second part of the study. And it shows us something essential for all that follows: the Old Covenant is not merely a silence awaiting utterance — it is also a prayer preparing for a Name above every name.

A brief spiritual observation

The Psalter is read in the Orthodox Church in its entirety, every week, in monastic services. This is not coincidence. He who prays with the Psalter learns, without knowing it, the inner grammar of invoking the Name. He learns that the Name is salvation, power, praise, remembrance in the night, presence in the heart. And when he comes to the prayer "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner" — all these dimensions are found there, concentrated in the saving Name, like a river that has flowed from the depths of the ages through the riverbed of the Psalter.

IX. The Septuagint: The Step Before the Incarnation

Something very important for Christians takes place three centuries before Christ. In Alexandria, beginning in the 3rd century B.C., the Torah and then the whole of the Hebrew Scripture were translated into Greek — the Septuagint (LXX). The translators were faced with the Tetragrammaton: how to render it in Greek, when the target language has no equivalent of the Hebrew consonants, and when, moreover, the Jews themselves no longer pronounced it?

They used, for the most part, Kyrios — "the Lord." The same logic of substitution: just as in Jewish liturgy YHWH was read Adonai, in the Septuagint YHWH came to be rendered Kyrios. The textual situation, however, is more complex: some very old Jewish Greek manuscripts (Papyrus Fouad 266, 1st century B.C.; fragments from Qumran) preserve the Tetragrammaton in archaic Hebrew letters (paleo-Hebrew) within the Greek text itself. The generalized substitution with Kyrios established itself in the Christian manuscript tradition of the Septuagint and then in the New Testament — a sign that, at least for those who still knew it, the holiness of the Tetragrammaton crossed the linguistic barrier, and the transition to Kyrios was a process, not a unitary decision.

This detail seems technical, but its importance is enormous. When the apostles and evangelists write of Christ that He is Kyrios, they are not using a generic title — they are using precisely the substitute for the Tetragrammaton. When the New Testament applies to Christ the title Kyrios in contexts that point directly to Old Testament passages about YHWH (as Saint Paul does in Philippians 2:9-11, citing Isaiah 45:23), the confession "Jesus is Lord" takes on its full christological force: Jesus is not merely a master or a teacher, but the One in whom the God of Israel reveals Himself. The Septuagint prepared, without its translators knowing it, the vocabulary by which Christians would confess the divinity of Christ.

X. Conclusion of the First Part: The Silence That Awaits

What do we have, at the end of the Old Covenant?

A revealed Name — YHWH, ho Ōn, He who Is — through which God makes Himself known and called upon, revealing His presence and glory, without His essence being contained in any word. A Name dwelling in the Temple, in the form of glory. A Name uttered liturgically in the service of the Day of Atonement, under conditions of strict holiness, by the high priest. A Name substituted, in the rest of liturgical life, by Adonai, by Ha-Shem, by Kyrios. A Name whose exact sound was, in the end, lost.

And yet, in the very midst of this silence, one place remained open: the Psalter. David cried out the Name, praised it in distress and in deliverance, remembered it in the night, brought it down into "all that is within." Beneath the cover of public liturgical silence, the Old Covenant kept an inner prayer in which the Name was unceasingly remembered — like a riverbed carved from of old for a river that was yet to flow.

This silence, then, is not a halt. It is an awaiting. Israel did not cease to call upon God — it called through titles, through substitutions, through gestures, through sacrifices, but above all through the Psalms. The whole Old Covenant stands in this tension between the Name that has been made known and the Name that cannot be fully uttered. It is like a door that God Himself has opened, but which man cannot pass through on his own.

That threshold will be crossed — but not from below upward. Man will never find the courage, the worthiness, or the capacity to utter the Name ho Ōn. The threshold will be crossed from above downward. He who is ho Ōn will Himself come to reveal His Name in a new form — in a human name, utterable by human lips, but through which He who Is becomes present to those who call upon Him in faith.

That name will be Jesus. And it will mean, in its very Hebrew etymology — Yeshua, "YHWH saves" — that He who is unutterable has descended into a Name that can not only be spoken but also placed in the heart of man as unceasing prayer. The riverbed carved by David will then receive its true river. The remembrance of the divine Name in the night, of which the Psalms spoke, will become the prayer of Jesus in the heart of the hesychast.

This is the mystery of the Incarnation seen from the angle of the Name. And it will be the theme of the second part.

---

Bibliographical notes and sources

Biblical sources:

• The Pentateuch (Exodus 3, 6, 20; Leviticus 24; Deuteronomy 4, 12, 14, 16) — cited from the Septuagint, the reference text of the Orthodox Church.
• The Psalter (Pss. 8; 9; 19/20; 21/22; 53/54; 85/86; 102/103; 112/113; 118/119; 123/124; 142/143) — for the theology of the Name as salvation, power, praise, and remembrance in the heart; numbering follows the Septuagint, with the Hebrew/Western numbering in parentheses.
• The Septuagint — Rahlfs-Hanhart edition, for the form Kyrios and ho Ōn.
• The Masoretic Text — for the consonants of the Tetragrammaton and the qere/ketiv system.

Patristic sources:

• Saint Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, chs. 56-60 — for the burning bush as a theophany of the pre-incarnate Logos.
• Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, III, 6 — for ho Ōn as the Name of the Son through whom the Father is revealed.
• Saint Gregory the Theologian, Fourth Theological Oration (Or. 30), §18 — for ho Ōn as the Name of the divine essence itself.
• Saint Basil the Great, Against Eunomius, I — for the distinction between relative names and the absolute Name, and for the theology of the divine names.
• Saint Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius, II — for ho Ōn as the only absolute being.
• Saint John Chrysostom, Homily 15 on John; Homily 6 on Philippians — for "I am" as the manifestation of eternal being.
• Saint John of Damascus, Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, Book I, chs. 9 and 12 — for "He who Is" as the most proper Name and for the warning that positive names express not the essence but what is said around the divine nature.
• Saint Dionysius the Areopagite, On the Divine Names, chs. I-II — for the tension anōnymos / polyōnymos.
• Saint Gregory Palamas, Triads in Defense of the Holy Hesychasts — for the dogmatic distinction between the essence and the energies of God.

Jewish and Hellenistic sources:

• Philo of Alexandria, De Vita Mosis, II and De Mutatione Nominum — for the arrhēton character of the Name.
• Mishnah, Yoma 6:2 — for the utterance of the Name on Yom Kippur.
• Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 39b; Kiddushin 71a; Sotah 38a — for the withdrawal of the Name from liturgical use and for the transmission of the pronunciation.
• Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Avodat Yom haKippurim, ch. 2 — for the ten utterances of the Name in the service of the Day of Atonement.

Modern studies:

• Robert J. Wilkinson, Tetragrammaton: Western Christians and the Hebrew Name of God (Brill, 2015).
• Anthony R. Meyer, Naming God in Early Judaism (Brill, 2022).
• Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Eerdmans, 2003).
• Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed. (Fortress Press, 2012) — for the treatment of the Tetragrammaton in Septuagint manuscripts.
• Mark DelCogliano, Basil of Caesarea’s Anti-Eunomian Theory of Names (Brill, 2010) — for the patristic theology of the divine names.

Next part: "The Name uttered: the Incarnation as revelation of the Name — from Tetragrammaton to Jesus."