YHVH - Behold the Name. Behold the Nail

Stress seems to be my middle name these days. My dad is in the hospital following another heart attack. Joe calls this afternoon stranded after his work van broke down. Turns out the fuel pump is out, which means two days of downtime and cost for repairs. Christmas is around the corner with taxes nipping at it's heels. School needs, party plans, it all seems unending. As I began hyperventilating this afternoon, I began to pray for God to show me His plans. For Him to tell me that He would handle it IF I just let it all go into His heart for a while. I believe this, I truly do. I have seen it happen many times, and yet it is never easy to pass on the burden.

With all this, I have been having a Crisis of Faith, not so much a crisis of faith exactly, but a need to explore Jesus as a Jew. A want to know that side of Him and to respect it fully, without disparage. I feel as if, without that, my faith isn't complete.

Anyway, in the moments before sheer panic set in, I sat down at my computer and looked up my favorite author of all time - Athol Dickson, for no other reason than a desire to do so. I found the following article on the meaning of GOD's true name. It startled me. Please bear with the author to the very end paying close attention to the last three paragraphs.
-------------------------------------------------------------

""I am still amazed by something a friend emailed to me yesterday, a quote from a devotional called Behold and Be Held, the Memorial Name of God, by Aaron Rabin. I can't find this devotional on the web, or I would link to it. I won't quote the whole thing here, lest I infringe on Mr. Rabin's copyright. So I'll just get to the bottom line.


In the devotional, Mr. Rabin refers to the tetragrammaton, YHVH. This is the most holy name of God, given to Moses at the burning bush, the one that most English translations render as “I AM”. The Hebrew letters sound like "Yud Hey Vav Hey". YHVH is also the "forgotten" name of God, which Jews say has a meaning and a pronunciation that was lost because their ancestors have refused to speak it aloud since about a generation before the Roman destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. (To learn more about this, visit this site, and scroll down to "The Name".) Today YHVH is most often rendered as "Yahweh" when written or spoken by Christians and others. It is still never pronounced aloud by Orthodox Jews. “Jehovah” is an older, less accurate rendition. YHVH is also the name most often printed as the LORD (all caps) in English Bibles. (Sometimes "Adonai" is translated that way as well.)


Anyway, in his devotional Mr. Rabin refers to a conversation he had with an Orthodox rabbi, which drove him to question his Christian faith. Here is a quote:


"As I spoke to the Orthodox rabbi and used the Scriptures to support my faith, I felt like a child in a highchair trying to explain the theory of relativity to Albert Einstein. He called me an apostate Jew, accusing me not of finding Messiah but of embracing a pagan religion. He wielded the Scriptures like a sharp sword, slicing my faith - and my heart - into smaller and smaller pieces.

"My testimony, which had always been to me like a beautiful stained glass window that I could gaze at to see the power of God's saving grace, now seemed like a pile of broken glass. My faith was in crisis. I knelt and pleaded with God to restore the joy of His salvation in me."


This is very like the crisis I felt myself after spending years studying the Torah with several rabbis in my home town. (You can read about it here.) Like me, Mr. Rabin turned to the Lord and to the Bible. In the midst of his search for truth, he says the Holy Spirit led him to the story of the burning bush, and the secret name of God, YHVH.


Mr. Rabin investigated the ideographic meaning of the Hebrew letters Yud Hey Vav Hey. An ideogram is a symbol that represents an idea, like those little male and female shaped signs you see on the outside of public restroom doors. This is similar--but not identical--to the Chinese written system, or ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Hebrew letters have had ideographic meanings since ancient times. (Learn more here). I knew this, but I never thought to check the tetragrammaton against those meanings as Mr. Rabin did. When I verified his assertion here, here and here, I was amazed. There are several ideographic meanings for each of the letters. Hey, for example can mean both "window", and "look" or "behold". Vav can mean "hook", "peg", or "nail". But in each case the ideas represented by the letters are closely related. With all of this in mind, using the ideographic meanings of Yud Hey Vav Hey most commonly accepted by Jewish scholars throughout the centuries, I found they absolutely match Rabin's translation.


Symbolically speaking, the most holy name of God, YHVH, can indeed be translated as:

 "Behold, the hand. Behold, the nail." ""