Do We Breathe the Name of God?
A popular meme making the rounds on Facebook claims that every human being literally breathes the name of God. The name Yahweh is two consonants, one that sounds like inhaling, the other exhaling. The covenant name of God—YHWH, also called the Tetragrammaton—is the sound of human breathing. This means that a baby’s first breath speaks the name of God. Every sigh in frustration or despair is an appeal too deep for mere human language. Even the atheist, with each breath, bears testimony to his or her Maker. Our final breath is the last time that God’s name fills our lungs.
This idea seems to have been popularized by Rabbi Stuart W. Gershon in his book, YHWH: God’s Name is a Breath of Life. A musician named Jason Gray even wrote a song about it called “The Sound of Our Breathing.” Before one performance, he explained, “For hundreds of years there have been people who’ve said that the name of God is so holy that we dare not speak it because of how unworthy we are. How generous of the Lord to give himself a name that we can’t help but speak every moment we’re alive.”
What a wonderful and beautiful commentary on our Creator.
Unfortunately, it’s a load of total malarkey.
People have always had a craving for secret or esoteric knowledge. We like secrets, but we love deciphering them even more. Why do you think the most popular television shows tend to be police procedurals where the viewer races against time to unravel the case before the detectives in the show? Because we like looking for clues, solving puzzles, and exploring the mysterious.
The same goes for Scripture. The history of biblical interpretation is filled with attempts to discover hidden truths in the Bible. Unfortunately, they are little more than the products of overactive human imaginations. We can see one example in gematria, the practice of assigning a numerical value to a letter in the Greek or Hebrew alphabet and determining what deeper meaning they signify. Greek and Hebrew letters did have a numeric value (a little like Roman numerals), but the key is seeing what these numbers mean. One example involves the Fifth Commandment: “Honor your father and mother” (Exodus 20:12). So, how does a person honor his or her parents? Gematria will tell you how!
You simply add up the numerical value of the letters in the word honor (kabed, which comes to 26). You compare that to the similar word for love (’ahavah, which adds up to 13). So, because “honor” is twice the numeric value of “love,” you fulfill this commandment by giving your parents a double portion of love (whatever that means). The subjectivity here should be pretty obvious.
We’ve seen other examples, like the infamous “Bible Code,” which was a fad that began in the mid-1990s. It supposedly predicts future events by examining the arrangement of words in the biblical text. Some of the most famous include the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel. If the Bible Code were genuine, then every government on earth would have a task force scouring the biblical text for clues about the future.
The illegitimacy of the Bible Code is easily seen in its application to non-inspired texts with equally-successful results. This includes the deaths of Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, and Princess Diana encoded in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and a preview of the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 in the lyrics of rapper Vanilla Ice’s music.
As I said, people want to find hidden or secret knowledge. It isn’t just fun; it’s exciting. And when it comes to the Bible, uncovering these kinds of things can be spiritually exhilarating. It really is quite moving to think that God’s name is like our breath and that every time we breathe, we speak the name of our Creator; that every time the atheist says, “There is no God,” he or she has to affirm the existence of God even while denying it; that the newborn baby’s cry is a testimony to the divine hands which fashioned that child in the womb.
It may be disappointing for some people to find out that there is absolutely no substance behind this popular claim, especially when bloggers try to sell it with officially-sounding phrases like “biblical scholars” and “aspirated consonants.” But there is something extraordinary about God’s name, isn’t there? Let’s take a look at the Hebrew.
The name YHWH was not written with vowels originally. A later group of Jewish scholars known as the Masoretes added the vowels in the early Medieval period. Scholars disagree about the name’s meaning and origin. Our best guess is that the name Yahweh comes from the Hebrew verb hawa, meaning “be” or “become.” We see the name referenced in Exodus 3:14-15, where God says, “I AM WHO I AM,” which could also be rendered as “I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE.” This is the God who is, and who causes things to be. He is Creator and sustainer. But most importantly, he is more real than anything else in creation. That, I think, is a more appropriate understanding of God’s name.
YHWH is who causes things to be, who gives them the power of existence. Everything we have, we owe to him. Every atom in creation, the tiny intricacies of living things, the twinkling nighttime stars all play their part in a beautiful, constant symphony praising their Creator.
But God is also the God who is real. He IS. That makes him more real than any of the bogeymen you fear, than any of your hurts or broken dreams, or any physical malady that will perish when this life is over. In a world of impermanence and illusion, God is the true rock of reality who cannot shift or change.
There are so many profound truths in Scripture waiting for us to explore them. We don’t need to create any on our own when God has already given us so much. All we have to do is dig.
