Summary:
The death of Leonard Cohen led me to connect to one of his
most popular songs, “Hallelujah.” He questions the fallacy of naming God in a
particular way, and encourages us to recognize divinity in all of its
manifestations. This got me thinking about God’s name in the Bible and how the
biblical insistence on worshipping only a god that goes by this name may
actually be a barrier to a more expansive recognition of the sacred. Thank you,
Leonard!
I can’t say I’ve ever been a big fan of Leonard Cohen. Yet in
any random moment that I hear one of his songs, I’m inspired. I have a book of
his poems that I glance at periodically, and when I do, I’ll spend the next day
or two pondering the depth of meaning that lies hidden in his often obscure verse.
But like so many other larger-than-life contemporary
personalities, we don’t truly miss ‘em ‘til they’re gone. So last Friday late
afternoon I lay in my weekly warm bath—my version of a mikveh or ritual
bath on the eve of the Sabbath—listening to Amazon Prime’s “The Essential
Leonard Cohen.” I had been hearing about one song in particular that the
talking heads mentioned most often; a poem called “Hallelujah.” As I drifted
off to the sound of the soulful melody and the rather lugubrious verses
interrupted by the crash of the chorus, “Hallelujah,” one verse brought me back
to the surface.
“You say I took the name in vain
I don't even know the name
But if I did, well really,
what's it to you?
There's a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn't matter which you
heard
The holy or the broken
Hallelujah”
I’ve been thinking a lot about God’s name in the Bible, the
enigmatic tetragrammaton, the four letters announced to Moses as he stood at
the foot of Mt. Sinai, YHWH, Yahweh, I AM, HE IS, “Being” itself (Exodus
3:14-15). It’s a sacred name, mysterious, mystical, ineffable. Jews substitute Adonai
“my Lord,” and even that is not pronounced by the Orthodox, who simply say ha-shem,
“the Name.” In our English Bibles, the name is not written, but appears as Lord, with those small caps to
distinguish it from the ordinary word lord that might be applied to a king.
But what has troubled me for some time, as I’ve noted
elsewhere in this blog, is that the Hebrew Bible as it stands is constantly
vilifying the people of Israel for worshipping “other gods.” In fact, the agony
of defeat, destruction and exile that resulted from the Assyrian conquest of
the northern Kingdom of Israel and the Babylonian conquest of the southern
Kingdom of Judah are both blamed not on the superior power of the enemy armies,
but on the citizens of these two nations. This suffering is God’s punishment
for their apostasy.
It’s true. The people of these two ancient kingdoms,
presumably heirs to the covenant initiated by Moses at Mt. Sinai, did venerate
Canaanite deities. A collection of administrative documents from northern
Israel known as the Samaria Ostraca dating from the 8th century BCE
feature numerous personal names formed by the theophoric element “ba’al”; names
like abyba’al, “Baal is my father,” or ba’lme’ony, “Baal is my
strength.” Clearly the people who bore these names were so named in tribute to
the deity. The Bible states that Ahab, King of Israel, married a Phoenician
princess, the villainous Jezebel, who promoted the worship of Ba’al (I Kings
16, 18).
Inscriptions from a Judean town in north central Sinai known
as Kuntillet Ajrud mention Yahweh and his Asherah, a reference to a Canaanite
goddess who, according to some scholars, may have functioned as Yahweh’s
consort. The prophet Jeremiah pillories the citizens of Jerusalem for baking
cakes for the “Queen of Heaven (Jeremiah 7, 44).”
More recently, however, biblical scholars have taken a
closer look at some of these biblical condemnations. Dartmouth scholar Susan
Ackerman points out that the religion of ancient Israel might have been much
more heterodox than we are led to understand from the Bible. The “foreign
worship” that the Bible condemns may simply have been forms of popular folk
religious practices taking place within what appears more and more to be a
polyglot Israelite society.
The Bible is, after all, mainly the end product of the work
of priests and scribes centered in the Temple in Jerusalem. The orthodoxy that
is expressed therein is their orthodoxy. Indeed, attempts were made
specifically to maintain Jerusalem as the unique center of worship in the
Kingdom of Judah. The Bible tells us that King Josiah, at the end of the 7th
century BCE, eradicated all centers of worship outside of Jerusalem (II Kings
22-23).
What the religious establishment in Jerusalem at the end of
the 7th century BCE was trying to promulgate was not exactly the
existence of a unique, singular deity. All of the nations surrounding Israel
had their national deities. What the priests and prophets of Israel were
attempting to assert was that only Israel’s national deity, Yahweh, was worthy
of worship, and only in the nation’s capital, Jerusalem. On the one hand, I
would suggest that this may be one of the dark sides of monotheism: only this
god, whose name is Yahweh, is worthy of worship. On the other hand, I would
suggest that this was as much a feature of national chauvinism and an exercise
of political power as it was religious piety. (I wonder if that is not true of most
expressions of religious piety.)
Which brings me back to Leonard Cohen. If there is but one
God, one source of divine consciousness in the cosmos, what difference does it
make how one names it; or even if one ascribes different names to the manifold
manifestations of divinity in the cosmos? What matters is the human desire to catch
that blaze of light in all of its manifestations and by every name by which it’s
called.
“You say I took the name in vain
I don't even know the name
But if I did, well really,
what's it to you?
There's a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn't matter which you
heard
The holy or the broken
Hallelujah”
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