shem

[Jude Bloom]

Orthodox Jews today still day 'Hashem.' God's original name – he actually has three – in the Hebrew Bible is The Sacred Tetragrammaton, YHVH. (The other two names he tells uh Moses I think is I AM THAT I AM, and El Shaddai, or Mountain God.) It's thought that this was pronounced YAHWEH, although nobody knows. Old-time Hebrew doesn't have vowel markings.

You were only to say God's name in the Holy of Holies, that little secret compartment in the Temple. So when referring to God, Ha Shem is Hebrew for The Name. You also here Adonai a lot (most all Jewish prayers start out 'Baruch atah Adonai...'), Adonai means roughly 'Lord' and is like a general term for, I dunno, Lord. It's not God's name so it's OK.

So some Jews'll say, 'Thank Hashem it's Shabbat' or something. Lemme just say, for myself, I'm with one of the two Philip Roths in Operation Shylock and think diasporism, and giving up all that goofy temple shit, was the best thing what happened to Jewish folk.


Rabbi J



On Jun 8, 2012, at 10:14 AM, Iris Sirius <irissiriustce at gmail.com> wrote:

Yes how does that go again?  Something like, there's a Hebrew word, shem, which, for whatever reason, well the reason is obvious, the word made very strange indeed beginning parts of the Old Testament, so it's always been translated as name.  But as a great deal of Semetic terms are taken ultimately from Sumerian, if you look at the Sumerian root, shem means something like "sky vehicle", or such things.  "Rocket."  Rocketmen.  So what happened was reading shem as name you read a lot of the ancient texts, like Gilgamesh, the Sumerians wanting names for themselves.  When really they wanted to be rocketmen, like the humans who came down in them and gave them advanced civilization.  One of the strangest things being regarding the tower of Babel--it was intended to be a rocketship.  "Let us make a rocket", rather than "Let us make a name."  The Neflim who lived with Adam's people before the flood and married the daughters were humans from the sky.  Nefilim into "giants" is another massacre.  Nefilim means "cast down".




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