God’s Name Is to Be Understood Theologically, Not Philosophically

This week’s Torah reading opens with God telling Moses that he, unlike the patriarchs, has been privileged to have God reveal Himself by His ineffable name—picking up on the passage in the previous week’s reading where God announces Himself as “I will be what I will be.” Analyses of these texts in the Jewish tradition, writes James A. Diamond, fall into two categories. According to the philosophical or rationalist approach, championed by Maimonides, the Tetragrammaton—which itself seems to be derived from the Hebrew verb to be—represents God as “Being itself,” or, in Aristotelian terms, as “the necessary existent.” Yet rabbinic, midrashic, and kabbalistic approaches, Diamond argues, are more faithful to the biblical texts: