The Meaning of God in the Hebrew Bible

The Hebrew name for God, יהוה, is a classic realm of contention for scholars, and there's also a fair bit of obfuscation preventing clear understanding of this concept really is.

I will lay out my theory very basically in the following points:

1) All names describes qualities or attributes. The grammatical root of יהוה is "to be", and so YHWH means "Being"

2) The ancient Hebrews, in Hebrew עברים, from the root "to cross over", refers to mystics who have "crossed over". Similarly, the word "Jew", is related to the word יָדַע, to "know".

3) The Hebrews were very focused on the semiotic meaning of reality, so much so that inner experience was understood to be a function of a grand causal-epistemological dynamic that begins in external reality and ends in internal reality. This is why the Bible starts with describing the structure of the external world

4) Part of this fascination with realities structure lead to numerological classification of meaning, that is to say, the objective representation of interactions between things in the world and between objects and people, so that everything was classified and organized within this semiotic scheme.

5) Many people have learned that the name of God, יהוה , and the English word 'God', both have the numerical value of 26. But why 26? What is the meaning of 26?

6) In Hebrew, the word for one, אֶחָד, and love, אַהֲבָה, both equal 13. Rabbis often see one and love as related to an idealized cube with 12 lines, with the cube itself taken in its oneness, as the spatial correlate of something being 'one', as well as the concept of love.

7) Now here comes the interesting psychospiritual part. I am reading a psychoanalyst, a feminist scholar named Jessica Benjamin, and she describes the power of love, or recognizing the motivational needs of the other, and how the continued experience of this process in analysis has led to 'fall in love with love', which was a turn of phrase that seemed unusually poignant in capturing my own feelings about the experience of love. Is it perhaps the case that the truest experience of Being, of knowing the purpose and meaning of the life we experience in this universe, is predicated upon coming to a conscious awareness of the power of love? And since consciousness, or awareness of love, is itself becoming aware of your source, would this not naturally produce, as it does in me, a love, or loyalty, to the principle of Love? Isn't it further important that for Benjamin, as for me and all human beings, this experience only comes within the context of a dyadic interaction - that is, within an intersubjective relationship?

Now reflect on how deeply the ancient Hebrews had probed the nature of Being. One (13) individual + One (13) individual = 26, the conditions for Being to be known. But more powerfully, and mystically, being affectively enamored (as in love - 13) with the conceptualization of the experience of love (love represented as it is experientially known - 13) = 26.

The play on numbers within this ancient language is not, at least as it seems to me, by any means random or arbitrary, but deeply and powerfully rooted in the psychological dynamics of how human beings operate as semiotic creatures.

There is no obsessive focus on nothingness in the Judaic conception of the world. The World is Full of Meaning; The arrow for them points forward, with the rest of time and space as it moves in the direction that the Creator has set for it. This is why their holy day is Saturday; in time, in the end - the goal, the "finality", of this Universes existence. It is the traumatological psyche, referring ever back to the empty black hole of an unnameable trauma, that the focus on nothingness derives its power.

Anyone who has known, or interacted with, any deep conception of oneself as being coextensive with the cosmos, can't help but experience that rupture within their being - that "not being known" - with an even greater force and power because of their wish to come closer to the source of Being itself. Being - for the traumatized, broken mind, fills that mind not with a deep feeling of love and awe, but with terror and existential anguish. The root of reality, conveying the intention of its root, the originating monad, essentially a divine love, cannot help but interact with a body-self harboring pain, and embellish that pain, or enhance its powerfulness, as the semiotic forces embodying the structure of the body 'react' against the energizing force of the souls root.

A whole world of confusion, of epistemological error, can grow when the human being fails to integrate its finite nature with its infinite source, and not realize that, paradoxical as it may seem, the structures within the spatiotemporal folds that make us up project backwards on the content of the root; the source, pure Love, can be computed as Abraxas, or as beyond good and evil, or as a holiness that transcends all differences, as if the originating monad and its extended body aren't fundamentally one - with the body elaborating and configuring the intent of the one in its temporal and spatial dynamics.

Interesting idea
I was always pretty smitten by this understanding


I am sure the name may have more than one meaning
Pointing to Jesus seems more likely

If ego had a picture in a dictionary, it would be God.

I would have to admit, worriyng about an afterlife is
just like thinking about the future, all the while tommorrow never comes. Strange thing of a beleive that isnt supposed to have an objective reality an elaborate on the present, can be focused on prophecies!?!

Btw, Ego in Greek means the same thing...sounds almost Gnostic of you, except for the material world being inherently evil.

In many ways, this could actually agree with the most prevalent scientific theory. The simulation theory would suggest that ultimately we all struggle to find a reason or place for our existence but are unable to reconcile that because as much as we perceive we know, there are just no fundamental answers about consciousness that seem, "right".

Even if we were to put the argument to an alternate theory which is universal collaboration, that could mean that the universe created us to experience itself and that would also leave us at loss to understand our own personal existence.

People on '___', the most mind altering and life changing drug I have every heard of people taking have always reported profound experiences because they report being taken from their "ego" from their "persona" and always say how absolutely profound that is to experience.

There is much we have to learn, not only about our world, the universe but indeed, ourselves. Life, despite all our advancements is still an utter mystery.

The name of God of the ancient mystical Hebrews was EL in Hebrew but the Tetragrammaton is a variation or a focusing on those attributes of God strictly compatible with the perspective of the Hebrews of that time…YHWH or JHVH.


Such attributes are among those with the God El and he emanates the YHWH in tune with the Hebrew culture and aspirations and historical challenges.

A not too successful endeavor.

Few know what these letters mean but one can deduce they mean something for the Hebrew nature and inclinations.

Our three major Western religious dispensations have each their own preoccupation with a great aspect of the God-man experience on the planet which reflects for the Jewish/Hebrew dispensation the general human aspirations’ to conquer the family/nation/tribal environment of human relationships=Judasim

Judaism= Family/nation/tribal/ integration

Christianity is preoccupied with the existential reality---of life and death….science…material progress.

Christianity= Search for solving the mystery of Life and death. Through the Jesus mythos.


Islam is preoccupied with the Peace, inner and outer of the world, and the inner gnosis as it relates to the cultivation of the Perfect Human.

Islam = preoccupation with universal peace and the mystery of solving violence and injustice; and the way to the complete human specimen of perfection. Jesus is the symbolic head of this endeavor. The Teacher of the Human/divine completeness.

Jesus said when he was here:

Ana Amir EL-Islam. I am the Prince of Peace!

a reply to: Astrocyte

thats a lot of "blah blah blah" for the jews invaded canaan and adopted the canaanites chief god "el" as their only god.

if you dig into the early formations of jewish religion, it becomes clear. a polytheistic tribe becomes henotheistic and then monotheistic.

In my research YHWH refers to the horned god of the Canaanites. The Hebrews or Israelites did defeat them and took their land. They might as well take the name of the Canaanite god as their own too, I guess.

Hint, don’t stop at what a book says. Keep going and find where that book’s information came from and then repeat until you get to no more books. You probably will not like the answer. You may find everything you know about something is wrong. Be brave and look anyway. Eventually the truth may sink in.

Believe what you will spiritually because belief has nothing to do with religion, but remember that all religions are manmade and made to control you.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Thanks for sharing and you are correct in your assumptions about the inter related nature of words with the same letter count (gematria).

Each word that has the same gematria score is interconnected or seen to be. To really unlock the connections and keys there is a whole process of meditation on the 'keys' and otz chi'im (tree of life).

I once studied with a western mystery school and was halfway through the lesson on gematria when I decided I could no longer dedicate the time it deserved.

My favourite God name in Hebrew is Ahiyah; I am, therefore I am.

Thanks again for sharing, love this topic.

The meaning of 'being' is existence.

Existence is not two..... existence is one.

But there is an assumption that there are separate 'beings'.

The assumed separate are fearing.....so not loving.

No one can know being/existence ...... as there is nothing separate to know it.

IT IS.

I'm kind of pulled into the Annunaki story recently.

a reply to: Astrocyte

I'm not beiong funny here but could you please sum all that up in simple, laymans terms?

I would like to understand what you wrote....but I don't.

Same goes for many of the replies.

It seems I am indeed, stupid.

In order to understand the meaning of the ancient Hebrew Divine Names, you need first to understand that they express the nature of God embodied in the particular Sephirah, or "Divine Quality", of the Tree of Life (Etz Chayim) to which they are assigned. According to Kabbalah, each Sephirah manifests in four stages, or "Worlds": Atziluth, Beriah, Yetzirah and Assiyah. Atziluth is the archetypal level, where the Divine Mind has conceived all that was, is and will be. Assigned to each Sephirah is a Godname, Archangel, Order of Angels and Mundane Chakra (physical manifestation at the level of Assiyah). To understand a particular Divine Name, you have to comprehend the metaphysical and psychological meaning of its corresponding Sephirah. However, they have through their gematria number values a more fundamental, mathematical meaning that has been fully investigated only with the past twenty years. Until recently, students of Kabbalah have ignored this aspect of Divine names, etc (or, rather, they have been completely oblivious of it), giving only human-based (and therefore distorted and incomplete) interpretations of them. What if I told you that their fundamental significance is not as Hebrew words but as numbers, the word being just a vehicle for the mathematical meaning of one of these numbers as parameters of any "holistic system" (i.e., one that embodies the divine blueprint)? What if I told you that there exist polygonal, polyhedral and polytopic versions of this blueprint, all characterised by the number values of Divine Names, such as Ehyeh, Yahweh, Elohim, El, etc? The mathematical way in which these powerful numbers of cosmic/universal significance prescribe whatever embodies the divine blueprint has now been fully worked out in a non-speculative way as rigorous as any proof of an axiom of Euclidean geometry. The values of the letters making up a Divine Name quantify different subsets of the global properties of a holistic system. There is NO arbitrariness in these letters because their values express major mathematical properties of the system. It needs to be understood that all holistic systems are isomorphic, their components having a 1:1 correspondence with one another. Although such systems may look entirely different, this applies to only their morphology - their underlying, mathematical structure is identical! This isomorphism, once it has been established to a level that cannot be attributed plausibly to chance, helps to explain why things in nature are as they are, e.g., why quantum mechanics predicts 26 dimensions for one-dimensional objects called "strings" (26 is the number value of Yahweh), why superstring theory requires a symmetry group of order 496 to generate a unified force free of quantum anomalies (496 is the number value of the final Sephirah, Malkuth, signifying the physical universe), why there are 80 single bones in the human axial skeleton (26 in the spinal column; 80 is the number value of Yesod, the penultimate Sephirah, meaning "foundation") and 63 pairs of bones in the appendicular skeleton, etc. The Divine Names have a scientific meaning as well as their traditional interpretations found in Judaism because they prescribe the mathematical nature of reality. Their mathematical meanings harmonise with their traditional spiritual/metaphysical interpretations in the sense that they operate according to the function of their corresponding Sephirah. This happens not through chance but as a result of the Intelligence generating the mathematical order of the cosmos - physical and superphysical.
The research on which the above statements are based can be found at:
smphillips.mysite.com...
It is recommended that one starts by studying the section "sacred geometry" before advancing to the research articles and later sections.

a reply to: Astrocyte

God means the oneness of the individual being expressed as a spark within the light that represents the oneness of the entirety of humanitys energy.The spark comes from the light and returns to the light for it is always the light.

a reply to: Freeborn

He will more then likely not reply, but basically, he trying to point out that Hebrew mythology a giant metaphor about Subjective reality( meaning reality exists within only of the mind) all the while, the God in the bible sounds like a painful reminder that God is objective an independent from the mind when it comes life.

Also, the possibility that love might also conquer time an space, and that if we dont love one an another , God will kick our asses an make sure we do.

a reply to: micpsi

Very interesting, but I don't like the way you're going about your claim to knowledge.

More or less, everything you've said can be reduced to "angels/spirits/higher dimensional beings told me".

How are you so sure that these mathematical representations aren't in themselves thought-out correlations made between concepts (that are mind dependent) and physical reality (mind independent) once thought up and associated by once living and socializing human beings? In other words, why do you dissociate the metaphysical system from the human intersubjective context that drummed the whole thing up? You act as if the only form of meaning that is real is metaphysical; as if raw, physical, non-verbal communicative, homeostatic regulation via sensorimotor dynamics, doesn't matter, or doesn't need to be accounted for?

The whole purpose of science, and a big reason why esoteric thought is marginalized to outside the university, is that they have little patience for the "great task" of crafting out a democratic understanding of how we work - in our relationships as we are born from the communicative gestures of others, as regulative beings subject to entropy (which is why we eat food and socialize) - all of this stuff, which is the basis of what is most important about how we work, seems deeply unimportant to the esotericist or mystic who seems preoccupied with abstract objects, dissociated from the needs of the living beings around them.

All in all, I am not against seeing the Hebrew Bible, or the claims of the kabbalists, as an interesting hypothesis, but hypotheses' are just theories that have not yet been confirmed by the empirical evidence. I myself would be lying If I didn't find the mathematical system of the Torah extremely interesting, but I also believe that human beings are fallible, and therefore, that it is prudent to assume that the Torah isn't, despite the grandiose pronouncements of so many mystics, the absolute truth of reality. I don't think mathematics is existing in some platonic or Pythagorean empyrean outside of the actual actions of objects in reality. Mathematics, in other words, is dependent on human beings in its existence; it is a signal, or sign, and as a sign, is derivative of meaning, and not the other way around i.e. meaning doesn't derive from math, but math from meaning. Math, after all, is an activity that human organisms find meaningful.

a reply to: Specimen88

Yes, I have a habit of not paying attention to responses to my threads. It's a bad habit I have.

But if I do read responses, I will only respond to people who have anything interesting to say, or if I would like to comment on why I think someone, such as yourself, has decided to write what they have written.

Like so many people here at this God-forsaken website (a complement to many, I'm sure), there is more sympathy for the canaanites (Heb. for "traders" i.e. capitalists; after all, Phoenicia was an important hub for commerce between the east and western parts of 'civilization') and the deities they worshiped - or the concepts/semiosis that their particular deities stood for - than for what the Hebrews stood for.

But in the end, given we are created by reality and are a function of reality, its not likely, as climate change is making quite apparent, that the dynamics of the physical, objective environment from which we arise, can long accommodate the gods of canaan, or Egypt, or whatever sadomasochistic heroic individualistic fetish happens to be your god of choice.

In the end, reality wins out.

a reply to: Astrocyte

I tend to think the 'Gods' of any culture...including the sadomasochistic 'YHWH' of the much revered Old Testament...also originated in an objective environment but possibly not the one on this planet. Same universe, yes.

originally posted by: one4all
a reply to: Astrocyte

God means the oneness of the individual being expressed as a spark within the light that represents the oneness of the entirety of humanitys energy.The spark comes from the light and returns to the light for it is always the light.

As a neophyte Lobsang I cannot say I know anything as well as each thing must be known....however the Properties of what we call transitional metals are what I am learning to learn now.It seems that Amazing things are to be purveyed if one is interested.I was first taught the beginning of learning of Diamonds and crystals.

That was educational, Astrocyte. Unfortunately, my mind has difficulty comprehending the true meaning of the word "love". I suspect it's because true love is beyond mind. Our minds can only grasp at it conceptually. Being free of this and that.

a reply to: glend

Is true love beyond mind?

In emphasizing the gematria, or numerology, of the words for 'one' and 'love', and both of which equal 13, I am trying to emphasize that the concept of Being (YHWH), or God, is equivalent to the duplication of these terms "one" and "love". That is, 13 + 13 = 26.

Consider the process that I am trying to describe. Let's say the universe in its emergence from the big bang has as its root the semiotic (meaning, or sign) of love. Since love is an inherently dyadic process i.e. emerges in the situation of a self and an other, the originating monad has a dyadic, point-counterpoint, or ying-yang primordiality to it.

As we emerge on a planet - the 3rd planet appropriately enough - in some peripheral section of the milky way galaxy, the structure and substance of our being is itself emergent from the dynamic interactions between the objects of our material environment as they have built up the animality of our individual organism over aeons of biological evolution. Importantly, this biological evolution is also a semiotic evolution , in that certain particles, atoms, molecules, cells, etc, begin o function as signs within the structural dynamics of the organisms search for "completion".

Completion is another word for symmetry, and symmetry, in terms of the operation of physical processes, is the beginning point of all our, and other animals, intentional states. In other words, I only desire because I need something, and I need because the substance of my physical organism is correlated to something 'outside of it'. In eating food, I seek the nutrition within the food I eat; in moving and exploring my environment, my basic inclination towards exploring is enacted. All of this higher-level exploratory behavior is itself parasitic on social dynamics as they're stimulated and grown within intersubjective processes between the infant (of which we all once were) and its caregivers. We learned how to know through them, and via those interactions, we developed various modes of knowing the world.

Our semiotic, or pursuit of meaning within life, is itself a process that was kickstarted with the big bang, and in becoming aware of our own processes, which is to say, in related to our own experience and knowing it as an object, we come to be influenced by our own conceptualizations of the world, and hence, our own internal processes become signs for the development of meaning.

The discovery of Being, or YHWH, or God, is basically the process which leads to eventually discovering that the root of your capacity to know - or your sentience, or motivation for knowing, is itself the quality of love itself; and thus, when the object that love is recognizing is the experience of love itself, when the object known is the experience of love, then love, as the root, is now contemplating love, as the emergent object of evolutionary processes. Love is thus finally knowing itself. The loop has closed. One + One, or one side of the equation (monad) and the other side (emergent organism), are united.

Love in this sense is both a suprasubjective and objective reality; it is the basis of being, and then through the processes of evolution (which is Being in its suprasubjective sense), becomes incarnated into its various processes through the subjective process of the knowing of an organism. This knowing integrates the suprasubjective with the objective, making the sign, that is, love itself, fully integrated within the created order.

Of course, this way of understanding love, and this way of understanding being - which I am basically arguing is the kabbalistic core of the Bibles teachings - is utterly denied in the western world, and for obvious reasons: the love for pluralism and individualism makes the very systematic, non-arbitrary logic of the bible extremely difficult to digest for the person with a arbitrary, nominalistic, hyper-idealistic, form of knowing the world.