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  • "Yesterday in Religion 101"


    Based upon the future direction we'll be taking with art, story development, and the name of god, I found this post especially interesting.

    Higgaion
    After that, I start to survey the (genuine) "names of God" in the Tanakh:

    'elohim, 'adonai, Yhwh, and 'el. I also discuss the little saying in Exodus 34 that my colleague Tim Willis calls the "character name." In connection with the name Yhwh, I briefly discuss the tradition of not pronouncing the Tetragrammaton, and show the students a photograph of an scroll from the DSS that has "YHWH" written in an archaic script (the rest of the manuscript uses square Aramaic letters). I don't go into Albrecht Alt's "God of the fathers" thesis very far; I just barely broach it by introducing the "God of PN" locution as something that emphasizes a personal relationship between the god and the person (or group) named. I don't dig too far into the history of any particular tradition, but I do tell students that at least some of the 'el-compounds tend to be associated with specific places (here again I reflect Alt, but don't discuss him directly).

    Now that students know about the names Yhwh and 'el, I introduce the concepts of "inclusive monotheism" and "exclusive monotheism."

    After that, I take just about fifteen minutes to talk about the tensions created by Exodus 6 and the use of the name Yhwh by characters in Genesis. This involves introducing the students very briefly to Jean Astruc and Julius Wellhausen, and the classic Documentary Hypothesis. And that's all I can get done in 75 minutes.