By Pastar Brick (Brandon Wirick)

My experience with Hebrew is limited to the years I spent as a Christian, trying to understand the true nature of Old Testament text. I am not fluent in any form of the language.

I do, however, know how to use Google Translate, and from what I can tell, the true name of God, Yahmeh (יהמה), translates approximately to “Yah-what?”

Judeo-Christian Definiteness

I am not well versed in the historical conversation around the Tetragrammaton, the meaning behind the four letters that make up the name of the Hebrew God. In Exodus 3:14, God offers this name in association with a description of his nature. Suffice it to say that the details have caused much speculation throughout the ages.

I had played around with the idea that when he says, “I am that I am”, he is saying something less like “I am who I am” and more like “I am so that I am”, that he is his own causal loop. This is, of course, probably wrong, because I don’t know the language.

Regardless, God then immediately abbreviates his name, telling Moses to say to his people that “I AM has sent” him to them. Going by the name “I AM” communicates an unmistakable tone of definiteness.

The Christian Gospel of John borrows this tone of definiteness, ascribing several “‘I am’ statements” to Jesus, implying to some degree that Jesus is to some degree God-ish.

Pastafarian Indefiniteness

Adding a question mark to “I AM” changes the tone entirely, and thus directs us to a fundamentally different theology, one which embraces confusion.

In a way, this is much more direct. We don’t have to figure out what God meant by some cryptic phrase. We don’t suffer from the irony of being tasked with understanding a very definite nature of God very indefinitely.

And yet, mostly this is less direct. If God is saying that they are question-like in nature, then we probably will not understand them. If God is doing their job, they will always confound us. They will never act in an expected way. There will always be more questions.

The closest I get to saying any sort of “prayer” to Yahmeh is to mutter, “I don’t know what to expect: do something.”

In contrast to the Jewish tradition of writing God as “G-d” (to acknowledge the sacred nature of “The Name”), perhaps we should write “G?d” instead.

A Hint from Gematria

And yet there is reason to believe we’re on the right track here, at least from a Hebrew language perspective. When I studied Gematria as a Christian, I was disappointed by the numeric nothingness behind the name YHWH. It’s 10-5-6-5, which doesn’t do anything interesting as far as I can tell.

But YHMH is 10-5-40-5, and that does something very interesting. It’s natural (with 40 being a two digit number) to read these as two numbers, 15 (for YH) and 45 for (MH). In case it doesn’t immediately jump out, 45 divided by 15 is three, which is a rather important number when dealing with the nature of God.

Maybe this wouldn’t convince any Jewish scholars that the name of God is wrong, but it should bother some trinitarian Christians that the Tricolor Pastafarians have a clearly better name for God.

 

Copyright 2015-2017 Brandon Wirick