72 A History of Judaism
contain you, much less this house that I have built’, but he goes on to
appeal directly to ‘YHVH, my God’ to open his eyes towards ‘the place
of which you said, “My name shall be there” ’. The special significance
accorded to the divine name YHVH (conventionally pronounced ‘Yah-
weh’ in English with the letter vav transliterated as ‘w’) lies in the
tradition, well established by the end of the Second Temple period, that
the name was too holy to be said aloud except by the High Priest in the
Holy of Holies. We have noted the scribal conventions attested in early
manuscripts among the Dead Sea scrolls of writing the name in distinct-
ive palaeo- Hebrew script or substituting for it with dots or strokes. The
origins of the Tetragrammaton (‘ four- letter’ name, that is the four Heb-
rew letters – yod, hay, vav, hay – transliterated as YHVH) are associated
with the biblical story that Moses enquired of God, when God spoke to
him before the exodus out of a bush which blazed with fire but was not
burned up, ‘if I come to the Israelites and say to them, “the God of your
ancestors has sent me to you”, and they ask me “What is his name?”,
what shall I say to them? God said to Moses, “I am who I am” ’ (in
Hebrew, ‘I am’ is AHYH, pronounced ‘ehyeh’). But the processes of
transmutation are obscure, and the Jews of Elephantine referred to the
God they worshipped as YHV, with only three consonants. The names
‘El’ and ‘Elohim’ seem to have been used more generically in the Near
East to refer to divinities more precisely by adding something about
their qualities or the place where they were worshipped; in the case of
the almighty God of Israel, he could be described as El- Elyon, ‘God
most High’, since he was creator of heaven and earth.^3
The Bible often assumes that God operates in an environment replete
with other supernatural beings, even if the nature of those beings is in
general left vague. The Israelites are portrayed as praising the Lord after
their salvation from Egypt by exclaiming ‘Who is like you, O Lord,
among the gods?’ On arrival in Canaan, they are shown abandoning the
Lord to worship the Baals, following ‘other gods, from among the gods
of the peoples who were all around them’. This is a world full of gods,
at variance with the radical monotheism expressed in the book of Isaiah:
‘I am the Lord, and there is no other; besides me there is no god.’ The
divine court includes ‘sons of God’, who act as a sort of heavenly coun-
cil and as messengers of the Lord who do his bidding. They are sometimes
envisaged as ‘myriads of holy ones’, that is, a ‘heavenly host’ or ‘the
army of the Lord’. In later biblical texts, such figures are portrayed as
angels who might speak up for the interests of individual humans, while
others, notably Satan, had been granted by God the role of accusing