Does existence precede essence, or essence precede existence - one of the great questions of 19th and 20th century philosophy. Jean-Paul Sartre framed it in terms of "Being" and "Nothingness" (L'Être et le Néant), which is the sort of dualistic view of life that we would expect from a man brought up in the Christian world, however lapsed, however atheistic.
In the monistic Jewish world, going back to very ancient times, the chicken hatches the egg which contains the chicken, and so there is no need to make this kind of dualistic distinction. And yet, in that ancient Jewish world, a distinction was made, not between the positive of "Being" and the negative of "Nothingness", but between two equal positives, "Being" and "Existing", and what precisely that distinction consisted of... I have yet to find a single scholar who has even attempted to explain it, and most in the Jewish world prefer simply to bypass the issue. I too am unable to explain the distinction, but I can at least describe its parameters.
In Yehudit there are two verbs, LEHIYOT (להיות) and LECHIYOT (לחיות), so similar in their written form as well as their oral pronunciation that the space between them must be deliberately hair's-breadth. When Mosheh asks his god (Exodus 3:14) "what name shall I know you by?", and the god answers "call me any name you please", his actual phrasing is "EHEYEH ASHER EHEYEH - אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה - I am whoever I am" - from the verb LEHIYOT = "to be". So the deity must be Life itself, incarnate? No, because Life itself is not HAI, but CHAI (חי), from the verb LECHIYOT = "to live". It seems such a small variation, that surely it can't really matter. And maybe it's only a dialect variation anyway, the difference between Night and Nite or Through and Thru or Plough and Plow in English. But LEHIYOT yields the names of the two pincipal deities, and not only in the Mosaic version. YHVH also comes from the verb LEHIYOT, as does YAH, the moon-goddess, though she also takes her name from the number of the full moon, the fifteenth day of the lunar month. Whereas CHAVAH (Eve), the first woman, Adam's wife, takes her name from LECHIYOT. Does this infer that the distinction lies in the deities having no physical form, where their creations do; that LEHIYOT is therefore, what shall we call it? "essence", whereas LECHIYOT is, dare I suggest, "existence"? Hmm!
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The goddess Yah is best known from the Phoenician myths, though she was Beney Chet (Hittite) before that - most things Phoenician were. To the Greeks she was Io, and later the Beney Yisra-El amalgamated her with the sun-god of Mount Tavor (Tabor), masculinised her, and renamed her as Yahaveh or Yeho'a - the Tetragrammaton YHVH (יהוה) which Jews do not pronounce but pseudonymise instead as Adonai (Lord), and which others have tended, probably incorrectly, to pronounce as Jehovah. A separate section of this lexicon deals with YHVH.
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Yah is thought by some scholars to be a variant on Babylonian Ea, and this is entirely possible as the Hittite empire, the first major empire in the history of humanity, stretched south and east across Mesopotamia and into the Indus Valley, providing the probable roots of "the common source" both as language and as culture; but also south and west into the Greek islands and surrounding regions, where Ea may well have become Io. The only difficulty with this hypothesis is that Babylonian Ea was male, but Greek Io female - though we have witnessed numerous times the transitions back and forth, and in the world of primal forces, which these deities originally "explained", gender is always of necessity both male and female.
Ea was itself an alternate name for Enki, the Assyrian and Babylonian god of the fresh waters that give life, and the breaking of the waters, so often poeticised as flood stories (No'ach, Gilgamesh, Deucalion, etc) or as water-miracle stories (Mosheh at the Sea of Reeds - Exodus 14:16ff - the most obvious example), and so central to the Biblical Creation story (Genesis 1), is self-evidently a female not a male image of birth.
Io, in Greek mythology, was the daughter of Inachus (which is very probably a variant of Biblical Nachor - and therefore adds weight to the "common source" hypothesis), the river god of Argos, and the Oceanid Melia. Under the name of Callithyia, she was regarded as the first priestess of Hera, the wife of Zeus. Zeus fell in love with her and, to protect her from the wrath of Hera, changed her into a white heifer. Hera persuaded Zeus to give her the heifer and sent Argus Panoptes ("the All-Seeing") to watch her. Zeus thereupon sent the god Hermes, who lulled Argus to sleep and killed him. Hera then sent a gadfly to torment Io, who therefore wandered all over the earth, crossed the Ionian Sea - which is named after her for this reason - swam the strait that was thereafter known as the Bosphorus (meaning Oxen-Ford, just like the English university-town), and at last reached Mitsrayim (Egypt), where she was restored to her original form and gave birth to Epaphus (a fuller version of her tale can be found lower down this page)
Io then became identified with the Egyptian goddess Eshet (Isis), and Epaphus with Apis, the sacred bull. Epaphus was said to have been carried off by order of Hera to Byblos in Assyria, where he was found again by Io - an obvious variation of the myth of Eshet (Isis) and Osher (Osiris), but also a connection to the Assyrian goddess Astarte; and back through that route to the Hittites. Both the Egyptian and the Assyrian parts, in fact, reflect interchange with the East and the identification of foreign with Greek gods. (Source: the Encyclopedia Britannica)
The grown-up Io was, in some versions, the mother of Dionysus, by Zeus disguised as a serpent; in other versions she simply nursed the infant Dionysus, who was guarded by Argus Panoptes, the hundred-eyed Titan; Argos, incidentally, was the name of Odysseus' dog (Argo was the name of Jason's ship, named for its builder, a different Argus).
Io was represented iconographically as the white cow aspect of the barley-goddess, but also as a white mare, and as a white sow named Choere or Phorcis, also known as Marpesa. The white cow in the Beney Yisra-Eli myths is Le'ah, and it is no coincidence surely that Le'ah - great-niece of Nachor - is buried at the Cave of Machpelah (Yah's cave, with her brother-spouse Ephron, Greek Phoroneus), while Ya'akov's other wife Rachel, who is identified with sheep rather than cattle, is not.
Robert Graves, in his "Greek Myths", suggest that she was originally known as Yahu = "exalted dove", which of course becomes significant in her later Christian manifestation; though more than likely Graves is wrong on this occasion, picking up the later Yisra-Eli masculinisation of her name and assuming that it came first, rather than afterwards.
How can we be so sure of this? One oddity of the Tanach is the variation on the Yah-names of several key figures, including two of the major Prophets. In early texts we have Yesha-Yah (Isaiah) and Yirme-Yah (Jeremiah), but in later texts Yesha-Yahu and Yirme-Yahu (need an example of each to show it); Sha'ul's son Yah-Natan likewise becomes Yeho-Natan, and many other examples can be found among the later kings. The early texts belong either to the epoch of polytheism, when YHVH was simply one of many gods and goddesses, or to the middle period of YHVH TSEVA'OT, when YHVH had replaced El as the chief god of the Elohim, and now ruled as "Lord of the Hosts of the Heavens". The later period, when the Tanach was redacted into the form that we now have, YHVH was becoming established as the Omnideity, all other gods and goddesses absorbed as mere aspects or facets of the Monotheos, and so it was necessary for his consort to be removed, or diminished. So Yah names became Yahu names; and where the names could not be absorbed, as in the phrase Hallelu Yah, theology declared Yah to be masculine, and so she remains to this day.
As noted above, the Ionian sea comes from her name, as does the word Iodine, because her royal colour was purple - the colour purple, and the name purple (Argaman in Yehudit), were deeply significant in Kena'an, which name in the native Hurrian language means "purple". We know that the Phoenicians created a purple dye from the murex snail that they found off the coast of Levanon and Northern Kena'an, and used it to make "clothes of many colours", which became one of their principal sources of trade across the known world, and thence the major source of their wealth and power. The Ionian sea is also called the Purple Sea, and the name Phoenician itself is derived from Phoinix, which means "purple".
In Yehudit Greece is Yavan (יון), though it is likely that it was originally pronounced Yavon; On (ון) as a suffix meaning "place of" – by either pronunication "the place of Yah". This suggests that she was originally a Phoenician goddess whom the Beney Kena'an borrowed, especially in the north, and who traveled across the Ionian sea to Greece, where she was transformed into or absorbed by other moon goddess cults, notably the dominant Demeter. And then the Egyptian connections, described above. All of which takes us back to my twice-made but never completed statement, that the source of all of this was surely Hittite. And so it must have been. In the ancient world of the Beney Chet, the sun-god was named Ephron, which the Greeks later rendered as Phoroneus; his sister-wife was precisely the same Io or Yah. Ephron appears in Genesis 23:1-20 as... Ephron the Hittite, who sold the cave of Machpelah to Av-Raham for the purpose of burying his sister-wife, Sarah, itself a variation of Asherah, which is another of the names by which the moon-goddess was known.
And in addition to the Demeter link, she was also known among the various ancient Greek nations as Dione, Persephone and Lethe. She was primarily the goddess of the moon, but moon-goddesses are always triple-goddesses (new moon/Sleeping Beauty, full moon/Madonna, waning moon/Hecate), the moon controlling the tides giving her hegemony over the ocean, and the moon controlling menstruation giving her a key fertility role. She is linked to all aspects of the night, including nightmares, furies, ghosts and witches etc; she is linked to the Earth through her fertility role: all vegetation emerges from the womb of earth, though it also requires the implantation of a seed. In other words, she is the co-principal deity of the ancient world, and irrefutably female, despite the attempt by many patriarchal societies to masculinise her, or to make her subservient to the male sun. In Genesis 1 she and the sun are independently equal (he rules the day, she the night), as do Delilah and Shimshon in the Danite myth.
Note that the initial letter of Yah is Yud (יוד) and from the name of this letter comes the word Yad (יד) = "a hand" in the pictographic alphabet of Ugarit. In Egyptian something similar takes place, where "Raha" means "a hand", and connects to Ra as sun god; Yehudit, fighting this paganism, has Ra (רע) mean "evil" (probably the reason why Rameses is the Pharaoh in the Mosaic story, which has no historical base, so any king-name would do - "Evil" (Ra)-Mousa, in the Egyptian, as antagonist, versus "good" Mousa, Mosheh himself, as protagonist - see Exodus 12:37 to confirm the RA spelling; Mousa is rendered as MESES in the Yehudit).
In Sanskrit "Raja" means "king", "rajan" - "to rule"; whence "reign" in English (yes, Latin regnum too; more evidence of the Common Source). This is all significant because the god of Av-Raham (himself a variant of the name Brahma) is neither YHVH nor Elohim, though the Tanach uses both, but El Shadai, and he is represented as a hand with the letter Sheen (ש) in its palm; the depiction of the hand, known as the Hamsa, remains a prevalent symbol in Jewish iconography and jewellery, as well as in the Moslem world, the Sheen being the shape made with the hand when the Kohanim recite the Yevarechecha, and by any person immersing himself or herself in the mikveh.
"Hand and Name" are combined as depictors of the presence of Elohim in human action, and especially in human memory - e.g. the Holocaust Memorial in Yeru-Shala'im which is called "Hand and Name", "Yad va Shem".
In Ethiopian, the equivalent letter Yud is represented not simply as a hand, but is named Yaman, the right hand. The Yehudit equivalent of Yaman is Yamin (ימין) which also means "the right hand" and gives us Bin-Yamin (Benjamin), "the son of the right hand", which later became an epithet for both David and Jesus. But Yad also came to mean "strength", and specifically that of YHVH. YHVH extricates the Beney Yisra-El from Egypt "Be Yad Chazakah" (ביד חזקה) = "with a strong hand" and forgetfulness of Tsi'on (Zion) is to be punished by loss of cunning in the right hand (Psalm 137:5).
Yah's name is especially significant numerically, Yud (י) being 10 and Hey ה) 5). The fifteenth day of the lunar month is the day of the full moon; festivals falling thereon are today given Tet-Vav (ט = 9 + ו = 6 making 15) instead of Yud + Heh, in theory because the name is sacred, in reality because patriarchal Judaism has expunged the female deity wherever possible. And then they pretend that singing Hallelu-Yah addresses a male deity!
The number fifteen = יה has other significances. It is constituted of 3 times 5: 3 being her aspects as maiden, nymph and hag; her 5 stages of growth: birth, initiation, consummation, repose and death (resurrection). But more worthy of note: there were 15 Songs of Ascent (Shirey Ma'alot) sung by the Levites as they stood on the fifteen steps leading from the women's court to the court of Yisra-El. The Temple was built on three rows of cedar pillars, fifteen to a row.
Ten of the Psalms are explicitly addressed to Yah, and known as Hallel for that reason (Psalms 106,111-113,135,146-150), through the expression "May Yah be praised" – Hallelu Yah. Modern Judaism has elected to sing 113-118 as the Hallel Psalms, again part of the male need to diminish the female.
That the ancient Beney Yisra-El worshipped female Yah at the same time, and literally in consort with the male YHVH cannot be doubted. She was fully present in the Solomonic Temple, where his thousand wives were not a sexual harem so much as an extension of the Women's Court - the Lady Chapel of Yah, so to speak - to include all the equivalent Mother-Goddesses of his Empire: by marrying the royal princess whose role was to serve as High Priestess at the Temple, Shelomoh (Solomon) achieved political control through the more important cultic, a trick he learned from his father. She was still present, and significant, in the reign of King Yehu, who exterminated the house of King Achav (Ahab) and Queen Iy-Zevel (Jezebel, probably Yah Zevel originally) and ruled from 844 to 856 BCE. Her disappearance, or at best her reduction to the role of Shechinah, the divine radiance, probably coincided with the exile in Babylon after 586 BCE.
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According to some scholars, the period of the prophet Eli-Yahu (אֵלִיָּהוּ - Elijah) was the time when the El cult became absorbed into the Yah cult as Yuval (יבל), which is to say Yah (יה) + Ba'al (בעל); thus Eli-Yahu defeating the priests of Ba'al is really the story of one cult subduing another. I remain to be convinced by this.
Phoenician worshippers of Yah were certainly the prime objects of Eli-Yahu's wrath when he took on their Ba'alite and Ashterotite priesthoods on Mount Karm-El (Carmel) (1 Kings 16:29-17:24). The attempted overthrow of the cult is not in question, though it seems to have survived within the cult of YHVH that grew up to replace it, and the Temple evidence is strong enough to show that Yah and YHVH were worshipped together for centuries centuries after this. Yuval appears, alongside his brother Yaval, as a son of Lamech, but there is nothing else in the Tanach to suggest a cult around him, or any religious activity that focused on his name. Elijah's own name is another instance o the Yahs that became Yahu, in his case probably is a conflation of Yah hu = "He is Yah", the original masculinisation of the moon goddess. But this implicitly suggests a continuation; if the aim was to destroy her cult rather than to absorb her, surely all evidence of the name Yah would have been removed? And if there is a combining of El with Yah, Eli Yah Hu ("my god is named Yah") achieves that in a way that Yuval simply cannot.
The Greek perspective of Io/Yah is reflected in a number of tales, of which I have given a very cursory summary earlier in this essay.In full now:
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The Greek perspective of Io/Yah is reflected in a number of tales, of which I have given a very cursory summary earlier in this essay.In full now:
There was once a maiden named Io, a priestess of Hera, who had disturbing dreams. Through them she learned Zeus wished to deprive her of her virginity. In time, Io told her father, Inachus, who consulted the oracle. Told by the oracle that the king of the gods would show his wrath if not satisfied, Inachus forced his daughter Io to leave his protection.
Zeus found Io wandering alone and aimlessly soon thereafter. Nor did it take Hera long to locate her errant priestess. Seeing his wife coming, Zeus turned Io into the first cow. Hera, who herself would become known for her white arms and bovine eyes, took a fancy to the beast, and with more than a drop of suspicion in her veins, insisted her husband give her the animal for a gift. What else could Zeus do? The hapless philanderer wasn't so much concerned with being caught in a lie as his precarious marital harmony, so he acceded to his wife's wishes.
Poor Io! The unwilling partner-turned-cow was put under the protection of Argus of the hundred eyes.With so many eyes, he could never be caught entirely asleep. Io was a prisoner. Other business consumed Zeus' time until his crafty son Hermes came to his attention. With a flash of inspiration, Zeus realised that Hermes could figure out a way to distract Argus and free poor cow-formed Io. First Hermes tried music to lull the monster to sleep. He played on the pipes that his son, Pan, had created from the reedy remains of his lost love, the nymph Syrinx. Many of the eyes closed, but - unfortunately for Argus - not all simultaneously. So Hermes devised a more devastating plan. The details are murky. Whether Hermes hurled a rock or sliced with a blade, he effectively dissociated the guard from his head and eyes.
Io was freed, but still a cow, and not quite safe, because Hera set a gadfly to pester her. Io roamed mile after mile, year after year until she finally came to term. When she reached Egypt, she gave birth. Then Hera, the childbirth goddess and Io's former nemesis, released her from her torments. Meanwhile Hera, loathe to waste such useful eyes as those belonging to the severed head of Argos, took them and inserted them into the tail feathers of her favorite bird, the peacock.
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As we have seen, the name occurs as a prefix or suffix to many Biblical names, e.g. as a prefix in Yonatan/Jonathan (יונתן) – properly Yah-Natan - Yo-Av/Joab (יואב) and Yehudah/Judah (יהודה); as a suffix in Eliyahu/Elijah (אליהו), Yesha-Yahu (Isaiah), Yirme-Yahu (Jeremiah - יִרְמְיָהוּ), Yedid-Yah (ידד-יה - the full name of David and the birth-name of Shelomoh/Solomon) etc. In fact almost all the prophets of the Beney Yisra-El have Yah names, which fact is itself worth further consideration. And just as many among the kings, including Avi-Yah, Yehoshaphat, Yehoram, Achaz-Yah, Atal-Yah, Amaz-Yah, Uzi-Yah, Chizki-Yah (who in later texts becomes Chizki-Yahu), Yoshi-Yah (ditto), Yahu-Yakim, Yehoiachin, Tsidki-Yah - and on reflection, that is virtually every one of the kings of Yehudah, and the list is hardly shorter for the northern kingdom of Ephrayim - click here for the full list.
Yo-Av (Av = father) in Latin becomes Yo-Pater or Jupiter, the husband, doubly ironically of Jove - we can deduce that the Romans, like the Beney Yisra-El, also attempted a masculinisation, and also failed to impose it upon a naturally matriarchal people (exactly as Catholicism has been forced to accept the cult of the Virgin Mary in its ever-increasing importance).
And then there is another interesting theory, which I leave my reader to opinioise alone: that YHVH, and especially that Mosaic YEHEYEH ASHER YEHEYEH, was probably Yah-Yah originally, the equivalent of Eshet (Isis) as a variant of Ishah-Ishah. Eshet (Yehudit Ishah) means "woman"; therefore "the Woman of Women" or the "Supreme Female", the repetition bestowing divinity as a variant or perhaps an earlier form of the multiple plural; the second Yud being elongated to Vav exactly as it is in the word Hee (היא) for She and elsewhere.
Gesenius suggests two possible origins of YHVH (Jehovah): Yahavoh or Yahaveh, with Yah as an abbreviation; this is less likely; we should treat them more as regional or dialect variations on the verbs Lehiyot (להיות) and Lechiyot (לחיות), which, as we have seen, have the meanings, respectively, "to exist" and "to be".
If the latter, then Yah-Chavah (יה חוה) is also an option, with a differently interesting connection to the Edomite moon-goddess Chavah (Eve) who, like Yah, is centrally connected to the shrine at Chevron, though at a different period of history.
Yah, apparently the most abbreviated form of the name, also happens to coincide with the third person masculine singular verb-form: "he will"; which allowed the priestly editors to pretend to deduce the meanings of the Yah names as "he will follow" (Ya'akov), "he will laugh" (Yitzchak), "he will give" (Yonatan ) etc, in order to disguise their pantheistic origins: "the heel god", "the laughing god", "the god of gifts", and so forth. Ultimately the god of the Beney Yisra-El was formed of both the above, Yahweh and Elohim hyphenated as a single, transcendent divinity and imbued with all other godly attributes. More interestingly, many of the attributes of the goddess Anat are also passed to Yahweh-Elohim.
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