The Names of God in the Old Testament 9 min read Lesson 12 of 12

Three names that are pictures, and what happened to the name Yahweh when the Bible changed languages

Rock, Shepherd, Redeemer, and the Name in the New Testament

Israel also named God by what he was like: a rock, a shepherd, a kinsman who buys you back. Those names are pictures, and the New Testament kept every one of them. But the name itself, the four letters of the second lesson, did not cross into Greek. What crossed was the word that had been said aloud in its place, and the New Testament gave that word to Jesus.

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Lesson 12 of 12 · The names in pictures, and the name in Greek

Three of Israel’s names for God are pictures: the Rock, the thing that does not move; the Shepherd, the one who leads and feeds; the Redeemer, the kinsman who pays to get you back. Each is a picture of something God did, and each is taken up by the New Testament and set on Jesus, in words meant to be recognized. The name itself went a different way. Yahweh, the four letters, was already unspoken by the first century, and the Greek Old Testament had put Kyrios, Lord, wherever it stood. The New Testament inherited that, and then did the thing this series ends on: it gave the word that stood for the name to Jesus, quoting the Old Testament’s sentences about Yahweh with Jesus as their subject. Whether that was right is the question the two faiths divide on. That it was done is not in question, and a reader of the Old Testament’s names should know it was done knowingly.

The Rock

The first of the picture-names is in the song of Moses, and it is the song’s word for God from beginning to end.

The Rock: his work is perfect, for all his ways are just. A God of faithfulness who does no wrong, just and right is he. — Deuteronomy 32:4 · WEB

Read the comment on The Song: the Rock

The Rock: his work is perfect, for all his ways are just. Moses names God a rock five times in one song, and the picture is not of beauty but of what you can stand on and what will not shift when everything else does. Hannah sings it, there is no rock like our God (1 Samuel 2:2); David sings it more than anyone, Yahweh is my rock, my fortress. The picture says what a rock is for: shelter and footing, in a land where both were scarce.

צוּר tsûwr H6697

or צֻר; from צוּר; properly, a cliff (or sharp rock, as compressed); generally, a rock or boulder; figuratively, a refuge; also an edge (as precipitous); edge, [idiom] (mighty) God (one), rock, [idiom] sharp, stone, [idiom] strength, [idiom] strong. See also בֵּית צוּר.

A cliff, a boulder, a sharp rock; figuratively a refuge, and by extension strength. The word is used of God some thirty times, and of nothing else in the same way — Moses even turns it against the gods of the nations, their rock is not as our Rock (Deuteronomy 32:31). Paul reads the rock that gave water in the wilderness and says, that rock was Christ (1 Corinthians 10:4), which is the picture-name crossing over in a single sentence.

The Shepherd and the Redeemer

“Yahweh is my shepherd; I shall lack nothing.” Psalm 23:1 · WEB
Yahweh is my shepherd; I shall lack nothing: the name and the picture, in the psalm more people know than any other.
““‘For the Lord Yahweh says: “Behold, I myself, even I, will search for my sheep, and will seek them out. As a shepherd seeks out his flock in the day that he is among his sheep that are scattered abroad, so I will seek out my sheep. I will deliver them out of all places where they have been scattered in the cloudy and dark day.” Ezekiel 34:11–12 · WEB
I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out: God taking the shepherd’s work back from the shepherds who failed at it, and the chapter behind John 10.
“Don’t be afraid, you worm Jacob, and you men of Israel. I will help you,” says Yahweh. “Your Redeemer is the Holy One of Israel.” Isaiah 41:14 · WEB
Your Redeemer is the Holy One of Israel: the ninth lesson’s name joined to the kinsman’s word.
“But as for me, I know that my Redeemer lives. In the end, he will stand upon the earth.” Job 19:25 · WEB
I know that my Redeemer lives, and in the end he will stand upon the earth: the picture-name in the mouth of a man with nothing left to redeem, and the confidence that the kinsman would come.

Redeemer is a legal picture before it is a religious one. The go’el, the kinsman-redeemer, was the relative whose duty it was to buy back a family member sold into slavery, or family land sold in need, or to marry a dead brother’s widow; Boaz is one, in Ruth. To call God Redeemer is to say that he has taken the duty of a relative toward Israel and will pay what it costs. Jesus calls himself the good shepherd (John 10:11) with Ezekiel 34 behind him, and the New Testament’s word for what he did, redemption, is this word in Greek clothing.

The name in Greek

Now the name itself, and what became of it.

By the time the Old Testament was translated into Greek, the name Yahweh was not said aloud; Adonai, Lord, was said in its place, as the fifth lesson told. The translators did what the readers did: they wrote Kyrios, Lord, where the name stood, some six thousand times. The New Testament was written by people who read that Greek Bible, and in it the name of the second lesson appears nowhere. What appears is Kyrios, and Kyrios is used of Jesus.

κύριος kýrios G2962

from (supremacy); supreme in authority, i.e. (as noun) controller; by implication, Master (as a respectful title):-- God, Lord, master, Sir.

Supreme in authority; master, owner, lord — the ordinary Greek word for the master of a slave or the head of a house, and a respectful "sir." In the Greek Old Testament it stands for both Adonai and the name Yahweh, so a first-century reader meeting Kyrios in Isaiah read it as the name. The New Testament uses the word of Jesus more than seven hundred times, from the polite "sir" of a stranger to the confession that ends Philippians 2, and the reader has to judge from the sentence which is meant. In the sentences quoted from the Old Testament, there is no doubt which.

Every knee

The clearest case is a hymn Paul quotes, whose last lines are Isaiah’s.

Therefore God also highly exalted him, and gave to him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, those on earth, and those under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. — Philippians 2:9–11 · WEB

Read the comment on Every Knee Shall Bow

God exalted him, and gave him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. The name above every name is not "Jesus," which he already had; it is the name the hymn ends with, Lord, Kyrios. And the bowing knees and confessing tongues are lifted from Isaiah 45:23, where Yahweh swears by himself that to him every knee shall bow. Paul has taken Yahweh’s oath and made Jesus its object, and then, in Romans, he does it again with a verse from Joel.

“I have sworn by myself. The word has gone out of my mouth in righteousness, and will not be revoked, that to me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall take an oath.” Isaiah 45:23 · WEB
To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall take an oath: Yahweh’s sentence, quoted by Paul with Jesus in the place of "me."
“It will happen that whoever will call on Yahweh’s name shall be saved; for in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there will be those who escape, as Yahweh has said, and among the remnant, those whom Yahweh calls.” Joel 2:32 · WEB
Whoever will call on Yahweh’s name shall be saved: the prophet’s promise, with the name in it.
“that if you will confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Romans 10:9 · WEB
If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, you will be saved: Paul’s confession, four verses before he quotes Joel.
“For, “Whoever will call on the name of the Lord will be saved.”” Romans 10:13 · WEB
Whoever will call on the name of the Lord will be saved: Joel’s sentence, in the Greek that stood for the name, made to apply to the Lord Paul has just named.

This is the fact the series ends on, and it should be stated as a fact and marked as a division. The New Testament writers took the Old Testament’s sentences about Yahweh and wrote them of Jesus, using the word the Greek Bible had used for the name. Jewish readers hold that this transfers to a man what belongs to God alone, and that the name cannot be given. Christian readers hold that it was given, by God, as Philippians says, and that the one who received it had borne it from the beginning, as the eleventh lesson’s I AM claims. The Old Testament does not settle it, because the Old Testament ends before it happens. What the Old Testament gives is the names, and the reader who knows them can at least see what the New Testament did with them, and how much it was claiming when it did.

What the names ask, together

Twelve lessons, and every name was a name for something God did: created, promised, provided, saw, commanded, judged, spoke from a bush, stood like a rock, went looking for sheep, paid the kinsman’s price. Israel did not name God by speculating about him. It named him by remembering, and the names are the memory. What they ask, together, is that a reader do the same: know God by what he has done, call him by what he has done, and, when the New Testament says that he did the last of it in a man from Nazareth, know what the names were saying before, so as to hear what is being claimed.