God's Name Sounds Like Breathing

A rather stunning observation

Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash

^{Exodus 3.13} But Moses said to God, “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?” ¹⁴ God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”

There it is, the name of the Creator revealed to a human being—I AM WHO I AM—in Hebrew: YHWH. And God’s name sounds like breathing.

Barbara Mahany writes in The Book of Nature:

In Latin, spiritus is defined as “the intake of breath by a god,” literally an inspiration. In Hebrew, God’s holiest name, a name that shall not be uttered it is so holy, is a four-letter Tetragrammaton (something like an acronym, only it’s a lettered symbol reserved for one of God’s names). It’s composed of the most breath-like consonants in the Hebrew aleph-bet, Y, H, and W, combined to Y-H-W-H, which in English would read as Yahweh. Peeling it back, just a bit, and sounding it out, the first syllable, Y-H, is the inbreath, and the second, W-H, is a whispered outbreath; the whole name, a single cycle of breath.

Wanting to check both this connection and her Hebrew, Mahany reached out to a rabbi friend, Samuel Gordon.

Here’s what dear Sam wrote in reply: “Yes, the breath of God breathed into Adam (from adamah—earth) is what animates us and is, thus, the Divine in us. Fascinating to connect it to the vowels of Hebrew. The proper name of God—YHWH—is also made up of four vowel letters. It is unpronounced, but to my mind just breath/wind sounds. Imagine the sound of the wind blowing through a burning mesquite bush appearing to Moses on Sinai. God’s proper name is that sound.”

Richard Rohr further unpacks this The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See:

I cannot emphasize enough the momentous importance of the Jewish revelation of the name of God. It puts the entire nature of our spirituality in correct context and, if it had been followed, could have freed us from much idolatry and arrogance. As we now spell and pronounce it, the word is Yahweh. For those speaking Hebrew, it was the Sacred Tetragrammaton YHVH (yod, he, van, and he). It was considered a literally unspeakable word for Jews, and any attempt to know what we were talking about was "in vain," as the commandment said (Exodus 20:7). Instead, they used Elohim or Adonai in speaking or writing. From God's side the divine identity was kept mysterious and unavailable to the mind; when Moses asked for the divinity's name, he got only the phrase that translates something to this effect: "I AM WHO AM.... This is my name forever; this is my title for all generations" (Exodus 3:14-15).

This unspeakability has long been recognized, but we now know it goes even deeper: formally the word was not spoken at all, but breathed! Many are convinced that its correct pronunciation is an attempt to replicate and imitate the very sound of inhalation and exhalation. The one thing we do every moment of our lives is therefore to speak the name of God. This makes it our first and our last word as we enter and leave the world.

For some years now, I have taught this to contemplative groups in many countries, and it changes peoples' faith and prayer lives in substantial ways. I remind people that there is no Islamic, Christian, or Jewish way of breathing. There is no American, African, or Asian way of breathing. There is no rich or poor way of breathing. The playing field is utterly leveled. The air of the earth is one and the same air, and this divine wind "blows where it will" (John 3:8) - which appears to be everywhere. No one and no religion can control this spirit.

When considered in this way, God is suddenly as available and accessible as the very thing we all do constantly - breathe. Exactly as some teachers of prayer always said, "Stay with the breath, attend to your breath": the same breath that was breathed into Adam's nostrils by this Yahweh (Genesis 2:7); the very breath that Jesus handed over with trust on the cross (John 19:30) and then breathed on us as shalom, forgiveness, and the Holy Spirit all at once (John 20:21-23). And isn't it wonderful that breath, wind, spirit, and air are precisely nothing — and yet everything.

So perhaps this is one reason why praying Breath Prayers can be so powerful. Here’s an introduction to this spiritual practice.

And here’s a song about that most mysterious of names, a name that sounds like breathing.