ABSTRACT
The Old Testament conception of God was of a single male deity who, unlike other gods at the time, was unknown insofar as he chose to reveal neither his name nor his appearance.1 However, a definite personality emerged in due course. In the meantime, all his worshippers needed to know was that he was their lord and king, and that he had given them a code of laws by which to live, the keeping of which would ensure their survival as a people. The withholding of his name was for his own protection; that of his appearance was for ours. Perhaps these amount to the same thing. Knowledge of a god’s name was believed to give one the power to invoke his presence (usually for the purpose of using the divine power for one’s own ends), even to see him as an objective physical entity. The God of Israel was so powerful, however, that this would be fatal for a mere mortal, hence the warnings in Exodus 33 and elsewhere.
