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Sometimes our Word of the Week falls into the sub-category we call “What’s in a Name?” But today we have a single name which is also a complete sentence, a prophecy, and the greatest mystery in the world.
Where shall I start? How about with Hebrew names? Whenever you see the word-parts YAH or EL in a Hebrew name, you should think, “This name might be a sentence.” The YAH is short for the name that may not be uttered, which in English we translate as “I AM” or “I AM WHO AM.” And that too is a great mystery, and maybe I’ll discuss it someday. In translations of the Bible, whenever the Hebrew reads YHWH, we read Kyrios (Greek) or Dominus (Latin) or Lord (English), because when the Jewish people read Scripture aloud, they would substitue the word ADONAI, LORD, when they got to YHWH. They’d also “point” the word with the vowels of ADONAI, because that’s what the reader was going to utter, and not YHWH; and that’s how later on people mistook the purpose of those points, and we ended up with the name JEHOVAH. You see, in Hebrew, vowels are usually denoted by little marks above or below or tucked into the side of the consonants. When Jesus says that not a “jot or a tittle” shall pass from the Law until all is fulfilled, I have no doubt he was thinking of a little pin-prick or a tiny stroke to mark a vowel. The EL is short for ELOHIM, a plural suggesting plenitude and not number, which we translate as GOD. So the name JOEL means “the Lord is GOD,” and ELIJAH means “God is the LORD!” And the name HEZEKIAH — the name of one of the few good kings of Judah — means “THE LORD gives strength,” while EZECHIEL means “GOD gives strength.”
Now then, what about EMMANUEL, or, closer to the Hebrew, IMMANUEL? Well, we see the -EL there, and that’s the emphatic part of the name, the syllable we lay the stress on. So GOD is doing something. What is it? First, let me say that in Hebrew, as in Welsh (of all things), the object of a preposition is usually expressed as a suffix on the preposition itself. Here, the preposition is ‘IM, well translated as English WITH, and in a powerful sense, too. By the way, if you want to pronounce it right, you have to open it with a glottal stop. Have you ever heard how Cockneys will swallow the T at the end of a syllable, and instead of FOOTBALL say FOO’BALL? That’s a glottal stop. So you have to OPEN the word with one of those, as if you were suddenly opening the back of your throat to let the air flow. ‘IM means WITH, as I said, but here it’s meant as suggesting FELLOWSHIP, COMPANIONSHIP, being TOGETHER with someone, and if it’s GOD who is with you, he is AT YOUR SIDE, giving you his HELP. “God is WITH YOU in all you do,” said Abimelech to Abraham — that’s ‘imka. Poor Job longs for the days when “the Almighty was yet WITH ME” — that’s ‘immadi.
So the prophet Isaiah reveals to the daft and sottish King Ahaz that a day will come when “a virgin shall be with child, and shall bear a son, and shall call his name EMMANUEL.” It is a Messianic promise; there are no other Emmanuels in Scripture. The ‘IM is there at the beginning. The -ANU- suffix is for the first person plural, US. The name is at the end, -EL, GOD. Again, the final syllable receives the stress: “With us is GOD!” Not “with us is Samson,” or “with us is David,” or “with us is Elijah,” as worthy as those men were, but “with us is GOD!”
The obvious way for anybody at the time to interpret that verse was that God’s presence and his aid would be made manifest in some great representative of God who was yet to come, a second David, a greater Moses. Nobody then could conceive that God intended the verse to be understood literally: that God would be in their midst in the flesh. A representative standing in for God? Anybody could accept that. The high priest was such a representative. But God himself, the Son of God, the Word made Flesh, to dwell among us? How is it possible? Rather, only with God who is present in his totality in the smallest of the seeds, in the fleetest moment of time, in the flicker of an electron, only with that true God is it possible.
This of course is the great and solemn and joyful mystery of Christmas, that the Word who spoke the world into existence humbles himself to come among us as a speechless and helpless little child. Had we known he was coming, we’d have barred the gates. He had to steal into our world of sin in order to stand beside us, for thirty years known only as the son of a carpenter named Joseph. But that was not the end of the story.
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