Believing in The Something
Made in God’s “image and likeness.”
We define God in so many ways. A multifaceted word for God is the Hebrew word יהוה — also called the tetragrammaton — the four-letter Name of God. For fun, I like to use this illustration of the letters stacked up to make a human stick figure.
The Name is sometimes written as YHVH, indicating the letters yud, hey, vav, hey ( יהוה ) — Hebrew reads right to left — and it’s unpronounceable and indescribable. It’s simply The Name we give to The Something that cannot be defined. The ancients declared that those “who can rightly pronounce it, causeth heaven and earth to tremble, for it is the NAME which rusheth through the universe.”
In the Bible (Genesis 1:26) when God decides to create man in the Divine “image and likeness,” the word for “image” is tzelem ( צלם ), a masculine noun; and the word for “likeness,” demoot ( דמות ), is a feminine noun. The ancient scribes were making doubly sure that we’d get the message of the male and female aspects of God.
Both words mean pretty much the same thing: Tzelem (“image”) means “form,” “resemblance” and “representative”; while demoot (“likeness”) means “figure,” “appearance,” “pattern” and “similitude.”
The letter hey ( ה ), repeated twice in The Name, signifies universal life. That’s you and me.
