it is limited to the institution of formal public worship on the part of a religious community (De.); and the idea that it is connected with a growing sense of the distinction between the human and the divine (Ew. De. al.) is a baseless fancy. It means that ´Enôš was the first to invoke the Deity under this name; and it is interesting chiefly as a reflexion, emanating from the school of J, on the origin of the specifically Israelite name of God. The conception is more ingenuous than that of E (Ex. 313-15) or P (63), who base the name on express revelation, and connect it with the foundation of the Hebrew nationality.
The expression (
Hebrew characters) (lit. 'call by [means of] the name of Y.')
denotes the essential act in worship, the invocation (or rather evocation)
of the Deity by the solemn utterance of His name. It rests on the wide-*spread
primitive idea that a real bond exists between the person and his
name, such that the pronunciation of the latter exerts a mystic influence
on the former.[1] The best illustration is 1 Ki. 1824ff., where the test
proposed by Elijah is which name—Baal or Yahwe—will evoke a
manifestation of divine energy.—The cosmopolitan diffusion of the name
(Hebrew characters), from the Babylonian or Egyptian pantheon, though often asserted,[2]
and in itself not incredible, has not been proved. The association with
the name of Enoš might be explained by the supposition that the old
genealogy of which Enoš was the first link had been preserved in some
ancient centre of Yahwe-worship (Sinai? or Kadesh?).
Ch. V.—The Ante-Diluvian Patriarchs (P).
In the Priestly Code the interval between the Creation (11-24a) and the Flood (69ff.) is bridged by this list of ten patriarchs, with its chronological scheme fixing the duration of the period (in MT) at 1656 years. The names are traditional, as is shown by a comparison of the first three with 425f., and of Nos. 4-9 with 417ff.. It has, indeed, been held that the names of the Cainite genealogy were intentionally modified by the author of P, in order to suggest certain
- ↑ See Giesebrecht, Die ATliche Schätzung des Gottesnamens, esp. p. 25 ff., 98 ff.
- ↑ W. M. Müller, AE, pp. 239, 312; Del. Babel [tr. M'Cormack] p. 61 f.; Bezold, Die Bab.-Ass. Keilinschr. etc. p. 31 ff.; Oppert, ZA, xvii. 291 ff.; Daiches, ib. xxii. (1908), 125 ff.; Algyogyi-Hirsch, ZATW, xxiii. 355 ff.; Sta. BTh. i. 29; Me. GA2, i. (2te Hälfte), 545 f. Cf., further, Rogers, Rel. of Bab. and Ass. (1908), p. 89 ff.
