From the Narrow Desert

This jumped out at me yesterday as I was reading Isaiah:

Fear not, thou worm Jacob, and ye men of Israel; I will help thee, saith the Lord, and thy redeemer, the Holy One of Israel (Isa. 41:14).

Due to current events, it was "Yemen of Israel" that first caught my eye, but my interest pretty quickly shifted to "thou worm Jacob."

From a very early age, maybe six or seven, I've used the old-fashioned abbreviation Wm for my first name. (Jas was added much later, when I started blogging.) From time to time, people jokingly pronounce it as it's written, as /wəm/, which is very close to how worm is pronounced in the non-rhotic New England accent I grew up speaking in Derry, New Hampshire. Jas is for James, of course, which derives, via French and Latin, from the name Jacob. So, in a fairly straightforward way, Worm Jacob = Wm Jas.

Thinking about this jogged loose a half-remembered factoid I'd picked up somewhere ages ago: Doesn't Isaiah use the same Hebrew word for "worm" and "crimson"? Indeed he does:

This word appears as worm in Isa. 41:14. A different form of the same word appears as crimson in one of Isaiah's most famous lines:

Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool (Isa. 1:18).

Isaiah juxtaposes crimson with wool, which got my attention because Woolly was a nickname of mine in my late teens and early twenties -- an alteration of Willy, but also inspired by my appearance at that time. As hard as it may be to believe now, there was a time when I not only had hair but had enough of it that a photo of me from back then is being used to this day as an illustration in the Hebrew Wikipedia article for "Hair." (I know this because some random Israeli dude once emailed me about it.)

The caption reads "blond hair and red beard." Of course it had to be Hebrew Wikipedia, and they chose me because I had a woolly red beard. In what I've written above, I started with something that reminded me of my name, looked up the Hebrew behind it, and was led to Isaiah talking about something red becoming like wool.

The Hebrew word in question means both "red" and "worm." This made me think of the red serpent I mentioned in my recent post "Red chameleons, manticores, and vampires":

the esotericists of the 19th and 20th centuries associated Teth with the serpent, and specifically with the red serpent. (This is why Oswald Wirth, who mapped Teth to the Hermit card, added a red serpent to his otherwise traditional version of that trump.)

(Like my past self, Wirth's Hermit seems to have gone a bit overboard with the beard.)

So Worm Jacob leads us to the red worm or serpent, which leads us to Teth, one of the two Hebrew letters transliterated as T. Is that a link not only to Wm Jas but to my surname as well? At first I thought probably not. Teth evolved into Theta, while the Greek and Latin letter T, as used in the Greek word from which my surname derives, evolved from a different Semitic letter, Tav. Hebrew Wikipedia changed my mind:

That's Tycho Brahe, another man who loved facial hair not wisely but too well. As you can see, Tycho is transliterated into Hebrew with Teth, not Tav. I can assume that Tychonievich would be similarly rendered.

Incidentally, I have one other link to Tycho besides the name and the fashion sense. Tycho famously lost part of his nose in a duel and used to wear false noses made of gold, silver, or brass. Some years ago, one of my young students asked me if I'd ever broken a bone. When I told him I'd broken my nose once, he looked at me in amazement and said, "So, that's not your real nose?"

Somewhere in Unsong, Scott Alexander mentions that the initials of Martin Luther King spell out the Hebrew translation of his surname. Since the Hebrew alphabet includes only consonants, melech, "king," is spelled mem-lamed-kaph — MLK.

When Alphonse-Louis Constant needed a pen name for his occult writings, he chose Hebrew names that were somewhat similar to his own given names. Alphonse became Éliphas (Eliphaz, son of Esau and friend of Job), and Louis became Lévi (Levi, son of Jacob and father of the Levites; Rabbi Louis Ginzberg also used Levi as his Hebrew name).

Back on November 19 -- that is, about a week and a half ago -- I checked the Junior Ganymede and found a one-sentence post by that blog's proprietor, who goes by the letter G. It read: "Wherever He is, there is beauty."

This is why God added He to the names of his chosen, changing Abram to Abraham, Sarai to Sarah. Definitely the most beautiful letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

There is even a Monogrammaton. The sages took the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and decided that exactly one of them was a Name of God. That letter is "he". It's the fifth letter . . . . later I was looking through my trusty King James Version and started noticing things. Psalm 95:7, "He is our God". Psalm 100:3, "It is He that hath made us." Job 37:23, "He is excellent in power and judgment." All of these have an overt English meaning. But they are, in their own way, invoking the Monogrammaton.

The Tetragrammaton ("four-letter word") is the proper name of the God of the Hebrews, spelt yod-he-waw-he, and supposed never to be pronounced. Observant Jews, when reading aloud from the Bible, replace the Tetragrammaton with "my Lord," "the Name," or some similar expression. In keeping with this custom, English Bibles generally replace it with "the Lord."

How might the Tetragrammaton be transliterated in the modern Roman alphabet? "YHWH," reflecting the hypothesized ancient Hebrew pronunciation of those letters, has become conventional, but here's another approach.

Yod, the first letter of the name, is genetically related to I and J. Because yod is the 10th letter of the Hebrew alphabet, we prefer J, the 10th letter of the Roman alphabet, as the closest equivalent. He is genetically related to E, and each is the 5th letter of its respective alphabet. Waw is genetically related to five different Roman letters: F, U, V, W, and Y. But because waw is the 6th letter of the Hebrew alphabet, our preferred equivalent is F, the 6th letter of the Roman alphabet. Thus the Tetragrammaton is rendered JEFE.

Jefe, as it happens, is a word in Spanish, meaning "chief, head, leader, boss" -- astonishingly close in meaning to the conventional substitute "Lord." But, as in English, grammar demands the use of the definite article -- el Jefe, "the Chief" -- and El happens to be another of the Hebrew names for God!

In fact, Spanish Bibles generally use el Señor for the Tetragrammaton. It's a pity that such a perfect equivalent was passed up.