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"The One Who Is". Who on Tildes recently called God by this name?
I was recently on a topic and a commenter referred to God this way. I can't seem to find it now. If it was you, or you know anything about this, I'm curious why that phrase? What does it mean? Is it associated with a particular tradition?
Also, is there a way to search for specific text on Tildes?
Revelation 1:8
In the New Living Translation Bible:
Here you go
https://tildes.net/~misc/1f1b/israels_ultra_orthodox_dont_serve_in_its_armed_forces_thats_getting_harder_than_ever_to_justify_and#comment-cbfg
u/promonk said
Sorry I can’t give you any tips on searching, I only knew it because I read and replied to that exact comment and also noted how unusual the phrase was.
Tildes rules, and so do you!
Actually, it's a Jewish thing. Christians just co-opted it, which seems to be a particular talent of theirs.
Edit: I gave a cursory explanation here.
Do you happen to know the origin of the phrase for the Jewish world, because I'm pretty sure Christians got it from the book of Revelation, as /u/krellor already pointed out, but that could easily be the book's author doing the co-opting.
I don't know the Jewish origins, but the origin of the Christian revelations were writings that began during the era of Emperor Domitian circa 81AD. They were written in Greek I believe, but the oldest version I've read dates to the 1500s. I'm not a great scholar of language unfortunately so don't know much more than that.
The 1500s version:
Ἐγώ εἰμι τὸ Α καὶ τὸ Ω ἀρχὴ καὶ τέλος, λέγει ὁ κύριος ὁ ὢν καὶ ὁ ἦν καὶ ὁ ἐρχόμενος ὁ παντοκράτωρ
From the Stephanus Novum Testamentum Graece, 1550.
Exodus 3 14, from the Hebrew Bible, called the Old Testament by Christians is the earlier use.
As was referenced by @Bet
I'm gonna split some hairs, but that passage has the name rendered as "I Am" and "I Am Who I Am"/"I Am That I Am" in every English version I could find, and my cursory search on Bible Gateway for "The One Who Is" netted a lot of "the one who is x", with only the Revelation passage (sometimes) giving a clear "the one who is" as part of some variation of "the one who is and was and is to come".
Though, the Good News Translation does have "The one who is called I AM" for Exodus 3:14.
I'm going to let someone who reads Hebrew and or Greek take this further if they want to.
My language study is a long time ago.
But I don't think it's as simple as what you explained.
Edit, also I trust OP when he says it is a Jewish tradition.
There are many more than ten times the Christians in the world than Jews, so proportionally, I'd say it's a Jewish thing.
Checkmate, atheists!
As a counter example; if Christians outnumber Jews 20:1 but 10% of Christians and 99% of Jews used the phrase, would you still say it’s a “predominantly Christian” saying just because of sheer volume? Or does the use-per-capita have more weight than just overall use?
I was aware that Hebrew folk (and others) put various constraints on referencing God. I had not heard this one before, but it had an intriguing ring to it. Kinda like the “I Am,” but with more meaning. It also more poetically distinguishes an acknowledgement of a true vs false god.
Not the commenter who commented your looking-for-that-missed-connection comment, but, just as a general possible answer, that strikes me as an Exodus 3:14 reference. Some religious traditions simply preclude the direct use of a name, considering doing so to be profane. It’s not necessarily uncommon. Also, sometimes it’s just another ‘name’ in and of itself.
This is the passage where the god of Israel is understood to have revealed some aspect of his personal name to the prophet Moses.
Ex. 3:14
The particular phrase that traces to the heart of OP's question is:
And the particular epithet is the word ehyeh (אהיה or AHYH, where A is a prefix that indicates which person is being used, in this case first).
The base word for ehyeh is hayah (היה or HYH) and it acts as part of a series of words that, when overlaid onto each other, come to form the Tetragrammaton:
@krellor has also pointed out Rev. 1:18, a passage in the Christian New Testament. What makes it fascinating is the way the verse directly points to the above word-play by dissecting what would have been the Greek pronunciation for the Tetragrammaton, "iaō", spelled ΙΑΩ in the Septuagint.
The careful choice of these three letters cleverly succeed in preserving the theme of "is, was, and will be" so integral to the divine title itself.
EDIT: Just a little formatting.
I just used it because it's one of the interpretations of YHWH I've heard in the past, and I was talking about a Jewish ethnostate.
I should know by now that trying to be clever usually just gets me in trouble. Sorry if I confused you.
Not confused, just curious. Thanks for sharing. I think it’s a good expression.
It's not perfect, but you can search a site for text by using google, with the query format
site:url.com "query string", where url.com is in this case tildes.net.https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Atildes.net+"the+one+who+is"
Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to return any results relevant to your inquiry. It's possible the page in question isn't indexed, or wasn't indexed at the point when a particular comment was made.
Interestingly, the same query does turn up the right answer on DuckDuckGo: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q="the+one+who+is"+site%3Atildes.net
My bet is just that google indexed the page prior to the comment being made and hasn't refreshed it yet, whereas DDG did so after the comment.
Ahh, thanks for the explanation.. I also tried this trick on google and was a bit confused why it wasnt working.
Most people have given you the info you're looking for. I wanted to add a small note about it, the implication of the concept of God from the Jewish and Christian tradition is that this is a core definition of God, i.e. that he "is"...has always existed, and always will.
You may already know that, but just in case.