There is a problem with names. Yes…a problem with names. And although it may not seem as such, this is a very important topic as far as The Exorcist is concerned. I mentioned this in an early part of this serial essay, and now it is time to take a closer look. You want a name to frame the Templars, you get the weird name Baphomet…but you don’t use it? The Inquisitors researched this and realized that the head was believed, by the Templars, to be the head of Mahomet, and as such, would only prove the Templars to be knights in the service of Christianity. So they decided not to include the name in the official charges. Now I will make a brief comment about something that I will be discussing in further detail in another essay. When Regan met Karras for the first time, she attempted to sell the possession-story that Chris had come up with after learning the truth about the nature of Burke Denning’s death. She was helped behind the scenes by someone who identified Father Karras as very open to manipulation. He appears much more so in the novel in a scene where he walks into Regan’s bedroom. She is urinating and defecating into diapers and producing a steady stream of vomit in the Style of Anna Eklund…though with Regan, it didn’t look tobacco leaves. So the room would have smelt putrid…nauseating…challenging to the stomach. But as he enters the room, Regan yells out…

Smells like sauerkraut, doesn’t it?

Karras muses to himself…it does smell like sauerkraut! I don’t know what kind of sauerkraut that Novel Karras eats, but even Tlazy won’t show up for a hot-dog lunch with Karras. During their first meeting, Regan made a series of blunders, the biggest being the claim that she was…The Devil. Karras instantly showed how ridiculous this claim was. In all subsequent scenes, Regan never claims to be a specific spirit-entity…demonic or otherwise...although she does refer to an exorcism during Karras’s second meeting with her. In short, she never uses a name. The Roman Rite of Exorcism requires that the priest performing an exorcism make all efforts possible to get a name. Why? If you read through the ritual, you’ll find that it doesn’t differ based on whoever the spirit-entity is. There isn’t a ritual for Beelzebub, and a different one for Asag. The same ritual applies for any demon who many be involved. And! Since there may be more than one at the same time, you’d have to read any number of demon-specific ritual texts. And if the demon was particularly shrewd, and the ritual, to be effective, must be adapted to different demons, then all the demon need do is to refuse to give the exorcist his or her name, probably telling him where to go in the process. This is an important point. In the exorcism of Anna Eklund, which had a profound influence on The Exorcist, the young lady did not hesitate to throw out a bunch of names. And my what mistakes were made! First…Satan. The Roman Rite of Exorcism is not used against Satan for the very reason that Karras told Chris…Satan is not a demon. And boy is that true! Satan does not possess people…demons do. So Anna messed that up. Lucifer was ok, assuming that you believe that Lucifer and Satan aren’t the same guy, or you just made the same mistake. But she also said…Judas Iscariot. Judas, whatever you think of him, is not a demon…he’s just a dead guy, whether you think he was evil, or as is true in my mind…anything but evil. So that was a mistake. And then! Anna claimed that she was possessed by her father, and her aunt Mina. Now I will say that Anna Eklund’s problem was psychological, and I believe firmly that her father and aunt were responsible for the severe trauma she experienced. But any real priest would have heard those names and said that, although she is very sick, there are no demons. And I will add this…Judas Iscariot, Anna’s father Jacob, and her aunt Mina…if they were present…and were not demons? What would they be? The answer…ghosts. And ghosts are very different than demons. One basic premise underlying the existence of a ghost is that something terrible happened during the owner’s life, and so when that person died, the spirit could not rest or move on as a result. That, if possible, would be a sad thing. No such thing can happen in a universe created, ruled, and redeemed by the Living God…so have no fears or trepidations. In Anna’s case, this would not seem to apply to Jacob or Mina…it would have applied to Anna, if she were the deceased person. Jacob and Mina simply died and are awaiting judgement before God…and if I’m right about what happened…I’m glad I’m not in their shoes. In another brilliant movie I’ve referred to on this website…The Changeling…Joseph, a murdered little boy, could not rest or move on until the right had been wronged. And the dynamics of that are, or so I think, very interesting. Joseph’s father, who had murdered him, was long since dead…so the ghost couldn’t have achieved the death of his father as a climatic event. So what did Joseph want? Well, he was an angry child…very angry…and what had to happen to allow him to obtain what he needed was patently unreasonable and unfair. After killing Joseph, his father went to Europe and obtained another child Joseph’s age, and brought him home, maintaining the lie that Joseph was still safe, sound, and very much alive. And Pseudo-Joseph never knew the truth until the very end. And what did Real Joseph demand?

As a necessary prelude to a point that I will be making about names, I will point out that in ancient texts, Hebrew is written without vowels…only consonants. That means that to know what the word is, you need to add the vowels (called “pointing”). Yes, that is a difficult thing! You don’t know what the word is until you add the vowels, but to add the vowels to the word…you have to know what the word is! And since Hebrew texts prior to subsequent translations such as the ancient Greek version known as the Septuagint (the Prime Mover behind the creation of the Virgin Birth of Christ myth as it was understood by the redactors who added the Gospel of the Young Jesus to the front of the older version of the Gospel of Matthew) were unpointed, i.e. lacking the vowels, translating the text into Greek was not simply a case of translation. To translate a Hebrew word into Greek, you have to know the Hebrew word. But since the Hebrew words were unpointed, the translator first had to figure out what word the Hebrew consonants indicate before he could then translate it. And since many Hebrew words can be any number of words depending upon which vowels are assigned to the consonants, one can understand why there are such significant differences between the ancient Hebrew version of the Old Testament and the ancient Greek version of the Old Testament. Here is a good illustration of this point…Jeremiah 3: 1-2. This is a translation of the Hebrew text:

They say that if a man divorces his wife, and so she leaves him and marries another man…can the first man return to her?
Wouldn’t such a land as that be greatly polluted? Yet you have played the harlot with many shepherds…yet return to me?
Lift up your eyes and look at the desolate heights, where have you not been perverse?
You have sat by the roadside looking wantonly…like a bedouin in the wilderness.

 This is a translation of the Septuagint Greek version:

If a man puts his wife away, and so she leaves him and marries another man…can she yet return to him?
Won’t she be utterly defiled? Yet you have played the hartlot with many shepherds, and yet have return to me.
Life up your eyes and look straight ahead, and see the place where you have not been defiled.
You have sat for them by the side of the road like a deserted crow.

My aren’t those readings different. The first thing the translator did was to realize that there was a problem with the Hebrew text being translated. The Hebrew version does not directly state why the hypothetical woman was divorced. It isn’t stated until the next verse. But the Hebrew presents a dramatic problem…

can the first man return to her?      You have played the harlot with many lovers…yet return to me?

The two questions are contradictory…the first husband can’t return to her, yet she has returned to him. The Greek translator corrected this error.

 can she yet return to him? Yet you have played the hartlot with many shepherds, and yet have return to me.

English versions will translate…shepherds…as…lovers. The reference to shepherds is problematic, since we’re soon to hear about the wilderness, and shepherds aen’’t mentioned again until Jer 3:15. But what is the people of God like? Are they like a bedouin…i.e. a person who wanders from place to place, never being in any one place very long, or are they like a crow? How can the Hebrew and Greek versions be so different on this point?

This is the phrase in question. Since ancient Hebrew texts don’t include the vowel pointing (the little marks above and below the consonants, we will have to remove them…

The first consonant is a preposition…like. The final letter, a yod, indicates the construct state relative to the words that follow…of the wilderness. I will remove these letters, and we will then have our tri-literal root word…

And here is our word…

Those are the three consonants of the noun in question. Remembering that ancient Hebrew texts do not provide vowels, and knowing that a tri-literal root can be many different words based on the vowels to be added, the translator could not simply translate the word. He first had to figure out what the word is, then add the vowels, thereby determining what the word is, and only then can he translate. The Hebrew text is problematic, so he chose to go by the overall context…in particular, the reference to the wilderness. In other words…if God’s people have something in the wilderness…what do you find in the wilderness?

So the Greek translator added the vowels to the tri-literal root and ended up with…crow; crow in the sense of a carrion bird…a wild bird you would find in the wilderness. But that is not the word that the later Massoretic Hebrew text…i.e. with the vowels added…chose. They gave the tri-literal root word different vowels…

This word means…bedouin, and gives rise to the English word…Arab. So both translators first had to determine what the word is, and both came to very different conclusions. It is the lack of vowels in the ancient Hebrew texts that has caused so many translational problems.

So how does this have anything to do with the names of Supposed Spirit Beings? If one is trying to sell a My Child Is Possessed By A Demon And We Need An Exorcism scheme, the natural instinct would be to give Karras the name of an Offending Spirit Being. Well, for the MacNeils, the names Beelzebub or Molech must have been tempting. Surely if you throw out a demon name, growl, howl, and say naughty things…wouldn’t that make it easier to convince someone that the claim is real? No. There is a whole biography that surrounds spirit-entities…a body of knowledge…a bunch of nonsense, of course…but a body of knowledge, nonetheless. And you can bet that those behind the scheme don’t know it. And the details that would end that scheme! In the case of the two best names to throw out…Beelzebub or Molech, the use of either name would instantly have proven that Chris and Regan had no idea what they were talking about. I begin with…Molech. He is a deity appearing in the Old Testament, and one who might seem perfect because of the supposedly gruesome rituals associated with him, including the sacrifice of children, and something described as …passing through the fire…in reference to children. Don’t take such things too literally…wine is the blood of Christ and you drink it during Communion. Human beings love gruesome things, and so all manner of Cotton-Matherlike-Horrific-Fantasies have been elicited by Molech…

The depictions of a red hot statue that you place a hapless child into its burning hands…these are based on the cult of…

…Baal-Hammon, worshipped by the Carthaginians. He was equated with Molech, and so now you get Baal-Hammonish images violently shoved into the Biblical context. You may have noticed that Baal-Hammon looks nothing like the weird Molech idol just shown. Still, there’s one small problem…his name wasn’t Molech…Molech isn’t a name. Earlier I discussed the problems translating the Hebrew text as a result of not having the all-important-vowels provided. However, there are instances when the redactors of the Massoretic text intentionally distorted what they knew to be the original word.

That’s the tri-literal root underlying the name of the pagan deity. This root appears over and over again in the Old Testament as…

This is the Hebrew word…king. David was a melek, Solomon was a melek. But to get to the name…Molech, you have to add different vowels…

Now you have Molech, although I don’t know why you would want him. However, in most instances of the appearance of this name in the Old Testament, the Greek translators used the word…

…which means…king. In only three instances does the Greek use the name…Molech, or Molox.

For what it’s worth, I don’t believe that the ritual of passing a child through the fire was turning the child into a living burnt offering.  I think it was simply a symbolic ritual that didn’t harm the child. Still, is the Septuagint, in its basic translation…king, actually right? If so, then why…Molech? Here’s a suggestion. Take this Hebrew word…

…another tri-literal root. And as we all know, we don’t have a word until we have the vowels. And we can’t translate a word until we know what it is…

There we go! We add the vowels and we get the Hebrew word for…shame…shameful, disgusting thing. If we wanted to take a shot at a loathsome pagan deity, believing him to be a disgusting, shameful thing, we could take the vowels from…bosheth, and add them to the tri-literal root noted earlier…

Melek is now Molech…a disgusting thing. Is there more proof? Yes! Following the death of King Saul during a battle with the Philistines, his son took over. Not Jonathan, David’s friend, who died during the battle. And David himself had not seized power over all of Israel yet. Son? Yes, his name was Eshbaal, or…Ashbaal, or…Ishbaal. The component…Baal, would appear to be the title of a specific Canaanite deity…known as Hadad…the Storm-bringer. He was often referred to as…Baal, a Hebrew word that means…lord…high-ranking person…commander. Baal is NOT a name! Hadad Ha-Baal…Hadad the Lord. That is his name and his title put together in the same phrase. Another version of the name Ishbaal is…Ish-Bosheth…man of shame. The redactors have substituted “shame” for “Baal” as an insult directed at Hadad. And I would maintain that melek was nothing more than a title for Hadad…Hadad the King. Unless you want to insult him. Go ahead, he has it coming. Still, there never was a pagan deity, or demon for that matter, named Molech, although it has a very demonlike-sound to it. So if Regan or Chris had thrown out the name…Molech, they would have made a serious blunder, and just proved that they were full nonsense since, or so it seems fair to expect, a demonic entity wouldn’t use the incorrect name for himself…particularly when the incorrect name is actually an insult. So too…

Now Ahaziah had fallen through the lattice of his upper room in Samaria and injured himself. So he sent messengers, saying to them, “Go and consult Baal-Zebub, the god of Ekron, to see if I will recover from this injury.” But the angel of the Lord said to Elijah the Tishbite, “Go up and meet the messengers of the king of Samaria and ask them, ‘Is it because there is no God in Israel that you are going off to consult Baal-Zebub, the god of Ekron?’

 But when the Pharisees heard this, they said, “It is only by Beelzebul, the prince of demons, that this man drives out demons.”

But some of them said, "By Beelzebul, the prince of demons, he is driving out demons."

The first passage is 2 Kings 1: 2-3, 6, and 16, and references a god worshipped at the Philistine coastal city of Ekron. It seems as though someone should have told Ahaziah that it wasn’t safe to walk across a flimsy lattice on his roof. He was badly injured, and he realized that he needed divine assistance. The prophet Elijah intercepted Ahaziah’s emissaries, and sent them back to the king with a very important message.
The second passage is from Matthew 12:24, and the third passage is from Luke 11:15. Both describe an unpleasant encounter between some Pharisees and Jesus on the question of his miracles of healing. And the reading…Beelzebul is rather odd, since the name is clearly…Baal-Zebub in 2 Kings. Now I have stated several opinions about the material in Matthew in other essays on this website, including my belief that Beelzebub was never mentioned in this context, indicated by the fact that Jesus ends up referring to Satan, not Beelzebub. I also see a Satan Substitution in the story of the temptation in the wilderness, where, or so I believe, Jesus went to face Azazel, not Satan. I have also taken the position that the rebuke placed in the mouths of the Pharisees is aimed particularly at the man being healed…he, like Ahaziah, did not seek the institutions of Jewish religion for assistance…he sought the aid of an outsider, which is exactly what Ahaziah did. The only reference to Baal-Zebub in the Old Testament is in the story of King Ahaziah, so the designation…prince of demons…which is put into the mouths of the Pharisees, has no Old Testament attestation. In Hebrew…

What makes this divine epithet so fascinating is the word…

…although it is technically singular, it is essentially plural…swarm of flies. So the god of Ekron’s name means…Lord of Flies…Vermin Lord. The classic depiction of Baalzebub is as a giant fly…

 A good-sized fly-swatter and splat! Or even a big spider would do the trick! How about a spider with only two legs, two feet, two arms, and two hands…

Well, that’s a Regan MacNeil Spider-walking Spider-girl! I’ve written about the original version of the spider-walk scene. In that scene Regan begins coming down the stairs Tummy-up and Bottom-down. But she flips around before Chris or Sharon see her in the aforementioned contorted bodily posture. She then comes down the stairs on all fours, begins flicking her weird tongue, and crawls off in pursuit of Sharon. The scene was removed for different stated reasons, but the removal did result in an apparent error in the scene during the final exorcism where she flicks this weirdly shaped tongue at Karras, leaving this scene the only one featuring the tongue, and thus leaving this scene otherwise unattested. I said an apparent error, since leaving the tongue in that shot leaves it in squarely in the mind of Karras, who is also the only one to see Mr. The Face with his tongue hanging out. There is no doubt that the addition of a Spider-walk scene in the Director’s Cut was absolutely the right idea, and just as right of an idea was that the original Spider-walk scene wasn’t it. It is silly, and would clearly depict Regan doing something, having something, that is not fitting with the film. The version with the bloody-mouth and/or nose…

…has the advantage of being really cool, fits the story found in the Director’s Cut perfectly, and…which is most important…fits in perfectly with my interpretation of the film. And I really dig the fact that the Spider-walk is something that can really be done, as contortionist Linda Hager proved…

I have also argued that Regan…

…came down the stairs on all fours, and then reared up, howling…growling…and showing the blood running from her nose and mouth. But a Regan Spider Girl could make short work of Purely Insectoid Baa-Zebub. Here is another image of the Vermin Lord…

I didn’t know he was an archer. Now for the weirdest image of Fly Guy I have found yet…

…whatever. Here, he takes the stage with The Boss…Satan…

And here he…

…appears in a musical context. If Captain Howdy was an Orange Scottish Highlander Playing His Bagpipes, here we meet Beelzebub playing his bagpipes, which just so happen to be shaped like a monk’s head.
It seems rather strange that this name appears only in these two contexts. And one is left wondering why anyone would worship a god name Vermin Lord, and, in particular, why a king who was badly injured falling through a lattice would want the help of a guy who sounds like he brings loads of infection in his wake. Actually, it’s not hard to see what has happened. The god in question is really Baal Hadad…Lord Hadad. Often, in the Old Testament, the title Baal, rather than the name…Hadad, which is only used in the context of the Syrian kings known as Ben-Hadad (son of Hadad), obviously a name used by successive Syrian kings, is used. I think the original text looked like this…

Baal, the god of Ekron. But Old Testament redactors decided that taking a shot at Baal Melek wasn’t sufficient, so they decided to take a shot at Baal in the context of king Ahaziah’s injury. But we need some extra space…

So as a self-appointed metaphorical Old Testament redactor, one keen to give Baal a black-eye, I have inserted a space between “Baal” and “god of Ekron.”

I have constructed my insult by inserting…of vermin…into his name, and so we get…

 Baal of Filth, God of Ekron…take that! And of all demons, i.e. as distinct from Satan or Lucifer, his is the name that most people will recognize. And so if Chris decided that it would be best if Regan gave Karras a name, Beelzebub is the most likely, and had this name been used, then it would have proven that the whole claim of demon possession is baloney, since the spirit-entity in question was really named Baal Hadad, and he would never have claimed the name that was really an insult concocted by Old Testament redactors. And I can see no way around the conclusion that the only reason why Chris and Regan refrained from doing what just about everyone else would have felt compelled to do…give a name to seal the deal with Karras, is because they were being advised on how to handle this matter.

Karras has just had his second meeting with Regan, and obtained the tape he would use to overcome the failure of Regan to speak in foreign languages. Chris has just finished up her phone conversation with Howard, and Karras has entered the study and sat down on the couch. There are plenty of women who drink beer, particularly if they are around men, but in my opinion the glass of beer sitting on the coffee table is not Chris’s glass of beer. No, I think that before Karras arrived, Chris had a meeting with her Spiritual and Karras-Oriented Advisor, who was steering her way through obtaining the exorcism. And I think that it was that very man who told Chris…Regan must not refer to the Devil ever again and under no circumstances is she to give Karras a name…Beelzebub or Molech included. She stuck with…we…us…which avoided a pitfall that most people trying to pull off what Chris was trying to pull off would have fallen right into, and created a far darker and diabolical atmosphere as Regan refuses to identify who we and us…actually are. Oddly enough, Karras told Merrin that there were three personalities in Regan, and just as he was about to go into who they were, Merrin cut him off with…there is but one. What a shame! I would give anything for Karras to have finished his thought.
I will offer one more example that shows how interesting all of this truly is. In Job 1 we find out a lot of things. First, the “sons of God” are having a conference. You can call them angels…but they are not angels…they are the “sons of God.” They are, in fact, divine beings…lesser gods in the service of the Big God. We also meet The Satan. He is present during this conference, and he is there because he is one of the “sons of God.” I will point out, but not dwell on the fact, that this character does not have a name. He does have a title, and his title is The Satan…the prosecutor…the accuser…the one who brings charges against someone. Christianity adopted this character, who appears in only one other context…the legal proceedings held in the presence of God, who is acting as judge, Satan, who is acting as the prosecutor, and The Malach of Yahweh is standing by the defendant…Joshua the High Priest…and is clearly serving as the defense attorney. The Satan is simply a title, and is not a name, any more than The Malach of Yahweh…Yahweh’s Messenger...is. A good reading of Job 1 could lead to a shocking conclusion. First, The Satan has no beef with Job. In fact, he simply comes walking by, and God asks him what he has been doing. Walking around on the earth, answers The Satan. Really? You must have seen my servant Job! No one is as righteous as him! He always chooses good and rejects evil! So we know that The Satan is really just minding his own business, though he will soon admit, he has seen Job. However, God brought up Job…The Satan did not bring him up, indicating that he really cared nothing about the Man from Uz. The Satan has heard God, and has seen Job, but is not impressed. Satan points out that Job is untested…God has given Job special protection, this includes his family, and just about everything else. He has not had to face the trials and tribulations that the rest of us face. The Satan asserts that should God revoke this special protection, and bad things happen, Job will…

Curse you to your face!

God does not counter this assertion. He gives no indication that The Satan is wrong on this point. That means that The Satan is…possibly correct. So God tells The Satan to give Job a good testing. What this means is that the awful things that happened to Job were the result of a…bet between God and The Satan…with God being the driving force behind it. Suddenly, bad things start happening. Job’s livestock is stolen by marauding bands…bad guys who previously could never touch job like they could everyone else in that part of the world…until now. And I’ll bet they’ve been itching to have a go at Job and his property for a long time. Then something puzzling happened…

 The fire of God fell from the Heavens and burned up the sheep and servants…

And only one survived, the guy who brought the news to Job. The Fire of God? Very cool name. It would seem that The Satan was not only the Great Prosecutor, he apparently was the Controller of the Fire of God! Then more marauders appeared and stole Job’s camels. That happened to me once! And then the worst news…

Yet another messenger arrived. And he said, “Your sons and daughters were feasting and drinking wine at your eldest son’s house…then a mighty wind swept in from the desert and knocked the house down…they are all dead.

A mighty desert wind? I sure hope Pazuzu hadn’t been there! So, did The Satan murder Job’s family? That is not what is said…oh, and Regan MacNeil didn’t do it either. Once the special protection was revoked, or so it would appear, a violent storm happened, and flattened the house of Job’s eldest son, killing everyone inside…except for the messenger.

Then we find Job declare…blessed be the name of Yahweh.

Things get worse during another conference, when The Satan shows up with the other “sons of God,” and is asked again by God whether he has seen how well Job has been holding up. The Satan gives the same answer as before. God appears to have won the bet…and He points this out to The Satan, who declares…

Skin for skin!

If God allows Job to become desperately ill, then, or so The Satan thinks, God will ultimately lose the bet. And so God allows The Satan to arrange for Job to experience something he apparently never had up that point…serious illness. So what happened? Satan said that Job would curse God, but Job blessed God, despite the horrible things that had happened. So who won the bet? God…right? It sure seems so…IN ENGLISH…in Hebrew, the matter is not quite so clear. And there is an amazing Linguistic Phenomenon that appears at this point. First, Job 1:11, where The Satan tells God that if Job loses his Special Protection, then he will…

Of course, a human can’t literarily stand in front of God the same way as a much maligned son of God with a peculiar title can. The translation here, in English, is…

He will curse you to your face!

Ok, but what does Job say?

The translation here, in English, is…

Blessed be the name of Yahweh!

However, even if you don’t know Hebrew, you can probably already see something very interesting when looking at the two phrases. It’s time to remove extraneous words. So now for Job’s great declaration…

“The Name of Yahweh” has been removed, leaving only the verb…

The verb is in the passive state, it is not active or causative…it functions as an adjective. That is connotated by the letter on the front of the word (mem) and the vowel points. The mem must come off if we’re going to get down to the tri-literal root word. So a few adjustments…

So what is the tri-literal root?

There it is..b-r-k. A simple passive form of this word is Baruch…the name of a scribe and friend of the prophet Jeremiah who began the process of writing Jeremiah’s prophesies in a series of scrolls…a name meaning…blessed. But what about what The Satan said? First, remove the extraneous word…

…and “to your face” is now gone, leaving…

This verb is in the future tense, and has a direct object attached as a suffix. So let’s remove those two elements…

Now lose the vowels, which are never original to the Hebrew text…

…there is one last thing. Some Hebrew consonants have two forms…one form if the consonant is the final letter at the end of the word. But if it isn’t, such as when it is carrying a direct object, is has a different form. In the tri-literal root just uncovered, the final consonant is a letter caph, and it cannot be written as the final letter in the form just uncovered. So it must be swapped out for its final form…

And that looks familiar! So The Satan said that Job would…

…b-r-k God to his face, and Job said…

…b-r-k be the name of God. And that is very interesting…

Yes! In an older Hebrew text lacking the vowels, Job did exactly what The Satan said he would do. And yes! The same Hebrew verb can mean both “bless” and “curse” depending upon the verb-form, context,  and what vowels you add to the consonants. So…who won the bet? Certainly the original consonant-only Hebrew text played on a very strange Linguistic Phenomenon whereby the same Hebrew word can mean one thing…and the exact opposite. If the same pointing is added to both words, then The Satan won the bet. But if we are to give Job the benefit of the doubt…then we add different vowels in each case and God wins the bet. Well, only temporarily. The bet continues yet again when God tells The Satan that he may strike Job with an illness whose main symptom is itchy boils on the skin, and I would remind my non-existent readers that the inhabitants of the Guinea Worm Capital of the World…Bukhara…had a tradition that it was actually…

 …Guinea worms from which Job suffered, which is interesting given the fact that as the worm begins to break through the skin, a boil…a Bukhara Boil…forms. The worm breaks through and you are left with a painful chancre. If you were in rural Kenya…boils certainly sound a lot like …

…Jigger fleas, which colonize the feet, spread to the knees, afflict the hands, and then the sky is the limit. Jigger infestation causes both intense itching, and considerable pain, usually leaving victims unable to walk and, ultimately, unable to use the hands. It certainly wasn’t…

…the painful boil left by the bite of the Tsetse fly, and it wasn’t leprosy. And Jigger fleas inhabitant dust, dry dirt, and gravel. Whatever it was, the question of Job’s medical affliction sets off the next stage of the bet. In my opinion, the consonantal text was written in such a way as to result in the posing of a very fascinating question for debate among students of the Bible…did God win the bet? Or did The Satan? So one can clearly see the disadvantage, not to mention the boringness, of the material in an English translation…it is the theological debate that is stimulated by the Linguistic Phenomenon that makes the material truly fascinating. In an earlier part of this serial essay, I spoke upon Elphias Levi’s Tetragrammaton pentagram, and I said that I would speak a bit more on that subject later on. Well, it is later on. I begin by again showing the relevant images of pentacles…

The figure on the far left is an inverted pentacle, or pentagram, and is the symbol that is commonly believed to be satanic. Next to it is the inverted pentagram of Eliphias Levi, the guy who invented the Baphomet image. It is inscribed with the name Samael…a spirit-being who is both a fallen angel and a ruler of demons, but nonetheless has not broken with God. Lilith is a name that appears in the Book of Isaiah in material describing the spooky things that live out in the desolate places in the wildnerness. In reality, Lilith is a type of owl, and one that makes a screetching sound that would cause a chill to shoot up your spine if you were stumbling around in some ancient ruins in the wilderness at the dead of night and you suddenly heard one. But Lilith was juiced up a bit, first becoming a female demon, and then becoming the first wife of Adam…his wife before Eve. It is not a satanic symbol. The head of Baphomet is in the middle showing that the pentacle on his forehead isn’t inverted anyway. To the right of Mr. Gorgeous is Eliphias’s Tetragrammaton Pentacle. Tetragrammaton means…The Four Letters, and is used to designate the proper name of the God of the Old Testament. How many Bible fanatics don’t know the name of their own God! It would be a real Lilith Hoot to quiz the Evangelicals and Fundamentalists…what is the name of the God of the Old Testament? And no…Lord, even when written…LORD…isn’t a name. Some might say…Jehovah! Yes! And that makes them considerably less Bible Illiterate than their peers. But Jehovah isn’t a name…it isn’t even a real word. The Tetragrammaton looks like this…

Basically, these are the Four Consonants of the The Tetragrammaton. Knowing that we need vowels to make a word, let’s see the vowels given to the Tetragrammaton.

…and you get…Jehovah. And so you know God’s name. Right? Wrong! In the Hebrew tradition, no one may say the name of God. So what happens when Torah is read aloud? Won’t you say the name of God and be struck dead? No. The vowels assigned to the Tetragrammaton are actually for the word…

…Adonai…Lord. The apparent difference in the first vowel point is due simply to the rules of Hebrew grammar. In the word…adonai, the consonant requires what is called a composite Shewa. But the rules of grammar don’t allow the composite Shewa under the consonant…yod (English “y”), and so it becomes a simple Shewa in that case. When you get to the Tetragrammaton, the vowels prevent you from accidentally saying the name of God, and prompt you to read…Lord…instead. The English reading…LORD…in English Bibles is alerting you to the fact that the word in the Hebrew text is the Tetragrammaton, distinguishing it from the simple word meaning…lord…noble…guy-in-charge-of-something. So there isn’t, and never was, a god named Jehovah. Darn! And so the Less Bible Illiterate Evanglicals and Fundamentalists become a bit more Bible Illiterate again. So what is the name of your God? It is believed to be…Yahweh…but that is an approximation.  How awkward it is that you can’t be sure that you KNOW THE NAME OF YOUR OWN GOD!