God's Name
Isaiah 42:8
I am the LORD: that is my name: and my glory will I not give to another, neither my praise to graven images.


God has a name — not given to Him by Adam, or any finite creature, but self-uttered and self-imposed. The denomination which God prefers for Himself, the name which He chooses before all others as indicative of His nature, is I AM, or its equivalent, Jehovah. Whenever the word Jehovah is employed in the Old Testament as the proper name of God, it announces the same doctrine of His necessary existence that was taught to Moses when he was commanded to say to His people that I AM had sent him unto them. The English name for the Deity, our word God, indicates that He is "good" — making prominent a moral quality. The Greek and Latin world employed a term (θεος, deus) that lays emphasis upon that characteristic of the Deity whereby He orders and governs the universe. (This etymology is given by Herodotus, 2:52.) According to the Greek and Roman conception, God is the imperial Being who arranges and rules. But the Hebrew, divinely instructed upon this subject, chose a term which refers not to any particular attribute or quality, but to the very being and essence of God, and teaches the world that God must be — that He not only exists, but cannot logically be conceived of as non-existent.

(G. T. Shedd, D. D.)



Parallel Verses
KJV: I am the LORD: that is my name: and my glory will I not give to another, neither my praise to graven images.

WEB: "I am Yahweh. That is my name. I will not give my glory to another, nor my praise to engraved images.




Victor Emmanuel, Emancipator
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