In Isaiah 52:5, the prophet accuses Israel of profaning God’s Name by their sins. So: what does it mean to sanctify God’s Name? One path to understanding it might be to turn it on its head and to ask first what it might mean to profane God’s Name. In other words, “hallowed be Thy Name” in this petition might be rendered, “may Your Name be sanctified”. The word “hallow” is of course the Greek agiazo, meaning “to make agios, or holy, to sanctify”. I suppose the story illustrates the danger of using archaic language-or perhaps of not enunciating clearly.
He had thought it was actually “Jehovah” or something like that, but felt on the basis of the Lord’s Prayer that it must be “Harold”. He thought that the adults were saying of God, “Harold be Thy Name” and concluded, not unnaturally, that God’s Name must be “Harold”. He had no clue what the word “hallow” meant, but he knew several children in his class at school by the name of “Harold”. Indeed the (possibly apocryphal) story is told of how a little boy heard the adults at church saying the Lord’s Prayer and praying “Hallowed be Thy Name” and didn’t understand what they could possibly mean. Thus, the Name we are to hallow is God’s manifested reputation for power in the world, His ability to save His people.Īnd what does it mean to “hallow” something? The word “hallow” is quite archaic, and is scarcely used outside religious circles. Here it is clear that God’s “name” is synonymous with His “might”. Thus Psalm 54:1: “Save me, O God, by Your name, and vindicate me by Your might”. One feature of Hebrew poetry is its parallelism, wherein the poet says something one way and then repeats it another way. We see this, for example, in the prokeimenon for Wednesday Vespers. God’s Name, therefore, is identical with His power. He had not manifested Himself with such power before (Exodus 6:3), but now He would. He could do whatever He pleased-including liberate Israel from Egypt.
His power was untrammelled and His acts were not conditioned by anyone. In response God replied, “I am who I am”-i.e. They were not asking for His verbal tag, but inquiring after His credentials and whether or not He had what it took to overcome the gods of Egypt and defeat the world’s greatest superpower. This was not a request for a verbal identifier they knew that He was the God of Abraham whom they had been worshipping. When He revealed Himself to Moses at the burning bush and told him that He was calling him to bring to Israel the message of impending liberation from Egypt, Moses foresaw that Israel would be sceptical and would ask, “What is His name?” (Exodus 3:13). God’s Name also embodied His essential nature. Thus one might be given a different name if one embraced a different destiny: Abram became Abraham when God called him to the father of a multitude, and Simon bar-Jonah became Kephas (or Peter) when the Lord called him to be His apostle.
It was otherwise in the Old Testament, where a name embodied a person’s essential nature. It hardly matters the name is simply a label worn so that one can be picked out in a group. For us, a name hardly differs from a number: one may say (as in the Village), “You are Number Six”, or “You are Lawrence” or “You are Barsanuphius”. In our culture, a name is simply a verbal tag, a number of syllables by which someone is specifically identified and differentiated from others. To understand this petition we must first understand the Hebrew significance of a name. We turn now to the next petition: “Hallowed be Thy Name”.
#Hallowed be thy name meaning series
We continue in this series with our examination of the Lord’s Prayer phrase by phrase, using Matthew’s version of the Prayer.
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