Names of God

A number of traditions have lists of many names of God, many of which enumerate the various qualities of a Supreme Being. The English word "God" is used by multiple religions as a noun or name to refer to different deities. Ancient cognate equivalents for the word "God" include proto-Semitic El, biblical Hebrew Elohim (God or/of gods), Arabic 'ilah (a or the god), and biblical Aramaic Elah (God). The personal or proper name for God in many of these languages may either be distinguished from such attributes, or homonymic. For example, in Judaism the tetragrammaton is sometimes related to the ancient Hebrew ehyeh (I will be).

Correlation between various theories and interpretation of the name of "the one God", used to signify a monotheistic or ultimate Supreme Being from which all other divine attributes derive, has been a subject of ecumenical discourse between Eastern and Western scholars for over two centuries. In Christian theology the word must be a personal and a proper name of God; hence it cannot be dismissed as mere metaphor. On the other hand, the names of God in a different tradition are sometimes referred to by symbols. The question whether divine names used by different religions are equivalent has been raised and analyzed.

Shemhamphorasch

The Shemhamphorasch (alternatively Shem ha-Mephorash or Schemhamphoras, originally Shem HaMephorash (שם המפורש)) is an originally Tannaitic term describing a hidden name of God in Kabbalah (including Christian and Hermetic variants), and in some more mainstream Jewish discourses. It is composed of either 4, 12, 22, 42, or 72 letters (or triads of letters), the last version being the most common.

12-, 22-, and 42-letter versions

Maimonides thought the Shem ha-Mephorash was used only for the four letter Tetragrammaton.

A 12-letter variant appears in the Talmud, though it was unknown in later Kabbalah and completely absent from Jewish magic.

A 22-letter variant is first written down in Sefer Raziel HaMalakh, without interpretation, as אנקתם פסתמ פספסים דיונסים (likely transliterated as Anaktam Pastam Paspasim Dionsim). Its origins are unknown, with no connection to Hebrew or Aramaic being found, and no agreement on any particular Greek or Zoroastrian origin. There are Geonic precedents for the name, indicating that the name is older than Sefer Raziel.

The Nine Billion Names of God

"The Nine Billion Names of God" is a 1953 science fiction short story by Arthur C. Clarke. The story was among the stories selected in 1970 by the Science Fiction Writers of America as one of the best science fiction short stories published before the creation of the Nebula Awards. It was published in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, 1929–1964. In 2004 it won the retrospective Hugo Award for Best Short Story for the year 1954.

Plot summary

This short story tells of a Tibetan lamasery whose monks seek to list all of the names of God, since they believe the Universe was created for this purpose, and that once this naming is completed, God will bring the Universe to an end. Three centuries ago, the monks created an alphabet in which they calculated they could encode all the possible names of God, numbering about 9,000,000,000 ("nine billion") and each having no more than nine characters. Writing the names out by hand, as they had been doing, even after eliminating various nonsense combinations, would take another 15,000 years; the monks wish to use modern technology to finish this task more quickly.