Shem ha-Mephorash: the history of the seventy-two names of God

With the Hebrew expression Shem ha-Mephorash, the “explicit” or “distinguished Name”, rabbinic literature originally referred to the Tetragrammaton as pronounced by the high priest in the Temple. In the course of the Middle Ages, however, the expression also came to designate a much longer name of God, made up of seventy-two groups of three letters each. Its history runs through biblical exegesis, Kabbalah, Renaissance scholarship and finally the learned magic of the early modern period.

Three verses of Exodus

The name derives from a passage in the book of Exodus, chapter 14, verses 19 to 21, which tells of the angel and the pillar of cloud during the crossing of the Red Sea. Each of the three verses contains exactly seventy-two letters in Hebrew. Writing the first in normal order, the second in reverse and the third again in normal order, and then reading the letters in columns, one obtains seventy-two triads, regarded together as a single great name.

The construction is mentioned by Rashi, the great French commentator of the eleventh century, in connection with a passage of the Talmud in the tractate Sukkah, and it appears in the Sefer ha-Bahir, one of the first kabbalistic texts, which circulated in Provence towards the end of the twelfth century. The number seventy-two also had other echoes in tradition, such as the seventy or seventy-two nations into which humanity was thought to have been divided after the tower of Babel.

The angels and the Psalms

By adding the divine suffixes -el or -yah to the triads, seventy-two angelic names were derived. In the Renaissance these lists were associated with verses of the Psalms, with five-degree sections of the zodiac and with other divisions of time. Johannes Reuchlin discussed them in his De arte cabalistica of 1517, one of the works that introduced Kabbalah to Christian humanists, presenting it as an ancient wisdom compatible with the Christian faith.

In the following century the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, in his Oedipus Aegyptiacus published in Rome in the mid-seventeenth century, presented a famous table in which the name of God was reproduced in seventy-two different languages, arranged in a radiating pattern. It was an idea akin to the kabbalistic one, joining the symbolic number to linguistic erudition and to the Baroque taste for universal synthesis.

From Kabbalah to the grimoires

The European magical tradition linked the same number to other lists. The Goetia, the first part of the Lemegeton or Lesser Key of Solomon, an English manuscript compilation of the seventeenth century, describes seventy-two spirits, each with a name and a seal; nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors set them in correspondence with the seventy-two angels. These are recent learned constructions, with no basis in the Jewish tradition from which the number came.

Historians of Kabbalah stress precisely this distance. In medieval Jewish mysticism the name of seventy-two triads was above all an object of contemplation and study, tied to meditation on the biblical text. Its transformation into a repertoire of entities to be invoked belongs to another story, that of Christian and occultist reception, which often simplified or misunderstood the sources.

Following the history of the seventy-two names means seeing how a textual detail, the identical number of letters in three consecutive verses, became the core of ever broader systems. Each age added something: rabbinic exegesis, medieval mysticism, Renaissance and Baroque erudition, and finally the magical compilations of the modern period.