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Eight Formulas of Daily Liturgy, Two Turning on a Name Never Pronounced

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Eight Formulas of Daily Liturgy, Two Turning on a Name Never Pronounced

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Judaism Mantras gathers eight formulas, several of them the ordinary vocabulary of daily Jewish liturgy and two of them built around a name the tradition refuses to pronounce.

Amen and Alleluia are the atlas's clearest examples of a Hebrew word crossing untranslated into other liturgical languages: Amen entered Greek, Latin, Arabic and hundreds of vernaculars as an assent rather than a statement, and Alleluia entered Christian worship as pure sound, its second half the divine name in short form, mostly unrecognised by the congregations singing it. The Shema Yisrael, recited morning and evening and as the last words before death, and Barukh Atah Adonai, said by a traditional Jew a hundred times a day, are the two most repeated formulas of ordinary practice; Barukh Shem Kevod, said immediately after the Shema's first verse, is prescribed to be whispered on ordinary days and spoken aloud only on the Day of Atonement.

Two members turn on the tetragrammaton directly. Ana BeKhoach is public and printed in ordinary prayer books, but the forty-two-letter divine name its initials are said to encode is transmitted, in Kabbalistic sources, only to the fit, and no vocalisation is given here. The Pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton records the plainer fact behind that reticence: the name ceased to be transmitted after the Temple's destruction in 70 CE, and the atlas records that refusal rather than supplying a reconstruction.

Cross-Tradition Connections

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Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)
Sources
Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005View the Source
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