Vehuiah

The technique that produces the seventy-two names is arithmetical, and it can be checked by anyone with a Hebrew Bible.

Exodus 14:19, 14:20 and 14:21 are three consecutive verses in the account of the crossing of the sea. Each contains, in the received Hebrew consonantal text, exactly seventy-two letters. That equality is the whole basis of the system, and it is a real property of the text rather than a claim about it.

The three verses are then read in a boustrophedon, literally an ox-turning, the pattern of a plough moving down one furrow and back up the next. The first verse is taken left to right in the sequence of its letters, the second in reverse, the third forward again. Taking the first letter of each verse in that arrangement gives a group of three letters; the second letter of each gives the next; and so on to the seventy-second. The result is seventy-two three-letter groups.

Those groups are the Shem ha-Mephorash in the sense the phrase carries in this tradition: the divine name, divided. Each is then made pronounceable by a suffix, either -el or -yah, both of which are divine elements in ordinary Hebrew names, and the seventy-two become names of angels.

Two features of the arrangement are worth noting. It is symmetrical and it is exhaustive: every letter of all three verses is used, once, with nothing left over and nothing repeated. And it is not stated in Exodus. The text of the crossing narrative gives no hint that it is to be read this way. The technique is imposed on it, by later readers, for reasons the passage itself does not supply.

The seventy-two-fold name is regularly presented as ancient, and the impression is usually created by leaving the dates out. They are worth putting in, because this is the claim about the system a knowledgeable reader will check first.

The Talmud discusses divine names of unusual length. At Kiddushin 71a it speaks of a name of twelve letters and a name of forty-two letters, with rules about who might be taught them. It does not describe a name of seventy-two letters, and it does not describe the Exodus 14 derivation.

The earliest clear attestation of the technique is Rashi, the northern French commentator who died in 1105. Commenting on Sukkah 45a, on the phrase ani va-ho, he writes that these belong among the seventy-two names which are marked out in the three adjacent verses in the portion Beshallach, and he then names them: va-yissa, va-yavo bein machaneh, and va-yet Mosheh et yado. Those are Exodus 14:19, 14:20 and 14:21. The method is set out, in a standard commentary, at the end of the eleventh century.

The Bahir, a foundational Kabbalistic text usually placed in the second half of the twelfth century, works with the same material, and the Zohar, from the late thirteenth, elaborates it at Beshallach 52a. The Sefer Raziel ha-Malakh tradition carries it further.

So the sequence is: a Talmudic interest in long divine names, without this one; an eleventh-century commentator who describes this one as already known; and a medieval Kabbalistic literature that develops it.

That is a respectable pedigree of roughly nine hundred years. It is not a biblical one, and the system should not be allowed to borrow authority it does not have.

The phrase now attached to a list of seventy-two angels began as something considerably narrower.

Shem ha-Mephorash is usually rendered the explicit, distinguished, or separated Name. In its earliest usage it refers to the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter name of God, and specifically to the pronunciation of it that was reserved. The Mishnah, at Yoma vi.2, describes the high priest on the Day of Atonement pronouncing the Name, and the people prostrating themselves on hearing it. That is the setting: a name spoken aloud once a year, in one place, by one man, and otherwise substituted for in reading.

After the destruction of the Temple the pronunciation lapsed, and the tradition of substitution hardened. The Talmudic passages about names of twelve and forty-two letters belong to the same world, restricted knowledge, transmitted under conditions, about how the divine name might be extended or expressed.

The later application of the phrase to the seventy-two-fold derivation is therefore an extension. It takes a term for the ineffable name of God and applies it to a set of seventy-two syllables extracted from a narrative passage by a counting procedure. Whether that extension is a natural development of the idea or a substantial change of subject is a question on which the tradition itself is not univocal.

There is a further shift when the seventy-two are given suffixes and treated as angels. At that point the names are no longer parts of the divine name at all; they are the names of created beings, each with a domain. What began as a way of speaking about God has become a directory of intermediaries.

Both usages are current, often in the same book, and readers should be aware that the phrase does not mean one thing.