Yesterday during morning worship, we sang a song about God being a good Father. Leo commented that, because we have the same Father, that makes us brothers and sisters, and my Mexican friend, Tony, quipped, "From another mother."
But the names of God I was considering yesterday and today tell a slightly different story. In Deuteronomy 32: 18, Moses is rebuking the people for forgetting and abandoning God. He says, "You deserted the Rock who fathered you - Tsur Yâlad; you forgot the God who gave you birth - El Hûl."
If you look up yâlad in a Hebrew dictionary, it literally means to father. All those begats and begottens in the Old Testament lists of family trees; those are yâlad. It describes the role of the man whose sperm provoked a new life.
If you look up hûl in the dictionary, there are a surprising variety of meanings. While the primary meaning is to carry or to give birth to someone, it carries the secondary meanings of to writhe in agony, to suffer torture, and even to twist or dance - a rather graphic picture of the labour pains a woman suffers when giving birth to a child.
In fact, if you keep reading through the Old Testament, yâlad is used for women and well as for men. When it refers to a man, it's translated, "begat" or "fathered." When it refers to a woman, it's translated, "bore" or "gave birth to." When Isaiah prophesied, "Unto us a child is born," or, "A virgin will conceive and bear a son," (Isaiah 9: 6 and 7: 14), the word used is yâlad.
In just one sentence, Moses is reminding the people that God has been both a Father and a Mother to them. He has cared for them from the very beginning, and yet they have abandoned Him.
Hûl is sometimes also translated as "formed" or "created" - the sense of God forming the child within the mother's womb. And although it's not the word used by the psalmist in Psalm 139, the psalm reminds us that not only was God with us even before our birth, He already had dreams and plans for our lives, if we later chose to embrace them. In every way, He is the God who gave us birth.
