“And the son of the Israelite woman pierced The Name and cursed. And they brought him before Moses. His mother’s name was Shelomith, daughter of Dibri of the tribe of Dan” (Leviticus 24.11).
The October sun has set, though it’s not yet night when Jim and Will, the two protagonists of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, meet Mr. Dark, the proprietor of the carnival that is more than it appears to be. And when asked, both boys—for reasons neither can articulate—give false names. Something in them, maybe something older than the carnival itself, senses the danger of giving their real names. Without spoiling the story, the boys are right to be wary.
Names thread in and out of Something Wicked, some hidden and some lost. The twisted and grotesque figures in the tent of “freaks” all have stage names—the lava eater, the skeleton—by which they are known. Almost as though their real names, like their bodies, experienced some sort of violence. As though Mr. Dark bore into them, and tore away what made them who they were.
Leviticus twenty-four is a story of names. It involves a nameless son of an Egyptian father and Israelite mother who commits an act of violence against the Divine Name. The act, traditionally translated as blasphemy, implies a piercing or a boring into of the Divine Name. Our nameless man attempted to strike out, to drive a spike into the heart of God. Perhaps with similar intent to Mr. Dark’s: to steal the name and leave behind something that lay in his control.
It’s a story that’s echoed in other familiar stories in Scripture. Adam and Eve are tempted by the prospect of being gods themselves. Perhaps they imagined the fruit they devoured would give them knowledge of the only part of creation they did not name, over which they didn’t feel they had control.
And, centuries after, humans would again attempt to bring God under their control, piercing with iron in place of words, committing a violence that wanted to erase the Divine from history. Leave him, if you will, as twisted and broken as the carnival skeleton or the side show lava-swallower.
But such violence doesn’t leave the thief unchanged.
Our villain in this passage, like Mr. Dark, could not work such violence to a name and leave his own intact. In reaching and grasping for the Holy Name, he lost his own. He stopped being who he was, who he could have been, to become nameless, no one.
I imagine you, like me, don’t have a carnival to populate or the desire to drill a hole into the heart of The Name. But, I wonder how often I’ve done no different when I treat someone else with impatience or distain. Am I twisting them in my mind into something else, attempting to rename them as burden or fool? Have I, in the days and years of life, struck out to leave little holes in the names of others I could put my fingers into? Did I, like the villains of these stories, attempt to steal another’s name?
And how much of mine did I lose?
Holy One, help me hold every name sacred.