The Sunday Mail
It’s possible, by now, that there may be some people wondering as to why I do not always use the word “God” in my articles, often preferring the word “Divine” instead.
Well, for one a name is “a sign standing for the personality, the achievements, the reputation, the character, the power and the glory of the one who wears it.”
There are products of human linguistic effort and in the ancient times they were descriptive as verbs. To practice the etymological method of interpretation, means discovering when that word came into use, why it thus came into use, and what it then means.
This would save us from an interpretation based on ignorance or arbitrariness.
In Greek the English word “God” is “Theos”, and this was when the Greek language ruled the world, the first language of the Christian Greek Scriptures (commonly called the “New Testament”). The word is derived from Greek “Zeus”, the supreme cosmic power, itself derived from Sanskrit “dyeus”, which means “to gleam or shine” in reference to the sun.
In Latin, “Theos” was translated into the language of the Roman Empire and that is “Deus” and this was derived from Greek “Zeus,” whose root is Sanskrit, “dyeus,” which gives us “dev” for good spirit. “Dyeus” means “to gleam or shine”.
In 476CE, the Western Roman Empire was conquered by a Germanic tribe, the Teutons under Gothic soldier Flavius Odoacer (433–493), and the Latin “Deus” was changed to German “Gotte/Gawd”.
In Teutonic expression, “Gotte/Gawd” (Old Norse, “Goth”), means “one who is invoked or sacrificed to” as a reference to their great grand ancestor.
It was later adopted to be a reference to the one supreme being.
Linguistic evidence links the root words for “day”, “sky” and “god” in all classical Indo-European languages and the name for the God of the Sky descends from the Proto-Indo-European word “deiuo” or “deiwo” meaning “clear sky” or “day light or day sky” (Winn, 1995: 20-23).
“English is primarily a West Germanic language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian dialects, brought to Britain by Germanic invaders and/or settlers in the 8th and 9th centuries from the places which are now called North West Germany and the Netherlands.”
Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th edition), says, “GOD – the common German (Teutonic) word for a personal object of religious worship … applied to all those superhuman beings of the heathen mythologies. The word ‘god’ on the conversion of the Teutonic races to Christianity was adopted as the name of the one Supreme Being…”
Webster’s 12th Century Dictionary (1st edition), says, “The word God is common to (Germanic) tongues … It was applied to (non-Christian) deities and later, when the (Germanic) peoples were converted to Christianity, the word was elevated to the Christian sense.”
The Oxford English Dictionary has this to say about “God”: “Derives from the Old Teutonic root gheu, meaning to invoke and to pour, as in a molten image.”
The American Heritage Dictionary says that the base root for God is “gheu”.
“The word God derives from the ancient Germanic word for Goddess in her Teutonic form, Goden, the sacred consort of the German (chief sky) cosmic force and (cosmic power of war) Woden (king of kings), who gave his name to the fourth day of our week, Woden’s Day, or as we now call it, ‘Wednesday’.”
James Hastings, in “Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics” (Vol 6 p 302), says, “After the conversion of the Teutons to Christianity the word came to be applied also to the Christian Deity…”
The word “God” received its scriptural attention only in 825CE. (Wim van den Dungen). Before that, the Nordic tribes associated “God” with a superman “able to influence the destiny of Nature and Man.” (cf Sacrificial Kingship)
“The word divine comes from the same source as the Sanskrit ‘div’, which means ‘to shine’, and appears in such words as div (heaven), divakara (the sun) and deva (a celestial being).
“The Divine is thus that which shines with its own light, or from within, and many of the ancients took the sun as its symbol, because from the sun shines forth all the light and heat and life of our world; while the moon stands ever against it as the symbol of matter, shining only with reflected light.” (Ernest Wood, “The Seven Rays”, 1915)
So in short for as long as we use the word “God”, we are invoking the mythical ancestor of a powerful historical Germanic tribe and theologically perpetuating ignorance!
