shem

The standard lexicons (BDB, HALOT, DCH) treat this as a single noun with a wide but coherent range rather than as homonyms: the name of a person, place, or thing; reputation or fame; the name of God; acting in someone's authority; and the name that endures after death through memory and posterity. HALOT counts roughly 864 occurrences. The Akkadian cognate šumu (documented in CAD Š/III and AHw III, and studied in J. J. Stamm's Die akkadische Namengebung, 1939) carries the same polysemy: name, reputation, son and heir, and inscribed monument, showing that the range of the Hebrew word reflects a shared ancient Near Eastern conceptual grammar in which a name is the publicly available index of identity, sovereignty, and continuance. The Ugaritic cognate šm and the Katumuwa stele (edited by Dennis Pardee, BASOR 356, 2009) confirm the same picture for the West Semitic world. Matthew Suriano (A History of Death in the Hebrew Bible, 2018) and Karel van der Toorn (Family Religion in Babylonia, Syria, and Israel, 1996) integrate this ANE material into the biblical levirate, ancestor-memorial, and posterity texts. The theological dictionaries (TDOT vol. XV by F. V. Reiterer; TLOT by A. S. van der Woude; NIDOTTE by Allen P. Ross) stress that in Hebrew thought a name represents its bearer, which is why the name of the LORD functions as a way of speaking of God's revealed self, character, and presence rather than a label. A major twentieth-century debate concerned the Deuteronomic formula about God placing his name at the chosen sanctuary. Gerhard von Rad (Deuteronomium-Studien, 1947; Theologie des Alten Testaments, 1957) and Moshe Weinfeld (Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School, 1972) read this as a theological corrective that protects divine transcendence by locating only God's name, not God in his fullness, at the temple. Tryggve Mettinger (The Dethronement of Sabaoth, 1982) refined this into a three-way scheme opposing Deuteronomic Name theology to Priestly Glory theology. Three lines of subsequent critique have largely dismantled this consensus. Ian Wilson (Out of the Midst of the Fire, SBLDS 151, 1995) showed that Deuteronomy elsewhere depicts YHWH as closely present. J. Gordon McConville (Time and Place in Deuteronomy, 1994; Apollos commentary, 2002) argued that the Name/Glory dichotomy is a false binary. Most decisively, Sandra Richter (The Deuteronomistic History and the Name Theology, BZAW 318, 2002; VT 57, 2007) demonstrated that the phrase is a Hebrew calque on the Akkadian royal-monumental idiom šuma šakānu, to place a name, meaning that Deuteronomy asserts YHWH's sovereign claim on the sanctuary in the manner of a conqueror inscribing his name on a monument there, not a move toward theological abstraction. Richter's reading has been broadly endorsed by Daniel Block (NICOT Deuteronomy, 2012), Bill Arnold (VT 64, 2014), and others. Michael Hundley (VT 59, 2009) accepts her translation while arguing that adopting a royal idiom in a cultic context does not necessarily strip it of presence implications. Benjamin Sommer (The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel, 2009) remains a principal dissenter, defending a modified version of the view that the Deuteronomic Name is in the temple while God's body remains in heaven. The hypostasis question, whether the Name ever becomes a quasi-independent divine entity, is addressed by Larry Hurtado (One God, One Lord, 3rd ed. 2015), Jarl Fossum (The Name of God and the Angel of the Lord, 1985), and Charles Gieschen (Angelomorphic Christology, 1998), with the broad scholarly consensus resisting ontological hypostatization while recognizing that the biblical name-rhetoric supplies the conceptual seed for later Memra and Logos traditions.