"He," being capitalized and all, obviously meant God. But something possessed me to pretend to think he was talking about the fifth letter of the Hebrew alphabet and to post this comment:
This is why God added He to the names of his chosen, changing Abram to Abraham, Sarai to Sarah. Definitely the most beautiful letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
I'm not sure why I left that comment, which I knew even at the time wasn't really funny or clever or anything, but I did. The thing about He being added to names in the Bible isn't even my own observation; I read it a few years ago in In the Beginning, Joel Hoffman's history of the Hebrew language.
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Today I happened to pick up Unsong, Scott Alexander's kabbalistic fantasy novel, which I have been reading on and off (more off than on) recently, and read a bit that talks about names of God that are even shorter than the well-known Tetragrammaton.
There is even a Monogrammaton. The sages took the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and decided that exactly one of them was a Name of God. That letter is "he". It's the fifth letter . . . . later I was looking through my trusty King James Version and started noticing things. Psalm 95:7, "He is our God". Psalm 100:3, "It is He that hath made us." Job 37:23, "He is excellent in power and judgment." All of these have an overt English meaning. But they are, in their own way, invoking the Monogrammaton.
So, shortly after reading the pronoun He, referring to God, and deliberately misreading it as the Hebrew letter He, I read something that says the letter He is actually a name of God and also connects it with the English pronoun. (I never knew that He was considered a divine name; I learned something from Scott Alexander today. I reciprocate by informing him that fish don't actually have four-chambered hearts.)
(A further coincidence is that "G," to whom my original comment was directed, chooses to go by a "monogrammaton" -- and by one which has also been used, by the Freemasons, as a name of God.)
One of the first things that came to my mind after reading the Unsong passage I have quoted, is that Hu is also a divine name, in Sufism, making the question "Who is he?" a statement equating one name of God with another. (Looking it up now, I see that Hu literally means "he" -- the pronoun -- in Arabic!) And that made me think of an essay I had read ages ago by the Mormon fundamentalist Ogden Kraut, titled "Adam; Who Is He? Adam; He Is God!" Who is He? He is God! Hu = He = God.
As for the "Adam" bit, I do not think I will guilty of doxxing if I mention that, before paring his handle down to a single letter, "G" used to post as "Adam G."
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Apropos of nothing, except that it is another coincidence involving "G," allow me to relate a dream I had last night. I was in a park with my wife, and I pointed up ahead and said, "Look at that!" What I was directing her attention to was a large brown tabby cat in the act of pooping on the grass. (It did this like a dog, not digging a hole and burying it like a real cat would do.)
I became aware that "G" was also standing there with us, also watching the cat poop. (I've never met him in real life and don't even know what he looks like, but I knew it was him.) After watching the cat for a bit, he announced, "This has convinced me that there is no such thing as a parallel universe. This universe we are in is in fact the only universe. And that means it is real -- fully real."
And then I woke up. So much for that being the only universe!
Checking the Junior Ganymede after the dream, I found a long post by G about a dream -- not a dream he had, exactly, but one he wants the reader (in this case, me) to imagine having. It begins with "Imagine you are having a dream" and ends with "That is your dream." Nothing about cats pooping or parallel universes.
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