Why, G-d, Why?

I wondered why I saw many posters writing “G-d” instead of “God”. A search of the archives revealed this, which pointed me to this quote:

I’m probably misunderstanding, but isn’t this just semantics? Isn’t G-d still the name of God, if you assume “name” to mean “what you call something”? Explication please, and no offense intended.

Cite

The way it was explained to me – note that I’m not an observant Jew, one will correct me sooner or later – is that writing God’s name, even on stone, is impermanent. We don’t want to write the actual name, since it can be defaced and thus would be an insult to God. Therefore, we only write part of the name and infer the rest. You’ll note, however, that I don’t follow that practice.

Maybe, t-h, so some might take the hint. :wink:
Peace,
mangeorge

Maybe they think god won’t notice if they don’t spell it out? Kinda like sitting up straight when you notice there’s a cop car behind you?

Me, I just don’t capitalize the word.

would god really really be upset with you if such a defacement happened? i mean as long as YOU don’t do the defacing, can you be punished for exulting god? btw, excuse the lower case, but it’s too early to use the shift key

??? You took the trouble to write these 14 words to explain why you can’t be bothered to press <shift>? Do you have a really good excuse like you only have one finger or you’re typing with your nose? Because, “it’s too early” doesn’t cut it.

Judiasm also has a long standing tenet against dropping a book, for example, that has the word god written in it.

in that case, i AM typing with my nose, and AM was used with CAPS LOCK–shouldn’t your post be in the BBQP, again, CAPS LOCK

ok, i am simmer down b/c i just thought of a different way to use shift, i’ll simply turn on CAPS LOCK then type the letter, then turn off CAPS LOCK and continue typing. Ok, alright

I do that, too. Like the cop’s gonna give you a ticket for bad posture.

There is a prohibition against destroying anything with G-d’s name written in it. If a siddur (prayer book), chumash (Bible), or any other religious book or paper becomes unusable, it is gathered together and eventually buried. Virtually all orthodox synagogues have collections of these items, and they are buried once a year or so (depending on the size of the collection).

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When a holy book falls on the floor, the practice is to pick it up and kiss it on the cover.

Many people, even knowledgable, observant Jews, understand that this hyphenation is an ettiquette sort of thing, based on the respect we should show to God. From that perspective, the questions of the OP, and many of the comments since then, make a lot of sense.

I was taught a different explanation.

In Deut. 12:1-3, God tells the Children of Israel what to do with the many idols which they will find in the Promised Land: Destroy their high places, tear down their altars, break their pillars, and destroy their name from there.

In contrast, the next verse, Deut 12:4, commands: Do not do so to the Lord your God.

Thus there is a specific command to destroy the names of idols, and not to destroy God’s name. To prevent His name from coming to destruction, we avoid writing it to begin with, and instead we use the hyphenated code so that we can still get the point across.

This explains why there is no problem writing the full name in Bibles or prayerbooks or any other medium not in imminent danger of being thrown in the trash.

Also, it could be argued that it only applies to His name when written in Hebrew, as that would be His “true” name. My practice is to hyphenate even in English, as whatever we call Him becomes His name, regardless of the language.

On the other hand, I do not use the hyphenation when typing on computer, unless I think the page might be printed on hard copy. The logic is that the characters appearing on the screen are constantly fading and being refreshed, and so they are not capable of being destroyed (even the Delete key will simply cause the name to be not refreshed).

Aaargh! He beat me to it!

But I got the source quote, so nyah nyah!