When Moses climbs the holy mountain to receive a heavenly name from God, he then descends the mountain to transmit this identity to the nation of Israel and raise them from slavery in Egypt, he is a mediator between heaven and earth. The mountain is a symbol of the spiritual axis.
God can lower his identity through the vehicles of meaning and language, but this invisible breath must be met from below with a body that physically expresses its meaning.
God’s identity is expressed as a singular name, the clearest example of a seed in the Bible. This name is a spiritual principle (point of wisdom) with great ramifications. As an identity, “being” or “I Am” suggests nothing specific but implicitly contains all of creation in its scope. The revelation of God’s identity was only the first step towards the materialization of this heavenly seed. The materialization of God’s identity required the following agreement between spiritual and corporeal realities: “All that the Lord has spoken [breath] we will do [body].” (Exodus 19:1-8)
At the communal level, an agreement or “covenant” between heaven and earth implies proper exchanges of laws and deeds. God provides a spiritual identity or “soul” from heaven, and the population provides physical expression or “body” from earth. The population of Israel becomes a physical body for God’s spirit when it agrees to follow divine law.
(The Language of Creation: Cosmic Symbolism in Genesis - A Commentary by Matthieu Pageau, 2018. Pages 77-80)
Mosaic Law is more than just a means of preserving social order – it also expresses a spiritual identity. Every law is a specific ramification of God’s identity at the level of human interactions.
God’s name is extremely simple, yet it fully encapsulates the agreement between Israel and God to perform with deeds everything spoken with words. I am in deed what I am in word. I am on earth what I am in heaven. This name symbolizes the seed that contains the entire agreement in principle. This cosmic seed is like a mathematical axiom – a self-evident principle that cannot be proven due to its simplicity but from which everything must derive. The name of God is the principle of all Mosaic Laws.
“Thou shall not lie” or conversely “thou shall be true” or “words must agree with facts” or “heaven must agree with earth” express the same identity “I am what I am” at different scales of reality.
“Thou shall not kill” can be expanded into more obscure questions like whether murders are all equal – killing parents, children, servants, dogs, by accident or self-defense, by indirect means, etc. (Exodus 21) These questions arise when law is applied to the complexity of human interactions and develops into a series of branches. This concretization is essentially what it means for God to blow into Adam’s nostrils the breath of life. It refers to a process of materialization in which a purely spiritual identity is fleshed out into its practical ramifications. The earth is not just a storehouse of matter but of enigmatic darkness to be answered by the light of a higher identity, so specific laws are formed by the descent of a metaphysical principle into the details of corporeal reality in a necessary process to reveal the identity of God to humanity. God’s identity is lowered, and the masses of Israelites must raise themselves into significance by embodying them as deeds.
The law is a tree, and the deeds are its fruits.
(The Language of Creation: Cosmic Symbolism in Genesis - A Commentary by Matthieu Pageau, 2018. Pages 81-83)