The 72 Names of God: How They Are Derived from Exodus 14

The 72 names of god are a set of seventy-two three-letter Hebrew sequences, traditionally drawn from three consecutive verses of the Book of Exodus. They are not words in the usual sense: they are a table built by a fixed procedure. This page follows that procedure step by step, then shows where Luckwell uses the result. It belongs to the Luckwell archive.

What it is

In the Jewish mystical tradition known as the Shem HaMephorash, the 72 Names are derived from Exodus 14:19–21, the verses that describe the angel of God, the pillar of cloud and the east wind at the Sea of Reeds. Each verse is read as a row of Hebrew letters. Letters are then taken from the three rows in columns, which gives seventy-two triplets. Later Christian Hebraists, Reuchlin in 1517 among them, attached angel names, ranks and psalm references to the triplets; the Wikipedia article on Shem HaMephorash records these. A Name here is a sequence of three letters, and tradition does not pronounce it as a word.

Step by step

1. Take the Hebrew text of Exodus 14:19, 14:20 and 14:21 (see the Chabad article in the sources for the derivation).
2. Write the three verses as three rows of letters, one under the other. The tradition reads the middle verse in the opposite direction to the other two, so that the rows interlock.
3. Read down the columns. Each column gives three letters: one from the first verse, one from the second, one from the third.
4. Number the columns in order. The count runs to seventy-two, and each column is one Name, identified by its index.
5. Do not pronounce the triplet as a word. In Jewish practice the letters are spelled out by their letter names.
6. Where a source attaches an angel name, a rank or a psalm reference to a Name, record it as that source's attribution (Reuchlin 1517; Rudd for the psalm references), not as a property of the letters.

A worked example

Luckwell's data file for the 72 Names contains a detail that shows why the index matters. Three triplets occur twice in the table: #1 and #49 are both spelled והו, #11 and #17 are both לאו, and #14 and #55 are both מבה. The letters alone therefore do not identify a Name; the position in the sequence does. Luckwell always keys its records by index for this reason.

Take #1, והו. Spelled as letter names, it is read: vav, he, vav. The same letters stand at #49, but that is a different column, with its own place in the order and its own attribution in the sources. The same reasoning applies to לאו at #11 and #17, and to מבה at #14 and #55.

Common mistakes and honest limits

• Treating a triplet as a pronounceable word. The tradition spells the letters by name.
• Assuming the 72 triplets are all distinct. Three pairs repeat, as shown above, so the index is the key.
• Mixing layers. The derivation from Exodus is one thing; the angel names and psalm references were added in later sources, and the wording of any modern label is a separate matter.
• Confusing a modern interpretation with the tradition. Luckwell's own routing tag for each Name is a neutral label of our choosing, derived from a modern title and a psalm; it is not part of the tradition.
• Expecting the table to say anything about your life. It is a symbol system, and no promise is made about health, money or the outcome of any event.

How Luckwell builds it

The 72 Names form one layer of the sigil. Luckwell chooses a Name by a hash of your birth date and your intention, within the subset of Names assigned to that intention. The choice is stable: the same person and the same intention return the same Name. Its three letters are placed on the outer ring of the sigil and traced on the same kamea in the accent colour, using the gematria values of the Hebrew letters. The kamea comes from the planet of the intention; for the planet Jupiter, see the Jupiter kamea page. The way letters become a path is explained in the sigil for luck.

The same Name also feeds the key, the short mantra of the sigil. The key is made only from fixed units, one of which is the Name spelled as letter names, and the Tetragrammaton is never written; Luckwell uses ה׳ instead. The engine does not invent words. If you would like a sigil with your own Name on the ring, you can forge your own.

FAQ

Luckwell is for entertainment and self-reflection; a sigil is a focus for your own intention, not a promise about health, money or the outcome of any event; 16+.