"When a man's relative carries him, even he who burns him, to bring bodies out of the house, and asks him who is in the innermost parts of the house, 'Is there yet any with you?' And he says, 'No;' then he will say, 'Hush! Indeed we must not mention the name of Yahweh.'
The words then, “for not to be mentioned is the Name of the Lord,” are very probably the voice of despair. “It is useless to name Him now. We did not name His Name in life. It is not for “us” to name it now, in death.” It might be the voice of impatient aversion, which would not bear to hear of God, the Author of its woe; or it might be the voice of superstition, which would not name God’s Name, for fear of bringing fresh evil upon itself. All these grounds for not naming the Name of God and others yet worse, recur, again and again, under the pressure of a general sudden destruction. Such times being out the soul to light, as it is. Souls, which have sinned away the grace of God and are beyond its reach, pass unobserved amid the thronging activity of ordinary life. They are arrested then. They must choose then or never. Their unchanged aversion from God, then, unveils what they had been before. They choose once more, deliberately, in the face of God’s judgments, what they had habitually chosen before, and, by the dreadful nakedness of their choice of evil, become now unmitigatedly evil. The prophet gives one instance of this utter misery of body and soul, because detail of misery sets the whole calamity more before people’s eyes. In one picture, they see all. The words, or what the words imply, that, in extreme calamity, people do not mention the Name of God, come true in different minds out of different characters of irreligion.