NAME.  All Hebrew names are significant, and were originally imposed with reference to some fact or feature in the history or character of the persons receiving them.  Camden says that the same custom prevailed among all the nations of antiquity.  So important has this subject been considered, that “Onomastica,” or treatises on the signification of names have been written by Eusebius and St. Jerome, by Simonis and Hillerus, and by several other scholars, of whom Eusebe Salverte is the most recent and the most satisfactory.  Shuckford (Connect. ii. 377) says that the Jewish Rabbins thought that the true knowledge of names was a science preferable to the study of the written law.

NAME OF GOD.  The true pronunciation, and consequently the signification, of the name of God can only be obtained through a cabalistical interpretation.

It is a symbol of divine truth.  None but those who are familiar with the subject can have any notion of the importance bestowed on this symbol by the Orientalists.  The Arabians have a science called Ism Allah, or the science of the name of God; and the Talmudists and Rabbins have written copiously on the same subject.  The Mussulmans, says Salverte (Essai sur les Noms, ii. 7), have one hundred names of God, which they repeat while counting the beads of a rosary.

NEOPHYTE. (From the Greek [Greek:  ne/on] and [Greek:  phyio\n], a new plant.) One who has been recently initiated in the Mysteries.  St. Paul uses the same word (I Tim. iii. 6) to denote one who had been recently converted to the Christian faith.

NOACHIDAE.  The descendants of Noah, and the transmitters of his religious dogmas, which were the unity of God and the immortality of the soul.  The name has from the earliest times been bestowed upon the Freemasons, who teach the same doctrines.  Thus in the “old charges,” as quoted by Anderson (Const. edit. 1738, p. 143), it is said, “A mason is obliged by his tenure to observe the moral law as a true Noachidae.”

NOACHITES.  The same as Noachidae, which see.

NORTH.  That part of the earth which, being most removed from the influence of the sun at his meridian height, is in Freemasonry called “a place of darkness.”  Hence it is a symbol of the profane world.

NORTH-EAST CORNER.  An important ceremony of the first degree, which refers to the north-east corner of the lodge, is explained by the symbolism of the corner-stone.

The corner-stone of a building is always laid in the north-east corner, for symbolic reasons.

The north-east point of the heavens was especially sacred among the Hindoos.

In the symbolism of Freemasonry, the north refers to the outer or profane world, and the east to the inner world of Masonry; and hence the north-east is symbolic of the double position of the neophyte, partly in the darkness of the former, partly in the light of the latter.