I think it not likely. Especially not with this name.S_Walch wrote:Could the final ה not be a vowel, rather than a consonant?kwrandolph wrote:I have seen more than one indication that in Biblical Hebrew, i.e. before the Babylonian Exile, that the writing was not an alphabet, rather a syllabary. As a syllabary, every consonant was followed by a vowel. That’s why indications of which vowels was not included, because people who were native speakers could recognize which vowels to include.
Jst lk ths sntnc, a ntv spkr of Englsh wd rcgnz whch vwls t insrt.
So a word with four letters would have had four syllables, four consonants each followed by a vowel. Hence the pronunciation would probably have been similar to Yehowahe.
Not being a Qumran scholar myself, I have to rely on those who have studied it more.S_Walch wrote:Also the orthography of Qumran would need to be looked at. There're more than a few times that we see readings like לכה for לך, and כיא for כי; so how Hebrew used it's vowel-consonants has changed over the centuries, as would be expected.
From what I understand, I hear that late in the pre-Jewish revolt era, there was an attempt to clean up the mms then in circulation, in other words, quality control. One of the results was to remove many, if not almost all, of the matres leccionis that had been added to texts. Later mms tended to be closer to the MT than earlier ones with lower quality control.
This inconsistency is one of the reasons I think that the Byzantine tradition of mms is more accurate. That inconsistency points to a retention of the Galilean accent in some of the transliterations, a retention that was edited out of Sinaiticus and Vaticanus and that school of mms.S_Walch wrote:Well technically, it uses the nomen sacrum ι̅ς̅ (Papyrus 13) / ι̅η̅ς̅ (Papyrus 46), rather than doing a full transliteration.The New Testament, one example Hebrews 4:8, mentions Joshua but transliterates that name as ιησους “Jesus”.
This is also the case in most OG (Old Greek) manuscripts, where we see the Nomina Sacra used rather than full name transliteration for Joshua/Jesus when he's mentioned (look at MS2648 - link - see the Nomina Sacra quite clearly).
The transliteration of יהושׁוע is also further complicated in that we have it transliterated fully in the Lucian LXX recension as Ἰωσηε.
This is one of the things I really wish we had found at Qumran - a Hebrew-Greek transliterated list of names, for the transliteration of Hebrew-Greek names is not unanimous throughout our extant Greek manuscripts, of both the LXX and the GNT.
Then there was also changing pronunciations within Hebrew. It appears to me that there was a pronunciation shift from south to north, an uneven one where the Galileans were the country yokels who spoke with the older accent.
Karl W. Randolph.