Jehovah vs Yahweh

For discussions which focus upon specific words, their origin, meaning, relationship to other ANE languages.
Forum rules
Members will observe the rules for respectful discourse at all times!
Please sign all posts with your first and last (family) name.
kwrandolph
Posts: 1531
Joined: Sun Sep 29, 2013 12:51 am

Re: Jehovah vs Yahweh

Post by kwrandolph »

S_Walch wrote:
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.
Could the final ה not be a vowel, rather than a consonant?
I think it not likely. Especially not with this name.
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.
Not being a Qumran scholar myself, I have to rely on those who have studied it more.

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.
S_Walch wrote:
The New Testament, one example Hebrews 4:8, mentions Joshua but transliterates that name as ιησους “Jesus”.
Well technically, it uses the nomen sacrum ι̅ς̅ (Papyrus 13) / ι̅η̅ς̅ (Papyrus 46), rather than doing a full transliteration.

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.
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.

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.
User avatar
SteveMiller
Posts: 465
Joined: Sun Nov 03, 2013 7:53 pm
Location: Detroit, MI, USA
Contact:

Re: Jehovah vs Yahweh

Post by SteveMiller »

Thanks Karl, Ste and Jonathan.
Sincerely yours,
Steve Miller
Detroit
http://www.voiceInWilderness.info
Honesty is the best policy. - George Washington (1732-99)
steven avery
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed May 02, 2018 3:10 pm

Re: Jehovah vs Yahweh

Post by steven avery »

enkidu wrote:There are quite a few considerations which favour Yahweh over Jehovah. These include theophoric elements in names,... it is pretty certain that "Jehovah" is wrong while "Yahweh" is close.

Historically, though the Yeho- prefixes have frequently been a major argument for Yehovah/Jehovah rather than various alternatives (that are usually two syallables.) Even Gesenius gave a solid nod to this argument, as given by the learned Johann David Michaelis (171-1791) And the English editor of Gesenius, Samuel Prideaux Tregelles, gave his strong assent to the argument. David-Paul Drach (1791-1868) has a paragraph in French that focuses on his argument. One can consider Drach as the religious counterpoint to the Gesenius drift to Yahweh in the same era.

Plus, even in critical scholarship, there have been a number of scholars and papers that do not see Yahweh as correct. They may prefer Yehovah, or they may prefer another three syllable name that is close to Yehovah. The idea of a consensus only arises because many people simply fuller whatever their fav lexicon resource says.

Steven
Isaac Fried
Posts: 1783
Joined: Sat Sep 28, 2013 8:32 pm

Re: Jehovah vs Yahweh

Post by Isaac Fried »

It seems to me that it is no more than the pair of personal pronouns היא-הוּא HIY-HU, or היה-הוה HYAH-HAWAH, and hence it is not a name at all. God is no man that needs to be identified by a name.
See also the name יֵהוּא of 1Kings 16:1.

Isaac Fried, Boston University
Isaac Fried
Posts: 1783
Joined: Sat Sep 28, 2013 8:32 pm

Re: Jehovah vs Yahweh

Post by Isaac Fried »

The combined היא-הוּא, 'He', is possibly similar to the combined אנוֹכי = אני-אכי, 'I'.

Isaac Fried, Boston University
R.J. Furuli
Posts: 158
Joined: Sat Sep 28, 2013 10:51 am

Re: Jehovah vs Yahweh

Post by R.J. Furuli »

Dear friends,

In a couple of months my book The Tetragram, Its History, Its Place in the New Testament, and Its Pronunciation will be published. It is based on a study of all the divine designations in the DSS, on apochryphal books in BCE, Josephus, Philo, the apostolic Fathers, and other sources. Its conclusion regarding the pronunciation is that the two-syllabic yah-wæh is an impossible form, and that there is strong evidence in favor of the trisyllabic
ye-ho-wa. This conclusion is based on theophoric names in the Tanakh and on Jewish names written in Babylonian cuneiform.

I argue that the Name consists of three consonants yhw and one vowel expressed by the matres he. I also argue, on the basis of Origen's Greek pseudo-transliterations of Hebrew words that the Greek iao is a pseudo-transliteration in Greek of the three hebrew consonants yhw.

Please note that the endings ya and yahu has nothing to do with yahwæh. Old Jewish inscriptions and seals show that the theophoric element in proper names is yhw both at the beginning and at the end. In the beginning, the theophoric element is written as ye-ho (with plene holem). The reason for the writing ya and ya-hu at the end are the rules of stress. The ya-syllable gets the stress, and therefore the vowel must be the long qamets.

Akkadian has syllables both with consonants and vowels. And I would also like to mention that ye-hu at the beginning and ya-hu at the end are found in the Babylonian writings of Jewish names. The Babylonians used to include the whole name of a God in proper names—not only abbreviations. Interestingly, we can find the whole trisyllabic name of the God of the Jews in Babylonian cuneiform.


Best regards,


Rolf J. Furuli
Stavern
Norway
Jemoh66
Posts: 307
Joined: Sat Sep 28, 2013 11:03 pm

Re: Jehovah vs Yahweh

Post by Jemoh66 »

I'm excited about your book Rolf. Congratulations!
This has always been my take on the pronunciation of the name. I am glad took hear that there's confirmation in Babylonian cuneiform text.
Jonathan E Mohler
Studying for a MA in Intercultural Studies
Baptist Bible Theological Seminary
kwrandolph
Posts: 1531
Joined: Sun Sep 29, 2013 12:51 am

Re: Jehovah vs Yahweh

Post by kwrandolph »

I have seen a variety of different transliterations into Greek.

Those that indicate only two syllables, I think are transliterations of the word יה. Is this a theophoric name? I don’t know, but at this time am inclined to say “no”.

Other transliterations indicate a three syllable name.

I saw one transliteration, I don’t remember where, that indicated a four syllable pronunciation of the name.

For linguistic reasons, I think that the four syllable pronunciation is correct, with the final syllable unstressed. Because it was unstressed, it may not have been noticed by translators.

Just my 2¢.

Karl W. Randolph.
Saboi

Re: Jehovah vs Yahweh

Post by Saboi »

י at the beginning of words produces a consonant sound such as י/δ

יער - δόρυ "Tree"
יהוה - Δευς, Διος, Δίου

ו/ϝ/β - Δεϝoς, Διϝος, Divus, Iovis , Je'ofeh
β/μ - διων, διϝων, δαίμων

The suffix of the name יהושׁוע is שוע/שבע "Cry" so the name is Ἰησοῦ and pronounced more like Ἰησοϝ
thus a variant of Ιωσηφ /יוסף .

Lee Mcgee
Post Reply