But it is possible that the story in E comes from oral tradition from before the Isaelites were strict monotheists when it would be important that their god have a name like the other gods in area such as the Canaanite god El.
And for another viewpoint here is a quote from Richard Friedman’s Who Wrote the bible (page 82 of the paperback):
If either is the case, it is a reasonable possibility that Yahweh could have had the meaning “to be” added later and that at first it just was a name.
E also refers to Yahweh as the god of the Hebrews. And the Song of the Sea (from J and possibily the oldest writing in the Bible) specifically speaks of Yahweh in relation to other gods.
Just to say thanks for an extraordinarily informative and helpful post, and especially for this part about ‘Jehovah’, which had never been explained to me before. Excellent
I am not a linguist (wish I was, but don’t have the facility with languages), but from my readings, I’ve stumbled across some interesting notions.
1.) As noted above, we don’t really know the pronnciation of YHWH, the interpolated vowels being something of a guess.
2.) When the Name doesn’t strand alone, but is used in a combining form, as in personal names, it’s effectively the much shorter “Yo” (as in “Joel” and “Jonathan” and “Joseph”)
3.) Biblical scholar Elias Auerbach has suggested (I don’t know if the idea is original with him) that Hebrew names could be “exalted” by having an additional syllable added to them, the “he emphaticum”, he called it. In this way “Abram” became “Abraham”, “Sarai” became “Sarah”. It explains that weird double “A” in “Aaron”, which ought to be “Aharon”. God, being as holy as you can get, rates two of these he emphatica, so “Yo” becomes “Yo-He-W-He”, the “W” being added so you can tell there are two of the emphatic syllables.
4.) The resulting “YHWH” somewhat resembles “I Am Who I Am”. The resmblance is coincidental, and the meaning is suitably mysterious, but not significant.
That, I gather, is the theory. It seems a pretty interesting one to me.
As an unrelated item of interest, I note that one of the Roman names for the chief god was Jove. In classical Latin “J” is pronounced like “Y” and “V” like “W”, so “Jove” becomes “Yowe”, which is awfully close to “Yahweh”. I’ve often wondered if this is fortuitous, or if there is a connection.
What a fascinating suggestion CalMeacham. I know the Father god was basically an Indo-European cultural icon and (though mutated) had spread through much of the Eurasian world – but I never associated him and Yahweh before. I looked on wiki for the word origins (which is like looking at McDonalds to sample local cuisine) but I all found was the Indo-European meanings – but it answers the origin Question I think – can anyone else tie this together?
Wiki Quote:
*
Linguistic studies identify his name as deriving from *dyēus ph2ter (“god-father”), the Indo-European deity who also evolved into the Germanic Tiwaz (after whom Tuesday was named), the Greek Zeus, and Dyaus Pita of the Vedic religion. Jove is a vocative form of the name, evolved from Dye
The variants J vs. Y and V vs. W in rendering the Four-Letter-Name derive from the variations across languages in what those letters stand for. J in German and Latin has a /y/ sound; W in German is sounded as /v/, while in Classic Latin V carries a /w/ sound. Medieval Biblical scholars of course wrote in Latin, the language of classical erudition, while the earliest modern-vernacular writings on the Bible were in German. So variants of YHWH, YHVH, JHWH, and JHVH are all acceptable transliterations of yodh-he-vau-he, depending on which scholarly tradition you are tracking.
Where Jehovah comes from, actually, is a misrendition of the Masoretic text. The custom, of course, being that the Divine Name was never actually spoken, except by the High Priest on Yom Kippur, when reading the Bible aloud one would view YHWH on the printed page and enunciate “Adonai,” i.e., “the Lord.” In the Masoretic text, with vowel marks, the vowel points for Adonai were supplied, leading the unwary to suppose that A-O-A (the final I seems to have been dropped) were the vowels for the word JHVH. Migrate that into English, where unstressed “broad” vowels move to the schwa sound, and you get “Juh-HO-vuh” written Jehovah.
In my opinion, an excellent English translation of YHVH is Beor; that is, the verb be plus the -or suffix. It has a nice earthy Anglo-Saxon sound to it, but I don’t see it ever entering general use.
A question: many religious people avoid writing God by using G-d instead. Do they also avoid writing YHVH?
Richard Friedman in the Bible with Sources revealed translates the third line of the Song of the Sea as:
The NIV, ESV, and KJV (these sources use LORD in all caps instead of Yahweh or YHWH) give it as:
Can some who can read Hebrew say if the is a difference in the way YHWH is written in the first line that is different from the way it is written in the third line of the Song of Sea that causes Friedman to translate it “Yah” instead of YHWH as he does in other places where other sources use LORD.
Yes. Anything containing the name of G-d is sacred text. It cannot touch the ground, cannot be thrown away, etc. If I write yod hay vav hay (the actual letters, not their names. I don’t feel like figuring out Hebrew mapping on this keyboard) in pink crayon on a paper towel, that towel is now sacred text. The Name is never pronounced. You see those four letters, or yod yod, you just say “Adonai”. The Name is sometimes represented by a hay and an apostrophe. This keeps the paper, just paper.
As I evidently did not make clear, the three Hebrew terms referencing the Deity are: Elohim (and variants like El Shaddai, El Elohu), translated “God”; Adonai, translated the Lord (note initial cap.); and YHWH, rendered variously Yahweh, Jehovah, and the LORD (either full caps or using the small-caps styling I prefer not to figure out how to code here). Jah/Yah is the shorter rendering of YHWH, as in poetry. “My help is in the LORD” and “My help is in YHWH” are equivalent translations of the same Hebrew phrase.
In my Temple, the name of God in this context was pronounced “Adonai” - but not written that way in the Hebrew. But that was not the name of God, just something to use instead of Yahweh, which is not the name of God either.
My Hebrew teacher taught us that the true name of God had great mystical and magical power, and was written inside the Holy of Holies in the Temple, where only the High Priest could see it. Some folklore claims that Jesus snuck in there and read the name, which gave him the power to do miracles. I repeat, folklore, this is nowhere near an official position.
I hope the people who really understand this issue will come in here and correct my over 40 year old blurry recollection. But I am quite certain that none of these tags is considered to be God’s true name in any respect.
The Kohain was the only one who knew how to pronounce the Name. He did this only on Yom Kippur. But, the true and ineffable Name of the G-d of Abraham is spelled yod hay vav hay.
See my post #24 above, specifically point #2 – In combining forms "Yo’, or evidently “Yah” (not surprising – they originlly didn’t have marks for vowels) stood for the Nam of God. Evidently it did sometimes when not combined, as well. If Auerbach’s theory is correct, then Yo/Yah is "God, as opposed to YHWH/Yahweh = “Great, Great God”.
In the interest of striving for correctness, it appears to me that you don’t see any evidence to support the first two. Lots of people, including some more intelligent than you and I, believe there is evidence supporting them. Interpreting evidence is subjective, is it not?
