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  • From: Henry Churchyard <churchyh AT ccwf.cc.utexas.edu>
  • To: b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Re: Tetragrammaton
  • Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 00:33:08 -0500 (CDT)


> From: GregStffrd AT aol.com
> Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 10:22:15 EDT
> Subject: YHWH vs. Yahweh

> Buchanan also points out that "the name 'Yahweh' does not even sound
> Semitic,"

How can this be? It superficailly looks just like a 3rd. person
sing. imperfect Hiph`il of a root H-W-H. Now I don't want to get into
deep waters and try to debate as to whether or not this is what the
tetragrammaton "really" is, but at least "Yahweh" certainly does sound
like it could be Semitic.


> Buchanan has elsewhere, and more recently, taken issue with the
> pronunciation "Yahweh." In "How God's Name Was Pronounced," BAR 21.2
> (March-April 1995), 31-32, he writes: "Anyone who cares to check the
> concordances will find that there is no name in the entire
> Scriptures that includes the Tetragrammaton and also omits the vowel
> that is left out in the two-syllable pronunciation

Presumably he is referring to the fact that YHWH often seems to take
on the form as "Yahu" as an element in compound names. But this
doesn't necessarily prove that there was originally any vowel in the
position H_W -- quite the contrary, original W in Hebrew regularly
becomes U when placed the end of a word after a consonant; this can be
seen in the historic "lamed-waw" segholate nouns such as s'axu
"swimming" etc. (Gesenius-Kautzsch-Cowley 1910:229,269). So
word-final *-yahw would naturally become -yahu. Also, there is the
further truncation -yah (with he-mappiq) which is also found as an
element of compound names (sometimes the same individual has variants
of his name in both -yahu and -yah), which seems to go against the
statement as you have it quoted above.

I don't want to tread on sensitive ground here, but are any of the
authors you cited JW's? The JW's didn't originally get their
trisyllabic form of the tetragrammaton from advanced Semitic
researches, but rather from the fact that European Christian writers
of the 16th-19th centuries commonly used the form "Jehovah" (it
appears a few times in the KJV, and numerous times in the late 19th
century "American Standard Version") -- unfortunately, however, this
form arose from a blatant out-and-out mistake in reading the
orthography of the Masoretic text (where the vowel points of "Adonai"
were added to the consonants of the tetragrammaton as a reminder that
YHWH should be said as "Adonai" when reading out loud). But some JW's
seem to be curiously reluctant to admit that "Jehovah" as used by
Christian Hebraists was a simple error (whatever the ancient original
form of the tetragrammaton may have been), which on occasion leads
them to adopt somewhat strange arguments.

--
--Henry Churchyard churchyh AT ccwf.cc.utexas.edu




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