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  • From: "Jay Childs" <selectjay AT hotmail.com>
  • To: furuli AT online.no, b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Re: traditions regarding tetragrammaton?
  • Date: Sat, 25 Aug 2001 00:27:14 -0500

Rolf,

Wait, if the Qumran sect did not use the tetragram, then what are the Phoenician characters I am seeing on some of the DSS in the middle of the Aramaic script?  It's not YHWH?

 

Jay

>From: Rolf Furuli
>Reply-To: Rolf Furuli
>To: Biblical Hebrew
>Subject: Re: traditions regarding tetragrammaton?
>Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2001 17:13:01 +0200
>
>>----- Original Message -----
>>From: David Stabnow
>>To: Biblical Hebrew
>>Sent: Thursday, August 23, 2001 8:51 AM
>>Subject: Re: traditions regarding tetragrammaton?
>>
>>
>>>
>>> If the one LXX MS reflects the original (which would make sense
>>>in
>>> context), the others are attempts to mitigate the language
>>>regarding the
>>> Name.
>>
>>Interesting point, since i think the LXX itself may be evidence of
>>translator with "traditions" to protect the name YHWH since it
>>usually kurios rather than a transliteration. It seems like i
>>recall
>>someone posting here within the past few months and saying that
>>originally LXX (and NT!) MSS had a transliteration of Yahweh but
>>that later scribes replaced it with kurios. Does anyone know of
>>evidence for this? It would not seem likely to me, since we have
>>some pretty early LXX MSS evidence (some pre-Christian), which i
>>don't think have a transliterated name.
>>
>>The fact that both LXX and scribal evidence in MT and DSS all seem
>>to point to influence from these "traditions" would seem to
>>indicate
>>that they were late and not original at the time of composition of
>>the HB.
>>
>>Regarding "kingdom of heaven" (mostly Matthew) vs. "kingdom of God"
>>(common elsewhere in NT), do we really have any evidence that this
>>was intended to avoid the word _theos_ with Jews, or was it simply
>>diversity of authors' preferences? Why would Matthew not want to
>>say
>>"kingdom of God" when he used _theos_ in plenty of other contexts?
>>And why avoid "kingdom of God" which is not the same as "kingdom of
>>Yahweh" anyway? I don't see that this NT evidence (mostly just in
>>Matthew) is very strong. Am i missing something?
>>
>>Dan Wagner
>>
>
>
>Dear Dan,
>
>
>I once wrote a thesis entitled "The tetragrammaton and its
>substitutes in the days of the second temple". Here are some points:
>
>All the LXX manuscripts from the second and first centuries B.C.E
>and
>the first century C.E have the tetragrammaton, either in old Hebrew
>script, square Aramaic script, or as the phonetic transcription IAW
>(
>indicating pronunciation). In the Chester Beatty Papyrii from 150
>C.E. the tetragrammaton is changed to KURIOS. While the Qumran sect
>and other groups did not use the tetragrammaton, other groups did,
>and we know nothing to which extent it was used by the people in the
>days of Jesus. The numerous claims that it was not used at all in
>the
>first century C.E. are unsubstantiated.
>
>In discussions about the tetragrammaton we should differentiate
>between "alternative words" and "substitutes". Different titles and
>designations are used for God both in the OT and the NT, but they
>are
>not "substitutes" for YHWH. Only if people were afraid of using YHWH
>and used another word instead can we speak of a "substitute". The
>use
>of "heaven" and "the power" in the NT where we would have expected
>YHWH do not necessarily represent a use of substitutes. We find the
>word "heaven" referring to God in the book of Daniel, where we also
>find the tetrgrammaton. A basic problem for the substitution theory
>YHWH -> )A:DONFY -> KURIOS is that the Qumran sect did not use
>)A:DONFY as asubstitute for YHWH but they used )EL as a substitute.
>It is extremely difficult to correlate the KURIOS of the NT with
>)A:DONFY. But a strong case can be made for the view that the KURIOS
>of NT is a *translation* of more than one Hebrew word, something
>which corroborates with the view that KURIOS was not original in
>the
>NT.
>
>George Howard has made quite a good case for the view that the
>tetragrammaton originally occurred in the NT (See his article in The
>Anchor Bible Dictionary), and that it was replaced by KURIOS just as
>was the case in the LXX in the second century C.E.
>
>
>
>
>Regards
>
>Rolf Furuli
>
>University of Oslo
>
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