Biblical Hebrew Forum

[George Athas <gathas AT mail.usyd.edu.au>]

Joseph,

I don't know how say this any other way, but YAH and HUWAH mean absolutely 
nothing in Hebrew as two
distinct words. YAH does not mean "He is" or something of the like. It is not 
a word in Hebrew. "He
is" or "He becomes" would be expressed with the word "YIHYEH" - root being 
HYH (heh-yod-heh). HUWAH
doesn't mean anything either. It is a nonsensical word.
The divine name, YHWH, is one word, not two or three or four. It's impossible 
to separate it into
more than one word. As Jonathan Safren mentioned, it looks like a Hiphil verb 
form (imperfect, not
perfect as Jonathan probably mistakenly wrote) of the root HWH.
Also, a note on the letter waw - Hebrew never has two vowels next to each 
other. Such a phenomenon
doesn't really exist in Classical Hebrew. So, waw + vowel is basically 
impossible if waw is, as you
say, a double "u" or elongated vowel. If waw was an elongated vowel, we would 
expect it not to have
been used in the earliest forms of Hebrew and Phoenician. Phoenician in 
particular uses only
consonants and never knows of any letters that represent vowels. So, the fact 
that it even uses waw
at all speaks for it being a consonant.

Very best regards,
GEORGE ATHAS
Dept of Semitic Studies,
University of Sydney
- Email: gathas AT mail.usyd.edu.au
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