Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Henry Churchyard <churchyh AT ccwf.cc.utexas.edu>]

> From: GregStffrd AT aol.com
>> From: churchyh AT ccwf.cc.utexas.edu
>>> From: GregStffrd AT aol.com

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

>> How can this be?  It superficially looks just like a 3rd. person
>> sing. imperfect Hiph`il of a root H-W-H.

> Buchanan's comment is in the context of the "sound" of the words in
> Hebrew poetry. You may wish to read the section of the Psalms that
> Buchanan uses for such a comparison, and then tell us whether you
> think it sounds Semitic, at least in that particular section of
> Scripture.

I may or may not read Buchanan's article (probably not within the next
two weeks), but I don't need to for this limited purpose of deciding
whether "Yahweh" sounds superficially Hebrew-ish.  If there was a root
H-W-H, and it had a Hiph`il, then by regular rules of conjugation, its
3rd masc.sg. imperfect would have the form "Yahweh"; furthermore,
verbs conjugated in the 3rd masc.sg. imperfect are sometimes used as
proper names in Hebrew (Yis.h.aq -- "Isaac").  Case closed (pretty
much), and it doesn't really have anything to do with any particular
passage of scripture.


>> 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.

> if you could list the examples for each statement you have made,

What, you weren't satisfied with a page reference to the conventional
English-language reference gtrammar?  If you want more about
lamedh-waw segholates (particularly from a historical point of view,
which Gesenius-Kautzsch-Cowley isn't systematically concerned with),
then see Bauer and Leander, _Historische Grammatik der Hebraeischen
Sprache des Alten Testaments_ (1922), pages 213 and 460.

I don't want to discuss in detail Yeho- etc. as initial elements in
theophoric compound names (I haven't really studied this particular
area of special onomastic developments); but in general phonological
terms, "h" and "w" are weak consonants which are specially subject to
loss, to diphthongizing with a preceding vowel (in the case of "w"),
etc., and there are phonological processes (which I have studied) that
can have the effect of changing a "w" to a vowel, so that it's not
clear to me how reduced and shortened forms of the tetragrammaton can
necessarily be strong and convincing evidence for a particular
proposed trisyllabic form of the unshortened tetragrammaton.


> In some of the Hebrew personal names that incorporate a theophoric
> suffix, we find three different treatments of such names. First,
> there is the case where a theophoric suffix (for example, -yah
> [Hebrew YH] or -yahu [Hebrew YHW], instead of the full spelling
> [Hebrew YHWH], of course,) was sometimes entirely dropped.

Yes, and how does this show that -yah [with he mappiq] and -yahu are
not alternate short variants of the same full form (the
tetragrammaton)?


> the theophoric element could appear either as -yahu or as -yah. We
> transliterate (not to be confused with Anglicizing a Hebrew
> spelling) both the second and third treatments of the theophoric
> suffix as -iah.

"I" with a little half-circle dealy-bobber under it and "Y" are both
perfectly adequate transcriptions of the Hebrew letter Yodh in its
consonantal value, but there isn't very much point in mixing
transliterations -- and -YHW should _not_ be transcribed "-yah",
because of the letter Waw at the end.


>> 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).

> First, Jehovah's Witnesses KNOW that "Jehovah" is the not true,
> ancient pronunciation,

Maybe the scholars concede that, but I suspect that the church
authorities don't emphasize this point too loudly to the rank and
file, since there are a number of JW's who appear on various Internet
Bible forums from time to time, and vociferously and dogmatically make
a number of assertions about the form "Jehovah" which are simply
false,


> Third, what evidence do you have that the "vowels points of 'Adonai'
> were added to the consonants of the Tetragrammaton"?

Look at the _Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia_ or any other standard
Hebrew Bible edition, and you'll see that usually the Yodh in YHWH has
a sh@wa under it, and the Waw has a qames. under it, where it was the
practice of the Jews to read the tetragrammaton aloud as "Adonai"; but
in some cases, the Waw has a h.ireq under it, in a few instances where
it was the practice of the Jews to read the tetragrammaton aloud as
"Elohim".  In many manuscripts (but apparently not according to the
best early masoretic practice), the first H also had a h.olem over it,
so that all the vowel points of "Adonai" were inserted into the
consonants of the tetragrammaton YHWH.  This was done according to the
well-known masoretic principle of Q're-K'tibh.  Reference:
_Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah_ by Israel Yeivin, translated by
E.J. Revell (1980), pp. 58-59.

So if some naive person not up on the practice of Q're-K'tibh were to
come along and see the combination of the consonants of the
tetragrammaton and the vowels of "Adonai", and were to try to
pronounce Y-sh AT wa-H-h.olem-W-qames.-He out loud, lo and behold he
would arrive at "Yehowah", or in Latin transliteration, "Jehovah".

I don't want to knock Biblical Archaeology Review, because it's
generally been good at what it has tried to do, I was glad when it
started asking pointed questions about Dead Sea Scroll access, I enjoy
flipping through it, etc.: but it doesn't provide the full detailed
background to arcane scholarly controversies, or an education in the
historical phonology of Biblical Hebrew (nor does it claim to).


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       % Henry Churchyard      http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~churchh/