Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Joseph,

Please forgive me if my tone sounded derogatory or harsh - that was 
definitely not my intention.


> [...] I think you can look at in the Bible in 2 Samuel 22:3 to see
> the same word there used, if I remember correctly.

Looking at the verse I can't see what you mean. Is this the verse you 
actually have in mind? If it is,
could you clarify a bit further?

> I do know for a fact
> however that it is everyday common knowledge in spoken Hebrew that
> 'HUWA'(H-W-H) means "He is."

How would you break this down? Are you treating HUWA as a verb? Or are you 
treating it as a personal
pronoun?

> [...] The people on this list are scholars, and look
> at the words from a scrutinized linguistic point of view, breaking down
> the sylabbles and grammatical rules. But the LORD, the Maker and Master of
> the Universe, does not look at such things - and it you guys seem to
> neglect the theological edge in your analyses. You eschew any sort of
> correlation between symbolic and or metaphorical message and meaning the
> LORD put in Ha-TNKH and center in on linguism. I think....this is
> debilitating towards a full and well rounded understanding of who and what
> THE LORD is about. The Most High does not use a grammar book.

Well, Joseph, we are just humble scholars here so we will do what scholars do 
- scholarship. And we will
do it based on the corpus of evidence we have from the relevant documents. We 
are not offering an
illogical or speculative study of the name of the deity YHWH - we're basing 
it on known principles and
the evidence before us. We're not really eschewing things in our study - 
after all (if you are of the
persuasion), the Most High did use language (with grammar) to write His book 
- otherwise it would never
have made any sense. And to gain a full and well rounded understanding of it, 
we have to use the logic He
created. We're not doing anything illegitimate and I'm sure you'd agree on 
that.

> > As Jonathan Safren mentioned, it looks like a Hiphil verb form
> (imperfect, not
> > perfect as Jonathan probably mistakenly wrote) of the root HWH.
>
> Again - what is all of these words you use? Hipil verb, imperfect verb
> form, irregular this and that. Those seem "nonsensical" in the religious
> sense.

It's because they aren't religious - they're grammatical terms. Without the 
grammar, Hebrew (or indeed
any language) would mean absolutely nothing and yet all things to all men at 
the same time. We're trying
to extract the meaning of YHWH from sensical study. We can't say that it 
means something it doesn't. If
it doesn't match what we know of grammar and the way Hebrew and other Semitic 
languages work, then YHWH
is a nonsensical word. And since we can say that YHWH appears to be a 
particular grammatical form, what's
wrong with that?

> I appreciate your comments however!
>
> TODAH RABA!

You're very welcome indeed!

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