Biblical Hebrew Forum

["yahua'sef" <gs02wmr AT panther.Gsu.EDU>]

Shalom Alaikhim Ya Achi George...ma nishma?

On Fri, 30 Apr 1999, George Athas wrote:

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

Hey I've heard worse thrown my way. ;-) Don't worry  - I didn't think much
of it.

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

Now, I know I am no grammar specialist or a linguist, far FAR from being
a scholar to some of the professors here - but I would take it as pronoun.
But who knows?When trying to analyze the Tetragrammaton its dangerous
waters we tread, and a slippery slope we embark on. I was simply offering
what I thought about it and what i was taught.

Now, I know I cannot say: "Ani medaber ivrit" as fluently as some here,
but that is how I can perceive it within the context of my messages. If we
wanted to say "He is Smart" in Hebrew, we could say "Huwa(Hu) chacham," or
'He is a tall man' would be 'Huwa(Hu) ish gavoah," etc. So that's where
Idraw my conclusions, as skewed and grammatically 'incorrect' as people
may see them.

> 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

You have absolutely no idea how humbled i am to be in the same dialogue
list as scholars with such a vast amount of knowledge on the subject. It's
fascinating to read the messages here, and I'm glad to observe and learn
what I can!

> 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.

Completely agree. Maybe it's just because I am a young naive novice to
this.

;)

> 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 just have trouble attempting to compartmentalize the most mysterious and
intruiguing name into some boxed set of rules and definition. For me, it
defies all logic - and out attempts to use modern day grammar rules(or
even ancient knowledge on the subject) is beyond futile, as enjoyable as
it may be for personal knowledge. The quest is what fascinates me.


Shalom Alaekhem,


Wondell M. Rachman