Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear Joseph and George,

Just a small note on HW) ("he"). At Qumran it was regularly written HW)H.
See for instance "The Rule of the Community" for numerous examples and  E.
Qimron: "The Hebrew of the Dead Sea  Scrolls", 1986:57. This difference in
writing illustrates all the more how problematic it is to understand the
etymology of such an old word as YHWH.


Regards
Rolf

Rolf Furuli
Lecturer in Semitic languages
University of Oslo




>Hi Joseph! (Or should I call you Wondell? I don't really know who it is
>I'm writing to.)
>
>> > 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.
>
>Well, unfortunately, if HUWA is a pronoun we've never seen anything like
>it before. The pronoun for "He" is
>spelled HW' (heh-waw-aleph). Also, aleph's are silent in Hebrew, so the
>pronoun for "He" is pronounced just as
>"hoo" ('oo' as in 'book'), without an "ah" sound on the end. This
>certainly isn't what the name YHWH contains
>because aleph's just don't drop out of words.