Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Henry Churchyard" <churchh AT crossmyt.com>]

> Subject: Re: traditions regarding tetragrammaton?
> From: Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>
> Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2001 17:13:01 +0200

> All the LXX manuscripts from the second and first centuries B.C.E
> and the first century C.E have the tetragrammaton, either in old
> Hebrew script, square Aramaic script, or as the phonetic
> transcription IAW ( indicating pronunciation).

I'd be curious to see the evidence for this "uniformity"; anyway you
left out the Yodh-He-Waw-He which, when written right-to-left in
"square" letters in Greek ms., was read back left-to-right by Greeks
as the Greek letters Pi-Iota-Pi-Iota, so that the divine name then
became "PIPI" ;-)


> While the Qumran sect and other groups did not use the
> tetragrammaton,

?? Certainly in written ms. they did.


> It is extremely difficult to correlate the KURIOS of the NT with
> )A:DONFY.

From what point of view?  Kurios is the most direct and simplest Greek
translation of Hebrew 'Adhonai (leaving aside the idiosyncratic plural
and possessive morphology of the Hebrew form, which would not transfer
smoothly to Greek).  (By the way, the use of "heaven" / ouranos seems
to be partly simply a reflection of internationally-fashionable
religious terminology of the 2nd. half of the 1st millennium B.C.)


> But a strong case can be made for the view that the KURIOS of NT is
> a *translation* of more than one Hebrew word, something which
> corroborates with the view that KURIOS was not original in the NT.

The second clause doesn't follow from the first; that Kurios may be a
translation of more than one Hebrew or Aramaic word doesn't mean that
it wasn't a fairly systematic "translation" (or substitute) for YHWH.
In phrases such as (ho) kurios ho theos in Luke 1:32 etc. etc. I don't
see how Kurios can be a translation or reflection of anything else.


> George Howard has made quite a good case for the view that the
> tetragrammaton originally occurred in the NT (See his article in The
> Anchor Bible Dictionary), and that it was replaced by KURIOS just as
> was the case in the LXX in the second century C.E.

It does seem to be a rather fatal flaw for this theory that not a
single such manuscript or manuscript fragment of the NT has ever been
found.  In any case, it seems to have been the international magicians
and occultists of the ancient world (not necessarily either Hebrew or
Christian) who were a lot more obsessed with the Hebrew name and its
correct pronunciation than the early Christians were.  Has IAO (in
Greek letters, with omega) really been found in Biblical ms., or just
in magical papyri?

--
Henry Churchyard   churchh AT crossmyt.com   http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/