Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Trevor Peterson" <06peterson AT cua.edu>]

Liz wrote:

> 3) the Greeks, to
> my knowledge, do not have an aspirated H in the middle of
> their words, so that sound if there could not have been expressed. 
> herefore, it doesn't make sense to me that Yah-weh is correct. Liz

Maybe I'm just missing your point here, but I don't see how this
assertion says much. Greek renders a name like avraham as ABRAAM. I
don't know what that says about how a Greek speaker would have
pronounced the name, but as a matter of transliteration, medial /h/ is
simply dropped. So if the Greek writing was an attempt to represent the
sound of the Hebrew name, that is precisely the form I would expect. You
might not get the /h/ directly from the Greek spelling, but if you have
the Hebrew consonants to compare, or even if you suspect that the Greek
word is transliterating Hebrew, there's good reason to expect that a /h/
belongs between the two vowel sounds.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics