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  • From: "Heard, Christopher" <Christopher.Heard AT pepperdine.edu>
  • To: b-hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Questions about YHWH
  • Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2005 22:25:05 -0500

On Jul 17, 2005, at 11:46 AM, Yaacov Yeretz wrote:
And if I'm right: Could anybody tell me, when the
pronunciation of the
Tetragrammaton became banned?

Okay, I'm a little reluctant to chime in on this because I am away from home and pretty much working strictly from memory on this. However, I offer the following observations:

(1) The tendency of the Septuagint and other Greek translations to supply κυριος for יהוה - does that suggest a reticence to actually pronounce the Tetragrammaton at the time those translation were made? If so, this would take us back to the beginning of the fourth century BCE. Or do our surviving LXX MSS represent a later development in this regard?

(2) As I recall--though again, I am embarrassed to say it because I am not in a position, physically/geographically, to check sources on this--some of the Dead Sea Scrolls have the Tetragrammaton written in a Paleo-Hebraic script while all the rest of the text around it is written in an Aramaic square script. I have a JPEG of one such instance on my hard drive, but I don't have proper documentation on disk of which MS that is (and I don't know if I can send attachments with b-hebrew messages in any case). This would at suggest that no later than the first or second century BCE (depending on which texts show this orthographic variation), the Tetragrammaton was being treated as something special and apart from ordinary language. The use of the paleo script may (speculation alert!) have been a "flag" to mark the qere perpetuum, maybe ... (speculation alert!).

Please take all this for "thinking out loud," not actual proposals (at least for now).

Chris

--
R. Christopher Heard
Assistant Professor of Religion
Pepperdine University
Malibu, California 90263-4352
http://faculty.pepperdine.edu/cheard
http://www.iTanakh.org
http://www.semioticsandexegesis.info




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