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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] YHWH discussion recap

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  • From: Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
  • To: Schmuel <schmuel AT nyc.rr.com>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] YHWH discussion recap
  • Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2005 14:55:23 +0100

On 25/07/2005 14:12, Schmuel wrote:

...

For consideration, probably just a decade or two ago, the "Yahweh" usage
would have
likely been the almost-overwhelming consensus on a scholarly forum, and we
have also in
the last decades seen it make its way into various translations, from the catholic Jerusalem Bible to the Everett Fox translation to others. It was becoming mainstream (socalled "sacred
name" or "qodesh name" Bibles had been using various such forms for 50 years).
Yet now we see a major turn-around, and to put it a bit indelicately, the promoters and defenders of "Yahweh" for the Tetragrammaton are a bit on the defensive, and the scholarship has shifted rather radically to at least a strong level of simpatico to the three-syllable "Yehowah/Yehovah" forms. And this is shown even on a scholarly forum like this one, possibly the most advanced discussions of the issues anywhere. And some
of the credit should, I believe, go to three writers on the topic, Gerard
Gertoux, Nehemiah
Gordon and Carl Franklin, all defending forms close to Yehovah, while the "Yahweh" scholarship has been rather stagnant.

I am not convinced that this is a fair summary. I don't think that authors like Gertoux, Gordon and Franklin have been taken at all seriously by the scholarly world. I am not saying that they shouldn't be, but that they are outsiders. I don't think any of them have a recognised academic position, and I have not seen publications by them in peer reviewed academic journals. I may be wrong here, if so please correct me. But if this is true or nearly true, their position can hardly be considered to represent a shift in "scholarship". The real scholars in this field have probably not even seen the arguments of these three, and so have seen no reason to confirm the continuing scholarly consensus for "Yahwe" or similar.

In fact, don't overestimate this forum as "scholarship". Few of us on this list hold recognised academic positions either.

...

If one decided on a two-syllable form, there would be NO starting vowels at all. It seems that "Yahweh" would be one of a dozen or so possible forms, and one that has a major problem to begin with (multi-syllabic Theophoric names invariably start
with "Yeh", per the pages on the Gerard Gertoux paper). It only exists as
one scholarly
reconstruction, hard to defend.

You have missed a point here. The existing multi-syllabic theophoric names in fact invariably start with Y:ho-, where the colon represents a sheva, rather than a real "e" vowel. And that sheva is almost certainly a reduced form of another vowel, which could be an "e" vowel (as in the name Jehu, which could be an abbreviated form of one of these names with the original vowel preserved) but is also very likely to be an "a" vowel, qamats. Certainly if the names had originally started Yaho-, with the first vowel as qamats, they would have been reduced, in that unstressed initial position, to the recorded form Y:ho-. So this is good reason to think that the initial vowel is "a", although it could also be "e" or "i".

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/



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