Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Vadim Cherny" <VadimCherny AT mail.ru>]

As a curiousity, Chinese could be likened to Semitic in its root system:
every hieroglyph consists of meaningful components, and every Hebrew root
likewise.

I also see non-trivial parallels between Confucianism and Levitical Judaism.

Vadim Cherny



> I don't know if this would interest you or if you may know of it already,
> but I remembered coming across one of my readings referring to a Chinese
> Emperor Yao, a mythological legend I believe. Here is a link to wikipedia
> and you can do a google search like "Chinese Emperor + Yao" that brings up
> some more links that could be of interest.  Anyway thought I would throw
it
> out, it is extra biblical but may not be necessarily Semitic.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Yao
>
> -patrick
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: b-hebrew-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org
> [mailto:b-hebrew-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Read, James C
> Sent: Wednesday, July 20, 2005 11:14 AM
> To: Harold R. Holmyard III; b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
> Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] yhwh pronunciation
>
> I sometimes wonder, but maybe I am just paranoid, if
> there are modern day Hebrews in high standing who keep
> the real pronunciation and meaning of yhwh as a closely
> guarded secret and pass them down from generation to
> generation to keep them alive.
> I noticed before that someone mentiones that Josephus
> commented that 'it was no longer lawful' for him to
> pronounce the name, implying that it happened in his
> lifetime and that the current pronunciation was known to
> him. Does anyone know where exactly he says that? I
> should be very interested in reading the account.
> It was also questioned before why ehyeh (hyh) is related
> to yhwh (hwh). I have reason to believe that as the name
> had already been widely accepted as being pronounced in
> certain way at the time of the penning of the Torah that
> this is why yhwh remained as it was even though the common
> usage in the Hebrew of that time was to use the hyh form.
> The reason I have come to this conclusion is the patterns we
> see in scripture before the widespread of the superstition
> which banned its usage.
> 1) Early MSS of the LXX show a hebrew tetragrammaton amongst
> Greek writing
> 2) DSS, in places, show archaic lettering of yhwh amidst the
> by now widely accepted aramaic lettering of the rest of the
> manuscripts
> These factors led me to believe that the behaviour was to preserve
> its ancient pronunciation against the flow of evolution of the
> rest of the language. Thus Moshe wrote ehyeh as the normal way
> of saying the verb form in his day while he wrote yhwh which had
> already by now been written in stone (so to speak).
>
> Does anyone know of extrabiblical semitic texts which attest to
> the divine name as a foreign god?
>
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