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  • From: <tladatsi AT charter.net>
  • To: <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [b-hebrew] YHWH & Elohim
  • Date: Sat, 6 Aug 2005 18:20:17 -0400

Here is a thought on the origin and pronunciation of YHWH.
The two most common words associated with the God of Israel
are YHWH (6519 times) and Elohim (2606 times although not
all of these are references to God). Far less common are
YH (49 times), Eloah (57 times, mostly in Daniel 1-6), and
El (245 times but some of these are not a reference to
God). Further, when the name YH does occur, it only occurs
in poetry or song (e.g., Song of the Sea and the Psalms,
Isaiah etc.), never in prose. Only in the Elephantine
Letters is the God of Israel referred to as YHW, and then
in Aramaic.

In contrast, YH, YHW, and El are very common elements of
theophoric names, despite their infrequent or nonexistent
use as stand-alone names for God in the text of the OT.
Even more interesting, YHWH and Elohim never occur in
theophoric names, at least I found none. There is a
complete inversion of frequency of divine names, those
found frequently as elements in theophoric names occur
rarely alone, if at all, in the text and those found
frequently in the text do not occur at all as theophoric
names.

A possible explanation is that YHWH and Elohim (and Eloah?)
are literary names, i.e., devices for the written word
only. In everyday speech, people may have used Yah, Yahu
or El to refer to God. The OT writers may have found these
names too vulgar and/or insufficiently grand for the God of
Israel. They are very short names. It may also have
played a role in distinguishing the God of Israel from
other competing gods. Certainly it is well documented that
other peoples used the name el for their gods. It may been
seen as important to more carefully distinguish (in both
senses of the English word) Israel?s God from those of her
neighbors.

The logic of lengthening a short name to a longer name is
pretty obvious. It is both visually more impressive and
sounds better. However, the actual grammatical and
linguistic logic is not clear to me. Eloah to Elohim is
straight forward but El to Eloah and YH to YHW or YHWH is
not clear to me. Any way, it was a thought.


Jack Tladatsi




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