Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Gene Gardner <g_gardner1234 AT yahoo.com>]

>From the same article, I found some points in this
quote to be interesting, and somewhat contradictory:

"Perhaps it is preferable to say that the sacred name,
though perhaps in a somewhat modified form, had been
in use in the patriarchal family before the time of
Moses. On Mt. Horeb God revealed and explained the
accurate form of His name, Jahveh. 

The sacred name occurs in Genesis about 156 times;
this frequent occurrence can hardly be a mere
prolepsis. 
Gen., iv, 26, states that Enos "began to call upon the
name of the Lord [Jahveh]", or as the Hebrew text
suggests, "began to call himself after the name of
Jahveh". 

Jochabed, the mother of Moses, has in her name an
abbreviated form Jo (Yo) of Jahveh. The pre-Mosaic
existence of the Divine name among the Hebrews
accounts for this fact more easily than the
supposition that the Divine element was introduced
after the revelation of the name. 

Among the 163 proper names which bear an element of
the sacred name in their composition, 48 have yeho or
yo at the beginning, and 115 have yahu or yah and the
end, while the form Jahveh never occurs in any such
composition. Perhaps it might be assumed that these
shortened forms yeho, yo, yahu, yah, represent the
Divine name as it existed among the Isralites before
the full name Jahveh was revealed on Mt. Horeb. On the
other hand, Driver (Studia biblica, I, 5) has shown
that these short forms are the regular abbreviations
of the full name. At any rate, while it is not certain
that God revealed His sacred name to Moses for the
first time, He surely revealed on Mt. Horeb that
Jahveh is His incommunicable name, and explained its
meaning."

In this last paragraph, the writer tells you that Jah
appears at the end of the names, and that “the form
Jahveh never occurs in any such composition.” Also,
this quote:

"Jochabed, the mother of Moses, has in her name an
abbreviated form Jo (Yo) of Jahveh."

I always thought that "Yo" was an abbreviated form of
"Yeho"


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