Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yigal Levin <leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il>]

James, I fail to see why you think that no. i is "completely absurd". The
fact is, that the issue has not been debated in either Judaism or
Christianity (with the possible exception of esoteric groups of scholars
such as those on this list) for the past 2000 years. Jews have been reading
YHWH and saying "Adonai" for at least that long, and at least the more
educated Christian clergy have also been aware of the fact that "Kurios",
"Dominus", "Lord" and the like are translations of an "original" name for
the same amount of time. And they have all been aware of the meaning of the
theophoric element in names like Joshua, Jonathan, Elijah, Jeremiah and so
on. And the fact is, that it's a non-issue in both traditions. God is God,
He has a "Name" that is ineffable, and that's it. It's only since modern
scholarship has: a. shown that in Iron Age inscriptions the name of YHWH was
invoked regularly in "secular" contexts; and b. began looking for a
"detached" way to refer to the God of Israel as just one more Ancient Near
Eastern deity with a name that can be used, that the pronunciation and use
of YHWH began to be an issue. 

Yigal Levin





James wrote:

Again, we see no mention of any argument about enunciation of the name. It
is a non-issue. This seems to leave us with only a few possibilities worth
considering:

i) the name hadn't been used for so long that it was considered to be a
non-issue by everybody.
ii) the issue hadn't yet been raised.
iii) it was an issue but the literature has been purged of every trace of
it.

Possibility iii) is so far fetched that none of us have even considered it.
Issue ii) is difficult to take on board because (as you rightly state) there
doesn't seem to be any explicit mention of it in the post NT Christian
literature. Possibility i) seems completely absurd because the central
prophet of Christianity, Jesus, was constantly engaged in conflicts about
the traditions of men made the word of God invalid.


James Christian