Biblical Hebrew Forum

[James Christian <jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com>]

Hi Edward,

thanks for that. I had forgotten about the PIPI controversy. I guess that
puts pay to the objection that the matter had not been discussed in any of
the Christian literature.

The most likely transmission of events is thus. Greek is written from left
to right like English. Hebrew is written from right to left. Thus less
educated readers of Greek MSS with YHWH where reading HWHY where the Hebrew
H most resembles the Greek letter Pi and both the letters W and Y most
resemble the Greek letter Iota. So they started reading PIPI instead of the
correct pronunciation. Perhaps a good reason for replacing YHWH with KYRIOS
and then eventually contracting to KS. Also, Stephen, it seems plausible
that the few occurences of KS you manage to find not referring to YHWH can
be either copyist error or, as Rolf suggests just a way of abbreviating
KYRIOS that first started out as a replacement for YHWH and was then used
more generally as a contraction for KYRIOS.

The strong witness of the MT text shows that the name was still being
correctly copied centuries later. The YY contraction is a much later change.

I would suggest the following chain of events.

1) Jesus and the apostles used the name. It was not yet an issue
2) The Christian faith was spread to the nations first to the Jewish
diaspora and then to the Greeks
3) The Greeks started pronouncing the name wrong PIPI and/or using the name
in vain
4) This was offensive to Jews and Jewish Christians
5) Copyists of Greek MSS started to replace YHWH with Kyrios to prevent this
from happening.
6) The Jews stopped using the name as freely as they feared the Greeks would
use the name in vain in some way
7) The Jews eventually got so scared of using the name that it was only
pronounced in the temple once a year
8) Later Jewish scholars debate the issue.

James Christian