Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Sorry. I forgot to say that for these reasons I had always understood the
exact opposite. That because the name was so ingrained in its archaic form
it resisted the changes that the rest of the language underwent:

i) The name did not change from YHWH to YHYH as would be expected
ii) The name was written with Hebrew characters even when the rest was still
being written with Aramaic characters.
iii) This practice still continued when the LXX was compiled. Amongst
possible motivations may be the fact that the Greek alphabet is incapable of
representing the exact pronunciation of YHWH and they continued to use YHWH
to preserve the correct pronunciation (this obviously backfired eventually
e.g. PeePee - The almighty god of the Hebrews - probably not quite as
embarassing in Greek as it comes out in English)

James Christian

2009/12/29 James Christian <jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com>

> Hi,
>
> 2009/12/29 K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>
>
> James:
>>
>> This is getting a little off field for B-Hebrew, so I’ll broaden it to
>> include Second Temple practice.
>>
>> It is commonly recognized that there often is a disconnect between written
>> and spoken practice, a practice made explicit in the Kethib/Qere recording
>> of the Masoretes. That some of the Aramaic square character DSS included
>> YHWH in archaic Hebrew font indicates that this already signifies that
>> practice, namely that the name is not to be pronounced, rather a Qere
>> should
>> be spoken.
>
>
> I'd always interpretted this phenomenon in exactly the opposite way. With
> the name YHWH we see a resistance against the natural evolution of the
> language. Firstly, we see this resistance in that we hypothesis that
> proto-b-hebrew used the verb HWH where we see HYH used in b-hebrew. Then
> secondly we see this resistance in that early MSS using the Aramaic alphabet
> still use the Hebrew alphabet for the name YHWH. We see this resistance to
> change even in the early LXX MSS. Then eventually this gets misinterpretted
> and the Greeks start reading the name as if it were written with Greek
> letters rather than Hebrew letters or Aramaic letters. Later still we
> finally see evidence of the substitution starting with KS abbreviation which
> later becomes KYRIOS but contextual clues still leave it clear that the name
> was intended because KYRIOS is used in contexts without the definite article
> where you would expect it. i.e. a title is seen to be used as a proper name
> where we see that the original Hebrew MSS used the proper name YHWH.
>
> James Christian
>
>
>