Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

James:

I see my understanding of the practices as being the opposite of yours.

On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 5:37 AM, James Christian
<jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com>wrote:

> 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
>

Expected? Why? There is a little used root in Tanakh that is HWH, different
from HYH, that apparently has the meaning connected with setting up, putting
in one’s place.


> ii) The name was written with Hebrew characters even when the rest was
> still being written with Aramaic characters.
>

If YHWH were to be pronounced, it is my understanding that it would have
been written normally with the rest of the text, not in a special way
indicating a Kethib/Qere pattern.


> 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)
>

I’ve seen only a couple of Greek MSS that had YHWH instead of kurios, and
they had it written in archaic Hebrew font which does not look at all like
Pipi. That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t written in Aramaic characters in
other MSS, just that I haven’t seen it myself.

That it was written in archaic Hebrew font indicates to me that the practice
as to its pronunciation should follow the same practice as while reading the
Hebrew MSS, the only difference being that it was in Greek.

>
> James Christian
>
>
My conclusion is that the New Testament, written to the common people
instead of the literati, simply reflects a late Second Temple period Jewish
practice of not pronouncing God’s name.

Karl W. Randolph.