Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 10:44 PM, James Christian wrote:
> Are you suggesting that God's full name is Yahoo? We seem to have gone a
> long way from YaHWeH in this discussion.
> James Christian

No, James, and I never supported "Yahweh" as the pronunciation.  I only said
that your rejection of "Yahweh" was flawed because you did not address the
evidence on which "Yahweh" was based.  The following conversation shows
that you are very prone to simply ignore the evidence rather than handle it.
My view of the name is that it is originally a qatl- formation, and I went 
into
great detail about it in an earlier message to you.  Unfortunately, despite
the great time I invested in explaining my opinion to you, it seems you
ignored everything I had to say and all you took from that particular
message was the photo link to 4QLXXLev-b, as if it gave you ground to
ignore the IAOUE evidence.  No wonder you are now surprised about my
position.  But my position is not "Yahoo", it is "Yahwu" and its pronunciation
evolved over time.

While I have generally tried to be patient with you, I find your messages
consistently disparaging in tone.  If not for the tone, I'd probably give you
again all the references for the Masoretic vocalization I've given in the 
past.
But I'm less apt to do that and I ask that you search the list for what I've
written in previous years -- just do a google search for Masoretic
pronunciation or Masoretic vocalization or the like on the list.  Your
knowledge of Hebrew is alright, but it is insufficient to reject Gesenius'
interpretation, nor to understand the Masoretic texts' vocalization.

Yitzhak Sapir