Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear Robert,

I have a few comments to your observations:


> Just a few observations:
>
>
>
> 1.  No matter how logically consistent your arguments are, if you 
> begin with a false assumption you are still building a castle in the 
> clouds.  It may be a well-constructed castle, it may be an enticing 
> castle, but, unless I really do not understand gravity, it will not 
> be a particularly safe castle.
> 2.  The Masoretic text must be regarded as essentially fossilized 
> Hebrew.  By the time the text came into existence, Hebrew had been 
> essentially a 'dead' language for eight centuries or so.  It is, 
> moreover, the fossilization of only one dialect of Hebrew.  More 
> accurately, it is the fossilization of a 'form' of Hebrew (since 
> dialect implies a common-place, spoken language) as it was 
> pronounced by a specific rabbinical group. I do not know exactly how 
> David would have addressed his good friend, but I doubt Moshe ben 
> Naphtali would have pronounced it the same eighteen hundred years 
> later.  Consider the pronunciation of the Latin Georgius and its 
> Spanish derivative, Jorge.

It is true that we today cannot know exactly how words were 
pronounced B.C.E. But the Dead Sea Scrolls indicate that the vowel 
system of the Masoretic text resembles the system used when the DSS 
were written. See E. Y. Kutcher. 1974. "The Language and Linguistic 
Background of the Isaiah Scroll." We must therefore conclude that the 
Masoretic text by and large is a reliable text.


> 3.  Also take into consideration the simple fact that the 
> pronunciation of the tetragrammaton was purposefully suppressed.  It 
> has not been part of Jewish public worship since the destruction of 
> the second temple.  Therefore, there is no reason to believe that 
> the originators of the Masoretic text had a clue as to how it was to 
> be pronounced.

Because of superstition, probably based on the views of Plato, the 
tetragram was not pronounced by some groups, but is was  pronounced 
by others  B.C.E. You are right when you say that the Masoretes did 
not know how to pronounce it. The Masoretes pointed YHWH with the 
vowels  e(a)-o-a because they probably  pronounced the name as )DNY. 
I have seen the argument that because of this we must conclude that 
the modern form Ye-ho-wa is wrong. This is a fallacious argument, 
because the name may very well have been pronounced like this by the 
Pharisees and the Morningbathers. What the Masoretes did is in this 
context irrelevant. Their "wrong" pointing of the name may perhaps 
coincidentally parallel the old correct pronunciation of it.

> 4.  Unless you are an orthodox Jew striving to avoid offending the 
> deity, or up to some Harry Potter stuff, what does the exact 
> pronunciation matter?  We do not know how the term was pronounced by 
> Moses, and we cannot know how the term was pronounced by Moses, but 
> we have a wonderfully complete presentation of the Person to whom 
> the name refers.

If we leave theology and tradition aside, the pronunciation of YHWH 
is not unimportant. I am not speaking of the correct (original) 
pronunciation, because any name form in modern translations of the 
Tanakh does not represent the original pronunciation. In 
translations, names must be rendered in accordance with the stock of 
phonemes of the target language, and therefore we find different 
forms in English, Norwegian, and Spanish. And here is the important 
point: A fundamental rule of translation is that proper names 
referring to particular persons or particular places should not 
substituted with other words but should be given a modern form.   It 
follows-and we must still avoid theology and tradition-that to 
substitute YHWH with another word, such as LORD or L'Eternal, is a 
violation of the fundamental principles of translation. From a 
translational point of view it is a falsification of the source text. 
One may argue that because of this particular tradition or this 
particular theology, in this instance this must be allowed. I will 
not discuss tradition or theology here, only state that from a 
technical translational point of view, to leave out the proper name 
of God, or any other proper name from the Hebrew Bible is nothing but 
falsification.


Best regards,

Rolf Furuli
Univeristy of Oslo

> Robert Shannon Sumner
> _______________________________________________
> b-hebrew mailing list
> b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew