Biblical Hebrew Forum

[davedonnelly1 AT juno.com]

On Sun Jun 27 20:11:39 EDT 2010 , Yitzhak Sapir yitzhaksapir at gmail.com
wrote


Dave,
Various answers have been provided to you over the years.
You never tell us why they don't satisfy you.
Yitzhak,
Why is the case that is written in the Encyclopedia Britannica 
Not acknowledged to be false up front, on B-Hebrew.
Yitzhak Sapir: Do you believe that the case against Yehowah,
made known in the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1911,
is valid? As it is presently written?
 
There is actually a whole lot of evidence that the Masoretes read
the name as Adonai.
First, the vocalization changes whenever the word is nearby the
word Adonai. This would be easy to explain if the vocalization of
the Tetragrammaton is Adonai, but not if it were something else.
How else would you explain the vocalization change next to the
word Adonai?
Yitzhak 
A large part of this issue, is that for the most part I have analyzed the
Ben Chayyim Hebrew 
Text of 1525 A.D. that underlies the Old Testament of the King James
Bible.
I have to acknowledge that I don’t claim to understand how the six
variants of YHWH that occur in Codex L, might provide helpful information
on this issue.
Could you help me by explaining how the various variants of YHWH might
help me to understand this issue.
Certainly the variants of YHWH that are meant to be read as “Elohim” and
which are written as “GOD” add information to this issue, but they
haven’t convinced me to to believe that the Masoretes wanted
[Yod-shewa-defective holem- waw-qamets-heh] to be read as “Adonai” 
HOWEVER THEY CERTAINLY HAVE CONVINCED ME THAT THE MASORETES WANTED
“YEHOVIH” TO BE READ AS “ELOHIM = GOD” 
If a hatef patah was found under the yod, in [Yod-shewa-defective
holem-waw-qamets-he] I most likely would believe that the Masoretes
wanted me to read “Adonai”
HOWEVER THERE IS NO HATEF PATAH UNDER THE YOD IN ANY OF THE VARIANTS OF
YHWH FOUND IN THE VARIOUS HEBREW TEXTS. [Except one that Gerard Gertoux
mentions in his paperback book] 
WHY IS THAT????? 

Yithak continues:
Why doesn't this answer satisfy you?
 
Yitzhak , I have just reached your list of the many cases 
where prefixes enter into this issue.
I will have to spend a lot of time on this new evidence, 
Although I must admit I was somewhat aware of some of this information 
that was covered slightly in William Smith’s 1863 “A Dictionary of the
Bible”.

Yitzhak, I assume that I will be spending a lot of time trying to
understand 
this new information.
Dave Donnelly
I will continue to study this new information at a later time.
Thank you for posting this new information!

Dave Donnelly
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Yitzhap Sapir continues:

Also, the schewa joins up differently with prefixes under the
letter yodh. If a word that begins with a vocal schewa under
yodh takes a prefix with a vocal schewa itself, both the
schewas and the yodh disappear and the prefix takes a long
hirik.
Some examples:
??? yade Gen 24:30 -
but:
???? vide - Ex 17:12,
???? bide Ps 141:6,
???? kide Gen 27:23
???? mide Gen 49:24
??? yihi Gen 1:6
???? vihi Gen 1:6
(This is a conjunctive waw different from vayhi which is a conversive
waw)
This also happens in proper names:
?????? yoho)aHaz 2 Ki 13:8
??????? liho)aHaz 2 Ki 13:7
????? yuhuda Gen 37:26
?????? vihuda Gen 35:23
?????? bihuda Jud 10:9
?????? lihuda Gen 38:24
Now, in the word Adonai, the prefix becomes a patah:
????? adonai Jud 13:8
????? vadonai 2 Ki 7:6
????? ladonai Gen 18:30
Now, Dave, the tetragrammaton behaves exactly like the
word Adonai when taking a prefix, but never like a word
that begins with a yodh -- even a theophoric name that
begins with YHW.
It is also important to understand that a schewa under the yodh would
not be read by the Masoretes as Jehovah. It would be read as [yohov@].
Jehovah is a late European reading of the Masoretic schewa and vowels,
but not how the Masoretes themselves read it. The Masoretes when
reading a letter with a schewa followed by a guttural such as He would
read the letter with the same vowel as the guttural. So above we have
yoho)aHaz, not yeho)aHaz, and yuhuda, not yehuda.
You can see this already in the LXX. The name YHWRM is read in the
Tiberian tradition as [yohor at m] and the name YHWNTN is read in the
Tiberian tradition as [yohon at th@n] and this vocalization of the
initial
syllable is already seen in the LXX. There these names are transcribed
IWRAM and IWNAQAN. This is why you get transcriptions such as
Joram or Jonathan. You even have IOUDA in the LXX. All these show a
long o: and u:. Because the He was not transcribed in Greek, this turns
out to be almost the exact same pronunciation as the Masoretes! (The
difference is actually in the qamats which the Masoretes pronounced
differently from a patah. This is not germane to this discussion so I've
not differentiated it in the transcriptions above).
Why would you continue to write Jehovah if it is clear that the first
vowel
under no circumstance could be -e- and the first consonant could not be
-j-? (For what it's worth, the Masoretes did pronounce the waw as a [v]
except when adjacent to an [u] vowel).
The Talmud already explicitly deals with the issue in a quote attributed
to
Rabbi Avina several centuries prior to the Masoretes:
??? ????? ???, ???? '?? ???' ????? '?? ????'. ??? ????? ???? ???,
?? ????? ???? ??? ????, ???? ??? ???'? ?'? ????? ???'? ??'?
Rabbi Avina said - It is written "This is my name" and it is also written
"This is my mention." The Holy One is saying - I'm not called the same
way as I'm written. I'm written with Yodh-He but read with Aleph-Daleth.
Why is this quote from the Talmud not sufficient for you, Dave?
Why are you skeptical about the evidence that has been provided?
Simply because one has hataf patah and one has a schewa? But a schewa
was normally pronounced like a hataf patah (except for some exceptions
such as when followed by a yodh or a guttural as described above). From
the Masoretic point of view they were the same.
Because sometimes you don't have the holam? But the only point the
Masoretes had to specify for the word was whether it was to be pronounced
Adonai or Elohim, and this depended only on the vocalization of the last
vowel - qamats or hirik. Also, we have additional documents from the
Masoretes and in these the Masoretes spell the name of God as three
yodhs arranged in a pyramid, two on the bottom and one on top, with a
circle around them. Since there is only room for two vowels, they give
the first and last vowel. This practice is what you apparently see now
when the holam is missing. But it is just a scribal convention for
specifying the vocalization Adonai. It is like one person would write
an essay and dot the lowercase j's only in some places. That doesn't
mean that the words with dotted lowercase j's are different variants from
the ones without them. It is just what the scribe felt like using from a
variety of equivalent representations for the same pronunciation.
Why are you skeptical about the evidence provided? Why doesn't the
evidence satisfy you?
Yitzhak Sapir
 
 
Yitzhak
Thank you for so much new information
Hopefully other members of b-Hebrew will respond to your Post 
as I occasionally look on in Awe.
Dave Donnelly
____________________________________________________________
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>From yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com  Mon Jun 28 08:39:58 2010
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Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2010 15:39:56 +0300
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From: Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>
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Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] b-hebrew] Can YHWH at Genesis 3:14 [ in Codex L. ]
        be "correctly"read as"Yehowah"? [ RE-TITLED MESSAGE
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On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 4:39 AM, Dave Donnelly wrote:

> Why is the case that is written in the Encyclopedia Britannica
> Not acknowledged to be false up front, on B-Hebrew.
> Yitzhak Sapir: Do you believe that the case against Yehowah,
> made known in the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1911,
> is valid? As it is presently written?

Dave, I don't know about the sentences following "When Christian
scholars."  However everything from the start of the entry to that
phrase is absolutely right, even though we're talking about an
encyclopedia entry from 1911.

I am in this case referring to the image you posted here:
http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2003-7/264290/BritannicaJehovah600.JPG

> I have to acknowledge that I don=92t claim to understand how the six
> variants of YHWH that occur in Codex L, might provide helpful information
> on this issue.
> Could you help me by explaining how the various variants of YHWH might
> help me to understand this issue.
> Certainly the variants of YHWH that are meant to be read as =93Elohim=94 =
and
> which are written as =93GOD=94 add information to this issue, but they
> haven=92t convinced me to to believe that the Masoretes wanted
> [Yod-shewa-defective holem- waw-qamets-heh] to be read as =93Adonai=94

The vocalization Elohim is used next to the word Adonai to avoid having
Adonai Adonai twice in a row ("Lord Lord").  So because the vocalization
is changed next to Adonai, we know that the standard vocalization (when
not adjacent to Adonai) is Adonai.  Do you have a better explanation?

> If a hatef patah was found under the yod, in [Yod-shewa-defective
> holem-waw-qamets-he] I most likely would believe that the Masoretes
> wanted me to read =93Adonai=94
> HOWEVER THERE IS NO HATEF PATAH UNDER THE YOD IN ANY OF THE VARIANTS OF
> YHWH FOUND IN THE VARIOUS HEBREW TEXTS. [Except one that Gerard Gertoux
> mentions in his paperback book]
> WHY IS THAT?????

No need to shout.

A hataf patah is equivalent to a vocal schewa in most cases.  Originally,
there was no hataf patah or hataf seghol or hataf qamats or hataf hirik.
However, at some point in order to clarify the pronunciation when it differ=
ed
from the most common case (short patah), the Masoretes began to use
hataf-vowel in place of the standard schewa to explain the vocalization
in that case.  They also used hataf patah in cases where the schewa
should be vocal but would normally be interpreted as quiescent.  In the
gutturals, they completely standardized the use and changed the schewa
under the guttural (this includes aleph) to the appropriate hataf vowel.
However, while making this change for words containing gutturals they
did not make the change for the tetragrammaton.  So the tetragrammaton
remained without a hataf patah for Adonai using the older convention of
a schewa in that case.  It has a hataf seghol in the case of Elohim because
this change was unrelated to the standardization of the gutturals.

So we have several steps in the development of the hatafim:

1) Using schewa
2) Using hataf-vowel when the pronunciation differs from standard
schewa (hataf-patah) and hataf-patah when the schewa is not quiescent
but normally would be read as such.  This includes the spelling Elohim,
but not Adonai.  Adonai is still spelled at this point with a schewa.
3) Standardization of the vowel spelling of the tetragrammaton
4) Standardization of the gutturals.  This includes the word Adonai, but
not the tetragrammaton.

> Hopefully other members of b-Hebrew will respond to your Post
> as I occasionally look on in Awe.

While perhaps I should be flattered, I would much prefer it if you took
an active part in this discussion.  I'm not sure if other members have
any input of their own to add (beyond what was discussed in the last
few days and in fact in all that has been posted on the subject on the
list).  But I really want to know if the answers above solve all your
questions.  Are you still skeptical, and if so, why?

I don't want you to go look at my evidence, read the discussions in
awe, and then in a month reopen the discussion without me knowing
what it was in my response that did not convince you.

Yitzhak Sapir