Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Dave Washburn <davidlwashburn AT gmail.com>]

I think "heck" may have just frozen over, because I completely agree with both Rolf and Karl. We're not going to recover any pronunciation; the people the name was given to don't pronounce it, so what makes us think we can do any better? These discussions pretty well always end up being futile. Can we talk about something else?

On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 9:59 AM, K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com> wrote:

Rolf:

On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 12:20 AM, Rolf <rolf.furuli AT sf-nett.no> wrote:

… We do not know the real pronunciation of YHWH, but the clues we have, based on theophoric names, and corroborated by Akkadian transcriptions of Hebrew names, are that YHWH had three syllables, that the first was YE, and the last was WA, or WE (segol), and that the middle vowel was O  or U. There is absolutely no ancient Hebrew evidence in favor of the two-syllabic YAHWEH.

I don’t think we’ll ever recover the pronunciation of the name, but I think that the closest we can get to it is by analyzing what was the pronunciation of the language as a whole, not just the one name.

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Dave Washburn

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