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QUERIES & COMMENTS
Ya done it again! In a footnote
to J. Glen Taylor’s article (May/June 1994. p. 53), you say:
“No one knows
how YHWH was pronounced, but it is usually vocalized as Yahweh.”
This, despite the fact that you had published my letter, “How was the Tetragrammaton Pronounced?” (July/August 1985. pp. 78-79), in which I gave the epigraphic and linguistic evidence in support of the pronunciation “Yahweh” (I’m still getting correspondence from all over the world in response to that letter).
First, I
mentioned the evidence from Greek transcriptions in religious papyri found in
Egypt. The best of these is Iäouiēe (London Papyri. xlvi,
446-482). Clement of Alexandria said
“The mystic name which is called the tetragrammaton … is pronounced Iaoue, which means ‘Who is, and who
shall be.’”
The internal
evidence from the Hebrew language is equally strong and confirms the accuracy
of the Greek transcriptions. Yahweh is from a verbal root “hwy,” “to be.” This root
usually shows up in Hebrew as *hwy.
It is a verbal root developed from the third person pronoun, *huwa/*hiya. The grammatical form of Yahweh is the third person masculine
singular of prefix conjugation. The ya-
is the third person masculine singular prefix.
In Jewish
tradition, it is forbidden to pronounce the Sacred Name and its true
pronunciation is supposed to remain a secret.
The fact is that Jewish tradents (who put the vowel points in the Hebrew
text) borrowed the vowels from another word, either ’adônai “my lord(s),”
or ’elôhîm “God.” They avoided the very short a vowel in this borrowing because it
might have led the synagogue reader to make a mistake and pronounce the correct
first syllable of the Sacred Name, namely -ya. The vocalized form one finds in the Hebrew Bible is usually Y’hôwāh/Jehovah, from which we get
in English the form Jehovah. Y’hôwāh/Jehovah is nothing but an
artificial ghost word; it was never used in antiquity. The synagogue reader saw Y’hôwāh in his text and read it ’adônai.
The final
syllable of Yahweh, -éh
is normal for the imperfect indicative form (present-future or past
continuous). A form like yahweh developed from *yahwiyu.
This development of -iyu to -éh
is thoroughly demonstrated for the verbal system in general. The form yahweh seems to be from the causative stem (hif`îl), and apparently means “He causes
to become/be.”
The
theophoric component on so many personal names in Judah (i.e., -yāhû, in such names as Hizqîyāhû [Hezekiah]) is the normal
shortened form of a verb like yahweh. For example, the verb “to do obeisance”
in the imperfect is yiŝtahaweh,
while the shortened form (for preterit or jussive) is yiŝtáhû. In other
words yiŝtáhû is to yiŝtahaweh as
yáhû is to yahweh. This is not hocus-pocus. Any layman can readily comprehend the
equation.
You don’t like to put linguistic
details in BAR. They’re “too
technical.” But this does not prevent
you from printing various items of linguistic misinformation without warning
your readership. Here I
* As
asterisk before a word indicates an undocumented reconstruction (hypothetical).
Illustration, left to right: Hizqîyāhû,
miŝttahawéh, yáhû, yahweh
(Not in original
article)
refer to the
description of the final component (not a suffix but a component of personal
names found in seal impressions from Dan (March/April 1994, pp. 28, 30). The theophoric component in Northern
Israelite personal names, written –YW on epigraphic texts, was never pronounced
-yô! The final W did not come
into use as a marker for a final ô vowel until the post-Exilic period. In the eighth and seventh centuries when we
have these personal names ending in –YW, the W was a consonant and the pronunciation was -yaw (or yau). So
anyone can see that the difference between northern -yaw and southern -yáhû is not so great, especially since
the -h- in the southern form was fairly weak.
Israeli archaeologists avoid Hebrew linguistics like it was poison
ivy. Thus, on the basis of modern
pronunciation, without asking any linguist, they have created ghost words like Immadiyo, zkryo or Gaddiyo (in the Samaria Ostraca) in your Dan article cited
above. The –W in those names
should be pronounced like the –W in words like raglāw “his
(two) feet” (written rglyw), cf. Genesis 24:32 et passim.
Israelis, of course, pronounce that form raglav because of
the European background of many “revivers” of modern Hebrew. Incidentally, that same European background
is where we get the V in Jehovah instead
of the original W.
Obviously, my letter in 1985 did not impress you. But the evidence for Yahweh as the correct pronunciation for the Sacred Name is at least
as strong as the view that Sennacherib destroyed Lachish Stratum Ill. The same can be said for the pronunciation –yaw
and not -yo. At least you should
ask a scholar whose opinion you do appreciate, such as Frank Cross or
Joseph Naveh or André Lemaire.
Speaking of Lemaire, I heartily endorse his new reading of bytdwd,
“House of David” on the Mesha stele (“‘House of David’ Restored in Moabite
Inscription,” May/June 1994).
Furthermore, I have gut feeling that both the Mesha and the Dan
inscriptions have to do with events in 853-851 B.C.E., namely the battle in
which Ahab, king of Israel, died while his ally, Jehoshaphat, escaped unharmed,
and the later invasion of Moab. I think
the king of Damascus (not a vassal of his—as pointed out recently by S. Ahituv
in the Israel Exploration Journal) set
up the stele in Dan to commemorate that victory. Likewise, the closing lines of the Mesha stele probably have to
do with the Invasion of Moab by Jehoshaphat and Ahab’s son Joram, as depicted
in 2 Kings 3. Many Bible scholars deny
that Ahab died a violent death or that Jehoshaphat took part in the war
recounted in 2 Kings 3. After pouring [sic]
over all the evidence and
all the arguments
for over 20 years, I am convinced that those negative arguments are specious
and that the Biblical testimony to both events is reliable, historically and
chronologically. One may refer to maps
126 through 130 in the new revision of The
Macmillan Bible Atlas.
Anson F. Rainey
Professor of Ancient Near
Eastern Cultures
and Semitic Linguistics
Tel Aviv University
