The name of the Israelite deity worshipped by Jews and
Samaritans, as well as Karaites (who are a subset of Jews), Christians,
Muslims, Bahai, and Rastafarians is Ya-hu-weh, or Yahuweh, accent on the last
syllable, and pronounced correctly it can
sound like “Yahweh” if you are not listening closely. Or at least that is the correct pronunciation
of the Tetragrammaton, the four letters of the Hebrew alphabet said to
represent the name represented by English letters YHVH.
Evangelicals in America are fond of pronouncing the “Jehovah”
as they find it in their King James Abridged Version ("abridged" because almost no copy today contains the Apocrypha, which those who translated the Authorized Version included), incorrectly using the modern
“J” and modern “v” sound for what in the early seventeenth century sounded like
“Y” and “w”. Yet even if they were
pronouncing it “Yehowah”, they would
still be getting it incorrectly along with giving their deity a verbal sex
change; in Hebrew the “wah” ending denotes the feminine.
Until the first century, use of the name in prayers and
readings from the Torah and other works using the Tetragrammaton were the norm,
at least among Jews. Even the
Septuagint, otherwise entirely in Greek, originally inserted the Hebrew letters
into the Greek text, rather than using the euphemism ‘Kyrios’ as later copies
did.
A few factors led to the abandonment and subsequent
abolition of use of the name.
Initially, much of the influence in the direction of
abandoning the use of “The Name” was a universalism among Jews, the desire to
present their deity as the God of all rather than just the God of the few,
which is part of what led to the substitution of Elohim (literally, ‘the gods’,
but in this usage more like the royal “we”) for Yahuweh during Hellenistic
times.
Another factor was the fear of saying the divine name which
was an extension of the prohibition against using the name of earthly
sovereigns; this can be found in Isaiah
45:3-4, where Yahuweh is telling Cyrus the Great who it is that dares to use
his name. This passage, by the way,
helps place Second Isaiah (Isaiah
40-55) in the immediate post-Exile period.
Fear of accidentally using “The Name” in a way which would
violate the Third Statement (too often mistakenly referred to as a “commandment”,
courtesy of the Calvinist mistranslators of the Geneva Bible) came into
play. What that Statement actually says
is ‘You shall not carry the name of Yahuweh your God superficially’, rather than
how Christians, and Jews for that matter, usually mistranslate it.
It must be said that the Samaritans abandoned the practice
decades or even centuries before the Jews, ragging on their Israelite cousins
for continuing to use it rather than a euphemism.
The late Hellenistic and early Roman eras of Palestine coincided
with the spread among the Gentiles around the Mediterranean world of a movement
in many quarters toward a worship of a single deity, or at least of one over
and above all the rest. Among the
Hellenistic philosophers, this was especially the case of the Platonists, the
Stoics, and the Pythagoreans.
From another direction came the worship of Theos Hypsistos
(the Most High God) in the East and of Deus Aeternus (the Eternal God) in the West. Evidence from the West is sparse, but in the
East, inscriptions to Theos Hypsistos have been found in at least some cases
which almost certainly point to a Diaspora Jewish setting, though others are
clearly of Gentile origin. This
represents a resurgence of the universalism among Jews which took a hit during
the Hasmonean ascendancy in Judea, at least in its early stages.
Finally, the Patriarchate in Palestine, by that time seated
in Galilee, abolished liturgical use of “The Name” even in reading the Tanakh
around 200 CE. This was done not in the
name of universalism, certainly not by the ideological heirs of the separatist
Pharisees, but in order to assist a Jew in maintaining purity and, some might
say, sanctimony. This, however, did not
extend to excising the Tetragrammaton from the Torah, the Psalms, or the
Prophets.
So, how, you may ask, did we get ‘Jehovah’? From the Masorete scholars in Palestine and
Mesopotamia, the scholars from the Jewish sect called the Karaites, which does
not accept the Mishna or the Talmud, only the Tanakh. From the seventh through much of the tenth
centuries, these scholars translated the Israelites scriptures into a
definitive official text, one which is still used by Orthodox Jews and Karaites
today.
Besides editing out certain embarrassments, as do all
translators of any scriptures across every religion on Earth, the Masoretes
gave their texts pointing for vowels and diacritical marking to guide pronunciation. In a sign that their separation from
Rabbanate Judaism cam later than is often claimed, in order to prevent a reader
from accidentally pronouncing “The Name” when called up to read, the Masoretes
substituted the vowels for the word ‘Adonai’, the Hebrew equivalent of ‘Kyrios’,
or ‘Lord’.
Today, most devout Jews used ‘Adonai’, literally ‘my Lords’
but signifying ‘my Lord’, or ‘Ha-Shem’, literally ‘The Name’.
One of the times I endured enforced chapel at the mission by
reading through the Bible rather than suffering through actually listening to
whoever was ranting from the pulpit at the time, I came across the following: “And
it shall be at that day, saith Yahuweh, that thou shalt call me Ishi; and shalt
call me no more Baali”.
This rather interesting verse is found at Hosea 2:6. I say “interesting” because although the
first literally translates as ‘my Beloved’, most mistranslate it as ‘my husband’,
counterposed against the translation of Baali as ‘my Lord’ (more literally, ‘my
Master’). In fact, both were modes of address of a wife to a husband, the two different
modes of address signifying relationships of widely differing intimacy.
Besides the rather interesting indication that Israelites
may have at one time referred to their national deity as “Baal Yahuweh”, that
brings up this question: if their God told the Jews to call him “Beloved”
instead of “Lord”, why don’t they? Why
don’t Christians or Muslims?
This is not about the actual name of an actual deity, but
rather about the correct pronunciation of the name given to a particular deity,
the deity of the Tanakh. If there
were/is an actual One True God beyond the (currently) 13.8 billion year old,
213 duovingintillion cubic kilometer spacetime of the (current) Cosmos, the
actual name would probably be beyond human pronunciation. Of course, it could also be something as
simple as “Fred”, or, as the CW show Supernatural suggested, “Chuck”.
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