The Last Supper
YHWH - Hebrew Tetragrammaton
YHWH - Hebrew Tetragrammaton
In The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown says that YHWH in the Bible stands for "Jehovah" which comes from Jah for male and Havah for female. As this four letter word is a core part of many religious beliefs, this would be an important issue to get correct.
First, a note on the Hebrew language. There were originally 22 letters in Hebrew - 18 consonants and 4 vowel/consonants (like our modern day "Y"). The four special letters were aleph א, hey ה, vav ו, and yud י. Usually writings used no vowels, because people just knew what they would be. Sort of like writing "fr scr nd svn yrs g" instead of "four score and seven years ago". It's a shorthand that the Hebrews simply learned and understood.
So in the Hebrew language, the word for God's name was written as YHWH - יהוה. Interestingly this only involves "consonant/vowel" special letters. Note that the word FOR God in Hebrew is "elohiym". Legend has it that Moses was actually told the full name of God (with the vowels), wrote this down as proper Hebrew syntax for a word (leaving out those vowels), and that it was decided that nobody going forward should actually speak God's name. So when people saw YHWH in their Bible, they would say the word "Lord" in whatever language they were speaking. That four letter combination YHWH is called the "tetragrammaton". YHWH was said to have been chosen (by God) because it was similar to "HYH" which means "to become". This was combined with "HWH' meaning "he is".
Jehovah is a RECENT word from the 1534 by Martin Luther as the "speakable" version of YHWH :) Translators hit the Jewish combination YHWH and weren't sure what it translated as. So they stuck in the vowels from the Hebrew word for Lord (adonai). Combining IHVH (another form of YHWH) with AOAI creates IAHOVAHI and the IA becomes IE out of tradition. So we've got IEHOVAHI.
The first version of the Bible in English was done by Tyndale in 1525, and God's name was shown as IEHOUAH. Other Bibles of the time put the words "THE LORD" in small capitals in this spot, to point out to people that the name should not be spoken. Those who understood the tradition of "not saying God's real name" kept saying Lord when they hit the word "Iehouah", as they should have. Remember, before this point, there were no real printing presses so only the most educated of people would have their own hand-done Bible. These people knew well how to say or not say certain words, from their training. But the many people who now got a Bible without that background information would say Jehovah when they saw it printed in their Bible.
Interestingly, Jehovah's Witnesses claim that the name was *always* pronounced as Jehovah and that the above sequence of events was guided by God so we would pronounce it this way now.
How Was YHWH Originally Pronounced?
Languages change over the centuries - just look at the trouble many modern people have understanding the nuances of Shakespeare. Pronunciations change as well. People in California have trouble understanding a Scottish person speaking English even though the language is the same. So it might be impossible for us to know what sort of accent Moses had when speaking Hebrew, even though we have Hebrew speakers in modern times. Anything we say is guesswork. We know that the name was spoken only once a year by one ancient Hebrew. On the Day of Atonement, the High Priest would say the name as part of the ritual. All other spoken use of the word was forbidden. When the Second Temple was destroyed in the year 70AD, the name was no longer used, and has not been said since.
Still, here are our clues. Hallelujiah (or Halleluyah) means "Praise God" or "Praise Yah". Meaning that Yah (the YH in the tetragrammaton) is probably the "short" version of God's name and that his full name begins with Yah (i.e. the A is the missing vowel). Next we have the name Eliyahu (the original form of Elijah) which means "My God is Yahu". So now we have three letters accounted for - the YHW is spoken as "Yahu". It also indicates that this "Yahu" was an appropriate short name for God. A final H in Hebrew was often silent, but it's more likely that if they bothered to add it to the word that it was to add additional sound. That would be the "hey" ה sound. So the three versions of speaking God's name seem to be:
* Yah
* Yahu
* Yahueh
This is interesting, because this name shows up in Egyptian writings in 1400 BC. The writing is in the Temple of Amon in Soleb / Nubia. The Egyptians write about a monotheistic religion practiced by the Shasu tribe, southeast of the Dead Sea. Appraently the Shasus called their god "Yahweh". The Shasus were a nomadic Bedouin tribe living in the Siani area.
Just to go off on a further tangent, as I tend to do, Jesus's full original name in Hebrew was Yehoshuah. This was Yeshua for short. The New Testament was written in Greek (not Hebrew) so they made that Iesu. The Greek language doesn't have any Y or "SH" letters, like Hebrew does. Also, Greeks add the letter S to the end of names so the name was now Iesus. Now when we get to Europe, the Europeans were translating this name, the Germans used a J because the J was pronounced as an I (sort of like in English how we use C and K in various words). So the name was written Jesus but was pronounced "Iesus" (like "yaesoos"). Then this was brought into English and the translators didn't know about the I/J issue and left the J, but the English people now pronounced it "Jesus" as in "geezus". So we are FAR from pronouncing Jesus' name the way it should be. If Jesus came back to earth and said "I am Yeshua" nobody would understand what he meant. It's pretty sad, really.
From a Visitor -
i loved the book - nice mix of novel and text book. I'd prefer to believe Jesus was human and Mary M his wife - somehow it seems more plausible, but there will always be fabrication whatever you believe... anyway - the four letters - can't remeber what they were (yh??). Brown hasn't loosely translated the pisces sympol with the surounding greek letters C Y IX and O (O with the line through it, theta) Translated as Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour. ???????????????
My Response -
OK, I'm not exactly sure what the question is here :) First, you seem to mean YHWH which was the Hebrew tetragrammaton which was used instead of writing "God". I talk about that above. As far as the "symbol" of Jesus Christ, well he is very associated with fish - several of his disciples were fishermen and many of his miracles involve fish. So the Christians very early on used the fish as their symbol, long before the cross. The fish is sort of a more "positive" symbol you might say and more subtle too. Also, in Greek if you say:
Jesus Messiah, Son of God, Savior
the first letters of each word are ICHTHUS which means fish. So just like the National Organization of Women chose a phrase to spell out NOW, the disciples of Jesus' followers chose a particular phrase that also spelled a word. If you want to delve even more deeply into this, the actual words Jesus Messiah (i.e. Jesus Christ, since Christ is the Greek word for Messiah) was:
IhsouV CristoV
There is the I and C/X that begins the phrase. His initial sign was an IX on top of each other, forming sort of a star with three points up and three points down.
The next letter comes from Theou (God) beginning with the Theta. In Greek culture, the theta (the O with the line through it) was the symbol of the sun, which came to also mean Jesus. Then Uios, the Y/Upsilon, meaning Son, and finally the E/Sigma, the first letter in Soter, meaning Savior.
From a Visitor -
You are little off on this. Jehovah is indeed a late invention of the sacred name of YHWH. But a pious reader of the name, particularly a pious Jew would not say the foru letters. Instead they would pronounce the term Adonai which is Greek for Lord. In fact, when the Hebrew Scriptures were pointed (vowelizations added) in the Middle Ages (quite late) the sacred name was pointed with the vowels for Adonai to remind the reader that the name should not be pronounced. In fact, given the method of Hebrew pointing and the placement of the pointings, it is impossible to pronounce the name now. This leaves us with the intriguing idea that the sacred, unpronouncable name's pronounciations has been lost to the ages. But I digress. When German translators met the pointed texts, and using J for the Hebrew Yodh usually transliterated as Y the results were JeHoVaH, giving us a completely constructed and new "name" of God.
As far as the Hebrew, it is a conjunction of the verb "to be" which has within its use the idea of God being self-existent. The tenses of the verbs are peculiar which lead to more than twenty ways of translating the name. I am that I am. I am what I was. I am what I will be. I will be what I am. My favorite version is from one scholar that offers: I am whatever I damn well please.
Incidentally, English translations of the Hebrew Scritpures have a distinct way of marking when the sacred name is used in the Hebrew texts rather than other appelations. Careful attention to an English text will show that often the words "Lord" or "God" are written in all capital letters with the "ord" or "od" being rendered in a smaller size but still in caps. This is to alert the reader that the sacred name was used.
I found Brown's book a fascinating and fun read but one that played rather loose with the "facts." When people ask me about the book I say that the most important two words that seem overlooked are the two one the cover that say "A Novel".
My Response -
I suppose I wasn't very clear in my original definition. What I was trying to say was that YHWH was sort of a "symbol" for the written page to stand for the name of God, but that the point was that it couldn't really be written - and since it wasn't a real word, then the readers would say something else (i.e. Adonai or whatever) when they got to that point to refer to their God. It's a very intriguing thought, sort of like Prince choosing that symbol for his name because of his copyright issues with his recording company "owning his name". So really they should have just come up with a symbol (a fish or something) for God to say "this spot represents God" and then people would say "Lord" when they got there. But then again if they were just going to say Lord, why not write Lord on the paper? It's what they were supposed to read and say at that point in the text. To put down something that was unsayable sort of makes things extra confusing for no reason ...?
From a Visitor -
I'm afraid that both You and the Author are at fault in your interpretation of YHWH. While your mistake may be in citing a historical reference that is inaccurate, the explaination in the Da Vinci Code is entirely innacurate.
Unfortunately, sacred oaths forbid me from revealing the true nature of the Tetragrammaton and its pronunciation, I can tell you however that it was originally represented YHVH as there is no equivalent to the letter W in the ancient language in which it first was intoned.
I can tell you that in general, what the tetragrammaton represents is accurately stated as the true name of God in several essoteric texts. It is the name of God as he appeared to Moses in the form of a burning bush.
My Response -
Well first, to argue over which particular letter is used in any translation is sort of silly. Many languages use different letters and they are all wild approximations of spoken verbal noises. For example, any word we try to "write" in English to represent a Native American tongue is going to miss out on a lot of subtleties and complexities. You always lose those intonations when you try to turn a spoken sound or another language into a new language. Just look at the phrase-
A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed.
You have the same "ough" letters that sound different in every case. If you tried to say that phrase and have someone in a DIFFERENT language try to write it down phonetically using only the letters they had in their language, what would they do? Heck the *English* language can't properly indicate how the phrasing should go.
Anyway the point is that those four letters (whatever letters we happen to say they are / were) were not a "shorthand" for Jehovah. They were symbols that stood for God's Name that was not to be spoken. And of course as time went on, we got more relaxed about things and decided we could speak it after all.
From a Visitor -
That's correct, the symbols weren't shorthand for Jehovah. They were the name of God in the Hebrew language. YHVH. Hebrew writing doesn't normally include the vowels. Later, In order to NOT pronounce it while reading it, the vowels in the greek word "Adonai" were used so that the word would not be pronounced correctly. Your point in saying that YHWH isn't the name of God, but is a symbol that stood for the name of God is illogical. That's like saying that John isn't my name, but it is a symbol of my name. WELL DUH! that is what written language is! But claiming that the correct pronunciation of the word "John" is not my name isn't logical. Neither is saying that the correct pronunciation of the Hebrew "YHVH" isn't the name of God. The difference is, the correct pronunciation of YHVH wasn't to be used, so other vowels were used instead so that the scriptures could be read and understood. Like if my name were too sacred, you could call me by a nickname.
In actuality, the name of the Lord WAS spoken. The idea of not speaking it came along much later than the time of Moses. Sometime in history, the priestly order started not speaking the name out of reverence. As usual, tradition became assumed as law over time.
My Response -
That's an interesting claim, what documentation do we have to say the name was spoken at some point? You're saying that they put down YHVH because it was a real name that was spoken, but NOT sounding like Jehovah, and that along the way people decided they should not speak it any more but left behind the letters YHVH? Where can that be researched?
From a Visitor -
Jahovah comes from the translators of the English Bible who did not know that Hebrew Bibles put the vowel pointing for Adonia into the consonants for Yahweh to allert readers not to say the word Yahweh out loud but to say Adonai which means Lord. In the 16th century this particular feature was not know to the Christian translators and what they read literally was Yahowah which they rendered in English as Jahovah. The coalescing of the vowel pointing for one word with the consonants for another is the reason for Jahovah.
My Response -
Well, I think we've agreed that Hebrew didn't have vowels so it wasn't the Hebrews who added the vowels, it was the Europeans in the 1500s. I agree that when vowels were added to YHWH that they added the vowels from the word "Adonai", Greek for Lord. And then people began saying that new letter combination, Jehovah, because it was what was printed in their Bibles. Apparently the very original believers had different vowels in the letters YHWH and actually spoke that name too (according to the previous writer at least) and perhaps what they said was YIHAWIH or something like that. I'm still trying to research if that can be documented anywhere - that the name was spoken for a while and then someone decided that it shouldn't be spoken any more but was still written as YHWH.
From a Visitor -
The issue of the High Priest is acknowledged but the issue of not saying the name is tied into Rabbinic traditions of putting a fence around the Torah. i.e. if the Torah says do not take the Name of God in Vain --if one never speaks the name one will not violate the law....hence the fence. It also reflects a belief that to pronounce a name suggests a way to control. For example if you were walking down a street and someone yelled your name you would turn around. Pronouncing a name has a way of eliciting action...ancient Israel did not presume to control God.
The tetragrammaton often has the vowel pointing for Adonai. In some instances it is unpointed. What is written is not what is said.
The Medianite Mountain God was named Yahweh. It is not know what connection that signifies. There are THERIES but we just do not know and trying to imagine these things into fact doesn't wash.
We really don't know HOW ancient Hebrew was pronounced PERIOD. There is likely some continuity in present practice but scholars know this can't be recovered because there are too many overlays. It is better to acknowledge what is established. I.e. There was a Medianite Mountain God named Yahweh. And recognize what is not presently know and will never be established with certainty unless there is some new major archaelogical find that casts light on this. Since sound recordings did not exist...what we have is conjecture.
My Response -
Great points, thanks!
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