Doug, Emanuel Tov is one of my "heroes" too.
Doug Mason : If the WTS wants to reflect the practices it touts, then it should use the ancient form of the Hebrew. That will show it was not meant to be pronoinced.
I have been thinking about the reason for the paleo-Hebrew characters when writing the tetragrammaton for years. I am familiar with the suggestion that it is written that way to show it should not be pronounced, just as the vowels for adonai were addded to the tetragrammaton at a later stage. But that never rang true to me. I knew that prior to the 2nd century C.E. there were many who were using God's name, partly due to the evidence in the book by Frank Shaw and partly due to my own research. Even so, I couldn't think of an alternative plausible reason until I read this monologue by Emanuel Tov.
In discussing the possible reasons for representing the divine name in paleo-Hebrew and by using four dots (tetrapuncta) he says (p. 205; PDF p.228):
This practice undoubtedly reflects reverence for the divine name, considered so sacred that it was not to be written with regular characters lest an error be made or lest it be erased by mistake. Possibly, the dots or strokes were also meant to alert against pronouncing the divine name.
Then on pp.230, 231 (PDF pp.252,253) he says:
The background of the writing of the divine names in paleo-Hebrew characters was analyzed by Siegel, "The Employment" and idem, Scribes of Qumran, 29-45. Siegel quoted extensively from y. Meg. 1.71d (parallels in b. Shev. 35b) providing the rules for the writing of the divine names, in particular stipulating which divine names were not to be erased...The use of these characters must have rendered the words more sacred, at least in the eyes of certain religious and/or scribal circles prohibiting their erasure...When erring, the scribes would never erase a divine name presumably adhering to a traditional norm. This description of the sanctity of the letters is hypothetical, but it is supported by the tradition that the Stone Tablets and the Torah (see b. Sanh. 21b) were written in paleo-Hebrew characters.
Personally, I am convinced this is the reason for the paleo-Hebrew characters. If that is the case there is no reason to print God's name in different script, both because the mistakes made by manual copying are (almost) redundant and because the Watchtower Society are not bound by the halakhic rules of Second Temple Judaism.
Just one other little gem to share for those familiar with P.Fouad 266 and its history in the New World Translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures, 1950:
According to Stegemann, KURIOS O QOES und KURIOS IHSOUS, 155, the four dots (tetrapuncta) indicating the divine name are also evidenced in P.Fouad 266b (848), where they were subsequently overwritten by the tetragrammaton written in small square characters, leaving much space on both sides.
It has to be said that Dunand, Papyrus grecs, Introduction, 13, and Aly-Koenen, Three Rolls, 5-6, who both examined P.Fouad 266b, found it difficult to recognise any dots behind the writing of the tetragrammaton.
