Nobody ever said JUH hovah or Jee sus until the 16th Century
by Terry 11 Replies latest jw friends
-
-
Beth Sarim
Aid to Bible Understanding pages 586 & 587.
Ray Franz was instrumental in the book.
If you have a copy of it....never let it go interesting.
-
Reasonfirst
English is not the only language in the world.
Here's how Chinese Christians would talk about 耶稣
-
EasyPrompt
If you are completely deaf, you can't hear the difference between the J or the Y...
Here is one way to sign God's name, but there are other ways in other sign languages...
-
DamnTheTorpedoesFullSpeedAhead
The Etymology of “Yahweh”
This is an educational dive into the way modern Christianity has been infiltrated and influenced by non-Christian parties, in this particular case, by a pair of Enlightenment-era etymologists.
Have you ever heard someone refer to God as “Yahweh”? That’s just the English for His revealed name in the OT, right? That must mean it’s the ancient Christian practice!
Let’s look at the genealogy of this one, because it is wild. N.b. this thread is not about “the secret name of God,” or YHWH, or Jehovah, or vowel pointing, or any other such debate. It is solely focused how & when the six letters “Yahweh” came into common use in English.
A friend asked this week whether a CPH commentary that insists on translating Lord as “Yahweh” is subversive. My first instinct was “yes, absolutely.” But what do I know? So I turned next to Google Ngrams, which searches over 8M books going back centuries. Ngrams shows just what I imagined: the term was invented in the last two centuries, and took off in popularity very recently. Neither of these are what you want to see when you’re considering sound doctrine. An unchanging God does not engender fickle beliefs.
Ngrams also lets you drill down to any date range to see precisely which hits are represented on the graph. After some spelunking, metadata errors, lots more googling, and hours of reading original source material, here is how we were tricked into saying “Yahweh”.
For thousands of years, there has been debate over the pronunciation of “YHWH”–the name “I am” which God gave Himself from the burning bush in Exodus 3. Written Hebrew of course has no vowels, so with only the text, there are numerous possibilities for any consonant set. “Jehovah” itself is one such made-up word, which deliberately transposes the vowel sounds from “Adonai” onto the consonants in “YHWH”. While the intention at the time was pious, it is highly relevant that no such thing was done in Jesus’ day.
The Greek Septuagint (LXX) is the Old Testament that was commonly used in Jesus’ day. Hebrew was already a dead language in the 1st century, meaning it was no longer spoken conversationally and most couldn’t read it. Jesus quotes the LXX, as does the NT hundreds of times.
So it is relevant how the LXX treats the YHWH “I am”. What we find is that the word is simply and naturally translated “ego eimi”–”I am”. The 4th century Latin Vulgate also faithfully translates it simply as “ego sum”. Zero interest in it as a proper name, vs. a declaration.
This fact is crucial to the question because it ties directly to Christ’s Divinity. When Jesus said, “Before Abraham was I am” He said ego eimi, and the jews tried to murder Him on the spot for blasphemy. He didn’t use some special Hebrew utterance, but “I am”–God’s Name.
For over 14 centuries, every Christian believed that God’s revealed name to Moses was “I am”.
I’m neither a theologian nor an etymologist. But I am an exemplaragnitorian with a respectable track record for correctly sniffing out both bullshit and sulfur. And all the fake Hebrewisms that some Christians like to sling around with pious abandon have always struck me as redolent of both, so it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest to learn that “Yahweh” is an Enlightenment-era construction.
UPDATE: a thematically-related article that takes the position that the use of “Yahweh” is dishonest.
Over the last generation, most American clerics have switched to pronouncing the divine name as Yahweh. I want to make the case that this is dishonest at several levels. First, few can even give a cogent summary of the reasons why Yahweh is to be preferred to Jehovah even though willing to disrupt the tradition over it. I am confident of this because even at the august Westminster Seminary, I caught three professors in the Hebrew OT department out of class and asked why we should say Yahweh. Two of them waved me off to “look it up.” The third, the only one to have an earned PhD from Harvard, said that Jehovah was an entirely possible way the tetragrammaton was pronounced; he used Yahweh as a disruptive mechanism, to shake people out of their comfort zone.
-
DamnTheTorpedoesFullSpeedAhead
"Jehovah" is the received usage in English, much like other names from the Bible.
https://butler-harris.org/archives/1815
The unspoken premise for overthrowing this centuries-long usage is apparently
P1: “whenever the original pronunciation of a name is known, we should strive to pronounce it that way.”
The process of language formation makes it so that once a child’s linguistic root is established, it becomes hard, not only to pronounce, but even to hear phonemes that are not part of the linguistic repertoire of his mother tongue. Traditionally, this was accommodated in the standard naming of international entities. We say Munich, not München, Florence, not Firenze (with front tongue-flap ‘r’). Even when the transliteration is identical, say for Berlin or Paris, the pronunciation is quite different than that of the natives (rear glottal ‘r’, the dropped ’s’ sound, accent, and other differences).
The received transliterations of names, both sacred and secular, belie P1. As mentioned, it was not followed, partly because it is impossible to follow: P1 is a fool’s errand. The new clerics don’t pronounce the morpheme-pair Yah-weh as it would have been: namely, they leave out one or both of the puffs of air associated with the ‘h’ [2]. James White does a valiant effort with the first one; it’s almost impossible for an English speaker to pronounce both h’s without emptying his lungs and sounding like he just got in from a long jog.
It seems like no one has noticed that P1 is only ever applied to biblical names in this one case. For, there are numerous names in the Bible where, in contrast to the tetragrammaton, we know the original pronunciation [3]; yet there is not the slightest effort to “correct” our received English pronunciation. Just a few example of dozens that could be given:
1. We can start with Eve the wife of Adam. In Hebrew, this name is pronounced Chawa (where ‘ch’ represents the palatal fricative, like the light-form of the ‘ch’ in German). Yet I have yet to hear a preacher tell the story of Adam and Chawa. (Note that there would be a stronger case for using the Hebrew form here than there is for the Tetragrammaton, as it would set the stage to explain the linguistic connection with Eve as mother of the living.)
2. The great king of Israel was not Day’-vid, but Da-weed’ (where I am indicating the phonetic spelling and indicating the accented syllable). But imagine how silly and affected it would seem if a pastor preaching through I and II Samuel was always referring to a character named Da-weed’ (unless perhaps it was an “urban” church).
3. The name John is interesting, because this is given to us in the Greek NT text as Yoannes, but the Greek is already almost certainly an adaptation to Greek of the Hebrew or Aramaic Yo-cha-nahn’ which would have been spoken. There are two things to notice here. (i) by the same principle of P1, I suppose that is how our scholarchens should pronounce it: Yo-cha-nahn’. (ii) Notice however that the Holy-Spirit-inspired Greek text does not hesitate to transliterate Yo-cha-nahn’ rather freely into the Greek usage, without this overweening effort to be “accurate” — even though the writers would have known the “correct” pronunciation with apodeictic certainty, having heard and spoken it themselves.
4. Continuing in the NT, the name that comes to us as James in the tradition is actually Ya-ko’-boos. But imagine how affected and pretentious it would seem if your pastor spoke of Ya-ko’-boos and Yo-cha-nahn’, the sons of Zebedee.
So if the second reason for saying our new clerics are dishonest is that they can’t do it anyway, the third reason is that even if they had a good linguistic argument, and could carry it out, it still wouldn’t follow that we should change our received usage in English, and they do not do so in any other case — even when, unlike the Tetragram, there is indisputable linguistic knowledge.
Now perhaps our opponents will argue that the divine name is unique: all names can be morphed and adapted to our usage except divine names. But then they are not consistent, for they continue to use ‘God’, which is both a class and a name, instead of El or Elohim.
Moreover, the name of our Savior the God-man in the original usage was Yeshua/`. The guttural at the end of the Hebrew and Aramaic version is all but impossible for an English-speaker to pronounce without sounding like he is choking. Greek speakers likewise gave it up and transliterated to Iesous, from which the morph to Jesus is fairly clear even to a non-linguist I think. The name of His office in Hebrew, meshiach’ went into Greek as Xristos based not on sound but meaning, and into English by sound affinity as Christ (from Greek, when used as the name) or Messiah (from Hebrew/Aramaic, when used to tag the office). The name Jesus bears scant resemblance to any of the indicated forms of Yeshua.
-
Fisherman
Jesus because of the Greek. Yehovah is God’s name pronounced J in English. As simple as that.
-
Anony Mous
Jehovah or Yahweh is an interpretation of what the names may have sounded like to the High Priest when passed on to the next one. Beyond that, nobody was allowed to know or pronounce the name, the actual pronouncement was never written and if it existed, likely had been lost to history around the first destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians.
The rest is just interpretation and conjecture over centuries, first by the Christian churches, later even considered by certain Jewish sects and Muslims. Phonetic writing over the centuries was minimal if at all existent, very few cultures (before the Renaissance, I think in the West, only the Greeks had a phonetic alphabet) were interested. And even so, even had the Tetragrammaton been transliterated in ancient Greek we have even lost accurate representations of that language, so we’re still making assumptions over a transliteration of an assumption of a transliteration of a proto-Hebrew word that had likely been lost centuries before it was ever written.
The name of God, a game of telephone lasting thousands of years across dozens of major cultures and hundreds of re-interpretations of this game. Must be real important stuff to God, someone should base a religion on it.
-
-
Terry
SUPERSTITION is the result of ignorance about Nature leading to false notions of causation.
In other words, humans perceive the frightening or awe-inspiring lighting bolts, thunder, volcanic eruptions,
rainbows, comets, Northern lights, etc. and attribute (false) causes.
That is the beginning of human knowledge: GUESS WORK.
An oddity of human nature is that humans who assume THEY KNOW something fall into 2 categories:
1. Those self-convinced who cannot be persuaded otherwise
2. Those with curiosity who are unafraid to be wrong and willing to CHANGE and UPDATE their knowledge.
(A man convinced against his will is
of the same opinion still).
https://bestlifeonline.com/facts-that-arent-true/
