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The Name
of Yahweh
Process Of Elimination Developed And Implemented
In order to implement the avoidance of pronouncing Yahweh's Name (), a system of
vowel points was developed and added to the Hebrew language.
The Jewish Encyclopedia, Volume 12, pages 118-119, tells us more about this:
TETRAGRAMMATON: The quadrilateral name of God, ().
The Tetragrammaton is the ancient Israelitish name for God. According to actual
count, it occurs 5,410 times in the Bible, being divided among the books as
follows: Genesis 153 times, Exodus 364, Leviticus 285, Numbers 387, Deuteronomy
230, (total in Torah 1,419); Joshua 170, Judges 158, Samuel 423, Kings 467,
Isaiah 367, Jeremiah 555, Ezekiel 211, Minor Prophets 345 (total in Prophets
2,696); Psalms 645, Proverbs 87, Job 31, Ruth 16, Lamentations 32, Daniel 7,
Ezra__Nehemiah 31, Chronicles 446 (total in Hagiographa 1,295).
In connections with () the Tetragrammaton is pointed with the vowels of "Elohim"
(which beyond doubt was not pronounced in this combination); it occurs 310 times
after (), and five times before it (Dalman, "Der Gottesname," etc., p.91), 227
of these occurrences being in Ezekiel alone. The designation "YHWH Zeba'ot,"
translated "Lord of hosts," occurs 260 times, and with the addition of "God"
four times more. This designation is met with as follows: Isaiah 65 times,
Jeremiah 77 times, Minor Prophets 103 (Zechariah 52; Malachi 24), Samuel 11,
Kings 4; but it does not occur, on the other hand, in the Pentateuch, in Joshua,
in Judges, or in the Hagiographa. Adding these 264 occurrences and the 315 just
noted to the 5,410 instances of the simple Tetragrammaton, the word "YHWH" is
found to occur 5,989 times in the Bible. There is no instance of it, however, in
Canticles, Ecclesiastes, or Esther; and in Daniel it occurs 7 times (in ch.
ix.)__a fact which in itself shows the late date of these books, whose authors
lived at a period when the use of the Tetragrammaton was already avoided, its
utterance having become restricted both in the reading of the Bible and still
more in colloquial speech. For it was substituted adonai; and the fact that this
name is found 315 times in combination with "YHWH" and 134 times alone shows
that the custom of reading the Tetragrammaton as if written "ADONAI" began at a
time when the text of the Biblical books was not yet scrupulously protected from
minor additions. This assumption explains most of the occurrences of "ADONAI"
before "YHWH"; i.e., the former word indicated the pronunciation of the latter.
At the time of the Chronicler this pronunciation was so generally accepted that
he never wrote the name "Adonai." About 300 b.c., therefore, the word "YHWH''
was not pronounced in its original form. For several reasons Jacob ("Im Namen
Gottes," p. 167) assigns the "disuse of the word "YHWH" and the substitution of
"ADONAI" to the later decades of the Babylonian exile."
The Interpreters Dictionary of the Bible, Supplementary Volume, page 717, tells
us more about the devices used to hide Yahweh's Name:
Qere perpetuum. The earliest instance where a word in the biblical text was not
read, but another was pronounced in its stead, is that of the TETRAGRAMMATON (YHWH).
The prohibition of pronouncing "The Name," and the obligation of substituting in
perpetuity a term that expresses the divine majesty, are explicitly recognized
in the Babylonian Talmud (Pes. 50a): "Said the Holy One, blessed be He: not as I
am written, am I read. I am written(yodh-he, i.e., the Tetragrammaton), but I am
read (aleph-daleth, i.e., Adonai)." The antiquity of this prohibition is evident
from the fact that the Hebrew Tetragrammaton was not translated in the most
ancient recensions of the lxx, where it appears only in Hebrew script. Later it
was rendered into Greek by (Lord), which conveys the sense of the Hebrew Adonai.
In the Greek text, at the beginning, the same procedure was followed as in the
Hebrew, namely, the equivalent of the divine name was first abbreviated, through
reverence, into the form , then, in later texts and under Christian influence,
it came to be written out fully. In the same way, the Babylonian Targ. on the
Pentateuch (Targ. Onkelos) systematically renders the Tetra-grammaton into
Aramaic by the abbreviation (the arithmetic equivalent of which __26__ is the
same as that of the Tetragrammaton fully written in its Hebrew form).
This ancient prohibition of pronouncing the divine name persisted orally until
the introduction of the Hebrew vocalic system, where the vowels written under
the Tetragrammaton are those of the substitute word Adonai. Its antiquity
clearly shows that it originated in the oldest Jewish oral traditions that
accompanied the transmission (masora) of the sacred text from the beginning. In
contrast to the qere perpetuum, substituted orally for the Tetragrammaton, the
Masoretic tradition, as a precautionary measure, indicated in the margin of
later mss, in the form of a statistical note (=134), the number of times in the
text where God is explicitly designated by the title (cf. Gen. 18:3 and passim).
In this way, they sought to forestall any change in the form of the sacred text
that might be made by an overhasty scribe.
Robert Pfeiffer, in his Introduction to the Old Testament, supplies more
information:
To avoid the utterance of the name Yahweh, both before and after the adoption of
the qere, other devices were employed. In some cases adonay was written in the
text (so in Dan. 9:9 where the Babylonians wrote YHWH); in Pss. 42-83 elohim
(deity) is substituted for Yahweh; in Am. 5:16 adonay (missing in the lxx) and
in Ps. 59:5 (H. 59:6); 80:4, 19 (H. 80:5, 20); 84:8 (H. 84:9) elohim are
interlinear substitutes for yhwh, which were mechanically copied into the text
(see W.R. Arnold, Ephod and Ark, pp. 31, 38, 145-147). We even find in the text
late substitutes for Yahweh: "Heaven" (Dan. 4:26 [H. 4:23]; cf. Is. 14:13, lxx;
the Kingdom of "Heaven" in Matthew) and "the Name" (Lev. 24:11, 16). In the
Aramaic portions of Daniel 2-7, not only are substitutes for Yahweh regularly
employed, but the verbal form YeHeWeH (he is or will be), which occurs regularly
in the Elephantine papyri, to avoid confusion with the ineffable name YHWH was
changed to LeHeWeH (similarly the plurals lehewon, lehewyah).
Long after the introduction of the qere "Lord" for YHWH (6,823 times in the Old
Testament according to the Masora), but before a.d. 500, vulgar expressions in
the text, as we have seen, were removed by substituting a euphemism in the
reading (qere). Equally ancient are the instances of "read but not written" and
"written but not read" listed above.
Vowel points were placed among the letters of Yahweh's Name as a code telling
the reader to pronounce another name (or title) in place of the Name Yahweh .
The Century Bible, by Adeney and Bennett, Volume 1, page 91, chronicles the
establishment of this doctrine.
Hebrew was originally written without vowels, but when the vowel points were
added, the vowels of Adonay or Elohim were written with yhwh, as a direction
that these words were to be read instead of the word whose consonants were YHWH.
Thus we find the combinations YeHoWaH and YeHoWiH.
We have already seen that the two names chosen to take the place of the Name
Yahweh are Adonai and Elohim. When the vowel points of Adonai or Elohim were
placed among the letters of the Name Yahweh , Yahweh's Name was changed to look
like the following: or . Then, when a reader saw the Name Yahweh with the vowel
points, the reader would know to say Adonai when he saw the form , and Elohim
when he saw the form . The Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Kiddushin, page 71a,
openly confirms that this became the standard practice of all Israyl, as it
still is to this day.
...R. Abina opposed [two verses]: It is written, 'this is my name'; but it is
also written, 'and this is my memorial'?__The Holy One, blessed be He, said: I
am not called as I am written: I am written with yod he, but I am read, alef
daleth.7
7. The Tetragrammaton is yod he waw he; but it is read adonai = alef daleth nun
yod...
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