St. Satan......If you haven't read this webpage, it is well worth it....it debunks much of his fake linguistics:
http://www.sitchiniswrong.com/sitchinerrors.htm
Enjoy!
The king of eternity and the eternal house
by Leolaia 20 Replies latest watchtower bible
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Satanus
Thanks a load. I'll check it out.
SS
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Leolaia
PP....I did not dismiss the possibility that Yahweh is etymologically related to or derived from Ugaritic Yaw, indeed I acknowledged it as either a reinforcing or derivational factor. What I dismissed is that the specific deity of Yaw is to be identified with Yahweh. Your suggestion of Yahweh as a hypocoristic form sounds quite attractive to me, though I'm not sure how philologically valid it is. I would consider maybe Yahweh-Ba'al "Ba'al Lives" as mythologically more appropriate. But perhaps Yahweh is just an epithet, like the many that Baal, El, Asherah, Anat, and Resheph have. This goes back to Yahweh's epithet 'lhym chyym "the living God" in Jeremiah 10:10 and other texts. Could Yahweh have originated as a similar epithet, denoting Baal/Yahweh's victory over death?
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Leolaia
BTW....This is assuming that the imperfect verb is in the qal form; Yahweh-Baal as "Baal Lives" or "Baal Shall Live", perhaps "Baal Abides". But isn't chayah with a cheth -- not a he? I guess that makes the conventional derivation questionable to me. But another interesting fact is that the oath formula chy-yhwh "Yahweh Lives" does occur 43 times in the OT, according to the TDOT.
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peacefulpete
Leolaia..Please don't understand my post as critical, my dislike of typing sometimes makes me appear glib or combative, when usually I'm just too lazy to be polite. I think Cross would have Yahweh -El be understood as,"may El be present".
I have no quarrel with my teacher.
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Narkissos
If the vocalization is Yahweh (but is it?) it is a hip'il, not a qal, whence normally a factitive or causative (hence transitive) meaning, with an implied object.
An old theory (still held in TDOT as far as I remember) was that the primitive object was tseva'ot ("armies"). Yahweh arising from a title of El (or Baal?), DN who makes (or creates, or summons) the armies. Could remind of Genesis 14:19 (with qal of a naturally transitive verb), 'èlyôn qoneh shamayim wa'areç, "the Most High who produces the heavens and the earth".
But if the basic meaning of hwh is "to breathe, to blow", the causative makes sense and the implicit object is better explained imo: he breathes or he blows = he causes the winds to blow.
But is it Yahweh in the first place? Or Yaho - Yahu ?
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Narkissos
As I was thinking of the subject later, I realized how amazing and profound it was that "eternity" and "life" were seen as antithetical concepts. This sure makes my day.
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peacefulpete
hwh=blow/wind makes a lot of sense for a storm god.
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Leolaia
Narkissos.....Do you have examples from the OT of the root hwh meaning "blow, breathe" especially with Yahweh as a subject? What verb is used in the case of Yahweh breathing life into Adam in Genesis 2? On the other hand, the frequent epithet formula chy-yhwh in the OT is also suggestive, especially since intermedial waw can occur for Hebrew yod in Ugarit and in the north. And though I used the form Yahweh, I wasn't suggesting the causative hiphil form (which the WTS favors, as I recall) but the qal one; the vocalization of yhwh is indeed simply as conjectural as the vocalization of Keret (or Kirta, or Kirtu?). I recall some prosodic evidence of a trisyllabic vocalization.
Are you referring to Yahweh-Sabaoth as the original form? One piece of evidence against this is that the focus on armies and war results from the conflation of Yahweh with Anat (following Mark Smith), which represents an early but subsequent development to Yahweh as a Baalish storm god.
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Narkissos
There is no example in Biblical Hebrew of such use of the root hwh. It's an hypothesis on the origin of the name in older Semitic. This was held by Ewald, Wellhausen and more recently by Lipinski. It would indeed suit the Baalistic storm theophanies and the breath of life motif (if not the actual words).
As to yahweh çevaoth being original, I personally am not very much inclined to buy into it, but it has been very seriously maintained (was it Driver? Cross? I don't remember, but you can check it in the yhwh article in TDOT if you have easier access to it).