I am sure that most of you here are familiar with Psalms 83:18.
So, whats the skinny? What is the Christian God's name?
Kansas District Overbeer
Is God's name Jehovah, Yaweh, or simply Lord?
by pr_capone 90 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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pr_capone
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inquirer
Jehovah - Hebrew
Yahweh - Aramaic.They use to write God's name with the Hebrew characters in the Septuagint, so Christians should say "Jehovah" in English.
Have a look a the history of the divine name here: www.biblestudy.org/maturart/sacname.html Explains everything in detail regarding the history of the name.
Look here for absolutely everything about the divine name: Or http://jehovah.freewebpage.org
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Leolaia
Jehovah - Hebrew
Yahweh - Aramaic.I don't think so...Hebrew yhwh, "Yahweh" being the most likely vocalization. Same goes with Aramaic, again represented as yhwh. The name may be shortened to yh (= Greek -ia, consistent with the "Yahweh" vocalization) or yhw (= vocalized as Yaho, as indicated by Greek Iao)
"Jehovah" is the name with Latinate spelling (J being a later variant of I, both representing the same palatal sound as Hebrew /y/), vocalized likely under the influence of shema and adonay.... it is not vocalized as such in any ancient texts (which have forms like Iabe) but instead appears to be a later convention. The early MT vowel pointings (which seem to exist to remind the reader to pronounce the subsitute word for the name) favored Yehwah (the vowels of shema "name", cf. the pointings in the BHS), with a few inserting a holem under the medial he, which became more common as time wore on. One theory of the origin of the holem is, of course, that the source is the word adonay, tho I believe there are no forms with a final qamats. Another idea is that the holem is an error for an intonation marker, which strongly resembled the holem.
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Mysterious
Lord is an obvious replacement for the tetragrammaton. As for the correct pronunciation I dont think anyone can be sure this far removed from the historical culture and context.
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Sirona
Leo, I would be interested in your views of this:
http://www.themage.net/Kabballah/tetragrammaton.htmTetragrammaton
The sacred name of God. In Hebrew "four-letter word" or symbol meaning yod-ye-vau-he (YHWH) and signifying Yahweh.
It is pronounced in Hebrew as "Adomai," and written generally as JHYH with variations of JHVH or YHVH. In English it became Jehovah.
This has often been confused with God introduction of Himself to Moses, "I Am That I Am." (Exodus 3:14) This particular introduction was derived from the god Ab-braham or Father Braham who introduced himself in Sanskrit 'Tat Sat'--"I Am That that Is."
The root YHWH is radical of HWH, he-vau-he, meaning "being" or "life" or "woman" which were interchangeable concepts in the ancient Middle East. These identical letters in Latin are E-V-E: Eve. So the central or inner meaning of the Tetragrammaton is Eve, the Mother of All Living.
In the Gnostic Gospels this concept also is conveyed. The Wisdom of God, or the Divine Spirit and Mother, is believed the real creator of the world. Allegedly her son, who was called the demiurge, stole his power from his mother and with it created the world. The early Gnostics believed the demiurge was the God which the orthodox Christians adored and not the true God or Supreme Being which they symbolized as Iao.
The Tetragrammaton had two versions. EHYH, the lesser-known one, comes from Hayya, another one of Eve's many names, which designates the Goddess in her special connection to women in childbirth. On Samaritan phylacteries the male and female versions of the Tetragrammaton were intertwined.
The Hebrew mystics embodied this sacred name of God into the lore of Kabbalism. The "ineffable name" of God by which all the powers of the universe could be controlled. Further Kabbalistic thought holds that the name YHWH contained all the Forces of Nature, and since some thought it could be divided this was a indication according to Kabbalistic theory that God had lost His Shekina, his feminine part or the Great Mother, who, as believed by mystics, had to return before there would be peace or harmony in the universe.
The Tetragrammaton has at times been referred to as Sem ha-mephoras or Schemahamphorasch, perhaps the origin of the word "semaphore," which resembles the Hindu samjna. "The Rabbinic tradition declares that Sam ha-mephoras either was inscribed on a holy phallic stone buried in the Great Gate of Mother Earth, or else was the stone itself, also called Eben stijjah, the Stygian Stone, or Stone of the Deeps. It was connected with the sexual myth of the descent of the Father Heaven's phallus into the yoni of the virgin Mother Earth, to "unlock her fountains," that is, to stimulate the Nether Upsurge of world-sustaining blood. Sexual organs of God and Goddess lay at the center of the holy of Holies. 'David is supposed to have found at the digging of the foundation of the temple, the Eben stijjah, Stone of the Deeps, that unlocked the fountain of the great deep, and on which the Sem ha-mephoras, the outspoken name of God, was inscribed.'" A.G.H.
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Evanescence
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=70538
Hebrew has its own alphabet. In the Hebrew alphabet, the Name of God is written yodh-he-vav-he. The "yodh" looks a lot like our apostrophe and is the equivalent of our letter "i" or "y". The "he" is the equivalent of our letter "h". The "vav" looks like a yodh with the lower part extended down to the line on which the letters are being written, and is the equivalent of our "o", "u", "v", or "w". So the Holy Name can be transliterated into English as "YHWH" or "YHVH"; there's not really a reason to prefer one over the other that I know of.
The future tense of the verb "to be" in modern Hebrew is conjugated in part as follows:
aleph-he-yodh-he (pronounced "eh-hi-yeh") - I will be
tav-he-yodh-he (pronounced "ti-hi-yeh") - you will be
yodh-he-yodh-he (pronounced "yi-hi-yeh") - he will be
I don't remember how to spell "she will be" but it is pronounced "ti-hi-yeh-na".
Ancient Hebrew is a good bit wilder and woolier than modern Hebrew, and the form for "I am who I am" in Exodus 3:14 is "eh-hi-yeh a-sher eh-hi-yeh." But elsewhere in the Hebrew Old Testament the YHWH Name of God is spelled as yodh-he-vav-he.
Interestingly, the letters in the Hebrew alphabet all stand for numbers and the ancient Israelites did not have separate numerals. The value for yodh is ten and for he is five. The number 14 is written as yodh-daled (daled being four) but the number 15 is written as tet-vav (tet being nine and vav being six) because to write yodh-he would be to start writing out God's Name. Sixteen is written as yodh-vav.Evanescence
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Cygnus
I like the theory that Judean Jews utilized a 3-syllable word for God's name, something like Yehowah. The Samaritans used a 2-syllable word, like Yahweh or Yahu. Yehowah in English is Jehovah.
Buttressing this argument is the English versions of other names that contain part of the divine name, such as Jehoaz, Jehoiakim, etc. They follow the pattern of including the vowel structure E-O-A.
It could be wrong, but it makes some sense to me.
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pr_capone
So then are the JW's right when they call him Jehovah?
Kansas District Overbeer -
Narkissos
Sirona,
Etymology gone wild: e.g. the h in Yhwh and in Hwh (Eve) stands for two completely distinct letters (hé = "h" and cheth = "ch").
The funniest of all is the derivation of semaphore (a perfectly regular Greek compound, meaning sign-bearer) from the Hebrew shem ha-mephorash...
Cygnus,
Gertoux's argument is flawed, especially when you consider that the "a" in the e-o-a sequence belongs to another word/root than the divine name. In your examples yeho-'achaz, yeho-yakim. Keep in mind, too, that "o" corresponds to the letter w and in that reading there remains no letter to open a third syllable (the final h being final).
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Cygnus
Hey Narki... well, that makes good sense to me too. Thank you. I guess it shows to go that I haven't kept up with this stuff very well as my interest has waned greatly. I should know better and keep my trap shut. Thanks again. :)