Jehovah (Y: Bible
Jehovah (Y: Bible
Jehovah (Y: Bible
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Several centuries before the Christian era the name Jhvh had
ceased to be commonly used by the Jews. Some of the later writers in
the Old Testament employ the appeliative Elohim, God, prevailingly or
exclusively: a collection of Psalms (Ps. xlii. lxxxiii.) was revised by an
editor who changed the Jhvh of the authors into Elohim (see e.g. xlv.
7; xlviii. 10; 1. 7; ii. 14); observe also the frequency of "the Most High,"
the "God of Heaven," "King of Heaven," in Daniel, and of "Heaven" in
First Maccabees. The oldest Greek versions (Septuagint), from the
third century B.C., consistently use Κύριος, Lord, where the Hebrew
has Jhvh, corresponding to the substitution of Adonay for Jhvh in
reading the original; in books written in Greek in this period
(e.g. Wisdom, 2 and 3 Maccabees), as in the New
Testament, Κύριος takes the place of the name of God. Josephus,
who as a priest knew the pronunciation of the name, declares that
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religion forbids him to divulge it; Philo calls it ineffable, and says that it
is lawful for those only whose ears and tongues are purified by wisdom
to hear and utter it in a holy place (that is, for priests in the Temple);
and in another passage, commenting on Lev. xxiv. 55 seq.: "If any
one, I do not say should blaspheme against the Lord of men and gods,
but should even dare to utter his name unseasonably, let him expect
the penalty of death."[2]
The early Christian scholars, who inquired what was the true
name of the God of, the Old Testament, had therefore no great
difficulty in getting the information they sought. Clement of Alexandria
(d. c. 212) says that it was pronounced Ιαουε.[9] Epiphanius (d. 404),
who was born in Palestine and spent a considerable part of his life
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The ancient explanations of the name proceed from Exod. iii. 14,
15, where "Yahweh[17] hath sent me in;" v. 15 corresponds to "Ehyeh
hath sent me" in v. 14, thus seeming to connect the name Yahweh
with the Hebrew verb hâyâh, to become, to be. The Palestinian
interpreters found in this the promise that God would be with his
people (cf. v. 12) in future oppressions as he was in the present
distress, or the assertion of his eternity, or eternal constancy; the
Alexandrian translation Εγώ είμι ό ον... Ό ῶν απέσταλπέν
This assumption that Yahweh is derived from the verb "to be", as
seems to be implied in Exod. iii. 14 seq., is not, however, free from
difficulty. "To be" in the Hebrew of the Old Testament is not hâwâh, as
the derivation would require, but hâyâh; and we are thus driven to the
further assumption that hâwâh belongs to an earlier stage of the
language, or to some, older speech of the forefathers of the Israelites.
This hypothesis is not intrinsically improbable—and in Aramaic, a
language closely related to Hebrew, "to be" actually is hâwâ—but it
should be noted that in adopting it we admit that, using the name
Hebrew in the historical sense, Yahweh is not a Hebrew name. And,
inasmuch as nowhere in the Old Testament, outside of Exod. iii., is
there the slightest indication that the Israelites connected the name of
their God with the idea of "being" in any sense, it may fairly be
questioned whether, if the author of Exod. iii. 14 seq., intended to give
an etymological interpretation of the name Yahweh,[19] his etymology is
any better than many other paronomastic explanations of proper
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great part, of the area occupied by the Western Semites. In its earlier
form this opinion rested chiefly on certain misinterpreted testimonies in
Greek authors about a god Ιάω, and was conclusively refuted by
Baudissin; recent adherents of the theory build more largely on the
occurrence in various parts of this territory of proper names of persons
and places which they explain as compounds of Yahu or Yah.[24] The
explanation is in most cases simply an assumption of the point at
issue; some of the names have been misread; others are undoubtedly
the names of Jews. There remain, however, some cases in which it is
highly probable that names of nonIsraelites are really compounded
with Yahweh. The most conspicuous of these is the king of Hamath
who in the inscriptions of Sargon (722-705 B.C.) is called Yaubi'di and
Ilubi'di (compare Jehoiakim-Eliakim). Azriyau of Jaudi, also, in
inscriptions of Tiglath-Pileser (745-728 B.C.), who was formerly
supposed to be Azariah (Uzziah) of Judah, is probably a king of the
country in northern Syria known to us from the Zenjirli inscriptions as
Ja'di.
Many attempts have been made to trace the West Semitic Yahu
back to Babylonia. Thus Delitzsch formerly derived the name from an
Akkadian god, I or Ia; or from the Semitic nominative ending, Yau;
[27]
but this deity has since disappeared from the pantheon of
Assyriologists. The combination of Yah with Ea, one of the great
Babylonian gods, seems to have a peculiar fascination for amateurs,
by whom it is periodically discovered. Scholars are now agreed that, so
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[ 314 ]Deut. xxxiii. I; Ps. xviii. 7-15; Hab. iii. 3-6. The cherub upon
which he rides when he flies on the wings of the wind (Ps. xviii. 10) is
not improbably an ancient mythological personification of the storm
cloud, the genius of tempest (cf. Ps. civ. 3). In Ezekiel the throne of
Yahweh is borne up on Cherubim, the noise of whose wings is like
thunder. Though we recognize in this poetical imagery the survival of
ancient and, if we please, mythical notions, we should err if we inferred
that Yahweh was originally a departmental god, specifically over
meteorological phenomena, and that this conception of him persisted
among the Israelites till very late times. Rather, as the god—or the
chief god—of a region and a people, the most sublime and impressive
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