On 11/08/2010 09:49 AM, David P Donnelly wrote: > And I don't know of any source that claims that the Jewish people ever > pronounced "YHWH" as "Yahweh" > > Kirk, have you ever found a source that claimed that there was ever a > time in history, > when it was know [ as a fact] > that the Jewish people ever pronounced the un-pointed Tetragramaton as > "Yahweh"? > > Dave Donnelly > > P.S. > > Of course in about 190 A.D. , > Clement of Alexandria wrote that "the word of four letters" was called > "Iaoue", > which favors the pronunciation "Yahweh", > but certainly that does not prove that God's name was "YAHWEH" > unless Clement was inspired by God to write "Iaoue"
The text was originally written without vowels. But one cannot speak consonants. Language is a combination of both vowels and consonants (and maybe other types of sounds). I don't think that it can be proved one way or the other conclusively. But, reading the texts, especially the Torah, seems to imply that the characters in those stories did pronounce it in some way. Of course, just what that pronunciation might have been has been the cause of much verbiage, just here on b-hebrew. The frequency of the Tetragrammaton, however, simply indicates that the name was important to those ancient people. Nothing more, in my opinion, can be inferred from the statistical frequency of occurrence. And, while interesting, the actual pronunciation is of small significance in comparison to the message(s) of the Hebrew Bible. Again in my opinion, it is best to pay attention to that message. Blessings, Kirk B-Hebrew moderator -- Kirk E. Lowery, PhD, President & Senior Research Fellow The J. Alan Groves Center for Advanced Biblical Research http://www.GrovesCenter.org/blogs/kirk -- The tricorder broke Communicator is dead And my shirt is red --Star Trek haiku _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
