Dear Rolf, You demonstrate a stubborn insistence on ignoring evidence which does not fit with your position, so your conclusions are faulty. Stephen Shead has already offered comments, so I shall not repeat his points. I would like to make one comment on this claim you keep repeating (and I keep disputing):
RF: There is evidence that in the last two centuries BCE the religious order at Qumran did not pronounce God's name, but used )L instead. There is no evidence that different groups in the second or first century BCE used )DNY as a substitute for YHWH. MS: You draw your evidence from sectarian manuscripts which contain the name Yhwh. How can a legitimate claim be made that a word is being used to avoid use of the name Yhwh when the manuscript already contains the name? Why avoid it and then use it? It makes no sense. Obviously the best sort of evidence would be a copy of a scribal manual which read "We do not write the divine name, we always substitute xyz." Now since such a text doesn't exist, we need to look for other pieces of evidence. Other legitimate evidence from the DSS would take the form of manuscripts which avoid using Yhwh and refer to God. Furthermore, in order to determine where substitutions of the name are being made, the best indication would be in quotations from the Tanak. Short of that, the use of alternate forms in phrases that are found in the Tanak or are strongly reminiscent of those phrases. As I have shown, there are a number of such pieces of evidence which use ×××× × (ʾÄdônay). I think there is actually better evidence for this than for your claims about ××. Regards, Martin Shields.
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