Dear Rolf, As you well know the following:
KS is an abbreviation of KURIOS. QS is an abbreviation of QEOS. PNA is an abbreviation of PNEUMA. Each of these abbreviations would be used to distinguish between lord = master, sir, Lord versus LORD, Lord (adonay); god versus God; wind, breath, spirit versus Spirit. These would have used in the 2nd Century AD by Christian scribes making more copies of the Greek Old Testament (GOT) and the LXX (BOTH subsumed by scholars under LXX). The best examples of this phenomena would have been the Great Codexes Alexandrinus, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. And this would make sense since they were addressing the predominately Gentile, Greek speaking members of the church. The Greek texts found in the DSS would make sense since it is found within Hebrew/Aramaic speaking area of Palestinian Judaism. See http://www.lib.umich.edu/reading/Paul/nominasacra.html for a list of abbreviations found in P46. These abbreviations for the Nomina Sacra would be for strictly Chrisitan purposes, but some abbreviations would be found in non-literary papyri. Most of these abbreviations were used more for speed in writing than for readability, but also to make a distinction between a regular use of a word and the use of the word as a holy word. See also http://www.skypoint.com/members/waltzmn/NominaSacra.html. Now, getting back to the purpose of this list. YHWH is found 6828 times in the Tanakh. The question is when did the use of Adonay in Qere begin to be used as a substitute for YHWH? I do not think that any one really knows. It would be based on conjecture, etc. Since the GOT was first translated in Alexandria during the reign of Philadelphus Ptolemy ca 250 BC, it would be easy to see that KURIOS was used to translate YHWH. And I have shown that sometimes YHWH was left untranslated when Adonay YHWH was found in the Hebrew Text especially in Ezekiel which has Adonay YHWH 217 of 317 found in the Tanakh. That still does not answer the question since pronunciation and the use of Adonay in Qere would not be known. We have only WRITTEN documents. We have no MP3 that is able to produce the original, accurate or any other pronunciation ancient or modern scholarship's attempt of the Tetragrammaton, PERIOD. We can only draw conclusions based on the written documents. We can draw inferences based on secondary material, but that is, at best, educated guesswork, i.e. speculation. Until we have more evidence in either direction all we can do is agree to disagree, but the predominance of the evidence leans against your position. Rev. Bryant J. Williams III _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
