GOD'S NAMES AND THE JEWISH READING TRADITION
By John
Wheeler
Those who insist that Yeshua should be used exclusively to represent our
Savior's name often insist that God the Father must be called by God's personal
name in Hebrew Scripture (the Tetragrammaton). Some even insist that Yahshua,
not Yeshua, is the correct pronunciation of our Savior's name. They fail to
reckon with something the early Church respected: the Jewish reading tradition
that accompanied Hebrew Scripture.
The Jewish Circumlocutions for YHWH
The Greek New Testament preserves (in translation) the current Jewish
circumlocutions for the Tetragrammaton [in Hebrew, Yhwh]. By Jesus' day, the Jews already considered the name
Yhwh too sacred to be pronounced outside the Temple.
Wherever Yhwh was written in a Hebrew text, the
reader substituted another divine name in its place. Usually the divine name
used was Adonay [or Lord].
Elohim [or God] was used
when Adonay actually preceded Yhwh in writing. All mainstream Greek Septuagint
manuscripts, other Hellenistic Jewish texts, and the Greek New Testament
translate Yhwh and Elohim
as Kyrios and Theos which
likewise mean Lord and God.
Thus when Jesus read Isaiah 61:1-2 in the synagogue of Nazareth, He read
Adonay Elohim (not Adonay
Yhwh) in verse 1 and Adonay (not Yhwh) in verse 2. Luke (citing the Septuagint) translated
Jesus' reading of Adonay in both cases as Kyrios (Luke 4:16-22). Had Jesus not followed this
convention, He would immediately have been accused of blasphemy under Jewish
law. Likewise, when Jesus cited Hebrew Scripture publicly, and when the apostles
cited it in preaching and writing, they always used circumlocutions for Yhwh-never Yhwh itself. Again,
the New Testament accurately records this fact. Had the apostles (including
Paul) not done so, they would have aroused tremendous controversy among the Jews
and Christ's disciples alike. The New Testament is silent about any such
controversy. This matter was simply a non-issue in the original Church.
Why was this so? Because in following the Jewish convention, Jesus and the
apostles were breaking no law of God. Here Jewish law was extending biblical
precedent, in which Abraham (Genesis 18:27, 30, 31-32), Moses (Exodus 4:10, 13),
Daniel (Daniel 9:7-8, 15, 17, 19), and others used Adonay or Elohim as if it were
Yhwh (that is, as a substitute out of respect for
God's personal name). These precedents were not inserted by early scribes so
that God's name might not be profaned, as the medieval Talmudists and Masoretes
thought. Had the early scribes sought to do so, they should also have made
similar changes in many other places (quite frequently in the same contexts
where the alleged changes were made). The Jewish law, then, was not arbitrary-
but was based on genuine biblical example.
Far from breaking the intent of the Third Commandment, as some charge, this
judgment on God's Law (cf. Matthew 23:1-2) was meant to help the common people
keep it. This worked as long as the Second Temple was still standing, because
the original pronunciation of Yhwh was repeated in
the Temple service every year on the Day of Atonement. It was only after the
fall of the Second Temple in Jerusalem that the exact pronunciation of Yhwh was lost. Even the Hebrew Masoretic Text, while it
preserves the ancient circumlocutions used for Yhwh,
does not openly state the original pronunciation of Yhwh. The meaning of Yhwh was
never lost, however (cf. Genesis 21:33; Exodus 3:14; Revelation 4:8).
Some few fragments of the Greek Septuagint insert Yhwh in archaic Hebrew characters among the Greek words.
For that matter, many of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Hebrew use the square script still used today, but spell out Yhwh in archaic Hebrew characters. In both cases, Yhwh is obviously being given special attention. But this
does not prove that the readers of these texts pronounced Yhwh aloud. On the contrary, specialists concur that Yhwh was so written to mark the name as holy while
reminding the reader not to pronounce it. The conventions of the Masoretic Text
serve a similar function. Yhwh is written out in the
normal square script, but most of the vowel-points for Adonay or Elohim are attached to
it. These remind the reader not to try to pronounce Yhwh as written, but rather as Adonay or Elohim-just as in
Jesus' day and long before.
The point is that, even if one could prove that the New Testament (in Hebrew,
Aramaic or even Greek) originally spelled out Yhwh in
Hebrew characters, this would not prove that the early Christians pronounced
Yhwh-in fact, quite the contrary. Rather, when the
Greek New Testament translates Yhwh as Kyrios (or Theos), it accurately
reflects the reading tradition that Jesus and the apostles respected. So, not
only is there nothing wrong with substituting Adonay
(or Elohim) for Yhwh in
Hebrew, but there is nothing wrong with then translating Adonay and Elohim as Kyrios and Theos in Greek (or as Lord and God in whatever other language).
How Was YHWH Pronounced?
There is another matter to consider. Apart from a system of vowelpoints (such
as the Masoretic Text uses), or else an exact knowledge of how Yhwh is derived and accented, there is no way of knowing
the exact pronunciation of the name. All four letters in Yhwh are semi-consonants, each of which may be used either
as a consonant or as the place-marker of a vowel (depending upon its position in
a word). One therefore cannot decide between possible pronunciations from the
letters alone.
Modern scholars (working largely on extra-biblical evidence) generally accept
Yahweh (or something close to it) as the original
pronunciation. According to the Oxford Bible,"Christian writers between A.D. 150
and A. D. 450 have Yaoua... in Greek characters
[Iaoua], and early magical texts have Yhbyh (Yahveh) in Aramaic
characters, all pointing to Yahweh as the original
pronunciation." Likewise the Revised Standard Version argues that "it is almost
quite certain that the name as originally pronounced Yahweh." The Brown-Driver-Briggs-Gesenius Hebrew-Aramaic
Lexicon also favors Yahweh (with Yahaweh given as an alternative), citing as part of its
evidence the Greek transliteration Iabe given by the
early Catholic commentators Theodoret and Epiphanius. (Iaue is also known from early Greek sources).
Extra-biblical Aramaic and Greek texts, however, cannot completely settle
this question. In the Aramaic letters from Elephantine (5th century BC), the
normal spelling is Yhwh or even Yhw. Not even Yhbyh (with b substituting for w as a
consonant and the second y marking the presence of a
vowel), as found in magical texts where the pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton
was part of the charm, can absolutely prove how Yhwh
was pronounced in Hebrew. This is because the first h
in Yhwh may mark either a consonant or a vowel. Even
given that the name is active rather than reflexive in its verb stem, Yhwh in Hebrew may be pronounced in at least three ways:
Yahweh, Yahaweh or even
Yehawweh (as proposed by Abraham S. Halkin in his
out-of-print 201 Hebrew Verbs). The Aramaic Yhw,
Yhwh and Yhbyh, and the
Greek Iabe and Iaue, could
have come from any one of these pronunciations. (Iaoua may be explained as an independent attempt to
pronounce Yhwh as Yahwah
or Yahuah).
Only Yehawweh seems to fit all the current
biblical and extra-biblical evidence. This includes the derivation of Yhwh from the root hayah, to be (Exodus 3:14-15), the explanations of its actual
meaning (Genesis 21:33; Revelation 4:8; etc.), its use as the prefixes Yeho-, Yo and Ye- and the suffixes -yah
and-yahu in compound personal names, its common short form Yah, and the received
grammar of Masoretic Hebrew. The latter includes not only the vowel-points, but
the accent notation, which indicates the primary and secondary stresses and the
number and kind of syllables used in a word (e.g., Psalm 96:10, which demands
that Yhwh have three, not two syllables).
Beyond this evidence, however, there is simply no authoritative record as
to how Yhwh was pronounced. God has allowed this because He wants us to
focus on the meaning of Yhwh-not on the sounds that represent that
meaning.
The Pronunciation of the Savior's Name
What, then, of Jesus' original name in Hebrew and Aramaic? The claim that it
was Yahshua rather than Yeshua is based largely on the work of Anson Rainey, a
linguist in Israel. Dr. Rainey claims that the Masoretic Hebrew spellings Yhwshw and Yhwsh -both pointed
as Yehoshua-reflect latter-day usage, when the w after the h was added to help
reinforce the pronunciation of h. In his view,
originally the h simply marked the present of the vowel a, and therefore the following w
would not have been present. Yeshua would then be
simply a Masoretic mispronunciation of an even shorter form Yhwshw, likewise pronounced Yahshua originally. But this theory does not explain why,
in the Masoretic Text, Yehoshua is found only in
books (or citations of those books) dating from before the Babylonian Exile, why
Yeshua is found only in books dating from after the
Exile-nor does it explain why both names were translated as Iesous in Greek. (Iesous
certainly does not derive from Zeus as some
gratuitously claim).
Here again, we must look to the Jewish reading tradition for answers. The
Masorete Moshe ben Asher (ca. 895AD) made clear that he and his fellow scribes
did not invent the vowel-points and musical accents they transcribed; they
received them-ultimately from a family of Second Temple priests called the
Elders or Sons of Bathyra (Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura, The Music of the Bible
Revealed, pp. 105-107, 499-502, 519). Taken at face value, this testimony means
that the Masoretes preserved the official pronunciation and melodic rendition of
biblical Hebrew current in Second Temple times. Moreover, we know from
inscriptions that Yshw was the Hebrew and Aramaic
spelling current in Jesus' day. We also know that this name was almost always
translated into Greek as Iesous. We may therefore
affirm that the Masoretic pronunciation of Yeshua is
reliable.
The Lord Jesus Christ
Jesus' full name in Greek-ho
Kyrios Iesous Christos (the Lord Jesus
Christ)-ultimately springs from Hebraic roots. In Masoretic Hebrew, that
full name would be ha-Adon Yeshua
ha-Mashiach. It is so rendered in all modern Hebrew New Testament
versions. (At least one early version shortens Yeshua
to Yeshu. The meaning is the same).
One day, every knee will bow at the name of Jesus, and every tongue will
confess that Jesus Christ is Lord (Philippians 2:10-11). Apart from the Jewish
reading tradition, we would not know precisely how His name would have sounded
in Hebrew. But its meaning-not its sound-is what will matter on the Day of
Judgment! It is that meaning that the Greek New Testament conveys word-for-word
and thought-for-thought.
Wheeler J.
God's Names and the Jewish Reading Tradition.
http://www.cogwriter.com/
2005/2006
