Hi All,
As some of you know I haven't been a Christian for long but I am a little confused about the word Yahweh,it's meaning and where it comes from.
When looking it up online it says it's found all over the Bible. Exodus 15:2 and 17:16 but in the Good News Bible it never says Yahweh. On some sites online it says it's a forbidden word.
Can someone please put up some Bible verses so I can have a look.
Many thanks for your help 🥰
Hebrew was written originally without the vowels put in. In the 300s AD, some Jews put in some vowel pointings to preserve their pronunciation tradition. In some places it does not conform well with Christian tradition and departs from the well-used Greek translation of the Old Testament, for example about the hands and feet being pierced in Psalm 22.
It seems pretty obvious from reading the Bible that the name of God was pronounced by the early Israelites after Moses. But after the captivity, there were serious restrictions on repeating it. Maybe it had something to do with Persian religion practices of not pronouncing the name of gods.
The Masoretes did not want Jews pronouncing the divine name, so when they put in the vowels, they put the vowels for the word they said instead of YHWH under the letters of the divine name. If you take a semester of Hebrew, and learn what they teach, you will probably realize that the letters don't match up with the vowel points in the way the syllable system works when you get to the divine name. But my professor taught us that a monk in the 16th century made one word out of the letters for Adonai (Lord)-- that the Orthodox Jews substituted when they came to the divine name-- and the letters for Adonai underneath. That is where we get 'Jehovah.' I think the J sound comes from the fact that j is y or short i in most of Europe, but initial 'i' sounds in English took on a hard j sound over time, so we ended up with the name "Jesus' when it had an initial y/i sound in the past.
But the majority scholarly consensus was that the name was likely pronounced as Yahweh. Also, note that when they spell that out, the Ashkenazi Jews are going to pronounce that w as a v. With those vowels in the divine name, it means "I am that I am" or "I will be Who I will be" or something like that. And there is a longer sentence in the passage where the divine name is introduced. I think it can have a double meaning. I'm not expert enough in Hebrew to know the verb forms to understand that deeply. I am repeating what I have heard and read.
Another piece of information about pronouncing the divine name is that in the 3rd or 4th century, it was written in Greek that the Samaritans pronounced the divine name as iabe. Modern Greek pronounces that b, that is, beta sound as a bilabial fricative that sounds like a v. From what I have read, that pronunciation of beta probably goes back to the time of the quote about the pronunciation of the divine name. And Greek didn't have final 'h' type sounds. So it would have fit a Greek transliteration of Yahweh with an Ashkenazi type 'w' sound being pronounced like a 'v'. Of course, the Samaritans did not have the right religion, but they may have spoken Samaritan Hebrew in the first century.
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