Was “Yahweh” actually the personal name of the God of Israel? And how do we explain that the world-destroying flood of Genesis 6-9 (the story of Noah) comes in so many other versions from antiquity written long before the book of Genesis appeared?
I have been doing a thread on interesting features of the Hebrew Bible from my textbook, The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press). Here I address the two issues of God’s name and the flood, both of them accounts found in the second book of the Pentateuch, Exodus.
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BOX 4.1 THE PERSONAL NAME OF GOD
God is called by many names in the Bible, including Lord, God, Lord God, God Almighty, God the King, and Lord God of Hosts. But there is one term used for God that appears to have been thought of by ancient Israelites as his actual, personal name. In English, this is often given as Yahweh, based on the Hebrew word YHWH. Ancient Hebrew did not have vowels, only consonants, and so we do not actually know how the word was pronounced, although “Yahweh” is a good guess. Because this special name of God consists of four letters, it is sometimes referred to as the tetragrammaton (literally, “the four letters”).
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For great insights into the Hebrew Bible, take a look at Joel Baden’s course at BSA “The Hebrew Bible: Exploring the Literature of Ancient Israel.” Lecture 4 (The Primeval Histories) explores the flood narrative, teasing out the two interwoven flood stories. Baden is excellent. Regarding YHWH and the using of the vowels from Adonai, Baden made a passing comment in one lecture about how Jews have been laughing at Christians for 1500 years over the appropriation and usage of Jehovah.
Hi Bart, hope you are having a good day, big fan of your books!
I’ve been thinking recently about John the Baptist’s seemingly illogical behavior when it comes to Jesus’ messianic status. In Matthew 3, John is hesitant to baptize Jesus and seems to be aware who Jesus is. But later on in the story, in Matthew 11, he sends his disciples so they can verify for him if Jesus is the one who the prophets spoke about. Analogous situation happens in Luke 3 and 7.
Is this some kind of error in the plot? Or am I missing something? Do the authors get confused, because the first event comes from Mark, and the other one from Q?
Ah, good point…. It’s usually understood to be a problem from using a variety of sources; one story comes from one source the other through the other. I’m away from my books and can’t check on Q — but if it looks like #2 has lots of verbal connections of Matthew and Luke, that would probably be it.
Adon and Adonai is interesting because it was -never- used for the immaterial idea of God in the cuneiform times, it’s used *only* for a king, including *God-kings*.
Imo the name of the Tetragrammaton phonetically might be Yahuha Lahmu.
(Variants: maybe Yahoha Lahmu (if you’re using the Akkadian u-to-o shift, maybe Yehuhe Lahmu if you’re acknowledging the a-to-e shift, or maybe you can even unpack further to Hayyasinhalahmu or Easinhalamu. idk.)
Deuteronomy gives you the three *regions* of god: the Sinai, Seir and Paran.
Sinai – Sin
East Semetic
(Lunar god of pastoralists in Abraham’s Harran. Imo equivalent to Hyksos deity Yah, imo bc the -ai refers to Ea in the 28th day of Sin in the Babylonian hemerologies.)
Seir – Lahmu “The Hairy One”
West Semetic
( Servant deity to Ea in Ur)
Paran = Ha the desert god (later, also the Lord of of Foreign Lands)
Egyptian, Midianite
Titulary deities for the three-kingdom coalition of Judah, Israel and Edom when they’re doing their desert campaign
I thought His personal name is “Howard.”
I’ll see myself out.
Oh and LHM could stack the Ugarit Elohim also, the divine council, because in Genesis the parts where the Mesopotamian Divine Council speaks seems to map as LHM.
So, nationalism is a kind of fictive kinship — it’s literally uniting different, smaller groups under one umbrella.
And the earliest records were kept in *cuneiform*. So, once they break the Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform in the Antiquarian Revival of Uruk, beginning the 4th C BCE, it’s a slow roll out to the least developed areas.
Jesus is showing he KNOWS. He KNOWS HaShem. He knows how national monotheism goes, like with Zooroastrianism (2 deities) or Atenism (two deities).
There’s lots of ways he shows that he knows, but sn easy example is him using Sumero-Akkadian phrases in their correct *contexts*:
“fishers” oh of men, haha. Hello, Dimuzi.
“shepherd” of *men*. Hello, Doeg the Edomite!
Bible says Doeg is the “chief herder”, Talmud says that’s a euphemism for being a herder of *scholars*.
Which version is YHVH? Apparently, it’s more confusing because there’s TWO YHVH’s! (I was shocked to learn this). There’s the Heavenly one, and the Manifest one. A quick AI search on “Two YHVH’s” is interesting. And such a search reveals (source not cited):
“Philo of Alexandria (Jewish Philosopher, c. 20 BCE – 50 CE): Referred to the second divine power as the Logos (“Word”), describing Him as the “second god” (deuteros theos) and the chief agent through whom God created and interacts with the universe.”
Sounds exactly like John 1:1 …
But of course, we’re in MONOtheism, and also need to resolve all this with doctrine such as a trinity. It is interesting that the Jews and OT scholars had two YHVH’s and yet didn’t exactly develop a trinity. They did have a notion of Shaliach, a sort of equivalency. Maybe I digress too much. But when one name/thing is the equivalent of another, how do you sort out its name? YHVH makes sense when you consider a merging of raw spiritual energy from above projected into the physical (Y), a spiritual life (H) merging (V) with physical life (H #2). Which is what a creator is.
The ReligionForBreakfast YouTube channel makes an absolutely fantastic case that the worship of Baal and Yahweh happened side by side in ancient Israel for centuries and many of Yahweh’s attributes came from Baal’s attributes. These include names of famous Israeli’s, like one of King David’s sons has “Baal” in his name. See link below, it is an absolutely fantastic watch. I learned more from it in 20 minutes than many documentaries you see on places like the History channel or the Discovery channel.
This brings up the whole issue of pre-exile Israeli religion, which seemed to have worshipped Yahweh’s wife, Asherah, along with Yahweh and Baal since the founding of Israel. It definitely seems that modern scholarship has shown that King Josiah and King Hezekiah fundamentally changed Israeli religion and re-wrote Israeli history. Bart, if you can provide your thoughts on these issues, it would be immensely valuable. This information about pre-exile Israel is basically absent from the public domain. Most people are as ignorant about it as they are about what modern critical biblical studies have revealed about the New Testament and the development of the Christian religion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WVKujAa3AU
Thank you so much, Prof. E. If you have time:
The Tetragrammaton is usually translated as I AM THAT I AM. What is the most accurate translation of which you are aware? One Hebrew source offered I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE.
Is there any chance that despite the strict dualism of the Jewish view of God and creation, The Name could imply a kind of nondualism- as if to say “I am existence itself,” (along the lines of Advaita Vedanta)? “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is One” – this has a similar possible level of meaning.
I don’t think it’s quite right to say that is a translation of the Tetragrammaton. The Tetagrammaton is a four-letter name, that can not be “translated” in the way a sentence can be. You can provide an English equivalent of the name (the standard one was “Jehovah”) but it is not a name. If you are asking how the passage in Exodus 3 should be translated, yes what you give is one of the options. Hebrew scholars vary among themselves, as you’ll see by checking out a number of translations.
Here is the rendering of the Tetragrammaton in English by Dr Yeshaya Gruber, of the Israel Bible Podcast:
The eternally dynamically being one who is an incomprehensible superimposition of every kind
“Superimposition” refers to superimposition in quantum physics.
I live in Montana and the land was shaped by glaciers. They dammed up rivers that created massive lakes and in time the ice dams broke and the water rushed out. The most famous is Glacial Lake Missoula which exploded across northern Idaho and eastern Washington when the ice dam failed. There are oral traditions that tell of people surviving because they were high up on hills.
In light of this, I believe that the flood stories were oral traditions from antiquity from when similar glacial floods affected the ancient people in the Levant.
Thank you. I guess I’ll try “rendered in English,” if that seems better.
So, YHWH became blasphemous to speak aloud somehow. Do you know why Jews started writing God as “G-d”? How do they pronounce that when they see it in print? I don’t know.
So when they saw the word they would know that his name is holy and not to be pronounced. I *believe* G-d is simply a writing convention to commemorate the God’s holiness and that when read aloud it is pronounced “God.” But mayube someone can correct me on that.
Modern Jewish people call him hashem, “the Name” and avoid difficulties with potential irreverence.