Page:EB1911 - Volume 15.djvu/337

Rh After the destruction of the Temple ( 70) the liturgical use of the name ceased, but the tradition was perpetuated in the schools of the rabbis. It was certainly known in Babylonia in the latter part of the 4th century, and not improbably much later. Nor was the knowledge confined to these pious circles; the name continued to be employed by healers, exorcists and magicians, and has been preserved in many places in magical papyri. The vehemence with which the utterance of the name is denounced in the Mishna—“He who pronounces the Name with its own letters has no part in the world to come!” —suggests that this misuse of the name was not uncommon among Jews.

The Samaritans, who otherwise shared the scruples of the Jews about the utterance of the name, seem to have used it in judicial oaths to the scandal of the rabbis.

The early Christian scholars, who inquired what was the true name of the God of the Old Testament, had therefore no great difficulty in getting the information they sought. Clement of Alexandria (d. c. 212) says that it was pronounced. Epiphanius (d. 404), who was born in Palestine and spent a considerable part of his life there, gives (one cod.  ). Theodoret (d. c. 457), born in Antioch, writes that the Samaritans pronounced the name (in another passage,  ), the Jews . The latter is probably not Jhvh but Ehyeh (Exod. iii. 14), which the Jews counted among the names of God; there is no reason whatever to imagine that the Samaritans pronounced the name Jhvh differently from the Jews. This direct testimony is supplemented by that of the magical texts, in which (Jahveh Ṣebāōth), as well as, occurs frequently. In an Ethiopic list of magical names of Jesus, purporting to have been taught by him to his disciples, Yāwē is found. Finally, there is evidence from more than one source that the modern Samaritan priests pronounce the name Yahweh or Yahwa.

There is no reason to impugn the soundness of this substantially consentient testimony to the pronunciation Yahweh or Jahveh, coming as it does through several independent channels. It is confirmed by grammatical considerations. The name Jhvh enters into the composition of many proper names of persons in the Old Testament, either as the initial element, in the form Jeho- or Jo- (as in Jehoram, Joram), or as the final element, in the form -jahu or -jah (as in Adonijahu, Adonijah). These various forms are perfectly regular if the divine name was Yahweh, and, taken altogether, they cannot be explained on any other hypothesis. Recent scholars, accordingly, with but few exceptions, are agreed that the ancient pronunciation of the name was Yahweh (the first h sounded at the end of the syllable).

Genebrardus seems to have been the first to suggest the pronunciation Iahué, but it was not until the 19th century that it became generally accepted.

Jahveh or Yahweh is apparently an example of a common type of Hebrew proper names which have the form of the 3rd pers. sing. of the verb. e.g. Jabneh (name of a city), Jābīn, Jamlēk, Jiptāḥ (Jephthah), &c. Most of these really are verbs, the suppressed or implicit subject being ’ēl, “numen, god,” or the name of a god; cf. Jabneh and Jabnĕ–ēl, Jiptāḥ and Jiptaḥ–ēl.

The ancient explanations of the name proceed from Exod. iii. 14, 15, where “Yahweh hath sent me” in v. 15 corresponds to “Ehyeh hath sent me” in v. 14, thus seeming to connect the name Yahweh with the Hebrew verb hāyāh, “to become, to be.” The Palestinian interpreters found in this the promise that God would be with his people (cf. v. 12) in future oppressions as he was in the present distress, or the assertion of his eternity, or eternal constancy; the Alexandrian translation , understands it in the more metaphysical sense of God’s absolute being. Both interpretations, “He (who) is (always the same),” and “He (who) is (absolutely, the truly existent),” import into the name all that they profess to find in it; the one, the religious faith in God’s unchanging fidelity to his people, the other, a philosophical conception of absolute being which is foreign both to the meaning of the Hebrew verb and to the force of the tense employed. Modern scholars have sometimes found in the name the expression of the aseity of God; sometimes of his reality, in contrast to the imaginary gods of the heathen. Another explanation, which appears first in Jewish authors of the middle ages and has found wide acceptance in recent times, derives the name from the causative of the verb; He (who) causes things to be, gives them being; or calls events into existence, brings them to pass; with many individual modifications of interpretation—creator, life-giver, fulfiller of promises. A serious objection to this theory in every form is that the verb hāyāh, “to be,” has no causative stem in Hebrew; to express the ideas which these scholars find in the name Yahweh the language employs altogether different verbs.

This assumption that Yahweh is derived from the verb “to be,” as seems to be implied in Exod. iii. 14 seq., is not, however, free from difficulty. “To be” in the Hebrew of the Old Testament is not hāwāh, as the derivation would require, but hāyāh; and we are thus driven to the further assumption that hāwāh belongs to an earlier stage of the language, or to some older speech of the forefathers of the Israelites. This hypothesis is not intrinsically improbable—and in Aramaic, a language closely related to Hebrew, “to be” actually is hāwā—but it should be noted that in adopting it we admit that, using the name Hebrew in the historical sense, Yahweh is not a Hebrew name. And, inasmuch as nowhere in the Old Testament, outside of Exod. iii., is there the slightest indication that the Israelites connected the name of their God with the idea of “being” in any sense, it may fairly be questioned whether, if the author of Exod. iii. 14 seq., intended to give an etymological interpretation of the name Yahweh, his etymology is any better than many other paronomastic explanations of proper names in the Old Testament, or than, say, the connexion of the name  with ,  in Plato’s Cratylus, or the popular derivation from .

A root hāwāh is represented in Hebrew by the nouns hōwāh (Ezek., Isa. xlvii. 11) and hawwāh (Ps., Prov., Job) “disaster, calamity, ruin.” The primary meaning is probably “sink down, fall,” in which sense—common in Arabic—the verb appears in Job xxxvii. 6 (of snow falling to earth). A Catholic commentator of the 16th century, Hieronymus ab Oleastro, seems to have been the first to connect the name “Jehova” with hōwāh interpreting it contritio, sive pernicies (destruction of the Egyptians and Canaanites); Daumer, adopting the same etymology, took it in a more general sense: Yahweh, as well as Shaddai, meant “Destroyer,” and fitly expressed the nature of the terrible god whom he identified with Moloch.

The derivation of Yahweh from hāwāh is formally unimpeachable, and is adopted by many recent scholars, who proceed, however, from the primary sense of the root rather than from the specific meaning of the nouns. The name is accordingly interpreted, He (who) falls (baetyl, , meteorite); or causes (rain or lightning) to fall (storm god); or casts down (his foes, by his thunderbolts). It is obvious that if the derivation be correct, the significance of the name, which in itself denotes only “He falls” or “He fells,” must be learned, if at all, from early Israelitish conceptions of the nature of Yahweh rather than from etymology.