| HeyBub 2007-09-27, 9:55 pm |
| Alistair wrote:
>
> I did know that but I am curious as to what the two words used were
> and why Martin Luther made the mistake.
(using Roman characters)
Okay. In the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, the word for God
appears as YHWH (written Hebrew has no vowels).
When reading aloud, there is a prohibition against using God's name, so
another word is substituted: "Adona" (means "lord" as in king or master). So
when the observant Jew runs across YHWH, he articulates "Adonai," and this
becomes as automatic as us thinking "etcetera" whenever we see "etc."
A group of scholarly Jews, the Masorites, fearing that Jews were losing the
ability to study the sacred texts, devised a set of diacritical marks to
represent the vowels of spoken Hebrew. These marks were placed above and
below the consants of written Hebrew. Now here's where the funny part comes
in.
Regarding the word YHWH, the Masorites placed the vowels for "Adonai" with
the consonants - because they knew that was the word that would be spoken
aloud.
Martin Luther, who knew Hebrew but not this trick, simply transcribed the
word as YaHoWaH. When the word was translated into English, The German "Y"
became "J" and the German "W" became "V."
The result is Jahovah or Jehovah.
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