| Alistair 2007-09-28, 6:55 pm |
| On 28 Sep, 03:40, "HeyBub" <heybubNOS...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Alistair wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> (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.
Thanks for that. Ta.
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