Tetragrammaton: Western Christians and the Hebrew Name of God (2024)

Why, in the English-speaking world, is nobody is given the name "Jesus" while in Spain and Latin America this theophoric name is quite popular? Any confessional argument is ultimately insufficient and unsatisfying and therefore the quandary remains unsettled. And what of theophoric names in early Christ religion? How did early Christian writers who adopted theophoric names for themselves, or employed them for others, navigate the fine line between misuse and honor, religious qualm and religious tribute? Did they navigate it at all? In his two-volume work, the writer known as Luke calls his Christ-believing addressee "Theophilos"; the real or putative Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, nicknames himself "Theophoros"; the anonymous author of the small tract To Diognetus probably invented the designation to formally address a prospective non-Christian audience. Are such names ("beloved of god"; "sprung from Zeus") merely hackneyed commonplaces? Or do such practices bestow "peer/gentlemanly honor" (Appiah 2010) as a manly quality shared by both sender and recipient? Or, as the meta-theophoric "bearer of God" seems to suggest, are theonyms used to rank positions and claim religious prestige? Focusing on three early Christian texts, the paper will try to work its way through these intriguing questions.

This monograph presents the grammatical context for select examples of the Tetragrammaton and the words Elohiym and Adonay as used primarily in Old Testament Scripture sometimes alone and often juxtaposed with each other. In some examples, the Tetragrammaton and Elohiym appear in a single clause as the subject and predicate. In most examples, however, they are found in apposition or within a construct chain. In addition, at Appendix 3, I propose an alternate gloss for “YAH” that, at least, provides a sensible syntax of Scripture whenever the “YHWH” paradigm is also applied to the sameScripture. *****The following are my other titles related to the Tetragrammaton:El-KapharThis study presents my hypothesis as to the primitive (early) meaning of the Tetragrammaton and gives arguments and evidence in support of my assertions. I devised my hypothesis based upon the Tetragrammaton written in the ancient Phoenician or Paleo-Hebrew scripts as it appeared in early Biblical Scrolls. I note the pictographic nature of the word and the images it portrays. The word very likely had two primitive interpretations: the first is the Oracle of Israel’s God and the second is the Land of Canaan. I provide scriptural justification for these interpretations and demonstrate that they adapt into the Scripture for both the Old and New Testaments.I conclude by giving my opinions regarding why Christians and Jews abandoned the two primitive definitions of the Tetragrammaton in favor of the word “Lord.” Tetragrammaton within Exodus and DeuteronomyIn this monograph, I present the results of my analysis of the documentary sources for both Exodus and Deuteronomy. This analysis determines the number of occurrences of the words, Lord and God and phrases comprising combinations of these two words. Tetragrammaton in Genesis through DeuteronomyIn this book I have reprinted the English translation of Genesis through Deuteronomy; the text is from the King James Bible. Within the text I have substituted alternate words and phrases in the many places at which the word “Lord” and the phrase, “Lord God” and variations thereof appear. These substitutions are based upon the findings described in my monograph, “El Kaphar.”Tetragrammaton and Joshua, Judges, Ruth, First Samuel and Second SamuelIn this book I have reprinted the English translation of Joshua through Second Samuel; the text is from the King James Bible. Within the text I have substituted alternate words and phrases in the many places at which the word “Lord” and the phrase, “Lord God” and variations thereof appear. These substitutions are based upon the findings described in my monograph, “El Kaphar.”Tetragrammaton and First Kings, Second Kings, First Chronicles and Second ChroniclesIn this book I have reprinted the English translation of First Kings through Second Chronicles; the text is from the King James Bible. Within the text I have substituted alternate words and phrases in the many places at which the word “Lord” and the phrase, “Lord God” and variations thereof appear. These substitutions are based upon the findings described in my monograph, “El Kaphar.”Tetragrammaton and Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job, Psalms and ProverbsIn this book I have reprinted the English translation of Ezra through Proverbs; the text is from the King James Bible. Within the text I have substituted alternate words and phrases in the many places at which the word “Lord” and the phrase, “Lord God” and variations thereof appear. These substitutions are based upon the findings described in my monograph, “El Kaphar.”Tetragrammaton and Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Isaiah, Jeremiah and LamentationsIn this book I have reprinted the English translation of Ecclesiastes through Lamentations; the text is from the King James Bible. Within the text I have substituted alternate words and phrases in the many places at which the word “Lord” and the phrase, “Lord God” and variations thereof appear. These substitutions are based upon the findings described in my monograph, “El Kaphar.”Tetragrammaton and Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah and MalachiIn this book I have reprinted the English translation of Ezekiel through Malachi; the text is from the King James Bible. Within the text I have substituted alternate words and phrases in the many places at which the word “Lord” and the phrase, “Lord God” and variations thereof appear. These substitutions are based upon the findings described in my monograph, “El Kaphar.” Tetragrammaton and the New TestamentThis work contains select books from the King James New Testament. These Books include: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, First Peter, Jude and Revelation. These were selected because they contain phrases from the Old Testament such as, “Lord God.” Within these books I have changed the English translation of these phrases and other individual words that are based upon the Tetragrammaton, to agree with the findings described in my monograph, “El Kaphar.” In that work I assert that the Tetragrammaton is a Paleo-Hebrew word that has a dual meaning: “Canaan” and “Oracle.” Here the word “Canaan,” refers to the Land of Canaan and the word “Oracle,” refers to the Oracle of God. The Oracle of God is generally thought of as the Holy of Holies where the Ark resides and where the High Priest meets God once a year on the Day of Atonement. By association, the word “Oracle” also implies atonement. In this present work, I apply the dual translation, “Canaan” and “Oracle,” to the King James New Testament text. This present work is a companion to my work in which I apply the dual translation to the King James Old Testament. End

Divine Names on the Spot Towards a Dynamic Approach of Divine Denominations in Greek and Semitic Contexts, 2021

The nativization of Modern Hebrew at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth is one of the most commonly cited examples of language planning and (possibly) revival. The Hebrew Language Committee, which was the main body responsible for Hebrew language planning in the formative years 1890–1953, held numerous discussions about the desired pronunciation, grammar, orthography and lexicon of the evolving language. The present study looks into one intriguing trait in the discourse of the Committee: the inclusion of numerous religious expressions drawn from Jewish religion, mysticism, and law. The paper examines these religious references and attempts to discover whether the Hebrew planning discussions included in the Committee’s Proceedings were a continuation of Jewish scholarly, halakhic deliberations, or whether the use of Jewish imagery and allusions was just a façon de parler. Using a language ideologies framework (Blommaert in Language ideological debates. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, pp 1–38, 1999; Irvine and Gal in Regimes of language: ideologies, politics, and identities. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, pp 35–83, 2000; Woolard in Language ideologies: practice and theory. Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, pp 3–47, 1998), it suggests that while the overt intentions of Hebrew language planners were most predominantly secular, there is enough evidence to support the claim that the language planning of Hebrew was not fully secularized.

The Believer and the Modern Study of the Bible, 2019

Four facets of names of God reveal clear internal development within the classical biblical period: (1) El Shaddai was used in oral speech only until the Exodus from Egypt. In later periods, the name Shaddai existed as an archaic term used, infrequently, by prophets and poets. (2) The expression YHWH Tzva'ot (the Lord of Hosts) originated only in the time of the book of Samuel, and was in use from then until the compostion of the books of Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. (3) The first two cases of the theophoric element YHW/YH/YW in personal names occurred just before and during the life of Moses. From that point, it increased gradually in frequency until the period of the late monarchy, by which time it was included in more than half of all personal names. (4) The name indicating lordship, Adonai, was initially a term of supplicatory address and became a name of God in the eighth century BCE.

Fs. Zipi Talshir, 2015

Strength to Strength , 2018

The common scholarly view that the writing of the Tetragrammaton inpaleo-Hebrew script in the Habakkuk Pesher was used to protect thedivine name from abuse is examined. I eschewed explanations that were drawn from external sources, and I sought a largely descriptive discussion of the use of the divine names, including the writing of the Tetragrammaton in paleo-Hebrew script. Iconclude that no single reason can explain all the features of the writing of the divine names.

C. Bonnet et al. (eds.), What’s in a Divine Name? Religious Systems and Human Agency in the Ancient Mediterranean, 2024

One of the major changes with regard to the transition of ancient Israelite religion into Early Judaism is the transformation of Yhwh from being the patron god of Israel, enthroned in Jerusalem, to being a universal (and invisible) deity residing in heaven. The first part of this paper surveys how the study of divine onomastic attrib-utes has been approached by Septuagint scholarship, highlighting how this corpus crucially attests to a reconfiguration of Yhwh’s power and status, but also pointingout some methodological shortcomings which emerged in past research. The second part of the paper seeks to provide a new framework for the study of divine onomastic attributes in the Septuagint. Paying attention to the relationship between divine name and embodiment, it correlates the deterritorialisation process of Yhwh, as attested by the onomastic attributes, with broader issues concerning the conditions, forms and limits of experiencing the divine presence in cultic contexts.

published in the volue: Comics and Sacred Texts: Reimagining Religion and Graphic Narratives, Assaf Gamzou (Editor), Ken Koltun-Fromm (Editor)University Press of Mississippi 2018

Journal for The Study of The Old Testament, 2007

Theological Research, 2016

Who is He, to Whom we address words God, Theos, Deus, etc.? How far goes possibility for adaptation of religious and philosophical language from other (non-Western) cultures? Do people, by using certain words and terms, denote being of God, or are they just conventional names? Those questions were raised quite early in theological debates in early stages of Christianity, and answers were given by such prominent Church Fathers as Gregory of Nyssa and Basil the Great. The problem resurfaced millennium later, when Western missionaries encountered nations and people whose religious and philosophical concepts were far different from their own. Should they accommodate local terms to fit the Christian concept of God, or should they introduce Western terminology? This translational and linguistic problem leads to the question: are there universal concepts which (despite of cultural affiliation, based on the common human experience) could communicate the Christian idea of God? Findings of Wierzbicka, and her own claim is: yes – there are semantic primes, through which we can translate our ideas (with minor imperfections). But this last question goes beyond the reach of mere secular linguistics, and enters the domain of theology. For it is theological claim that in our human nature we are capable of addressing Triune God.

Ancient Jewish letter writing is a neglected topic of research. Lutz Doering’s new monograph seeks to redress this situation. The author pursues two major tasks: first, to provide a comprehensive discussion of Jewish letter writing in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman periods and, second, to assess the importance of ancient Jewish letter writing for the emergence and early development of Christian epistolography. Although individual groups of Jewish letters have been studied before, the present monograph is the first one to look at Jewish letters comprehensively across the languages in which they were written and/or handed down (chiefly Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek). It operates with a broad concept of "letter” and deals with documentary as well as literary and embedded letters. The author highlights cross-linguistic developments, such as the influence of the Greek epistolary form on Aramaic and Hebrew letters or the non-idiomatic retention of Semitic "peace” greetings in some letters translated into Greek, which allowed for these greetings to be charged with new meaning. Doering argues that such processes were also important for early Christian epistolography. Thus, Paul engaged creatively with Jewish epistolary formulae. Frequent address of communities rather than individuals and the quasi-official setting of many Jewish letters would have provided relevant models when Paul developed his own epistolary praxis. In addition, the author shows that the concept of communication with the "Diaspora”, in both halakhic-administrative and prophetic-apocalyptic Jewish letters, is adapted by a number of early Christian letters, such as 1 Peter, James, Acts 15:23-29, and 1 Clement . Ancient Jewish and early Christian letters also share a concern with group identity and cohesion that is often supported by salvation-historical motifs. In sum, Lutz Doering addresses the previously under-researched text-pragmatic similarities between Jewish and Christian letters.

Vetus Testamentum, 2009

When translating the name of God, the reader becomes thrown inexorably into a thick and inescapable tangle, a veritable “gnommero” (literally, an unsettling jumble, according to the dense and coloured expression of Carlo Emilio Gadda’s linguistic artistry). In a certain sense, the outcome is prejudiced both by the very definition and wording of the subject, to the extent that any unbiased, objective claim may be irreparably nullified. As such, this paper deals with a typical hermeneutic tangle, whose absolute solution clearly does not exist. Exodus 3:14, the focus of this paper, has been the object of extensive studies over the last two-thousand years, thus returning to it may seem a little pedantic. I have already done various studies on the subject in the past, one of which featured in the IV Incontranto Nazionale di Traduzione in Brazil, which took place at the University of São Paulo in 1990, entitled “Acerca do problema da tradução do Nome de Deus”. It provided yet another variation to the theme, even if the dimensions of the presented text came to only, at most, a quarter of its actual length (fortunately for the reader). The extensive notes to Erri de Luca’s own Italian translation from Hebrew of Esodi/Nomi (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1994) reinforces my own reasoning, which is a little rough, amateur and somewhat playful.