YAHWEH AS
THE ORIGINAL PRONUNCIATION
OF THE TETRAGRAMMATON
CANNOT "BE CONCLUSIVELY PROVEN."This short essay on the name of God is taken from the introduction of The Schoken Bible: Volume I. This volume is Everett Fox’s translation of the Old Testament's The Five Books of Moses, published by Schocken Books, New York, 1995. The essay is quoted here in its entirety. Some of the text has been underlined and highlighted in red to call attention to it and to emphasize it.Professor Fox is associate professor of Judaica and director of the Jewish Studies Program at Clark University in or Worcester, Massachusetts. His essay will serve to showcase the fact that all who claim to know a correct and an exact pronunciation for YHWH as it might have originally been pronounced are fooling themselves even as they are deceiving others. One cannot but think of the words of Jesus about the blind leading the blind.
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ON THE NAME OF GOD AND ITS TRANSLATION
The reader will immediately notice that the personal name of the biblical God appears in this volume as "YHWH." That is pretty standard scholarly practice, but it does not indicate how the name should be pronounced. I would recommend the use of traditional "the LORD" in reading aloud, but others may wish to follow their own custom. While the visual effect of "YHWH" may be jarring at first, it has the merit of approximating the situation of the Hebrew text as we now have it, and of leaving open the unsolved question of the pronunciation and meaning of God's name. Some explanation is in order.The name of God has undergone numerous changes in both its writing and translation throughout the history of the Bible. At an early period the correct pronunciation of the name was either lost or deliberately avoided out of a sense of religious awe. Jewish tradition came to vocalize and pronounce the name as "Adonai," that is, "the / my Lord," a usage that has remained in practice since late antiquity. Another euphemism, regularly used among Orthodox Jews today, is "Ha-Shem," literally "The Name."
Historically Jewish and Christian translations of the Bible into English have tended to use "Lord," with some exceptions (notably Moffatt’s "The Eternal"). Both old nd new attempts to recover the "correct" pronunciation of the Hebrew name have not succeeded; neither the sometimes-heard "Jehovah" nor the-standard scholarly "Yahweh" can be conclusively proven.
For their part, Buber and Rosenzweig sought to restore some of what they felt was the name's ancient power; early drafts of their Genesis translation reveal a good deal of experimentation in this regard. They finally settled on a radical solution: representing the name by means of capitalized personal pronouns. The use of You, HE, HIM, etc., stemmed from their conviction that God's name is not a proper name in the conventional sense, but rather one which evokes his immediate presence. Buber and Rosenzweig—both of whom wrote a great deal about their interpretation (see Buber and Rosenzweig 1994) based it on their reading of Lx. 3:14, a text in which another verbal form of YHWH appears, and which they translated as "I will be-there howsoever I will be-there" (i.e., my name is not a magical handle through which I can be conjured up; I am ever-present). For more on this passage, and the name, see the Commentary and Notes in the text below
The B-R rendering has its attractiveness in reading aloud, as is demonstrated by recordings of Buber reading his text, but it is on doubtful grounds etymologically It also introduces an overly male emphasis through its constant use of "HE," an emphasis which is not quite so pronounced in the Hebrew For these reasons, and out of a desire to reflect the experience of the Hebrew reader, I have followed the practice of transcribing the name as YHWH.
Readers who are uncomfortable with the maleness of God in these texts may wish to substitute "God" for "he" in appropriate passages. While, as a translator, I am committed to reproducing the text as faithfully as I can, it is also true that the ancient Hebrews viewed God as a divinity beyond sexuality and modern readers as well may see fit to acknowledge this.
Email: Gary Mink, Editor
