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Tidbits

Every now and then I learn some interesting (sometimes pointless) tidbits of information. I thought I might start to blog some every now and then, so here is College tidbit #1 "Jehovah":

Most of the Old Testament is written in an ancient form of the Hebrew language. While the spoken language has many vowels sounds, these vowels sounds are omitted from the written word; ie. they only write the consonants - like some peoples text messages. I guess this is okay if you grew up with the language, but it makes it very difficult to read Hebrew for someone new to the language as many words could be any number of things; and the pronunciation... ?

So... going back a few thousand years (give or take) scholars began 'pointing' the text - adding in little dots to indicate what the vowel sounds should be. When they came to the word Yahweh however, they did something strange. Yahweh, the most holy name for God, was considered too holy by the ancient scribes, even to read out. When they came across "Yahweh" in the text then, they would just say "Adonay", which means my Lord. So... the scholars pointing the text took the vowels from "Adonay" and placed them under "Yahweh", the idea being whenever you saw this you would be reminded to read out "Adonay" in stead of "Yahweh".

Ok, bear with me caus this is where it gets interesting. Fast-forward to the reformation period around 1500's. The protestant church begins to emerge and protestant scholars with their newfound zeal to discover for themselves what scripture is really saying begin to translate it for themselves. When they came across "Yahweh" however, they obviously did not understand what had happened with the pointing and so read it literally. The resultant form when you combine the consonants of Yahweh, and the vowels of Adonay, comes out something like Yehovah. As they could not pronounce the "Y", they would say "J"... = "Jehovah". So that is where the name Jehovah comes from! How funny... someone should tell the Jehovah's Witnesses.

posted by David @ 3:32 pm