Honoring this tradition, the Masoretes inserted the vowels for “Adonai” everywhere YHWH appeared, functioning as a sort of global “replace-all” to indicate what should be read aloud ( qere) from the written text ( kethiv). Rather, they substituted “Adonai” any time YHWH appeared in the text, and if they needed to refer to YHWH as the written name, they usually called it “HaShem” (The Name). While the LORD ascribes numerous names to himself, his “covenant” name was YHWH (יהוה, also known as the “tetragrammaton”), which is usually written in English as Yahweh, though some folks (namely, Jehovah’s Witnesses) write it Jehovah, using different vowels with the consonants.Īccording to Jewish tradition as later codified in the Mishnah (specifically the Halakha), when the Hebrew Bible was read in the synagogue by Jews – and possibly even earlier in the first temple period, though that is debated – the covenant name of God was usually not pronounced (according to some Jewish writings, YHWH could be spoken, or, rather, sung, in some circumstances, such as priestly prayer or when reciting the Numbers 6 benediction). The great transition towards Greek out of HebrewĪs most Christians are aware, the Old Testament was originally written primarily in Hebrew with a few parts (a few chapters of Daniel and Ezra) in Aramaic. The reason behind this embarrassing mistake provides a nice little (short) tour into the world of scribal habits and ancient manuscripts. One of the most fascinating parts of the seminar involved reading an old fragment of the Greek translation of Deuteronomy 31, during which one of the professors in attendance made what we thought was a joke about early Christians misreading the name for the LORD in the synagogue and saying “Pipi.” Turns out…he wasn’t joking. It’s quite a demanding task for the newbie who is used to reading nicely printed, uniform Greek text in print (yes, I know, that’s a very first-world problem to have). During the conference we spent several hours working on reading old Greek manuscripts, including both biblical texts (Septuagint and NT) and non-biblical texts.
ORIGINAL PALEO HEBREW MANUSCRIPTS FULL
I was fortunate to have the opportunity to attend a full day seminar at Cambridge before Christmas dealing with ancient manuscripts and writing systems (papyrology and paleography), hosted by the Tyndale House.
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