True of False? Yahweh was the name given to the jewish god, initially spelled without vowels.?

Answer 1

Not really. It is just ONE of the names of God. In fact, the first name for God used in the Torah is Elohim- the tetragamatton is only revealed much later.

As for vowels- no hebrew is actually written with the vowel points. They were added when Achad Ha'Am and the other earfly zionists were reintroducing hebrew as an everyday modern language and wanted to make it easier for people to learn by putting the vowels in. Even so, modern hebrew, unless aimed at a second language audience, is written without vowels. On the other hand, you find that many books of the ancient hebrew are now being written WITH vowels to make them easier to study! (My copy of Midrash Rabba is written like this). So, you could effectively say that the vowel points in hebrew are actually teaching guides since they are only used by those not familiar enough with the manguage to do without them.

As an example of the no usage of vowels in modern hebrew- it is easily seen on the official israeli government website:
http://www.israel.gov.il/firstgov

Answer 2

YHWH were the consonants, but the vowels are no longer known. Ancient Hebrew was written without vowels, so there's no written record of the name as originally pronounced. A Jewish superstition led to the discontinuation of using the name (Josephus makes mention of this in the first century), so the oral pronounciation was also lost, even though the consonants were preserved.

Yahweh is an "educated guess" and should be very close to the way the name was pronunced by God himself when he revealed the name to his Jewish servants. But it's still a "guess".

Answer 3

Maybe...

a) "Yahweh" is the most widely accepted GUESS about how this name was pronounced. Most of the evidence comes from NAMES which include a form or part of the name, but not has the whole. (Common forms = Yah -- in all those "-iah" names [Isaiah, Jeremiah, Nehemiah, etc], and also an abbreviated form of the name used all by itself, e.g., Praise be to Yah!)

b) "initially spelled without vowels" -- a bit misleading or confusing. In fact, ALL Hebrew words were spelled without vowels!! That's how their alphabet worked. It was only many centuries AFTER the Old Testament was written that scribes developed a method for marking in the vowels, as they understood them to be (by a system of dots written around the consonant text, called "vowel points").

But it IS true that a tradition developed at some point (perhaps shortly after the Babylonian Captivity in the 6th century BC) of not PRONOUNCING this name. Note, it seems fairly clear that BEFORE the Exile the name WAS pronounced.

Anyway, the tradition of not pronouncing the name --based, it seems, on the warning of the third commandment , "Do not take the name of YHWH your God in vain" -- meant using some sort of substitute wherever the name came up in writing. The most common substitute ended up being saying "Adonai", Hebrew for "the Lord".

(This practice was picked up by ancient Greek translations of the Bible and is also reflected in many places where the New Testament has "Lord" [Greek "kyrios"]. It is continued in many translations. For example, many English Bibles indicates YHWH by writing "LORD" --using small capitals, to distinguish this from places where the Hebrew texts actually does say "Adonai".)

In fact, when scribes added vowel points they indicated that this is what one should say by adding the VOWELS for "Adonai". (The mistaken attempt by some Christians to pronounce these vowels with the consonants YHWH led to "Yehowah" or "Jehovah"... which is really a NON-name.)

Answer 4

All of Hebrew is written without vowels and without spaces.

The above sentence would be written this way.

llfhbrwswrttnwthtvwls.

About 100 years after Christ, scribes starting adding vowel points to the hebrew.

In the Hebrew and the Greek bible of Jesus' day, God's name was continued to be used and pronounced.

It was after Jesus' life that the divine name started to be pronounced as "LORD"

Wolfgang Feneberg comments in the Jesuit magazine Entschluss/Offen (April 1985): “He [Jesus] did not withhold his father’s name YHWH from us, but he entrusted us with it. It is otherwise inexplicable why the first petition of the Lord’s Prayer should read: ‘May your name be sanctified!’” Feneberg further notes that “in pre-Christian manuscripts for Greek-speaking Jews, God’s name was not paraphrased with kýrios [Lord], but was written in the tetragram form [YHWH] in Hebrew or archaic Hebrew characters. . . . We find recollections of the name in the writings of the Church Fathers;

Professor George Howard of the University of Georgia wrote: “Since the Tetragram [four Hebrew letters for the divine name] was still written in the copies of the Greek Bible which made up the Scriptures of the early church, it is reasonable to believe that the N[ew] T[estament] writers, when quoting from Scripture, preserved the Tetragram within the biblical text.”—Journal of Biblical Literature, March 1977, p. 77.

“In pre-Christian Greek [manuscripts] of the O[ld] T[estament], the divine name (yhwh) was not rendered by ‘kyrios’ [lord] as has often been thought. Usually the Tetragram was written out in Aramaic or in paleo-Hebrew letters. . . . At a later time, surrogates [substitutes] such as ‘theos’ [God] and ‘kyrios’ replaced the Tetragram . . . There is good reason to believe that a similar pattern evolved in the N[ew] T[estament], i.e. the divine name was originally written in the NT quotations of and allusions to the OT, but in the course of time it was replaced by surrogates.”—“New Testament Abstracts,” 3, 1977, p. 306.

The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology (Volume 2, page 649) says: “One of the most fundamental and essential features of the biblical revelation is the fact that God is not without a name: he has a personal name, by which he can, and is to be, invoked.” Jesus certainly had that name in mind when he taught his followers to pray: “Our Father in the heavens, let your name be sanctified.”—Matthew 6:9.


.

.

Answer 5

True

YHWH -- there were no vowels in ancien t Hebrew. This is why the nameYHWH is known as the sacred tetragrammaton or the sacred four letter word.

Answer 6

True - there were no vowels in Hebrew

Answer 7

True. The name of God was unpronounceable because God was seen to be unknowable.

Answer 8

true