HaShem - Yahweh or Jehovah?

That it was the earliest transliteration of the divine name, doesn't make it in any sense correct. Lots of things when transliterated into another alphabetical system can go wrong.If you look at what the Gnostics tried, they came up with, amongst other things, IAO, understandable because the Greeks didn't do too well with the /h/ sound (the "he" in Hebrew). Note two things from this, 1) nothing to support the English pronounced "j", but rather the "y", and 2) the vowel after the "I" being an "A". The "O" is a transliteration for the Hebrew letter "waw". So, let's re-insert the /h/s into the transliteration and we get YaHWH.The "j" of "Jehovah" is simply a problem of passing from one orthography to another without compensating. It obviously should be "y". The "v" is another simple problem: it doesn't represent the sound in the original, but the way the sound changed from Hebrew into German influenced Yiddish.Having been around for a long time is no argument for justifying the obviously mistaken English form Jehovah. Amongst other things the second vowel is not justified by Hebrew morphology. Why is the middle vowel there at all? It's unexpected from the Hebrew original. "Jehovah" is just a series of mistakes.English speakers are not renowned for their linguistic ability. This is how we ended up with some awful forms from other languages: Peking, Ceylon, Munich, the Poonjab (as they pronounced it), etc. One normally corrects the errors of the past.But why is there a debate over the pronunciation of the name of God, when those in whose culture the name appeared, long ago stopped pronouncing it, as it was too sacred to say? The Jews, as you know, referred to their god as ha-Shem ("the name") and everyone who adhered to the religion knew exactly what was meant. In ancient manuscripts it was written in Palaeo-Hebrew script to set it apart from the other words, to warn the reader not to pronounce it.The traditional substitution when the Hebrew bible was translated was kurios ("lord") in Greek, dominus ("lord") in Latin, and of course "Lord" in English. Substitution has been the tradition since the second temple period. "Jehovah" is an aberration from that tradition, which doesn't even reflect the original orthographic representation of the name in Hebrew. It does reflect English difficulties in the field of linguistics.The form "Yahweh" is supported by the gnostic evidence; it doesn't make any deviant substitutions for letters in the original consonantal form; and has a much better chance of reflecting a hypothetical original pronunciation.

On what philological evidence exactly is this supposition of three syllables based on??

There is a surprising number of names in the Hebrew bible which are really -yahu (YHW) names, Jeremiah = Yirmiyahu, Isaiah = Yisayahu, Zechariah = Zacharyahu.(Netanyahu is the same as Yehonatan, ie Jonathan.)The Elephantine texts (circa 5th c. BCE) use YHW for the divine name.At the waystation across the Negeb from Gaza, Kuntillet Ajrud (late 9th c. BCE), inscriptions were found there that gave northern names which ended in YW (where the intervocalic HE was lost). Also at Kuntillet Ajrud were found mention of YHWH W )$RTH, usually translated as Yahweh and his Asherah, but this may not be correct. The T in )$RTH is a feminine indicator which only appears in Hebrew when a suffix is attached, otherwise the feminine usually ends in H. This therefore suggests that the two names both have a suffix -H and there names should be YHW and )$RH, Yahu and Asherah. (It is strange for names to have suffixes however.)I'm suggesting here that the divine name may have been not a tetragrammaton, but a trigrammaton at least in the early part of the millennium. This would explain all those YHW names that don't get correctly translated into English.This message has been edited by spin, 12-18-2004 02:14 AM

This is not particularly meaningful. The first people who brought England the Hebrew literature used the notion that the name was ineffable and followed the tradition of those who came before them substituting the "Lord" for the ineffable name. That was a good hundred years or so before Pietro Colonna Galatino -- or Petrus Galatinus -- (is attributed to have) made up the basic form of "Iehoua" (Jehovah) from parts of Hebrew forms of the verb to be, circa 1520 CE, though there were previous attempts at representing the tetragrammaton. (Romance languages tend to use more vowels than most other languages.)When Tyndale published his translation of the Torah, he used IEHOUAH, where the "U" functions as the consonant for which we now have "w". Thus Tyndale was using the form which preceded him some ten years from Galatino. Tyndale's novelty of supplying the ineffable name was put aside when with the new translation under King James I, which returned to the long tradition of substituting the "Lord" to indicate the name.English pronunciation has changed since Tyndale's time. His "Dauid", which is close to the Hebrew pronounced something like "dah-wid", has become "David" ("day-vud"). "Iohn" has become "John". What Tyndale wrote as IEHOUAH was pronounced quite differently from what you say with Jehovah.What we have with Jehovah, is a mishmash of influences which relate little to the original name or how it should be written or pronounced, and more to changes in English pronunciation.While most people have followed the long tradition of not using the name directly, for some reason there are others who prefer to use a misconceived representation of the divine name based on errors of the past.