Biblical Hebrew Blog by ClassicalHebrew.com

The Tetragrammaton Yhwh is the personal name for the God of Israel and Judah as revealed to Moses in the Wilderness (Exodus 3:14). This name is first attested to outside the bible in the late ninth century Mesha Inscription, where the enemy king of Moab announces “I took the vessels of Yhwh and dragged them before Chemosh” (line 17). It is unmistakable that Yhwh was worshipped and his name was known and spoken by even Israel’s neighbours. However it happened that the nation of Israel went from a time when they knew the name of their God, and spoke it, to a time where they forgot the proper pronunciation, and avoided using it.

This change began to occur in the late Second Temple Period when the Jews decided to avoid speaking the name of Yhwh in public places. By the time of the Middle Ages the name of their God was not spoken at all, and in fact the knowledge of how to correctly pronounce Yhwh had been forgotten. Instead the simple title ‘Lord’ was preferred and used, one reason was to safeguard against intended or unintended blasphemy.

The correct pronunciation of Yhwh and its meaning has been the subject of much scholarly debate and a great effort has been made to recapture what was lost over time. Foremost in understanding of the name Yhwh is to realize that in the Hebrew Bible it is written one way, but pronounced another way entirely; this is called a qere perpetuum. This is when the consonants Y h w h are marked either with the vowels of Adoni (my Lord/Master) or with the vowels of Elohim (God). This was to indicate to those reading the text that they should actually read (qere) “Lord” or “Master” instead of the unspeakably holy name of God! Not knowing this writing convention has led to the erroneous reading of Jehovah which conflates the consonants Yhwh with the vowels of ‘My Master’.

Today it is generally accepted to see Yhwh as a verbal form derived from the root hyh meaning “be at hand, exist, become, come to pass”; and should be pronounced as Yahweh. If translated as a hiphil verb, which is causative, then it appears we are dealing with a sentence name, such as Yahweh Shalom “he creates peace” the name written on Gideon’s altar (Judges 6:24). We have a clue into the eternal and consistent nature of Yahweh through the story in Exodus 3:14 where Yahweh declares

’ehyeh ’asher ’ehyeh. The many translations we have bear testimony to the difficulty in capturing its meaning; “I AM who I AM”; “I create whatever I create” or “I AM The One Who Always Is”. Both ’ehyeh and Yahweh are from the same verb and are attesting to the character of the God who bears its name; a creator who is an eternal being.
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Parallelism is a prominent feature in Ancient Near Eastern poetry and biblical poetry as such, and is also present in certain cases in biblical prose. The meaning of parallelism is that there is an inherent connection between the two members of a poetic verse: various elements are re-worded and repeated, or changed and re-stated, as part of the stylistic characteristics of the poem. A good example of the simplest kind of parallelism is Deuteronomy 32:1: “(a) Listen, heavens, and I shall speak, (b) and the earth shall hear the words of my mouth”: 1. listening (a) is parallel to hearing (b); 2. heaven (a) is parallel of earth(b); 3. speech (a) is parallel to words of mouth (b). While the first and the third parallelisms listed are obvious, the second teaches us of the types of parallels this style can create: due to the need to have a parallel for each element in the verse, opposites can also serve as parallels when they both come together to convey one and the same meaning: all of creation, heaven and earth, are called to listen to the song.

As part of its stylistic features, the genre of parallelism usually dictates the use of specific word-pairs as parallels: hear-listen, Israel-Jacob, peoples-nations, desert-wilderness, and many more. It is interesting to note that many of the same exact parallels are common in Ugaritic poetry as well.

In terms of the meaning of parallelisms, there are two major types: synonymous parallelisms like the example above, where both members of the verse convey the same meaning in different ways; and antithetic parallelisms, where the two members of the verse convey opposite ideas. Naturally, there are many parallelisms which are hard to classify as either.

From the technical aspect, there are different ways of creating a parallelism: not all the elements in the first member of a verse are necessarily repeated, and often it is the verb or the person addressed which is only stated once and implied in the second member of the verse. The parallel members can either be grammatically identical and organized in the same order (as in the example above), or can be presented in a different order. A common way of doing so is chiastic parallelism, as in Gen 9:6: “One who sheds a man’s blood, by a man shall his own blood be shed.”

Like many middle-eastern languages, Hebrew is a member of the family known as the Semitic languages. This name follows the biblical description of the post-deluvian divide between the sons of Noa – Shem, Ham and Japheth, who divided according to their nations and languages. The acknowledgement of this fact and the investigation of the languages surrounding biblical Hebrew can assist us in better understanding the language we strive to learn.

Like any family, a family of languages is defined when we have the ability to define a common source from which all the members of the family evolved, and a set of rules that can explain the different stages of evolution and the outcomes of these processes in the different languages. In the case of Hebrew, the joint ancestor is a conjectured language, of which we have no actual proof, labeled as “proto-Semitic.” This archetypal language developed over many centuries, branched off into many smaller branches, and eventually became many different languages, all similar in some respects but also very different in others, as distant relatives often are. An example of the close kinship between all these different languages can be found in joint vocabulary such as the consonants mlk, which denote the word “king” in many of the members of the Semitic family of languages.

Hebrew is defined as part of the more specific family of North-Western Semitic languages, a branch including Arabic, Aramaic, Canaanite languages and Ugaritic. Most similar to Hebrew are of course her fellow Canaanite languages (or possibly even dialects) such as Ammonite and Moabite. These languages have close vocabulary, grammatical and morphological ties. For example, in all these languages, a long ā sound found in other Semitic languages becomes a long ō sound, a clear-cut characteristic that enables us to identify whether or not a language is Canaanite.

Despite the fact that it is not a Canaanite language, Ugaritic is extremely close to Biblical Hebrew. Seeing that the Ugaritic culture is closely tied with the Canaanite, this is a good example of the fact that culture and language often go together and that the influences of one are often discovered when researching the other.

Once becoming a language of its own, Hebrew also underwent many changes and influences, from early Biblical Hebrew – the earliest recorded form – to Second Temple Hebrew, influenced immensely by Aramaic, the Hebrew of the Rabbis, and finally, Modern Hebrew.

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From the dawn of human culture, people had the need to mark property and correspond. The first method of doing so was by symbols-pictures representing different people and ideas. It was from this primary form of corresponding ideas by drawings that all the known forms of writing later developed, initially for administrative needs.

The three known scripts considered most ancient are the Acadian (Cuneiform), the Egyptian (Hieroglyphic) and the Indian (Sanskrit) scripts, all emerging towards the end of the fourth millennium BCE. Of these, the two relevant for our discussion are the Cuneiform and the Hieroglyphic, both emerging in two of the most powerful cultures surrounding Ancient Israel. These scripts are very complex because each syllable is represented in a different way, so that, for example, “ab” and “ba” would have two completely different ways of writing, not necessarily connected to one another. While the Hieroglyphic writing is pictographic, with actual pictures of animals and objects representing each syllable, the Cuneiform writing is more abstract.

Like the oldest known scripts in the world, the first alphabetic system of writing also initiated in the Ancient Near East, sometime in the middle of the second millennium BCE. This was the “proto-Canaanite” (Canaan being the ancient name for Palestine) writing, not documented in its primary stages but defined as such based on Phoenician and other Semitic early writings. While it developed from pictographic writing – a picture for each word, such as a picture for a bull, “‘Alp” – the abstract characters which evolved from the pictures came to represent consonants – “A” written with an “Aleph” – and not whole syllables, thus substantially reducing the number of symbols needed. It was the Phoenicians, traders who sailed across the ancient world, who spread the knowledge of this method of writing, which reached the Greeks. While the Phoenicians wrote from right to left, the Greeks wrote in the opposite direction, and reversed the letters. The Latin script known to us today evolved from the Greek script, while the Ancient Hebrew script evolved directly from the Phoenician, and is therefore written from right to left.

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