salatheel
User ID: 357831
 United States
12/26/2008 3:15 PM
Report abusive post | Tracing the roots of Yahweh.
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Cultus
A more fundamental question is whether the name Yahweh originated among the Israelites or was adopted by them from some other people and speech.
The biblical author of the history of the sacred institutions (P) expressly declares that the name Yahweh was unknown to the patriarchs (Exod. vi. 3), and the much older Israelite historian (E) records the first revelation of the name to MosesMoses
Moses or Moshe is a legendary Hebrew liberator, leader, lawgiver, prophet, and historian....
(Exod. iii. 13-15), apparently following a tradition according to which the Israelites had not been worshippers of Yahweh before the time of Moses, or, as he conceived it, had not worshipped the god of their fathers under that name.
The revelation of the name to Moses was made at a mountain sacred to Yahweh, (the mountain of God) far to the south of Canaan, in a region where the forefathers of the Israelites had never roamed, and in the territory of other tribes. Long after the settlement in CanaanCanaan
Canaan .Canaan is an ancient term for a region approximating present-day Israel and Palestine plus adjoining coastal lands ...
this region continued to be regarded as the abode of Yahweh (Judg. v. 4; Deut. xxxiii. 2 sqq.; I Kings xix. 8 sqq. &c).
Moses is closely connected with the tribes in the vicinity of the holy mountain. According to one account, he married a daughter of the priest of MidianMidian
According to the Bible, Midian was a son of Abraham and his concubine Keturah....
(Exod. ii. 16 sqq.; iii. 1). It is to this mountain he led the Israelites after their deliverance from EgyptEgypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a Middle Eastern country in North Africa....
. There his father-in-law met him, and extolling Yahweh as greater than all the gods, offered sacrifices, at which the chief men of the Israelites were his guests. In the holy mountain the religion of Yahweh was revealed through Moses, and the Israelites pledged themselves to serve God according to its prescriptions.
It appears, therefore, that in the tradition followed by the IsraeliteIsraelite
An Israelite is a member of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, descended from the twelve sons of the Biblical patriarch Jaco...
historianHistorian
A historian is someone who writes history, and history is a written accounting of the past....
s, the tribes within whose pasture lands the mountain of God stood were worshipers of Yahweh before the time of Moses. The surmise that the name Yahweh belongs to their speech, rather than to that of Israel, is a significant possibility.
One of these tribes was Midian, in whose land the mountain of God lay. The Kenites also, with whom another tradition connects Moses, seem to have been worshipers of Yahweh.
It is probable that Yahweh was at one time worshiped by various tribes south of Palestine, and that several places in that wide territory were sacred to him. The oldest and most famous of these, the mountain of God, seems to have lain in Arabia, east of the Red SeaRed Sea
The Red Sea is an inlet of the Indian Ocean between Africa and Asia....
. From some of these peoples and at one of these holy places, a group of Israelite tribes adopted the religion of Yahweh, the God who, by the hand of Moses, had delivered them from Egypt.
The tribes of this region probably belonged to some branch of the Arabian desert Semitic stock, and accordingly, the name Yahweh has been connected with the Arabic hawa, the void (between heaven and earth), "the atmosphere, or with the verb hawa, cognate with Heb; Hawah, "sink, glide down (through space)"; and hawwa "blow (wind)". "He rides through the air, He blows" (Wellhausen), would be a fit name for a god of wind and storm. There is, however, no certain evidence that the Israelites in historical times had any consciousness of the primitive significance of the name.
However, the 'h' in the root h-w-h, h-y-h = "be, become" and in "Yahweh" is the ordinary glottal 'h' (spelled with a HeHe (letter)
He is the fifth letter of many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician , Aramaic, Hebrew , Syriac and Arabic ....
), and the 'h' in the roots h-y-w = "live" and h-w- = "air, blow (of wind)" is a pharyngeal 'h' (spelled with a HethHeth (letter) Summary
' or ' is the reconstructed name of the eighth letter of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, continued in descended Semitic al...
) which is usually transcribed as 'h' with a dot under.
Yahu
According to one theory, Yahweh, or Yahu, Yaho, is the name of a god worshipped throughout the whole, or a great part, of the area occupied by the Western Semites.
In its earlier form this opinion rested chiefly on certain misinterpreted testimonies in GreekGreek language
Greek has a documented history of 3,500 years, the longest of any single language within the Indo-European family....
authors about a god and was conclusively refuted by Baudissin; recent adherents of the theory build more largely on the occurrence in various parts of this territory of proper names of persons and places which they explain as compounds of Yahu or Yah.
The explanation is in most cases simply an assumption of the point at issue; some of the names have been misread; others are undoubtedly the names of Jews.
There remain, however, some cases in which it is highly probable that names of non-Israelites are really compounded with Yahweh. The most conspicuous of these is the king of Hamath who in the inscriptions of Sargon (722-705 B.C.) is called Yaubi'di and Ilubi'di (compare Jehoiakim-Eliakim). Azriyau of Jaudi, also, in inscriptions of Tiglath-Pileser III (745-728 B.C.), who was formerly supposed to be Uzziah of JudahUzziah of Judah
Uzziah of Judah, was the king of the ancient Kingdom of Judah, and one of Amaziah's sons, whom the people appointed to repla...
, is probably a king of the country in northern SyriaSyria
Syria , officially the Syrian Arab Republic , is a country in the Middle East....
known to us from the Zenjirli inscriptions as Ja'di.
Mesopotamian influence
Friedrich Delitzsch brought into notice three tablets, of the age of the first dynasty of Babylon, in which he read the names of Ya- a'-ve-ilu, Ya-ve-ilu, and Ya-u-um-ilu ("Yahweh is God"), and which he regarded as conclusive proof that Yahweh was known in Babylonia before 2000 B.C.; he was a god of the SemiticSemitic Overview
In linguistics and ethnology, Semitic was first used to refer to a language family of largely Middle Eastern origin, now ca...
invaders in the second wave of migration, who were, according to Winckler and Delitzsch, of North Semitic stock.
We should thus have in the tablets evidence of the worship of Yahweh among the Western Semites at a time long before the rise of Israel. The reading of the names is, however, extremely uncertain, not to say improbable, and the far-reaching inferences drawn from them carry no conviction.
In a tablet attributed to the 14th century B.C. which Sellin found in the course of his excavations at Tell Ta'annuk (the city Taanach of the O.T.) a name occurs which may be read Ahi-Yawi (equivalent to Hebrew Ahijah); if the reading be correct, this would show that Yahweh was worshipped in Central Palestine before the Israelite conquest. Genesis 14:17 describes a meeting between Melchizedek the king/priest of Salem and Abaraham. Both these pre-conquest figures are described as worshipping the same Most High God later identified as Yahweh.
The reading is, however, only one of several possibilities. The fact that the full form Yahweh appears, whereas in Hebrew proper names only the shorter Yahu and Yah occur, weighs somewhat against the interpretation, as it does against Delitzsch's reading of his tablets.
It would not be at all surprising if, in the great movements of populations and shifting of ascendancy which lie beyond our historical horizon, the worship of Yahweh should have been established in regions remote from those which it occupied in historical times; but nothing which we now know warrants the opinion that his worship was ever general among the Western Semites.
Many attempts have been made to trace the West Semitic Yahu back to Babylonia. Thus Delitzsch formerly derived the name from an AkkadianAkkadian language
Akkadian was a Semitic language spoken in ancient Mesopotamia, particularly by the Assyrians and Babylonians....
god, I or IaEnki Overview
Enki was a deity in Sumerian mythology, later known as Ea in Babylonian mythology....
; or from the Semitic nominative ending, Yau; but this deity has since disappeared from the pantheon of Assyriologists. Bottero speculates that the West Semitic Yah/Ia, in fact is a version of the Babylonian God Ea (Enki), a view given support by the earliest finding of this name at EblaEbla Overview
Ebla is not to be confused with Elba....
during the reign of Ebrum, at which time the city was under MesopotamiaFacts About Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia refers to the region now occupied by modern Iraq, eastern Syria, and southeastern Turkey....
n hegemony of Sargon of AkkadSargon of Akkad
Sargon of Akkad, or Sargon the Great, founder of the Dynasty of Akkad....
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