Sunday, June 28, 2015

God is a complex verb

It makes a good title.  Yet it is true:  the unpronounceable name of god is not only one verb, it is three tenses of one verb conflated into a single, unpronounceable word, represented by the consonents YHWH, known as the Tetragrammaton.

Christian scholarship contends that the name is unpronounceable because ancient Jews "lost" or "forgot" the pronunciation.  Christian scholars claim they "reconstructed" that pronunciation, and came up with Yaweh.  Which is...wrong.  They base this "reconstructed" pronunciation on a small fund of knowledge--that  Hebrew consonants take a vowel--but that is where they stop.  Unfortunately, they stop too soon.

They translate the Name as "I AM." which is also...not accurate.  But the difficulty in translating the NAME is that there no accurate translation is possible, because of the complexity of the Name.

The Name is all three forms of the third person masculine of the Hebrew verb "to be," past, present and future, combined into a single form.

Hebrew verbs are based on a three consonant base, called the shoresh.  (There are exceptions to this--verbs that are based on two consonents, verbs based on four consonants--but there are not many of those.)  Each consonant has a vowel.  Occasionally, a consonant will have a sheva as its vowel.  There are two types of sheva: "sheva nach," (essentially a "silent e," which is intended to either to end one syllable and begin another or create and elision of consonants, and "sheva na" which is pronounced as a short "e."

The verb "to be" is part of a class of verbs called "hollow verbs" because the middle consonant ו (vav) can change into a י (yod). The shoresh of the verb "to be" is היה, HYH.

The third person present masculine is written  הֹוֶה.  The middle consonant ו "vav" is pronounced "v."  The consonants are HVH.  The vowels are ֹ "o" and ֶ  short "e." The third person masculine present tense is pronounced "hoveh."  

The consonant ו was transliterated into the letter "w" by German scholars who pronounce "w" as a "v".  This is how the Tetragrammaton came to be transliterated as YHWH, rather than as YHVH, which would be the correct transliteration.

The future form of Hebrew verbs is distinguished by a prefix and a change in the vowels of the verb. יְהִיֶה in the case of the third person masculine, the prefix is י "yod," the vowels change from ֹ "o" and ֶ  short "e"  to ְְ short "e," ִ "i," and ֶ  longer short "e."  It is pronounced "yehiyeh." (The first short "e" is somewhere between an "e" and an "i.")

The past tense of Hebrew verbs is the three consonants which form the shoresh.  The vowels change to "a."  In the case of the verb "to be," the consonants are היה and the vowel for both consonants is ַ ָ  which is pronounced as "a."  The third person masculine of the past tense is הַיַה.

The NAME, written in Hebrew, combines the י "yod" prefix used in the third person masculine, future, the ו "vav" consonant used in the third person masculine present and the two ה which are the constant consonants of the shoresh (the root which is  determined by  the consonants of the past tense).  It uses the vowels of the different tenses:  the sheva of the future and the "a" of the past tenses.  Thus, the Name combines all three tenses, past, present and future, in a single form.

The Name is commonly written as יְהוָה.  While it would seem reasonable to pronounce this as "YeVah," it would not be so pronounced because the second consonant lacks a vowel entirely.  And, in Hebrew, each consonant has a vowel.

To those who are familiar with Hebrew, the lack of a vowel accompanying the second consonant indicates that it is not possible to pronounce the name, because the omission of a vowel for the second consonant says that it is not possible to know which  vowel ִ( for the future tense, ֹ for the present tense, or  ָ   for the past tense) should accompany the consonant.

If English operated on the same principle, that each consonant had to be accompanied by a vowel, the translation of the Name would be "willbeiswas." This is less than accurate, but it gives an idea of why it is not possible to pronounce the Name.  This is also why translating the Name as "I AM" is...not accurate.  Because "am" is solely present tense, yet the Name encompasses all tenses in a single unit.

Arguably, those who formulated the Name used the third person masculine less because their image of a Supreme Being was male than because י is the inclusive prefix for the 3rd person masculine and feminine plural.  ת, the prefix for the 3rd person feminine singular future, is also used for the third person feminine plural future, but only when the plurality of persons is exclusively female. The use of  י as the future verb prefix is consistent with "Elohim," a plural form used inclusively for a group comprising both males and females.



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