Have YHWH's letters been considered a pictoral acronym?

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rakovsky
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Have YHWH's letters been considered a pictoral acronym?

Post by rakovsky »

I. In ancient Egyptian, Chinese, Babylonian, and Sumerian writing, the written letters for God or deity themselves contained an allusion to their meaning. The Sumerians drew the word as an eight pointed star, thereby associating the concept of deity with the heavens, brightness and stars. and the Babylonians who succeeded the Sumerian empire adopted and developed their alphabet. They altered the eight pointed star into the sign Image, which (A) could signify the phonetic sound "An" in speech, (B) could directly mean words like "heaven" or high, or (C) could denote that something was a god.

II. This raises a question: Did Hebrew also develop from a logographic or pictographic script, and then keep any of its pictograhic meanings when it became a phonetic one?

Michael Handelzalts, writing in the Israeli paper Haaretz notes that certain "elements distinguish the Hebrew alphabet from others", one being that "the names of the Hebrew letters have meaning in the Hebrew language", although it notes that this "doesn't actually matter when writing". (http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/.premium-1.539683)

He notes how the Hebrew alphabet developed:
The last two millennia BCE were turbulent years for alphabets as the two existing systems of writing – hieroglyphs and cuneiform – evolved into a third, representative form. Hieroglyphs and cuneiform used symbols (pictographs or schematic drawings) to depict words. That morphed into a phonetic system, where each sign represents a sound.

About the end of the sixth century BCE the Hebrew language discarded the ancient Hebrew letters and adopted Aramaic ones. This dramatic act is documented in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah in the Bible and commented on in the Talmud and in Greek sources.
http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/.premium-1.539683

So in the time of the Torah and the Psalms (c. 1300-900 BC), the TaNaKh was still written in the older script of Hebrew than the modern Assyrian/"Ashurite" one.

Wikipedia's entry on Paleo-Hebrew explains:
The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet (Hebrew: הכתב העברי הקדום‎), also spelt Palaeo-Hebrew alphabet, is a variant of the Phoenician alphabet.
Archeological evidence of the use of the script by the Israelites for writing the Hebrew language dates to around the 10th century BCE. The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet began to fall out of use by the Jews in the 5th century BCE, when the Aramaic alphabet was adopted as the predominant writing system for Hebrew.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleo-Hebrew_alphabet
Wikipedia gives the letter for Heh as Image
Waw as Image
Yod as Image
I don't have a font for that, unfortunately. Z 3 Ч 3 only resembles a bit ImageImageImageImage

The Jewish Encyclopedia explains about the letters' meaning:
The names for the characters were chosen with reference to near-by things, such as parts of the body and other objects of the daily life peculiar to the Bedouins, the name of each of which began with the very sound the letter indicated. In a few cases the names seem to have been derived from the form which the sign represented. These names, as well as the order of the letters, certainly existed at least one thousand years B.C., for they were known when the Greeks adopted their alphabet from the Semites.
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/artic ... the-hebrew
III. Another question is whether the ancient Israelites sometimes attached mystical or inner importance to their letters.
It looks like they did, since for example Shin is written with four prongs instead of three when it's written on the Tefillim, and other times it's drawn with crowns.

The Jewish Encylopedia notes that some words were intentionally written with special ornamentations, although it doesn't conclusively explain why in the example below:
A passage in the Talmud even declares that those small "ornaments," as they are called, the three Imageor Imageplaced over the seven letters Image, were at the time not only customary but obligatory (Men. 29b).
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/artic ... the-hebrew
IV. Jewish tradition also treats the name of YHWH with special mystical importance.

Wikipedia notes how Paleo-Hebrew was sometimes still used in special religious contexts even after the alphabet shifted to the current Ashurite script, and it notes how one of the cases of PaleoHebrew was spelling of the divine name at Qumran:
After the Babylonian capture of Judea, when most of the nobles were taken into exile, the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet continued to be used by the people who remained. One example of such writings are the 6th-century BCE jar handles from Gibeon, on which the names of winegrowers are inscribed. Beginning from the 5th century BCE onward, when the Aramaic language and script became an official means of communication, the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet was preserved mainly for writing the Tanakh by a coterie of erudite scribes. Some Paleo-Hebrew fragments of the Torah were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls: ... In some Qumran documents, YHWH is written in Paleo-Hebrew while the rest of the text is in Aramaic square script.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleo-Hebrew_alphabet
Forum users here made interesting notes about it:
"The tetragra... is silent, it is never pronounced , instead the four letters are read as Adonai or the LORD or HaShem ...
Or as some English speakers do, vowels are added to read Jehovah by agreement" ~ Iskander

"I once saw a description that it was originally a breath in and a breath out - the word for breath was the same as the word for spirit." ~Mr.MacSon
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2274&hilit=vav+hand
"so far as I am aware... the ancient scribes, for DSS, placed little dots above a word, like YHWH, for example, to signal something that could be contentious.... Perhaps the little dots triggered the notion of "nomina sacra", which are not exclusively used for "sacred" people or places" ~ Slevin
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1405&hilit=vav+hand
The Jewish Encyclopedia also notes its special importance:
The avoidance of the original name of God both in speech and, to a certain extent, in the Bible was due, according to Geiger ("Urschrift," p. 262), to a reverence which shrank from the utterance of the Sublime Name; ... The true name of God was uttered only during worship in the Temple, in which the people were alone; and in the course of the services on the Day of Atonement the high priest pronounced the Sacred Name ten times (Tosef., Yoma, ii. 2; Yoma 39b). This was done as late as the last years of the Temple... The physicians, who were half magicians, made special efforts to learn this name, which was believed to possess marvelous powers...

It was in connection with magic that the Tetragrammaton was introduced into the magic papyri... Even the Palestinian Jews had inscribed the letters of the Name on amulets
It also pays attention to the verse of
Ex. iii. 14, in which Yhwh terms Himself "I will be," a phrase which is immediately preceded by the fuller term "I will be that I will be," or, as in the English versions, "I am" and "I am that I am." The name Imageis accordingly derived from the root Image(= Image), and is regarded as an imperfect. This passage is decisive for the pronunciation "Yahweh"; for the etymology was undoubtedly based on the known word. The oldest exegetes, such as Onḳelos, and the Targumim of Jerusalem and pseudo-Jonathan regard "Ehyeh" and "Ehyeh asher Ehyeh" as the name of the Divinity, and accept the etymology of "hayah" = "to be" (comp. Samuel b. Meïr, commentary on Ex. iii. 14).
...
"Yah,"an abbreviated form of the Tetragrammaton, occurs 23 times: 18 times in the Psalms, twice in Exodus, and three times in Isaiah. ... The form corresponding to the Greek "Iao" does not occur alone in Hebrew, but only as an element in such proper names as Jesaiah ("Yesha'yahu"), Zedekiah ("Ẓidḳiyahu"), and Jehonathan.

http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/artic ... agrammaton
V. This leads to the final, main question of whether the letters of the Tetragrammaton themselves were seen by some followers of Judaism as combining to form a mystical or inner meaning.
A graph of the letters in the Old and Middle Hebrew pre-Ashurite alphabets can be found below.
http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/files/alphabet_chart.gif
Applying the meanings of the letters to the Tetragrammaton would suggest that those letters mean:
Nail (yod), Behold (heh), Arm/Hand(waw), Behold(heh)

The Jewish Encyclopedia says about the letters Yod, Heh, and Waw:
YOD (י):
Tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The name seems to be connected with "yad," meaning "hand"; the Phenician "yod" remotely resembles a hand in form. The letter is a palatal semivowel, identical in sound with the English "y." ... The Tetragrammaton is sometimes represented by "yod," its first letter.
HE (ה):
It is a guttural, pronounced as the English "h," standing midway between א and ת, and sometimes interchanged with these two. At the end of a word it is generally mute... The Tetragrammaton is sometimes represented by ת, as being the second letter of Image.
WAW (ו):

The name possibly means "nail" or "hook," and the shape of the letter in the Phenician alphabet bears some resemblance to a hook. "Waw" is a labial spirant, identical in sound with the English "w."
SOURCE: http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com

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Tod Stites
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Re: Have YHWH's letters been considered a pictoral acronym?

Post by Tod Stites »

If "Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews" in Hebrew reads:

Yeshu Hanosri Wumelek Hayehudim

and the initials are: YHWH, does it suggest to you that the

tradition of the "titulus" attached to the cross was embellished

by the composer(s) of John's Gospel ?

See: John 19:19.Brown "Death Of The Messiah" (p.956n73).
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rakovsky
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Re: Have YHWH's letters been considered a pictoral acronym?

Post by rakovsky »

Tod Stites wrote:If "Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews" in Hebrew reads:

Yeshu Hanosri Wumelek Hayehudim

and the initials are: YHWH,
It doesn't read that.

W means AND, and there is no AND in your first line in English.

melek would be capitalized to M in Hebrew.

It don't fit.

My research on the prophecies of the Messiah's resurrection: http://rakovskii.livejournal.com
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