A Little More on the Name of God

Accents & pronunciations change over time. Even if you know exactly how a word was spelled three hundred years ago, you cannot know exactly how it was pronounced. For example, Americans, Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders, and Brits, who were once a single people and still speak the same language, all pronounce the same letters differently. If you picked up an English text written by a 17th century Virginia planter you could not pronounce the written words exactly as he did, even though you could read and understand them plainly.

Now consider the tetragrammaton, YHVH. If a little time and geography make it impossible for English speakers today to know exactly how a familiar English word was pronounced just three centuries ago, how much more is it impossible for English speakers today to know how a Hebrew word was spoken two or three thousand years ago? It's not just a different language separated by millennia. It's an entirely different alphabet with no vowels! Even if we could be 100% confident about what vowels should go between the consonants, nobody alive can know exactly how to pronounce the consonants, let alone the assumed vowels.

There are only two ways to know how to pronounce YHVH for certain: 1) Go back in time and hear it pronounced by Yeshua or one of the prophets; 2) Get a direct revelation from YHVH himself.

Anything else is just academic speculation and anyone who tells you otherwise is just blowing hot air.

1 comment:

Tell me something.