194 



EEY. J. lYEEACH MUXRO^ M.A.^ ON 



stage of i^^i^,* "to get," so that the assumption of scholars 

 of the last century that the philology of Biblical writers must 

 be wrong, savouring if not of the assumption that philological 

 Avisdom would die with them, at least, that it began very near 

 their tune, turns out to be as far as possible from reality. 



nirf Jehovah, H'' Jah. 



Let us now, in this connection, revert to the name Jehovah, 

 which, as we saw, was written in full in the Samaritan 

 translation of their Pentateuch. It is an old form of the 

 imperfect active Qal with the old accusative ending ah, as in 

 Jehudah and the rare form Jaakobah in Chronicles. The form 

 Jah was not derived from Jehovah, but was from the same 

 original root, in, hauv, which became yau or yauv in Babylonian, 

 and dropping the vav became Yah, in Hebrew, in which the 

 original n was represented by and the n was marked with 

 mappicj through coDfounding it with the root n of "^ipi, with 

 which it had no connection, being merely the representation 

 of the vowel a. The true pronunciation, therefore, I am now 

 persuaded, was the one indicated by the Massoretes when the 

 name occurs without a prefix. The vowel pointing is not that 

 of as there is a simple sheva vocal instead of the 



composite sheva. The word Lord, seems to have been 



substituted for Jehovah, not because of its vowel points but 

 because it expressed something of the majesty of the original. 

 The substitution had taken place long before the time of the 

 Massoretes. It is a pure coincidence that two of the vowels 

 are the same, although the coincidence enabled the Massoretes 

 to use, in the case of prefixes, the actual vowel points of 

 The original form of the name in the imperfect would be 

 Jahauv, but proper names of the imperfect form had a tendency 

 to take an accusative ending, hence Jahauvah, when the accent 

 was shifted to the last syllable, would become Jehauvah, 

 and on the modification of the old diphthong au, which expressed 

 the active to d, it became Jehovah, 



It would appear, then, that there were two forms of the 

 name, one the form which came from the same root as that of 

 the verbal-noun behind t^lPT ; the second must have been much 

 later as it is compounded from the former and the sign of third 



* Cf. -'p, Research, etc., p. 29 f. 



