ARAMAIC WORD STUDY – THE WEDDING DANCE – CHADOTHA חדותא  Cheth Daleth Vav Taw Aleph

Exodus 3:14: “And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.”
Genesis 17:1 “The Lord appeared unto Abram, and said unto him, I am the Almighty God, walk before me and be thou perfect.”

The Lord appeared Moses and said that His name was “I Am.”  Now, this is not the usual words in Hebrew for “I am.”  As we find in Genesis 17:1 God says “I am the Almighty.”  Here the word I am is ‘ani which is really the pronoun “I” without the am. The “am” is inserted by translators as you really cannot say: “I the Almighty.”  You could but it just doesn’t sound right so the translators put the “am” in there to make it sound more like English talk.   

In Exodus 17:1 we have the word “I Am” as the expression of God’s name. Still, this is not the familiar YHWH that we all know. Here the word is ‘Ehyeh from the root word hayah which means to be or to exist.  Most of us as I said would be familiar with the word YHWH which is traditionally pronounced Yah way.  However, you may have noticed that YHWH has no vowels.  It is impossible to speak a word in English without a vowel. The Hebrew alphabet, like the alphabet in most Semitic languages, is an abjab in other words they consist of just consonants and no vowels. Vowels were added by Scribes known as the Masorites about 700 years after Jesus walked the earth. As it was forbidden to pronounce the name of God and only prophets dared to really invoke the sacred name of God, John the Baptist being the last in that line, the true pronunciation if YHWH has been lost and only tradition gives us a hint. However, we cannot be sure Yah way is really the true pronunciation of God’s name. Should it be Yah way or Yoh woha. It could also be Yeh weh.  Maybe it is Yoh way, Yeh way or some other combination of the vowels a,e, i,o,u.  

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What some Jewish scholars did was take the vowels for the word ‘adonai which means Lord and put them into YHWH using the Semitic pattern of consonant, vowel, consonant-vowel and they got yahovahi. The Vav is pronounced as a “v” rather than a “w.”   Went that entered into the European languages the “y” became a “j” and  you ended up with Jehovah.  As you can see it gets pretty complicated to decide on the correct pronunciation if you use the Sefer Torah (Torah Scrolls) which do not have vowels as opposed to the Masoretic text which specifically adds the vowels according to the best that tradition had to offer seven hundred years after the birth of Christ and the dispersion of the Jews throughout the world learning other languages and developing different accents. 

So, you can see why I do not concern myself with developing a correct pronunciation as I am pronunciation-ally challenged.  The last time I tried to learn Spanish the Spanish-speaking people on my disability bus all laughed at me.  I tried to learn German and a German missionary laughed at me. I tried to learn French and my French teacher stuck her tongue in her cheek to keep from laughing.  I was just a kid at the time and it sure sounded like “mercy buckets” to me. So, I deal in dead languages and to me when a language is dead its pronunciation is also dead. I can read these languages just fine, but don’t ask me to speak them, I don’t care to be laughed at anymore. 

So I just say Jehovah and Jesus and if you don’t like it or are offended that a Hebrew teacher will not use the Hebrew name, well that is just tough, I hope you have a long cold winter. 

Since I don’t bother wasting my time with proper pronunciation I can devote my time to the grammar, etymology, and construction of words, their cultural history, and various usages. I can even spend time examining words letter by letter. 

Now there is something I discovered about the word YHWH that just fascinates me. The that it is in an imperfect form but a rabbi told me it could also be a particle and another really thought we could consider the word as having a perfect inflection. Many rabbis will say that the word YHWH could be understood as all three and it would therefore mean, “I was, I am and I will be.”  That is a perfect name for God who is infinite. Only He and He alone could bear such a name. 

The Talmud teaches that Moses had a thick tongue and could not pronounce any of the names of God, so God gave Him a name he could pronounce with his breath – YHWH. 

 

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