As a part of my research into the book I am writing on 'Lord's inadequacies, I have started going through an important paper on the Divine Name of Yahweh/Kyrios/LORD by Pavlos D. Vasileiadis. In fact, I will be writing a few more posts on this paper as I go through it, so I hope it's helpful!
In the opening lines, Vasileiadis reiterates what I already sense quite strongly to be the reality among the last centuries before Christ, that is of a diversity of practice on the divine name. Vasileiadis states it perfectly: "the sacred Tetragrammaton [was persistently used] as an effable, utterable name at least in some circles, despite the religious inhibitions against its pronunciation."
So in order to verify this diversity ("at least in some circles") we need to start as early as possible; and that means we need to talk extant manuscripts. This means actual surviving manuscripts, not copies. I didn't know this, but there is actually some verified Hebrew scripture that survives to this day that predates the famous Dead Sea Scrolls - the Silver Scrolls. I'm guessing the fact that they are made out of silver is also a huge reason why they have survived at all, but the amazing thing is that they date back to the period of time prior (although possibly only by a short period) to the Babylonian exile, which means 7th or even 8th century BC. Look at the characters, though, so interesting to see how different they look to Hebrew characters we are familiar with (see right column). This early written Hebrew is referred to as "Paleo-Hebrew". In it, we note with no particular surprise that there is no apparent reticence on writing down Yahweh. His Name, as Holy as it is, could be written and was written.
That point is significant when we realise that this small portion of Scripture, connected to passages in Deuteronomy 5 and 7 (although possibly elsewhere too) was actually also an amulet - an apotropaic amulet, i.e. to ward off evil (that is why I put "manuscript" in quotes in the title of this posting). In other words, some of the Israelites were pretty superstitious. Interesting that Christianity's ancestors combined being both theistic and superstitious. Back soon!
In the opening lines, Vasileiadis reiterates what I already sense quite strongly to be the reality among the last centuries before Christ, that is of a diversity of practice on the divine name. Vasileiadis states it perfectly: "the sacred Tetragrammaton [was persistently used] as an effable, utterable name at least in some circles, despite the religious inhibitions against its pronunciation."
So in order to verify this diversity ("at least in some circles") we need to start as early as possible; and that means we need to talk extant manuscripts. This means actual surviving manuscripts, not copies. I didn't know this, but there is actually some verified Hebrew scripture that survives to this day that predates the famous Dead Sea Scrolls - the Silver Scrolls. I'm guessing the fact that they are made out of silver is also a huge reason why they have survived at all, but the amazing thing is that they date back to the period of time prior (although possibly only by a short period) to the Babylonian exile, which means 7th or even 8th century BC. Look at the characters, though, so interesting to see how different they look to Hebrew characters we are familiar with (see right column). This early written Hebrew is referred to as "Paleo-Hebrew". In it, we note with no particular surprise that there is no apparent reticence on writing down Yahweh. His Name, as Holy as it is, could be written and was written.
That point is significant when we realise that this small portion of Scripture, connected to passages in Deuteronomy 5 and 7 (although possibly elsewhere too) was actually also an amulet - an apotropaic amulet, i.e. to ward off evil (that is why I put "manuscript" in quotes in the title of this posting). In other words, some of the Israelites were pretty superstitious. Interesting that Christianity's ancestors combined being both theistic and superstitious. Back soon!
[Image taken from: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/Birkat_kohanim_22.jpg]
Vasileiadis article is available at: https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/opth.2014.1.issue-1/opth-2014-0006/opth-2014-0006.xml
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