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Re: Tetragrammaton

divorce

divorce

Student
Hello, I've just completed my first reading of the Tanakh material, as it is present in the KJV of the Bible. I have many questions about what I've read, and I'll likely be wrestling with them for a long time, but there are a few which I can't find much scholarship on and would like to hear views from a public forum.

It is not my intention to disprove or 'call out' any logical inconsistencies, but my view does assume the validity of the Documentary Hypothesis.

First, how does the exclusion of the rest of the Canaanite pantheon which the primary deity was a member of affect modern day worship?
I'm assuming the deity which is the principal object of worship is only associated with the deity present in the material by metaphor in current times. Is that a correct assumption?

What -canonically- happens to the Canaanite deities?
The book of Enoch provides a reasonable account of them turned to Demons (the subsequent pantheon which comes out of this is later canonized by occult magick practitioners for some reason), I feel as though these and similar questions must come up pretty often by those studying the roots of the religion historically, so why was it not included in Deuterocanon? Enoch seems like an adequate way of 'explaining them away'..

Why do you suppose Yaweh worship became a monotheistic practice? (As opposed to Yaweh/Elohim followers continuing to exist within the surrounding pantheon)

Why is it a taboo action in Abrahamic religions to speak the name of the primary deity?

Thank you very much, I apologize if these questions are a little :facepalm: but I've not had much experience with western religion. In my reading I was trying my best to look at everything anthropologically, as it applies to the ancient Hebrews, and now I'd like to connect what I've read to modern culture.
 
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Levite

Levite

Higher and Higher
divorce said:
Hello, I've just completed my first reading of the Tanakh material, as it is present in the KJV of the Bible. I have many questions about what I've read, and I'll likely be wrestling with them for a long time, but there are a few which I can't find much scholarship on and would like to hear views from a public forum.

It is not my intention to disprove or 'call out' any logical inconsistencies, but my view does assume the validity of the Documentary Hypothesis.

First, how does the exclusion of the rest of the Canaanite pantheon which the primary deity was a member of affect modern day worship?
I'm assuming the deity which is the principal object of worship is only associated with the deity present in the material by metaphor in current times. Is that a correct assumption?

What -canonically- happens to the Canaanite deities?
The book of Enoch provides a reasonable account of them turned to Demons (the subsequent pantheon which comes out of this is later canonized by occult magick practitioners for some reason), I feel as though these and similar questions must come up pretty often by those studying the roots of the religion historically, so why was it not included in Deuterocanon? Enoch seems like an adequate way of 'explaining them away'..

Why do you suppose Yaweh worship became a monotheistic practice? (As opposed to Yaweh/Elohim followers continuing to exist within the surrounding pantheon)

Why is it a taboo action in Abrahamic religions to speak the name of the primary deity?

Thank you very much, I apologize if these questions are a little but I've not had much experience with western religion. In my reading I was trying my best to look at everything anthropologically, as it applies to the ancient Hebrews, and now I'd like to connect what I've read to modern culture.
Click to expand...

Obviously, I cannot speak for the interpretations of Christianity or Islam, which are bound to be quite different than those of Judaism.

For us, we generally understand that at some point along the way, more and more of our ancestors began to realize that polytheistic idolatry was simply incompatible with the worship of YHVH as set forth in the Torah. That in fact, as the book of Deuteronomy points out,
אתה הראת לדעת כי ה' הוא האלהים אין עוד מלבדו
You have been taught to know that YHVH is God: there is no other beside Him.

In other words, it's not merely that YHVH is a "better" god than other gods, so much as that there are no other gods. What people perceive as other gods and worship-- when they are not simply inventing stories-- are in fact all aspects of the same One God. Their fundamental error is in supposing that what they perceive is separate rather than parts of a whole.

Therefore, fanciful quasi-midrashic works like Enoch aside, nothing "happened" to the Canaanite pantheon because they never existed.

As to the Tetragrammaton, we do not pronounce it because we do not know how it is to be pronounced. That knowledge was lost a long time ago-- some time during the Second Temple period-- and we have not recovered it. Therefore we do not even seek to try and pronounce it lest we err grievously in doing so, or lest we inadvertantly pronounce it correctly at a time which would be wrong to do so. For example, the commands not to swear falsely or to take God's name in vain refer specifically to oaths and vows taken by invoking the correct pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton to witness. Such oaths are held deeply binding, perhaps even unbreakably so; therefore all the more do we not attempt to pronounce the name whose correct pronunciation we do not know.

There are some amongst non-Jews who claim to have a correct pronunciation, like Yahweh or Jehovah, however these are incorrect, arising from erroneous conclusions by Latin or German translators. When we encounter the Tetragrammaton we instead say the lesser name Adonai (meaning roughly "My Lord"); the Tetragrammaton, when it is vowelled in Hebrew, is vowelled with the markings for the name Adonai, as a tacit reminder to say Adonai and not try to pronounce YHVH. Translators saw this, assumed the markings reflected the proper pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton, and tried to translate accordingly. They were wrong.

By the way, for serious study of the Tanach, you're better off with a JPS translation, such as The Jewish Study Bible (edited by Mark Zvi Brettler, Adele Berlin, and Michael Fishbane) than with the KJV. Even the NRV is better than the KJV in terms of accuracy and idiom.
 
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