The Jews invent vowelsSo far, so good, although the internal vowel letters (the W in RWMH) were added in Hebrew some centuries after the time of King David. (And, as an aside just to be clear, this system is close to 2000 years earlier than the invention of the Masoretic vowel points used in current Bibles. The Masoretic text has these vowel points superimposed on the old system of Matres Lectionis, which makes for confusion sometimes.)
By JOEL M. HOFFMAN
IN THE BEGINNING
"Roughly 3,000 years ago, in and around the area we now call Israel, a group of people who may have called themselves ivri, and whom we call variously 'Hebrews,' 'Israelites,' or more colloquially but less accurately 'Jews,' began an experiment in writing that would change the world."
Almost all alphabetic writing the world today is the result of the 3,000-year-old Hebrew experiment.
That's how I began the remarkable history that links the Jewish people to its historic language and identity. (In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language; NYU Press 2004). ...
THE VOWELS
Around the time of King David (roughly 1000 BCE), the Hebrews took the Phoenician consonantal system and made a seemingly minor improvement.
They used the letter H (which we call a heh) not only as a consonant, but also to represent the vowel A. They used the letter Y (yud) to represent the vowels I and E, and W (now called vav, though back then it probably had a W-sound, not a V-sound) for the vowels O and U. By using letters for both consonants and vowels, the Hebrews created the alphabet.
(We should be careful not to confuse these vowel-letters with the "Hebrew vowels" - the dots and dashes in and around letters that have been used for only the past 1,100 years or so.)
In ancient Jerusalem, the vowel-letters were generally optional. (American President Andrew Jackson, who opined that, "it's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word," would have been proud.) The word for "high" (ram) was still written RM, but if the Hebrews wanted to make it clear that they had the word rama in mind, they could append a heh in its newly invented role as vowel: RMH. And for roma, they could add a vav, too: RWMH.
[...]
But the speculations about the origin of the Tetragrammaton seem much less well founded to me:
THE MAGIC VOWEL LETTERSThis is very speculative and not entirely accurate. The name YHWH clearly has a connection with the ancient Northwest Semitic root HYY, "to be," and one plausible etymology is that it arose in the sentence name YHWH Sebaoth (generally translated "Lord of Hosts" in English Bibles). Frank Cross proposed that the name involved a causative of the verb "to be" and meant something like "He who creates [causes to be] the heavenly armies." I would think that the name YHWH is too old to be connected with the use of the four letters as vowel letters -- it would have been around and presumably well established as the name of the God of Israel well before the tenth century.
Genesis 17 tells of a covenant between God and a man, Abram, whose name is spelled ?BRM. (Again, the question mark represents an alef, used for a glottal stop.) The ancient word ?B means "father," and, as we saw, RM means "exalted." ?BRM was the "exalted father," or "tribal elder."
When ?BRM enters into a covenant with his God, he gets a heh inserted in the middle of his name: ?BRM becomes ?BRHM. That is, Abram becomes Abraham.
Regardless of the historical accuracy or divinity of the story - and here, obviously, well-meaning people disagree - it is clear to all that it is the special heh, one of three letters that completed the alphabet, that gets added to ?BRM to create ?BRHM. His wife, too, gets a heh added to her name: Sarai becomes Sarah.
The Hebrews didn't stop there. As we saw above, the ancient Canaanite word for "god" was el, spelled ?L, and the word for "gods," therefore, was elim, spelled in Phoenician ?LM and in Hebrew ?LYM. The Hebrews took this common Canaanite word and added a heh right in the middle to create one of God's names: ?LHYM.
In short, the patriarch, matriarch, and deity of the Hebrews all get their names by adding a heh to convert otherwise common words into special ones. The Hebrews used their vowel-letters not just to make writing possible, but to create their most important names.
In addition to ?LHYM, we find a second, four-letter name for God, the tetragrammaton (which means "four-letters" in Greek). The four letters are yud, heh, vav, heh. Common pronunciations such as "Yahweh" or "Jehovah" miss the point. What really matters here is the remarkable fact that this name consists entirely of the Hebrews' newly invented vowel letters, each included once, with the particularly special heh repeated.
The tetragrammaton is unique in ancient Hebrew, in that its pronunciation seems divorced from its spelling. It also seems to lack any plausible etymology, and is unattested in similar ancient languages. Now we know why. The Hebrews paid homage to the vowel letters that made it possible to spread the Word of God by using those letters to refer to God.
[...]
The speculations about H in the other names are interesting, but I wouldn't push them very far.
