and then again, by changing the first person into the third, יהוה. From the derivation of this name from the imperfect, it follows that it was either pronounced יהוה or יהוה, and had come down from the pre-Mosaic age; for the form הוה had been forced out of the spoken language by היה even in Moses' time. The Masoretic pointing יהוה belongs to a time when the Jews had long been afraid to utter this name at all, and substituted אדני, the vowels of which therefore were placed as Keri, the word to be read, under the Kethib יהוה, unless יהוה stood in apposition to אדני, in which case the word was read אלהים and pointed יהוה (a pure monstrosity.)[1]
This custom, which sprang from a misinterpretation of Lev 24:16, appears to have originated shortly after the captivity. Even in the canonical writings of this age the name Jehovah was less and less employed, and in the Apocrypha and the Septuagint version ὁ Κύριος (the Lord) is invariably substituted, a custom in which the New Testament writers follow the lxx (vid., Oehler).
If we seek for the meaning of יהוה, the expression אהיה אשׁר אהיה, in Exo 3:14, is neither to be rendered ἔσομαι ὃς ἔσοαι ( Aq., Theodt.), “I shall be that I shall be” ( Luther), nor “I shall be that which I will or am to be” ( M. Baumgarten). Nor does it mean, “He who will be because He is Himself, the God of the future” ( Hoffmann). For in names formed from the third person imperfect, the imperfect is not a future, but an aorist. According to the fundamental signification of the imperfect, names so formed point out a person as distinguished by a frequently or constantly manifested quality, in other words, they express a distinctive characteristic (vid., Ewald, §136; Gen 25:26; Gen 27:36, also Gen 16:11 and Gen 21:6). The Vulgate gives it correctly: ego sum qui sum, “I am who I am.” “The repetition of the verb in the same form, and connected only by the relative, signifies that the being or act of the subject expressed in the verb is determined
- ↑ Note: For a fuller discussion of the meaning and pronunciation of the name Jehovah vid., Hengstenberg, Dissertations on the Pentateuch i. p. 213ff.; Oehler in Herzog's Cyclopaedia; and Hölemann in his Bibelstudien. The last, in common with Stier and others, decides in favour of the Masoretic pointing יהוה as giving the original pronunciation, chiefly on the ground of Rev 1:4 and Rev 1:5, Rev 1:8; but the theological expansion ὁ ὤν καὶ ὁ ἦν καὶ ὁ ἐρχόμενος cannot be regarded as a philological proof of the formation of יהוה by the fusion of הוה, הוה, יהי into one word.
