…excel still more

Did you know that Michael Jackson was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness? Aparently his mom is really devout. When I found that out I remembered something that I learned in Hebrew class..

The term “Jehovah” is actually one huge mistake.. or well, at least a misunderstanding. It comes from the mispronounciation of a word in the Hebrew Bible.

Just some quick background in formation… Hebrew does not have any vowels at all, and so all of its letters are consonants. This was fine for the most part, because the ancients who read the Tanakh (the proper term for hte Hebrew Bible.. the Christian Old Testament) just knew how to pronounce the words without the vowels. Kind of like how people who txt msg alot cn cmncte wo lke ths.

But as time went on and Hebrew was spoken less and less, there was a group of Hebrew Scholars called the Masoretes who decided to add vowels into the text to preserve the pronounciation. The way they did this is to add what we now call “Masoretic Vowel Points”. They’re basically dots and dashes added either above, below, or inside hebrew letters to indicate what vowel should occur after that consonant…

Ok so back to the “Jehovah” mistake… The word is derived from the English transliteration of the personal name of God, which without any vowels is transliterated as YHWH. Now the thing is, Jews revered the personal name of God so much that when they read the scriptures, instead of pronouncing it, they would use another word “Adonai” instead, which meant “Lord” or “Master”. What happened then was, when the Masoretes added the vowel markings, instead of adding the proper vowel markings on YHWH so that it’s pronounced properly, what they did was add on it the vowel markings for the word Adonay (‘DNY) … which produced YeHoWaH which is the word we derive Jehovah from (I know adonay begins with an a.. but the vowel marking underneath the first letter of Adonay – ‘ or aleph is what we call a shewa, and becomes either a very short “a” or a very short “e” depending on what letter it’s on).

No one really knows what the original pronounciation of the word YHWH is, but based on word comparisons and other arguments that I’m not in the mood to write out right now, the best guess of scholars today is that it is actually pronounced “YaHWeH”. (I think in some countries the word for God is “Jah” pronounced “Yah”).

Anyway, all that is to show that even in its name the Jehovah’s Witness “religion” has got it wrong… Bah, hope MJ didn’t buy in to all that. LOL.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 5:07 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.