Background
I started studying biblical Hebrew in my second year of Bible college way back in 1999. So far, it’s been a twenty-seven-year dance with the language and what it presents to us. I’ve loved this language and the texts that have come down to us in it, both from the biblical period and from later periods of history. Almost anyone who sits through one of my live lessons will know that I’m excited about what we find in segolate constructions, in which consonant clusters undergo some type of resolution to create new syllables and to break up the cluster. This is something that I took interest in during that first year of study of BH (Biblical Hebrew) at Ozark Christian College (OCC) under Dr. Larry Pechawer, and every time I get to teach or talk about segolates in class sessions, I might go a bit overboard in my excitement to show just how prevalent this feature of the language’s morphology actually is. It appears everywhere and influences everything in the language. If understanding the use of participles is the key to mastering ancient Greek, then understanding the phenomenon of segolates is the key to unlocking comprehension of Hebrew morphology. I’m convinced of this.
When I was a first- or second-year student of biblical Hebrew, I was not impressed with issues related to the Tetragrammaton (יהוה) in the Hebrew Bible. We learned in Seow’s grammar that יְהוָֹה bears the vowels of אֲדֹנָי, we read יְהוָֹה as אֲדֹנָי every time we ran into it in the text (except when it was pointed as יְהוִֹה, of course), and we never questioned it. I mean, why would we question it? It seemed pretty reasonable, it came from a trusted source (Dr. Pechawer earned his PhD in Aramaic inscriptions from Hebrew Union College and was more than competent in his handling of the Hebrew language—and intellectually honest to a fault), and everyone seemed to agree with it. I started visiting the local synagogue in 2000 during my second year of Hebrew, being concerned with getting my reading and pronunciation skills to a good level. I wanted to hear how Jews (at least, Jews in Southwest Missouri) pronounce Hebrew. Just as we had learned to read אֲדֹנָי for the Tetragrammaton, so did the congregants of the United Hebrew Congregation (UHC) in Joplin. What I had learned at OCC was reinforced by the practice of the synagogue goers there in my hometown. I later joined the congregation and completed a conversion to Reform Judaism in 2003.
I was surprised, then, to find Neḥemia Gordon claiming years later that the name should actually be read as Yəhōvâ, as if the vowels written on יְהוָֹה were the way that it should be pronounced. I had never heard anyone make such a claim, and I had never really taken interest in the pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton particularly up until that point. In fact, I think it was a Jehovah’s Witness that first pointed me to Gordon’s position and directed me to his position paper on it.
Confronting the Conspiracy
When confronted with new information, it is always advisable to give it the benefit of doubt, to suspend disbelief, and allow the argument to play itself out against the information that you already have and your background experience. As I read through Neḥemia Gordon’s paper, I kept being hit with the awareness that “this doesn’t match what I know,” “could this be right?”, and “what about these other cases?”, but I allowed the whole argument to play out in my head. I gave it a chance, and I wondered about the possibility that I had been taught incorrectly from the outset.
Gordon’s position paper was not very well written. If you read it, you can see this. He didn’t use a consistent transliteration system that could distinguish between chataf-segol (םֱ) and sh’va na (םְ). The arguments were not laid out logically and just wandered from one thought to the next. Some things that he claimed about Hebrew were just wrong (like suggesting that scholars propose Yahveh as the impossible form *יֲהְוֶה and arguing against the use of ה in the middle of word with sh’va—after just quoting אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה a few paragraphs earlier, which has הְ in the middle of the word!), amounting to evidence that his control of the specifics of Masoretic pointing is weaker than one might expect from an expert in biblical Hebrew. He should know, for example, that a composite sh’va cannot exist in a closed syllable (*יֲהְוֶה) and that heh can end a syllable within a word with a silent sh’va (one thinks immediately of וּבְתוֹרָתוֹ יֶהְגֶּה יוֹמָם וָלַ֫יְלָה from Psalm 1:2 as an example).
I came away underwhelmed after reading his paper because I had expected to see a solid argument in favor of Yehovah and was met with something less than professional or persuasive. I figured he might have something better to say about it if given ample writing space, so I bought his book Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence: The Hebrew Power of the Priestly Blessing Unleashed (Hilkiah Press, 2012) and read through it, surprised to find no argumentation in favor of the pronunciation at all. He wrote there essentially that he feels that the name’s pronunciation was revealed to him by God just as he was receiving the news about the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. Once he was struck by this revelation, he began to search the Leningrad Codex for instances of the Tetragrammaton with three vowels (יְהוָֹה) rather than the two vowels that normally appear on it (יְהוָה). It strikes me now as odd that he never seems to have questioned why אֲדנָי appears without a cholam throughout the Aleppo Codex when it refers to God.
Once I had formulated some thoughts on the Tetragrammaton, which I came to see was like other segolates of the ל״ו sort, I wrote up a letter and sent it to Neḥemia Gordon. In that letter, I brought up the issue of the attached prepositions (to which he semi responded later on), how other words that for whatever reason end up with consonant clusters ending in vav resolve the cluster, and a few other issues. The letter went unanswered, of course. As I listened to more of his presentations on YouTube, I came to the conclusion that he is following his personal and emotional convictions against the weight of the evidence and that he is selling something to a hungry audience that isn’t able to evaluate the Hebrew language and its evidence on their own. He is so invested in this “God’s real name is Yehovah” stuff, he receives his whole income on the basis of his audience thinking that he has special knowledge of Hebrew and of Judaism, and he is in so deep that he is not able, at this point in the game, to reevaluate and take in better information.
I made such a statement at one point, and he took me to mean that he’s swindling people—and he blocked me on social media. In saying that he’s in too deep and depends too much for his livelihood on the information that he’s put out and continues to put out, I did not mean to say that he has bad intentions. He’s just not able to be unbiased on this issue, since he really believes that God revealed it to him and because he’s past the point of no return. That is not an insult, but he took it as one. I know that if I were to receive better information than what I have found until now, I would be able to change my mind and take the opposite position. I approach this topic completely willing to be persuaded by what I find in the Hebrew Bible and what I understand from Hebrew word morphology.
What I Have to Add
I have to admit that I don’t have anything earthshattering to contribute on the Yahwist side of this argument. In fact, I have discovered through my reading that every conclusion I’ve drawn on this topic has been explained before. It’s already been explained that the triliteral version of the name (יהו) is a segolate form (cf. Koehler et al’s The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament [HALOT] on יהוה: “in names in which יהוה is the final element, *yahweh changes to yahw [cf. יִשְׁבֶּה > jussive יִשְׁבְּ] and *yā́hū, [cf. יִשְׁתַּחֲוֶה > יִשְׁתַּ֫חוּ, and שָׂ֫חוּ swimming < *śaḥw, Bauer-L. Heb. 420k, 576g], and נְתַנְיָ֫הוּ reduced > נְתַנְיָה”). This is the basis of my argument about the name, but I cannot claim it as an original thought (though I did come up with it before I found what was written in HALOT).
The only thing I add to that is the intervening segolization stage: yahweh > *yahw > *yáhaw > yā́hû and that the intervening form *yáhaw is the one used to create the theophoric names such that in *yahawnāṯān, the first a is in a distant open syllable and reduces to sh’va, the diphthong aw is also in a distant pre-tonic syllable and undergoes monophthongization to ô, thus we get from this yəhônāṯān by completely natural historical processes.
I think, then, that the only thing I can add to the position against “Jehovah” or “Yehovah” (Yəhōvâ) is my voice. Neḥemia Gordon has come out strong in support of that pronunciation, and people all over the world are taking his word for it while not knowing Hebrew themselves. I’ll let other people judge whether or not I know Hebrew well enough, but I will continue to offer arguments against pronouncing the name in this way, and I hope also to be a voice in support of those who believe that we should be using the name, but that we should do it more responsibly and without any ambitions to make money off of this argument by scratching itchy ears.