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.
