I studied the ancient pictograms for God in ancient languages and found it interesting how they had special meanings, and so I would like to please ask if Jewish tradition has found a similar one in the written name for God, YHWH.
To explain what I mean, in Egyptian, God was NTR, which scholars tend to think meant "the self-animating one". The letters NTR in hieroglyphics were water, bread, and a mouth, the combination of which sustain life. He was commonly written as a single word in the form of a flag (analogous maybe to the Bronze Age Hebrews' Asheroh poles) or a sitting man with a kingly beard. The Babylonians associated God with the heavens and wrote his name as a single star, while the Chinese called Him Shang Di(supreme ruler) or Tien, written as a man with a line near the top, noting a high person.
The Hebrew alphabet in the time of the Torah and King David was not pictoral (like Chinese), but the letters were based on pictographs. For example, Aleph was drawn as an ox's head.
The Ancient Hebrew website has an interesting page on the evolution of the letters.
Quote:These graphics show the history and evolution of the Hebrew alphabet as it transitions from the early pictographic script to the modern script and its influence on Greek and Latin.
http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/
It includes this graph of the meaning of the letters:
(CLICK BELOW)
http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/files/alphabet_chart.gif
Joel Hoffman sees the development of vowel letters like Y H and W as playing an important role in the formation of Biblical Hebrew names. He notes in his chapter "Magic Letters and the Name of God" of his book In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language that in Genesis God made a covenant with Abraham and:
Quote:Part of the covenant entails changing abrm's name to abrhm (Abraham) that is, adding a heh into abram's name. ... Also in Genesis, Sary (Sarai), Abram's wife, becomes Sarh (Sarah). .... Rashi, a preeminent biblical commentator from the 11th century CE provides [a theological guess about the meaning of the h in their names].
Do you know what he might be referring to by Rashi?
Hoffman continues:
Quote:The most likely answer is that the Hebrews, recognizing that no other culture had them, used their vowel letters not only for their original purpose.... of marking vowels...., but also for the purpse of marking something as belonging to the... culture...... no other culture had [vowel letters.] In this sense, the Hebrews were the vowel letter people. One of the three major names for God in the OT provides corroboration ... elhym... The word elym meant gods, from the word el, god, and the plural suffix -ym.
Clearly, elhym which refers to the Hebrew God, is the word elym with a heh inserted to mark the word as belonging to the Hebrews.... The most common alternative [etymology] is that the word is the plural of eloah. ... With the addition of elhym to abrhm and srh, we find that the patriarch, matriarch, and God of the Hebrews all have names derived by adding a magic heh to a previously known name or word.
In his next section "Of God and Gods", he writes more about his theory of adding an h into elym to make elhym:
Quote:One troubling detail... is that the Hebrews ... seem to have based the name of their deity on the plural word "gods." Why didn't they take the singular word el and add a heh to that, instead? One possibility is that the word may have come from an older akkadian or Phoenician word ilum which, related to the Hebrew el, meant god, not "gods". If so, elhym is the Hebrew ilum, that is, the Hebrew God, and there is no puzzle. On the other hand, if in hact elhym represents the Hebrew version of the plural word elim, gods, we find not only a puzzle, but two possible solutions to it, both supported by considerable evidence.
One theory, widely accepted, is that the word elhym goes back to an earlier time in the Hebrews' history, before they adopted monotheism... In further support of this theory, it is often noted that the other word for God, adonai, sounds like the word "my lords."
Hoffman later proposes that the name YHWH was proposed because it was a combination of the Hebrew alphabet's unique vowel letters - Y,H, and W.
Further, Jewish tradition treated its letters mystically in some cases or as if it had another inner meaning. Shin was written with four prongs on the Tefilim instead of three, and sometimes it was drawn with little crowns. Another claim was that one reason B begins Genesis ("Bereshit") is because of the way a B is drawn in Hebrew - a bit like a "C" with one end open and another closed, bookending the Torah, in a way.
The Ancient Hebrew website gives this explanation for the word "EL" (God) based on the two pictures used to write it, along with the letters' individual meanings:
Quote:Each letter represents a sound and a concept. The first letter,(Note that Hebrew is read from right to left), is the aleph (pronounced ah-leph) and represents the "Ah" and "Eh" sounds. Aleph is a Hebrew word meaning "ox," and this letter is a picture of an ox head and represents the concept of "strength," from the strength of the ox.
The letter lamed, , the twelvth letter, is a picture of a shepherd staff and represents the sound "L" as well as the concept of "authority," from the authority of the shepherd over the flock.
When these two letters are combined, we have the Hebrew word (EL, written as אל in the Modern Hebrew alphabet), the "strong authority."
It is in the power of my hand to do you hurt. (Genesis 31:29)
This passage includes the Hebrew word EL, which in the King James Version is translated as "power." However, a better translation, based on the pictures of the word EL, would be "There is strength and authority in my hand to do you hurt."
Blessed be Abram of the most high God, possessor of heaven and earth. (Genesis 14:19)
This passage also uses the same Hebrew word EL, but in the King James Version it is translated as "God." Based on the pictures of the word El, a better translation would be "Blessed be Abram of the most high strength and authority, possessor of heaven and earth." When we see the word "God" from a western perspective we see an old bearded man sitting on a throne in the clouds. When the ancient Hebrew's see the word "EL," they see the strength of an ox and the authority of a shepherd.
http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/alphabet_early.html
One known example of ancient Jews using a name as an acronym with spiritual significance was "Maccabee", the name of the Jewish revolutionaries of the 2nd c. BC.
Quote:In Jewish tradition, the Torah verse, that was the battle-cry of the Maccabees (Hebrew: מקבים Machabim), "Mi chamocha ba'elim YHWH" ("Who is like You among the heavenly powers, YHWH" [Exodus 15:11]), is an acronym for "Machabi" as well as an acronym for "Matityahu Kohen ben Yochanan"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elohim
Further, Jewish tradition gives special mystical treatment to God's name and its letters. Yahweh means He Who Is. Another name I heard is in the Torah is: "I am Who I Am".
The name YHWH was considered so special that it was not uttered audibly.
Further, the written name is called the "Tetragrammaton", the four letters. One Jewish tradition was that Solomon or David had a seal/emblem with 5 or 6 points for mystical purposes. In some versions of the story, it was also inscribed with the Tetragrammaton. Out of this legend, by the way, comes the Star of David symbol.
So this leads back to my main question of whether Jewish tradition noted a special meaning to the combination of letters themselves in the Tetragrammaton.
Rama on the Ancient Hebrew forum looks at
Quote:the ideograms and interprets YHWH as meaning "Beholds the hand, behold the nail". ... This is essentially the same interpretation you would get by looking at the ideograms we use here by looking at the AHRC Hebrew Alphabet Chart (http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/28_chart.html).
http://ancient-hebrew.proboards.com/thre...z4UwAGXnQO
(Rama also connects this to Jesus' words about Jesus' nail wounds in the main Christian religious writings: “Reach your finger here, and look at My hands” Jn. 20)