Yahweh

Yahweh - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

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Many Jews, Christians and arguably Muslims are offended by the idea that Yahweh appeared historically as another god among many pagan gods:

The idea of God changing seems a contradiction in terms, because God is supposed to be absolute, and eternal, and sacred, and in fact that essential sacred reality doesn't change but the way people express it over the years does change.

—Karen Armstrong, A History of God, A&E Television Networks, 2001

It can be argued that any object of historical research has a history and therefore an evolution, this is how history works as a science. This, regardless of whether Yahweh is the One True God.

In the Hebrew Bible the name is written as יהוה (YHWH), as biblical Hebrew was written with consonants only. The original pronunciation of YHWH was lost many centuries ago, but the available evidence indicates that it was in all likelihood Yahweh, meaning approximately "he causes to be" or "he creates".^[8] The origins of the god are unclear: an influential suggestion, although not universally accepted, is that the name originally formed part of a title of the Canaanite supreme deity El, el dū yahwī ṣaba’ôt, "El who creates the hosts", meaning the heavenly army accompanying El as he marched out beside the earthly armies of Israel; the alternative proposal connects it with a place-name south of Canaan mentioned in Egyptian records from the Late Bronze Age.^[8][9]

By early post-biblical times the name Yahweh had ceased to be pronounced aloud, except once a year by the High Priest in the Holy of Holies; on all other occasions it was replaced by Adonai, meaning "my Lord". ^[7] In modern Judaism it is one of the seven names of God which must not be erased, and is the name denoting God's mercy.^[7] The Vatican has banned the use of "Yahweh" in vernacular worship since 2008,^[10] and the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments has directed that the word "Lord" and its equivalent in other languages be used instead.^[11] Almost all Christian Bibles substitute "the LORD" and "GOD" for the tetragrammaton, although the Sacred Name Movement, active since the 1930s, propagates the use of the name Yahweh in Bible translations and in liturgy.