Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] God's Actual Name and Another Account of the Flood by Bart D. Ehrman, read by John Paul Middlesworth.
[00:00:09] Was Yahweh actually the personal name of the God of Israel? And how do we explain that the world destroying flood of Genesis 6 through 9, the story of Noah comes in so many other versions from antiquity, written long before the book of Genesis appeared?
[00:00:24] I've been doing a thread on interesting features of the Hebrew Bible from my textbook the the A Historical and Literary Introduction, second Edition, Oxford University Press.
[00:00:34] Here I address the two issues of God's Name and the Flood, both of them accounts found in The Pentateuch Box 4.1. The personal name of God God is called by many names in the Bible, including Lord God, Lord God, God Almighty God the King, and Lord God of Hosts.
[00:00:55] But there is one term for God that appears to have been thought of by ancient Israelites as His actual personal name.
[00:01:02] In English, this is often given as Yahweh based on the Hebrew word yhwh.
[00:01:08] Ancient Hebrew did not have vowels, only consonants, and so we do not actually know how the word was pronounced, although Yahweh is a good guess.
[00:01:17] Because this special name of God consists of four letters, it is sometimes referred to as the Tetragrammaton, literally the four letters.
[00:01:26] Because God Himself was thought to be so holy, it eventually came to be considered improper or even blasphemous to call him by his personal name. And so when ancient Jews read the Scriptures out loud and came to the Tetragrammaton, instead of pronouncing it, they would say instead the word Adonai, the Hebrew word for Lord.
[00:01:48] That is why even today English translations as a rule do not give the personal name of God as Yahweh when it occurs as it does thousands of times in the Hebrew Bible, but instead translate it as Lord with all capital letters to differentiate it from the translation of Adonai as lord.
[00:02:07] By the 7th or 8th century CE, Jewish scribes added vowels to the text of the Hebrew Bible in part to make it easier to read, but to make sure that ancient readers of the biblical texts did not inadvertently say the name Yahweh when they came to it, they provided it with the vowels that went instead with the word Adonai.
[00:02:27] This combination of consonants and vowels was very difficult to pronounce, and so readers would be alerted to the divine name and would simply speak it as Adonai.
[00:02:37] It was this strange conglomeration of consonants and vowels, keeping the consonants of the Tetragrammaton but using the vowels of the word Adonai that led to the invention of a new word in English, Jehovah, because Jh Vh is the English equivalent of yhwh.
[00:02:57] The Flood As I indicated in a previous post, there are a number of ancient tales from around the world about a flood that destroyed the human race.
[00:03:06] These stories are not limited to Genesis I mentioned in the previous post. The ancient Near Eastern text that tells the tale that is called Atrahasis after the name of the main character.
[00:03:18] An even more famous version comes in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Here's what I say about it in my the gilgamesh epic in 1853, several fragments of a different ancient text were discovered in the ruined palace of ancient Nineveh. The texts, also written in cuneiform script, were deciphered by George Smith. Since then they have been recognized as containing one of the great epics of ancient literature, named after its lead character, Gilgamesh the a king of the city of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia.
[00:03:50] Numerous other fragments of the epic have since been discovered and pieced together.
[00:03:55] They tell the story of this great hero, Gilgamesh, especially in his relationship with a one time wild and uncivilized but now tamed companion, Enkidu.
[00:04:06] The epic is highly episodic, going from one adventure to the next, but there are many striking parallels to what can be found in the primeval history of Genesis, such as the tale of the Garden of Eden.
[00:04:18] One portion of the epic was immediately found to be particularly significant, a story of the flood with unmistakable similarities to the account in Genesis.
[00:04:27] At one point of the narrative, Gilgamesh is said to meet with a man who had become immortalized, named Utnapishtim. Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh how he had survived a flood sent from the gods to destroy all the living things on earth.
[00:04:43] He was instructed by the gods to put aboard the seed of all living things into the boat, the boat that you are to build.
[00:04:51] He is instructed on how to build the boat and what dimensions to make it. He is told to take his relatives on board as well.
[00:04:58] The rains descended. The massive flood occurred. All the peoples of the earth were destroyed. The boat comes to rest on a mountain.
[00:05:07] As the waters dry up, Utnapishtim sends out a dove which returns when there is no dry place to perch.
[00:05:13] Then a swallow with the same result, and then a raven which does not return.
[00:05:19] After leaving the boat, Utnapishtim makes a sacrifice to the gods.
[00:05:24] All of these points have clear parallels to the Genesis story of the flood. And again this cannot be accidental. Nor could Genesis have influenced this Mesopotamian myth. The earliest accounts of Gilgamesh date from before 2000 BCE, many centuries before the J and P sources of the story of Noah.
[00:05:44] Stories of the destruction of the world by water appear to have flooded the ancient world.
