Hebrew Voices #91 – The Aramaic Name of God

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Hebrew Voices #91 - The Aramaic Name of God

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Nehemia: So, you can take that Greek from 4Q120 in the Dead Sea Scrolls and you combine it with what we find in Elephantine, there’s an Aramaic form of God’s name which is “Yaho.” That’s really interesting, guys. What’s really interesting to me is that one of the clear pieces of information that I can take away from this, from the Aramaic and Greek evidence together, is there’s an “O” in His name. That’s interesting, to me.

Benjamin Netanyahu: Le ma’an Zion lo ekhesheh, u’l’ma’an Yerushalayim lo eshkot. (For Zion’s sake I will not be silent, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest. Isaiah 62:1)

Nehemia: Shalom, this is Nehemia Gordon, and I'm here today in Jerusalem with Professor Emeritus at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Bezalel Porten. Professor Porten is best known as the editor of the Elephantine papyri, one of the most important collections of documents in Jewish history. And he's a legend in this field of dealing with the Elephantine papyri. In 1952 he began his doctorate, which eventually led him to collect and translate many of the Elephantine papyri. And he just has some incredible stories and information we're going to hear about today. We're gonna hear today about a Jewish temple in southern Egypt. We're gonna hear about Jewish soldiers who were garrisoned in southern Egypt during the Persian period. We're gonna hear about people who had names based on the Psalms. We're gonna hear about people who were non-Jews who were keeping the Sabbath in the 4th and 5th century BC. I mean, incredible things that we don't hear enough about. Bezalel Porten here has discovered many of these things and translated them. Shalom, Professor Porten.

Bezalel: Shalom, Nehemia.

Nehemia: It's incredible, because I'm here, you're my neighbor. You're about a 10-minute walk from my apartment in Jerusalem. And I met you in Helsinki, at the SBL conference, the International Society of Biblical Literature conference. You were doing a fireside chat there and then later you came to my talk. And I said, “We need to get together back in our home city and have a discussion about these Elephantine papyri.” Professor Porten, I want to jump into it. I look around your apartment here in Jerusalem. One of the things I see is little cards with elephants on them and little figurines with elephants. What is Elephantine? Let's start with that, Elephantine in Egypt and what are the Elephantine papyri and ostraca?

Bezalel: Well, first of all, Elephantine is the Greek translation of yev, yud, bet, which in Egyptian means “elephant.” And we have in the Hebrew hybrid word ‘shenhav,” heh, bet, yud, bet, alef, bet, all three forms of elephant in ancient Egyptian.