Topical Discussions, June 2nd, 2023

Topical Discussions, June 2nd, 2023

Including Who's “Out-Jewing the Jew?”, Black Hebrew “Israelites” and Which is it, Lord or Yahweh?

Lately I have been considering and saving some of the short topics discussed at various venues at Christogenea which would serve as ten or fifteen or even thirty minute recordings for videos or for our radio streams. So while I have done a few of these topical discussion presentations in the past, hopefully we can do even more in the future.

But first I want to speak of some of the challenges I have operating Christogenea, so that listeners may better understand certain things, especially things like why it takes me so long to ship book orders. Lately I have missed shipping books on time for certain holidays, such as Christmas, a holiday which we don’t even really care much about. But at the same time, while I hate to disappoint our brethren, I don’t even pay much attention to the calendar. Right now all I know is that it is already June, and a couple of days ago I really thought May had only just begun.

Some readers or listeners seem to have the impression that we should operate as efficiently as Amazon or some other huge internet retailer. But Christogenea is a one person entity, which receives some help in some areas from my wife Melissa, or in some aspects, from certain close friends who believe in our cause. Until 2018 we used a third party to print and retail our books, and they probably made more money from the venture than we did, but I did not mind, so long as the books were available. Being a one-person entity, that is why I would rather just publish everything I write freely, as I feel that is an obligation, and electronically, because that is the easiest method for me, and provides the widest possible audience.

So aside from managing about a dozen servers on the internet, which is a part-time tech job in itself, and the fifty websites which are hosted on those servers, as well as a half dozen specialty applications, I have to do a lot of smaller chores, like fulfill book orders. According to Networkworld.com, “Typically, there is one systems administrator for every seven to 15 servers,” so maybe that is a full time job, or maybe every worker in the tech world is just lazy. Then on top of managing my own IT and websites for Christogenea and many other Identity Christians and Christian Nationalists, I have to produce my content, which is usually in the form of detailed Bible commentaries and other studies, and that is what I consider to be the most important task that I have. Everything else is a necessary distraction, if I want to share my work. Because I believe that writing my next Bible commentary is my most important endeavor, I prioritize all of my other tasks after that. While my wife does most of the book order fulfillment, she cannot do it all, and when that happens it has to wait until I can help.

I refuse to sell books through Amazon. When I did, back in 2012 through maybe 2015, it was costing about $21 to have a hardcover Christogenea New Testament printed by Lulu.com. Then, if it was sold through Amazon, Amazon demands %50 of the sale price! You cannot sell a book at Amazon for a discount, without losing money on it. So if I sold it for $42 I broke even, but I never received a dime. If I sold it for $50, I could make $4 on a copy, after Amazon got half and Lulu got their $21. I could not bring myself to charge $50 for a book at that time, and see Amazon get $25 out of it. I still cannot imagine wanting to do that. But through the Lulu.com retail interface, Lulu wanted %20 of the sale price over and above the $21 cost they charged to print. So for over seven years that is how I sold my books, until they cancelled me in 2017.

Then, in order to further promote our message, I sold t-shirts and other promotional materials through Spreadshirt.com. I sold CDs with collections of podcasts through another company, called Trepstar, and I sold Saxon Messenger magazines through MagCloud. Each one of these retail interfaces took days or longer to set up, and they were all lost due to vendors caving in to the demands of the Cancel Culture. So now I would rather go it alone, but we have never had the capital to bulk-order magazines, t-shirts or CDs, and I would go bust if we did order them and they failed to sell. I cannot take those risks, so I don’t bother. I never made more than a couple of hundred dollars a month from any or all of those ventures anyway, but I never did it to pay my bills. I only did it to promote our cause.

Likewise, I cannot support myself or Christogenea selling books. At the most, we might sell forty or fifty or sometimes a hundred books in a good month. But on forty or fifty books, I might make $200 dollars after expenses. That does not even pay the electric bill. I guess it is hard to sell books when you have no outside advertising, the audience is limited, and you give the contents away freely on line. So books to us are a peripheral luxury, and they are by no means central to what we do. If Melissa makes a trip to the post office, which is nearly 25 miles one way, she burns at least three gallons of gasoline, so we certainly do not do it for the profit. That does not mean I don’t want to do it, it only means that it is hard to move it up in the list of priorities.

Perhaps one day soon I will be able to rebuild the website where we sell books, so that I can interface it with a postage service, print labels and have the postal service pick them up here. Then we could ship at least once a week without much trouble. But I need at least a week or two to do that task. While I cannot make promises now, it is one of the items on my wish list, but I have more ability than I have spare time.

Speaking of websites… Last year I planned to update Christogenea, but I had to postpone the project, because the migration tools for the content management system which I use were not quite ready for a live website. Now they supposedly have the bugs worked out, and I am looking at taking the project up again this winter, or perhaps as early as October. The current Christogenea website is built on 2012 technology which I implemented at the beginning of 2014. While it still performs adequately, it is less viable and less likely to do so in the years to come and needs to be replaced soon as it is more vulnerable to hacking and other security risks as technology evolves. When I do update the website, I hope to reorganize it so that content is easier to find, and also so that it is much more user-friendly on mobile devices. In 2014, at the main Christogenea website less than 10% of our visitors were mobile, and now for the month of May this year, that number is about 20%. For anyone who may be interested, over 62.7% of the mobile traffic is Android, and the rest is Apple. To update Christogenea, it may take as long as three months working two or three days each week.

I just wanted to say these things so that listeners who do not frequent our Chat can hear them and better understand what my focus is and why. All of these things come up as questions in emails and other messages which I receive quite frequently. I constantly have a large backlog of email, and I receive a lot of paper mail that, while I always read all of it, regrettably it is practically impossible for me to answer. It is not that I do not want to answer, but rather, I simply cannot answer it if I am going to do my next podcast. Friday night comes quickly, and the clock is not forgiving. The best way to keep in touch with me is to join the Christogenea Chat, and I spend at least a little time participating and answering messages there each day.

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Now I have three topics to discuss this evening, and the following topic, “Out Jewing the Jew”, was originally inspired by an appearance I had made on the Battle of New Orleans radio program on February 8th, 2017. So in response to an argument on that program, I wrote a Christogenea Forum post under that title on February 11th, and it was published as an editorial in the Saxon Messenger in March of that same year.

But so far as I can find, I never got it into a recording. Actually, I have been looking for short topics like this in preexisting recordings, that I can use as filler for radio streams, as they help me round out an even number of hours in the schedule. So far I have only collected six or eight, but there must be more than that, so I would also appreciate it if any of our listeners can suggest any. With over 1,500 podcasts it is hard to know where to begin looking.

The accusation that we are “Out-Jewing the Jew” is a frequent slander against Identity Christians heard mostly from neo-pagans, Orthotards and assorted other clowns on the Alt-Right.

Who is "Out Jewing the Jew"?

Identity Christians are often accused of wanting to “out-Jew the Jews” or of wanting to be the “real Jews”, or so-called “wannabe Jews”. We are accused of wanting to mimic the Jewish philosophy which is expressed in the Talmud. But even these are apparently Jewish arguments that have for a long time been used to disparage Christian Identity beliefs, and prevent people from investigating whether our claims are true.

Jews claim to be the “Chosen people” and then they use that claim as the basis for their desire to rule over and enslave all of the other races, even to validate their crimes in whatever nations have hosted them. So in essence, Jewry uses the claim as a front for their international crime ring, a syndicate which they have been operating for thousands of years. Then they found organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League as public relations firms and quasi-governmental organizations for the protection of their criminal syndicate.

But the Jews are not the Israelites, and they never have been. Rather, they are a wandering tribe of merchants, usurers, panderers and criminals which had infiltrated and subverted ancient Judaea just as they have every modern nation. They have perverted the perception of ancient history to their own advantage just as they continually pervert modern history for their own profit. There is nothing new under the sun. Doing this, they seek to undermine the national fabric of every nation, which is grounded in its distinct character and ethnicity, just as they had undermined ancient Judaea.

At diverse times throughout the fifteen hundred year period of the Old Testament, Jews were called Canaanites, Kenites, Edomites, and by other names. The Antiquities of Flavius Josephus, the Geography of Strabo of Cappadocia and various of the writings in the New Testament all serve to prove this assertion.

The true children of Israel were taken into captivity by the Assyrians over 700 years before the time of Christ, and it can be proven through ancient history – the classics and archaeology – as well as Biblical literature that they are among the ancestors of modern Europeans. But much of southern Europe was settled before this by other related tribes from Mesopotamia and the Levant, and these are also among the ancestors of modern Europeans.

This history is the basis for Christian Identity. It cannot be told in few words, but it can all be established from a plethora of ancient documents and inscriptions. The myth that the Jews are the “Chosen People” is only about 1600 years old. It was developed as original apostolic Christianity was persecuted out of existence in the first two centuries of Christianity, and slowly replaced by a universalist Roman Catholic Church which had accepted the Jewish lies even while it rejected Jews.

The persecution of original Christianity was also at the instigation of the Jews, another fact which is established by ancient writers, such as Tertullian and Minucius Felix. But later, when Rome accepted Christianity, the Jews were ostracized, and although early Christians understood that they were a cursed people, they developed their myth by concealing their true history in order to justify their existence, perpetuating their criminal activities among Christians.

However Identity Christians have the beliefs which they do because they have investigated the history which reveals the truth, both the truth of their own origins as well as the truth of the identity of the Jews. Believing these things that they are able to establish through the ancient writings of our European race, Identity Christians look back to the original promises made to their ancestors, as well as the original expectations required of them in return, and seek to follow them. That is not Jewish, but Christian, and that is the Christianity which was taught by the apostles of Christ.

So we read in Leviticus chapter 19: “5 Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine: 6 And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation. These are the words which thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel….” The God of Israel then proceeded to lay down a moral code, beginning with the basic commandments, by which the nation could survive distinctly in an immoral world. The people known today as Jews are actually a portion of the descendants of those who created that immoral world, portrayed in the accounts of Sodom and Gomorrah, and they perpetuate those corrupted ideals to this very day.

European Christians are properly the heirs of that legacy which began in the Exodus, as the apostle Peter wrote in his first epistle: “9 But you are an elect race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people, so that you should proclaim the virtues for which from out of darkness you have been called into the wonder of His light, 10 who at one time were ‘not a people’ but now are the people of Yahweh, those who ‘have not been shown mercy’ but are now shown mercy.”

The words are cryptic to the unlearned, but Peter is quoting the 8th century BC Hebrew prophet Hosea, who witnessed the time that those ancient Israelites were carried off by the Assyrians into captivity and resettled around the Black and Caspian Seas and near the Caucasus mountains, through which they travelled and for which reason their descendants had later called themselves Caucasians – which is a reference to the White people of Europe.

The history of the true people of Israel in Scripture is an analogy, whereby they were put out of their land for their sin, becoming “'not a people”', and were shown mercy and reconciled to God in Christ, being the true Chosen Race of Yahweh their God. Throughout history, Identity Christians have come to realize the meaning of the analogy in the words of that prophet, and its fulfillment in the modern people of Europe. Other prophets, such as Isaiah and Jeremiah, also tell us rather explicitly where true Israel was located, and their identification helps to lead to what Identity Christians generally believe.

Throughout history, Christians have demonstrated that they are the anointed of God by building nations which are based on the rule of law, God’s law, by treating their racial kinsmen with brotherly love, justice and equity, and by working for the edification of their communities, which are properly their own extended families. This is how Identity Christians practice their Christianity, for the benefit of their own White race, while also knowing that they have an obligation to defend their race against outsiders. Every proper nation begins with a larger collection of these extended, related families, and survives so long as it continues to defend itself against intruders from outside.

This is why Jews hate Christian Identity, and seek to undermine and destroy it, because it is a glue that they cannot otherwise dissolve. Christian Identity is absolute anathema to the Jew and to all non-Whites who would want to infiltrate White society for their own profit. But properly, Identity Christians do not seek to rule over or enslave non-Whites, and rather, they seek to ostracize them, as Christians are commanded to be a separate people. That is the very meaning of the term “holy nation” as Peter had used it in his first epistle. The Greek word for holy means separated and devoted to God, and any multi-racial nation cannot possibly be holy by the very definition of the term.

Identity Christians believe that the White man is the Adamic man of Scripture, and there is a plethora of evidence to support that belief. The White man is therefore the pinnacle of the Creation of God. To defend the White race is to defend the Creation of God.

From Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Volume 1, Chapter 2:

And so I believe to-day that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator. In standing guard against the Jew I am defending the handiwork of the Lord.

Identity Christians agree with those words completely. This is not an endeavor to act like Jews, but rather, it is an endeavor to love one’s own brethren, and therefore to please God. Whites who despise this concept are themselves acting as Jews, as the Jews have historically been the creators of confusion in all societies, promoting multiculturalism and diversity wherever they are found.

From Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Volume 2, Chapter 1:

To undermine the existence of human culture by exterminating its founders and custodians would be an execrable crime in the eyes of those who believe that the folk-idea lies at the basis of human existence. Whoever would dare to raise a profane hand against that highest image of God among His creatures would sin against the bountiful Creator of this marvel and would collaborate in the expulsion from Paradise.

Identity Christians also agree with these words completely. Christian Identity is the exact polar opposite of the ideology of Judaism. Identity Christians seek to preserve their race, thereby preserving that pinnacle of God’s Creation, as being distinct and differently valued from all other races. No member of any other race, and especially the Jew, has a right to decide what is good or moral for our White European race. Therefore no member of any other race should even ever have any voice in White society.

From Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Volume 1, Chapter 8:

What we have to fight for is the necessary security for the existence and increase of our race and people, the subsistence of its children and the maintenance of our racial stock unmixed, the freedom and independence of the Fatherland; so that our people may be enabled to fulfil the mission assigned to it by the Creator.

Identity Christians also agree with these words completely. But while Adolf Hitler was not Christian Identity, he understood the essence of Christianity, and in this regard he had the same understanding that we do. He certainly cannot be accused of wanting to “out-Jew the Jew”, and neither should we. All of those who oppose Identity Christians by disparaging us or opposing our ideals, they are the “wannabe Jews”, and it is they who are trying to “out Jew the Jews”, because they are assisting the Jews in their eternal plot against White society.

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If my faulty memory serves me correctly, in that same episode of The Battle of New Orleans radio, there was raised the subject of the so-called “Black Hebrew Israelites”, as a means of discrediting Christian Identity, because after all, if negros claim to be Israel, then Identity Christians must be no better than negros. So on the same day, February 11th, 2017, I had written a Christogenea Forum post Refuting Black "Hebrew Israelites", and I will present that here. I must admit that these two brief articles, on “Out Jewing the Jew” and “Black ‘Hebrew’ Israelites”, have probably been sitting here on my desktop for at least a couple of years, waiting to be included in a podcast, but there are a few other topics waiting as well, which can wait a bit longer.

Refuting Black “Hebrew” Israelites

This idea that there are "black Hebrews" who are "Israelites" is about the biggest joke that has ever been played on negros, most of whom are stupid enough to believe it. It is almost as ridiculous as thinking that Jews are Israelites. If anyone thinks that either could possibly be true, their name may as well be "Payday Monsanto". [Payday Monsanto was the handle of one of the regular guest hosts of The Battle of New Orleans Radio, whose existence I was ignorant of until he began disputing with me on the program. Payday actually quit the program shortly thereafter. We met the other hosts in May of that year, when we went to NOLA for the demonstrations at Lee Circle, and they were amicable.]

Aside from the obvious things, such as the fact that the Israelites were a highly successful agrarian society for several centuries, that they built a kingdom which lasted 800 years before it fell apart due to infiltration and corruption, that they left behind a legacy of literature and law which ancient Greek writers esteemed, and that every description of them in Scripture describes White people, there are a few things we must ask.

If the apostles were sent to the "lost sheep of the house of Israel" and if the New Covenant was made for the “house of Israel and the house of Judah”, as the apostles themselves stated, then why did the apostles go to Europe? And where are the epistles of Paul to the Mandingos, Hutus or Tutsis? Where is there any evidence of a sub-Saharan Christianity before the time of the first European missionaries to Africa in the 15th century? Why do Africans today require a constant stream of White missionaries and they still struggle to maintain a merely marginal appearance of being “Christian”? Why do Africans today still need White Christian missionaries at all?

Why don't the sub-Saharan African languages have any historical traces of Biblical languages? Why didn't Hottentots and bushmen speak either Hebrew or Greek? No sub-Saharan African nation has ever spoken anything which even remotely resembled either Hebrew or Greek.

A thousand obvious arguments can be made against the idea that negros are Israelites, or that Israelites were negros. But here is one of the best, because it comes from a Greek writer who lived nearly a hundred years before Christ, and I originally wrote the following few paragraphs a couple of years ago for a video I had posted at Christogenea, so I will merely repeat it here:

In spite of the Hollywood propaganda, the ancient Greeks and Romans hardly knew the African negro, except perhaps as a passing spectacle in the desert or by the surviving population of mixed races in certain places in Egypt or Ethiopia. One literary example which demonstrates the truth of this assertion is found in the Library of History, Book 3, by the ancient Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, whose work was published around 36 BC.

After describing the cultured people of Ethiopia, who were originally not black and who had many things in common with the rest of the civilized world, Diodorus wrote in Book 3 chapter 8: “1 But there are also a great many other tribes of the Ethiopians, some of them dwelling in the land lying on both banks of the Nile and on the islands in the river, others inhabiting the neighbouring country of Arabia, and still others residing in the interior of Libya. 2 The majority of them, and especially those who dwell along the river, are black in colour and have flat noses and woolly hair. As for their spirit they are entirely savage and display the nature of a wild beast, not so much, however, in their temper as in their ways of living; for they are squalid all over their bodies, they keep their nails very long like the wild beasts, and are as far removed as possible from human kindness to one another; 3 and speaking as they do with a shrill voice and cultivating none of the practices of civilized life as these are found among the rest of mankind, they present a striking contrast when considered in the light of our own customs.” (Library of History, 3.8.1)

The primary reason by which negros claim to the Israelites is that Israel was taken into slavery, so they must be Israel because they were once slaves. However the Old Testament prophets inform us that Israel was taken into slavery in the north, and would migrate into Europe, for example in Jeremiah chapter 3 and Isaiah chapter 66. However negros, and unfortunately many Whites also, are completely oblivious to the fact that millions of Whites had been enslaved all throughout history. For example, the British Museum has an article titled Slavery in Ancient Rome which explains that an estimated ten to twenty percent of the population of the Roman Empire were slaves, and the vast majority were taken from northern Europe and the Near East, areas inhabited by Whites. Even if some slaves were taken from Africa or Egypt, history would prove that they were at least mostly White. Furthermore, a 2004 Ohio State University news article gives credibility to a book written by Robert Davis, a professor of history at Ohio State University, titled Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800, where the author demonstrates that “a million or more European Christians were enslaved by Muslims in North Africa between 1530 and 1780”. Of course, muslims were taking Christian slaves as long as eight hundred years before 1530. But not four hundred thousand negro slaves were ever imported into America from Africa, according to an article at Statista.com. Now there are 42 million negros in America, so the four hundred thousand negro slaves were hardly oppressed.

The Jews frequently entertain the idea that Hebrews were negros mostly because Jews do not really have any care for truth or historical antiquity. Rather, the Jews love to promote confusion, and discredit those who do seek the truth concerning antiquity. So they do that by promoting these negro fantasies of a glorious past, something which the negro never had and never could live up to. Through their control of the media, Jews promote any lie which will help them to undermine Christian society, and they will suppress any truth which obstructs that objective.

There is a legacy of nearly three thousand years of writing and art in the Mediterranean basin which reflects an entirely White society, only that Egypt and Ethiopia were the first White nations to be overrun with blacks (see Isaiah 43:3), and were turned into mulatto cesspools before the Greeks went and tried to civilize them once again, in the 3rd century BC. The Egyptians and Ethiopians of today are the first result of multiculturalism and diversity outside of Asia, and the Jewish desire is to do that same thing to every White nation which still exists.

"Black Hebrew Israyelites" are among the tools of the Jews in that objective, and Whites who fall for this trash are just as dumb as the negros.

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Now to change the subject back to things which concern actual people:

Identity Christians who use the Hebrew name of God, which is Yahweh, rather than the English title Lord, are often assailed as Judaizers, and even told that Yahweh is a Talmudic name which we learned from Jews only recently, as recently as the 19th or 20th century. Even some supposed Identity Christians have adopted this attitude. But these charges are utterly absurd, and we hope to address that here.

We will do chiefly this by presenting an article by Clifton Emahiser titled Which is it, Lord, or Yahweh? This article is credited to Clifton Emahiser, who had produced it some time in the first half of 2006. But Clifton actually only wrote the first paragraph. The balance of the article consists mostly of a lengthy excerpt of an article from Encyclopædia Britannica, and then there are notes in a conclusion which I had written for Clifton at that time.

But before we begin, let me say that when I arrived at Clifton’s home to move him to Florida in 2017, because he could no longer live by himself, I packed all of his books which I could find. Doing that, he had a set of the 11th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica which he mentions here, but by that time he had relegated it to his basement, probably because the bindings are in very poor condition, and are now crumbling on my shelves. But on the shelves in his living room, he had a set of the 9th edition of Britannica, which dates to 1894, and we also brought that with us, but it is in much better condition. In the 9th edition, in Volume XIII, there is an article on Jehovah which is much more concise and succinct than this article, but which says many of the same things. Photographs of the relevant pages are found below, and perhaps I will digitize the text in the near future.

Which is it, “Lord” or “Yahweh”?

by Clifton A. Emahiser

Many today are struggling with this very question. What other subject could be of more importance than the very name of our Creator? Maybe the following article will solve some of your uncertainties. If one wishes to find information on the term “Yahweh” it is somewhat hard to find. One reason is because in most encyclopedias it is listed under “Jehovah.” Also, in later up-to-date encyclopedias the information is rather suppressed. The following is a rather thorough, but not perfect, article on this subject found in the 11th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica printed in 1910. We will not use the entire article as toward the end they get mired in the errant criticisms of the 1800’s humanists. Otherwise this article brings to light many historical facts on the topic. But like all testimony, it must be scrutinized!

(Footnotes have been changed to paragraph notes at the end of each paragraph by the use of superscript numerals inside of brackets [ ]):

Many of the so-called “higher critics” of the 19th century were actually Jews, who have always been critical of and have sought to undermine Christianity. Although many of the higher critics were European humanists, whether they were theologians or not, they followed and accepted most of the traditions of the Jews concerning Scripture, so that theologically they were little different than Jews.

Now to proceed with the article from Britannica:

JEHOVAH (Yahweh¹), in the Bible, the God of Israel. “Jehovah” is a modern mispronunciation of the Hebrew name, resulting from combining the consonants of that name, Jhvh, with the vowels of the word adonay, “Lord,” which the Jews substituted for the proper name in reading the scriptures. In such cases of substitution the vowels of the word which is to be read are written in the Hebrew text with the consonants of the word which is not to be read. The consonants of the word to be substituted are ordinarily written in the margin; but inasmuch as Adonay was regularly read instead of the ineffable name Jhvh, it was deemed unnecessary to note the fact at every occurrence. When Christian scholars began to study the Old Testament in Hebrew, if they were ignorant of this general rule or regarded the substitution as a piece of Jewish superstition, reading what actually stood in the text, they would inevitably pronounce the name Jehovah. It is an unprofitable inquiry who first made this blunder; probably many fell into it independently. The statement still commonly repeated that it originated with Petrus Galatinus (1518) is erroneous; Jehova occurs in manuscripts at least as early as the 14th century. [¹This form, Yahweh, as the correct one, is generally used in the separate articles throughout this work.]

The Oxford Languages dictionary defines ineffable as “too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words” and secondly as “not to be uttered.” Then an example of the use of the word is provided which says: “the ineffable Hebrew name that gentiles write as Jehovah.” However there is nowhere in Scripture which prohibits the use of the name Yahweh, except in vain. Rather, in the first century AD, Flavius Josephus wrote in Book 2 of his Antiquities of the Judaeans [2.276] speaking of Moses that “God declared to him his holy name, which had never been revealed to men before; concerning which it is not lawful for me to say any more.” That statement by Josephus implies that at one time it was lawful for him to say the name, but that it had been prohibited. It was very likely prohibited throughout Judaea even before the ministry of Christ. It did appear in the Dead Sea Scrolls, even in place of κύριος in the Greek manuscripts of the Old Testament which have been found among the scrolls.

Continuing with Britannica:

The form Jehovah was used in the 16th century by many authors, both Catholic and Protestant, and in the 17th was zealously defended by Fuller, Gataker, Leusden and others, against the criticisms of such scholars as Drusius, Cappellus and the elder Buxtorf. It appeared in the English Bible in Tyndale’s translation of the Pentateuch (1530), and is found in all English Protestant versions of the 16th century except that of Coverdale (1535). In the Authorized Version of 1611 it occurs in Exod. vi. 3; Ps. lxxxiii. 18; Isa. xii. 2; xxvi. 4, beside the compound names Jehovah-jireh, Jehovah-nissi, [and] Jehovah-shalom; elsewhere, in accordance with the usage of the ancient versions, Jhvh is represented by LORD (distinguished by capitals from the title “Lord,” Heb. adonay). In the Revised Version of 1885 Jehovah is retained in the places in which it stood in the A.V., and is introduced also in Exod. vi. 2, 6, 7, 8; Ps. lxviii. 20; Isa. xlix, 14; Jer. xvi. 21; Hab. iii: 19. The American committee which cooperated in the revision desired to employ the name Jehovah wherever Jhvh occurs in the original, and editions embodying their preferences are printed accordingly.

From this, if they had known better, it is obvious that as early as the 16th century, with only a few exceptions Christians throughout Europe had sought to use the name Yahweh in their translations of Scripture, even if it was in the mistaken form of Jehovah. Coverdale, who did not follow the others, published his Coverdale Bible in 1535. But Coverdale also collaborated on the Geneva Bible which was published in 1557. The 1611 King James Version was largely based on the Geneva Bible.

Returning to Britannica, we cannot be certain that it is correct where it gives a time frame for when the Judaeans had ceased to use the name Yahweh. In our opinion, it most likely was not restricted until at least the time of the first Herod, since, as we have explained, the name is found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, whose authors were outlaws since the time of the first Herod:

Several centuries before the Christian era the name Jhvh had ceased to be commonly used by the Jews. Some of the later writers in the Old Testament employ the appellative Elohim, God, prevailingly or exclusively; a collection of Psalms (Ps. xlii. - lxxxiii.) was revised by an editor who changed the Jhvh of the authors into Elohim (see e.g. xlv. 7; xlviii 10; l. 7; li. 14); observe also the frequency of “the Most High,” “the God of Heaven,” “King of Heaven,” in Daniel, and of “Heaven” in First Maccabees. The oldest Greek versions (Septuagint), from the third century B.C., consistently use Κύριος, “Lord,” where the Hebrew has Jhvh, corresponding to the substitution of Adonay for Jhvh in reading the original; in books written in Greek in this period (e.g. Wisdom, 2 and 3 Maccabees), as in the New Testament, Κύριος takes the place of the name of God. Josephus, who as a priest knew the pronunciation of the name, declares that religion forbids him to divulge it; Philo calls it ineffable, and says that it is lawful for those only whose ears and tongues are purified by wisdom to hear and utter it in a holy place (that is, for priests in the Temple); and in another passage, commenting on Lev. xxiv. 15 seq.: “If any one, I do not say should blaspheme against the Lord of men and gods, but should even dare to utter his name unseasonably, let him expect the penalty of death.”¹ [¹See Josephus, Ant. ii. 12, 4; Philo, Vita Mosis, iii. 11 (ii. §114, ed. Cohn and Wendland); ib. iii. 27 (ii. §206). The Palestinian authorities more correctly interpreted Lev. xxiv. 15 seq., not of the mere utterance of the name, but of the use of the name of God in blaspheming God.]

This is a complete mischaracterization, where it is claimed that the later Old Testament writers ceased to use the name of Yahweh. It can be established that Malachi was the last prophet, and the last book of the canonical Old Testament. In the words of that prophet, the name Yahweh is found 38 times in the Masoretic Text. Haggai and Zechariah were prophets at the time of the post-Babylonian return to Jerusalem, and in those books the name is found 25 and 120 times respectively, where we must add that Haggai and Malachi are much shorter books than Zechariah. Citing apocryphal Greek books in this argument is irrelevant, since no Hebrew copies of those books exist, and since the oldest Greek copies are from the 4th or 5th centuries AD, and to late to prove anything. However the Greek copies of Scripture found among the Dead Sea Scrolls do contain YHVH, the Tetragrammaton, written in Hebrew characters, and not the Greek word κύριος.

In the earlier prophet Daniel, who is cited here in support of this misleading argument, the name Yahweh appears only 7 times, but much of Daniel’s interaction is with pagans with whom he should not have shared the name of Yahweh. Daniel was in a pagan world, and he was earlier than Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi, so the argument is patently false. The authors cited the restriction described by Josephus, but it is certainly not relevant to “several centuries before the Christian era”, as Josephus used himself, and not his nation, in reference to the restriction. Philo may have called the name YHVH ineffable, but he was born during the rule of the first Herod, and wrote in Alexandria in Egypt until about 50 AD, which supports our own assertion concerning when the name was prohibited. It was prohibited by Edomite Jewish authorities, and certainly not by the earlier Israelite high priests.

Once again continuing with Britannica:

Various motives may have concurred to bring about the suppression of the name. An instinctive feeling that a proper name for God implicitly recognizes the existence of other gods may have had some influence; reverence and the fear lest the holy name should be profaned among the heathen were potent reasons; but probably the most cogent motive was the desire to prevent the abuse of the name in magic. If so, the secrecy had the opposite effect; the name of the god of the Jews was one of the great names in magic, heathen as well as Jewish, and miraculous efficacy was attributed to the mere utterance of it.

We would rather assert that if a generic term is used, such as “God” or “Lord”, it serves to facilitate a multiracial society such as what Judaea had become by the time of Christ. With the incorporation of the Edomites and other Canaanites and the forced conversions which happened from about 125 BC to about 80 BC, chiefly during the tenures of John Hyrcanus and Alexander Jannaeus as high priests, Judaea became such a pluralistic society, and once Herod the Edomite became king, that society was ruled by Edomites until after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD.

If I say “god” in the presence of a Buddhist, a Judeo-Christian, and a Muslim, the word will evoke a different god in the mind of each listener. The same is true of the title “lord”, as the Buddhists even call the idol Krishna their “lord”. But if I say Yahweh, I am speaking specifically of the Old Testament God of Israel, and Buddhists, Judeo-Christians, Muslims, and especially Jews can all be offended. As an Identity Christian, that is what I would rather do, I would rather offend heretics and drive away the outsiders.

Returning to Britannica once again:

In the liturgy of the Temple the name was pronounced in the priestly benediction (Num. vi. 27) after the regular daily sacrifice (in the synagogues a substitute – probably Adonay – was employed);¹ on the Day of Atonement the High Priest uttered the name ten times in his prayers and benediction. In the last generations before the fall of Jerusalem, however, it was pronounced in a low tone so that the sounds were lost in the chant of the priests.² [¹... Siphrê, Num. §§ 39, 43; M. Sotah, iii. 7; Sotah, 38a. The tradition that the utterance of the name in the daily benedictions ceased with the death of Simeon the Just, two centuries or more before the Christian era, perhaps arose from a misunderstanding of Menahoth, 109b; in any case it cannot stand against the testimony of older and more authoritative texts. ²Yoma, 39b; Jer. Yoma, iii. 7; Kiddushin, 71a.]

As the “older and more authoritative texts” must be the books of Scripture which the editors attempted to use to support their argument, they have failed as well as the Talmudists since we have seen that the later prophets refute their argument. Evidently, Simeon the Just is a reference to a high priest of the late 4th century BC, Simeon the son of Onias the son of Jaddua who had met Alexander the Great at the gates of Jerusalem. But the citations from the Talmud are from five hundred years or more later, and have no authority on their own. In fact, all of the supporting citations for the statements in this paragraph and that which follows are from the Talmud, and therefore we would discard them all as Jewish fable and hearsay.

Again, returning to Britannica:

After the destruction of the Temple (A.D. 70) the liturgical use of the name ceased, but the tradition was perpetuated in the schools of the rabbis.¹ It was certainly known in Babylonia in the latter part of the 4th century,² and not improbably much later. Nor was the knowledge confined to these pious circles; the name continued to be employed by healers, exorcists and magicians, and has been preserved in many places in magical papyri. The vehemence with which the utterance of the name is denounced in the Mishna – “He who pronounces the Name with its own letters has no part in the world to come!³ suggests that this misuse of the name was not uncommon among Jews. [¹R. Johanan (second half of the 3rd century), Kiddushin, 71a. ²Kiddushin, l.c. = Pesahim, 50a. ³M. Sanhedrin, x. 1; Abba Saul, end of 2nd century.]

The Samaritans, who otherwise shared the scruples of the Jews about the utterance of the name, seem to have used it in judicial oaths to the scandal of the rabbis.¹ [¹Jer. Sanhedrin, x. 1; R. Mana, 4th century.]

We would expect the Jews to despise, and therefore to look for ways to avoid and ultimately prohibit the use of the name. Continuing:

The early Christian scholars, who inquired what was the true name of the God of the Old Testament, had therefore no great difficulty in getting the information they sought. Clement of Alexandria (d. c. 212) says that it was pronounced Ιαουε.¹ Epiphanius (d. 404), who was born in Palestine and spent a considerable part of his life there, gives Ιαβε (one cod. Ιαυε).² Theodoret (d. c. 457),³ born in Antioch, writes that the Samaritans pronounced the name Ιαβε (in another passage, Ιαβαι), the Jews Αἳα.⁴ The latter is probably not Jhvh but Ehyeh (Exod. iii. 14), which the Jews counted among the names of God; there is no reason whatever to imagine that the Samaritans pronounced the name Jhvh differently from the Jews. This direct testimony is supplemented by that of the magical texts, in which Ιαβε ζεβυθ (Jahveh Sebaoth), as well as Ιαβα, occurs frequently.⁵ In an Ethiopic list of magical names of Jesus, purporting to have been taught by him to his disciples, Yawe is found.⁶ Finally, there is evidence from more than one source that the modern Samaritan priests pronounce the name Yahweh or Yahwa.⁷ [¹Strom. v. 6. Variants: Ια ουε, Ια ουαι; cod. L. Ιαου ²Panarion, Haer. 40, 5; cf. Lagarde, Psalter juxta Hebraeos, 154. ³Quaest. 15 in Exod.; Fab. haeret. compend. v. 3, sub fin. ⁴ Αἳα occurs also in the great magical papyrus of Paris, 1. 3020 (Wessely, Denkschrift. Wien. Akad., Phil. Hist. Kl. XXXVI. p. 120), and in the Leiden Papyrus, xvii. 31. ⁵See Deissmann, Bibelstudien, 13 sqq. ⁶See Driver, Studia Biblica, I. 20. ⁷See Montgomery, Journal of Biblical Literature, xxv. (1906), 49-51.]

Here I must interject, that I have seen the citations referenced here from the Greek of these early Christian writers. Clement of Alexandria lived from about 150 to 215 AD. Epiphanius from about 310 or 320 to 403 AD. With their testimony alone, the claim that Identity Christians learned the name Yahweh from Jews is proven to be utterly ridiculous. We shall discuss their pronunciations further on.

Returning to Britannica once again, for our purposes here I will pronounce the leading ‘J’ properly, as a leading “Y”:

There is no reason to impugn the soundness of this substantially consentient testimony to the pronunciation Yahweh or Jahveh, coming as it does through several independent channels. It is confirmed by grammatical considerations. The name Jhvh enters into the composition of many proper names of persons in the Old Testament, either as the initial element, in the form Jeho- or Jo- (as in Jehoram, Joram), or as the final element, in the form -jahu or -jah (as in Adonijahu, Adonijah). These various forms are perfectly regular if the divine name was Yahweh, and, taken altogether, they cannot be explained on any other hypothesis. Recent scholars, accordingly, with but few exceptions, are agreed that the ancient pronunciation of the name was Yahweh (the first h sounded at the end of the syllable).

Genebrardus seems to have been the first to suggest the pronunciation Iahue,¹ but it was not until the 19th century that it became generally accepted. [¹Chronographia, Paris, 1567 (ed. Paris, 1600, p. 79 seq.).]

Here I will only note that in my own notes in conclusion to this article, which we shall present below, I explain in other ways how we may understand how to pronounce the Tetragrammaton, which is YHVH or Yahweh. Continuing with the article:

Jahveh or Yahweh is apparently an example of a common type of Hebrew proper names which have the form of the 3rd pers. sing. of the verb. e.g. Jabneh (name of a city), Jabin, Jamlek, Jiptah (Jephthah), &c. Most of these really are verbs, the suppressed or implicit subject being ’el, “numen, god,” or the name of a god; cf. Jabneh and Jabne-el, Jiptah and Jiptah-el.

The ancient explanations of the name proceed from Exod. iii. 14, 15, where “Yahweh¹ hath sent me” in v. 15 corresponds to “Ehyeh hath sent me” in v. 14, thus seeming to connect the name Yahweh with the Hebrew verb hayah, “to become, to be.” The Palestinian interpreters found in this the promise that God would be with his people (cf. v. 12) in future oppressions as he was in 0the present distress, or the assertion of his eternity, or eternal constancy; the Alexandrian translation Ἐγώ εἰμί ὁ ὤν ... Ὁ ὤν ἀπέσταλκέν με πρὸς ὑμᾶς understands it in the more metaphysical sense of God’s absolute being. Both interpretations, “He (who) is (always the same),” and “He (who) is (absolutely, the truly existent),” import into the name all that they profess to find in it; the one, the religious faith in God’s unchanging fidelity to his people, the other, a philosophical conception of absolute being which is foreign both to the meaning of the Hebrew verb and to the force of the tense employed. Modern scholars have sometimes found in the name the expression of the aseity² of God; sometimes of his reality, in contrast to the imaginary gods of the heathen. Another explanation, which appears first in Jewish authors of the middle ages and has found wide acceptance in recent times, derives the name from the causative of the verb; He (who) causes things to be, gives them being; or calls events into existence, brings them to pass; with many individual modifications of interpretation – creator, lifegiver, fulfiller of promises. A serious objection to this theory in every form is that the verb hayah, “to be,” has no causative stem in Hebrew; to express the ideas which these scholars find in the name Yahweh the language employs altogether different verbs. [¹This transcription will be used henceforth. ²A-se-itas, a scholastic Latin expression for the quality of existing by oneself.]

This assumption that Yahweh is derived from the verb “to be,” as seems to be implied in Exod. iii. 14 seq., is not, however, free from difficulty. “To be” in the Hebrew of the Old Testament is not hawah, as the derivation would require, but hayah; and we are thus driven to the further assumption that hawah belongs to an earlier stage of the language, or to some older speech of the forefathers of the Israelites. This hypothesis is not intrinsically improbable – and in Aramaic, a language closely related to Hebrew, “to be” actually is hawa – but it should be noted that in adopting it we admit that, using the name Hebrew in the historical sense, Yahweh is not a Hebrew name. And, inasmuch as nowhere in the Old Testament, outside of Exod. iii., is there the slightest indication that the Israelites connected the name of their God with the idea of “being” in any sense, it may fairly be questioned whether, if the author of Exod. iii. 14 seq., intended to give an etymological interpretation of the name Yahweh,¹ his etymology is any better than many other paronomastic explanations of proper names in the Old Testament, or than, say, the connexion of the name Ἀπόλλων with ἀπολούων, ἀπολύων in Plato’s Cratylus, or the popular derivation from ἀπόλλυμι. [¹The critical difficulties of these verses need not be discussed here. See W. R. Arnold, “The Divine Name in Exodus iii. 14,” Journal of Biblical Literature, XXIV. (1905), 107-165.]

In response to this, I will only say that there is considerable confusion in Hebrew manuscripts in the letters י, yodh or y, and ו, vav/waw or v/w, and would want to investigate that further in reference to this debate over hayah and hawah. Returning to Britannica:

A root hawah is represented in Hebrew by the nouns howah (Ezek., Isa. xlvii. 11) and hawwah (Ps., Prov., Job) “disaster, calamity, ruin.”¹ The primary meaning is probably “sink down, fall,” in which sense – common in Arabic – the verb appears in Job xxxvii. 6 (of snow falling to earth). A Catholic commentator of the 16th century, Hieronymus ab Oleastro, seems to have been the first to connect the name “Jehova” with howah interpreting it contritio, sive pernicies (destruction of the Egyptians and Canaanites); Daumer, adopting the same etymology, took it in a more general sense: Yahweh, as well as Shaddai, meant “Destroyer,” and fitly expressed the nature of the terrible god whom he identified with Moloch. [¹Cf. Also hawwah, “desire,” Mic. vii. 3; Prov. x. 3.]

The derivation of Yahweh from hawah is formally unimpeachable, and is adopted by many recent scholars, who proceed, however, from the primary sense of the root rather than from the specific meaning of the nouns. The name is accordingly interpreted, He (who) falls (baetyl, βαίτυλος, meteorite); or causes (rain or lightning) to fall (storm god); or casts down (his foes, by his thunderbolts). It is obvious that if the derivation be correct, the significance of the name, which in itself denotes only “He falls” or “He fells,” must be learned, if at all, from early Israelitish conceptions of the nature of Yahweh rather than from etymology.

Here the humanists at Britannica are endeavoring to reduce the meaning of the name Yahweh to a reference to a typical storm god, or even one of the nephilim, which we should reject. Their own explanation of the Aramaic form of the verb and the confusion between hawah and hayah, among other things which are evident here, reveal that the derivation from hawah as they define it is not “formally unimpeachable”. But for now we shall continue with the article:

A more fundamental question is whether the name Yahweh originated among the Israelites or was adopted by them from some other people and speech. The biblical author of the history of the sacred institutions (P) expressly declares that the name Yahweh was unknown to the patriarchs (Exod. vi. 3), and the much older Israelite historian (E) records the first revelation of the name to Moses (Exod. iii. 13-15), apparently following a tradition according to which the Israelites had not been worshippers of Yahweh before the time of Moses, or, as he conceived it, had not worshipped the god of their fathers under that name. The revelation of the name to Moses was made at a mountain sacred to Yahweh (the mountain of God) far to the south of Palestine, in a region where the forefathers of the Israelites had never roamed, and in the territory of other tribes; and long after the settlement in Canaan this region continued to be regarded as the abode of Yahweh (Judg. v. 4; Deut. xxxiii. 2 sqq.; I Kings xix. 8 sqq. &c.).

We shall interrupt the paragraph here to say that many of these arguments are grounded in an incomplete view of the facts of ancient Biblical history, and even worse, the authors of the study accept the lies of the critics which claim that the writings of Moses in the Pentateuch are a compilation of diverse sources, one which is identified as “the biblical author of the history of the sacred institutions” called “P” and the other as “the much older Israelite historian” called “E”. This entire assessment of the work of Moses is false, and it is based on Jewish and humanist conjecture and lies.

Once again continuing with Britannica, there is now an attempt to discredit Moses as a purveyor of some religion of the Midianites, which the later Scriptures clearly disprove:

Moses is closely connected with the tribes in the vicinity of the holy mountain; according to one account, he married a daughter of the priest of Midian (Exod. ii. I6 sqq.; iii. I); to this mountain he led the Israelites after their deliverance from Egypt; there his father-in-law met him, and extolling Yahweh as “greater than all the gods,” offered (in his capacity as priest of the place?) sacrifices, at which the chief men of the Israelites were his guests; there the religion of Yahweh was revealed through Moses, and the Israelites pledged themselves to serve God according to its prescriptions. It appears, therefore, that in the tradition followed by the Israelite historian the tribes within whose pasture lands the mountain of God stood were worshippers of Yahweh before the time of Moses; and the surmise that the name Yahweh belongs to their speech, rather than to that of Israel, has considerable probability. One of these tribes was Midian, in whose land the mountain of God lay. The Kenites also, with whom another tradition connects Moses, seem to have been worshippers of Yahweh. It is probable that Yahweh was at one time worshipped by various tribes south of Palestine, and that several places in that wide territory (Horeb, Sinai, Kadesh, &c.) were sacred to him; the oldest and most famous of these, the mountain of God, seems to have lain in Arabia, east of the Red Sea. From some of these peoples and at one of these holy places, a group of Israelite tribes adopted the religion of Yahweh, the God who, by the hand of Moses, had delivered them from Egypt.¹ [¹The divergent Judaean tradition, according to which the forefathers had worshipped Yahweh from time immemorial, may indicate that Judah and the kindred clans had in fact been worshippers of Yahweh before the time of Moses.] …

The mention of the Kenites here is disingenuous. In Judges chapters 4 and 5, one man related to Jethro, a Midianite, is called “Heber the Kenite”, but in that instance it can be demonstrated that kenite is a mistranslation, as the word also may mean smith, as in the occupation. That Heber was a smith is demonstrated in the action of his wife Jael, who was able to nail the Canaanite general Sisera to the floor of her tent with a hammer and one nail through the head, killing him. Only a woman with experience with a hammer would be able to do that so confidently and efficiently, which is natural for the wife of a smith.

While the name of Yahweh certainly may have been known to men before the time of Abraham, to Abraham himself it was not revealed. As we read in Joshua chapter 24, the ancestors of Abraham had been pagans. But Moses was only six generations from Abraham, the line being Isaac, Jacob, Levi, Kohath, Amram, and Moses, and Moses’ father-in-law was probably closer to Abraham in descent than that, having been older than Moses, and having his descent from Abraham’s later wife, Keturah. The fact that Moses’ father-in-law was a descendant of Abraham through Midian shows that Moses and his father-in-law shared a common heritage and faith up to the time when Yahweh revealed himself to Moses. That does not mean that the name of the God they had both worshipped, Yahweh, had revealed His Name to anyone of the line of Abraham before the time of Moses.

Returning to Britannica for one more paragraph, now they fail to admit connections that they should have made, but all along it is clear that the editors have been following Jews:

The attempts to connect the name Yahweh with that of an Indo-European deity (Jehovah-Jove, &c.), or to derive it from Egyptian or Chinese, may be passed over. But one theory which has had considerable currency requires notice, namely, that Yahweh, or Yahu, Yaho,¹ is the name of a god worshipped throughout the whole, or a great part, of the area occupied by the Western Semites. In its earlier form this opinion rested chiefly on certain misinterpreted testimonies in Greek authors about a god Ἰάω, and was conclusively refuted by Baudissin; recent adherents of the theory build more largely on the occurrence in various parts of this territory of proper names of persons and places which they explain as compounds of Yahu or Yah.² The explanation is in most cases simply an assumption of the point at issue; some of the names have been misread; others are undoubtedly the names of Jews <sic. Israelites>. There remain, however, some cases in which it is highly probable that names of non-Israelites are really compounded with Yahweh. The most conspicuous of these is the king of Hamath who in the inscriptions of Sargon (722-705 B.C.) is called Yaubi’di and Ilubi’di (compare Jehoiakim-Eliakim). Azriyau of Jaudi, also, in inscriptions of Tiglath-Pileser (745-728 B.C.), who was formerly supposed to be Azariah (Uzziah) of Judah, is probably a king of the country in northern Syria known to us from the Zenjirli inscriptions as Ja’di. [¹The form Yahu, or Yaho, occurs not only in composition, but by itself; see Aramaic Papyri discovered at Assuan, B 4, 6, 11; E 14; J 6. This is doubtless the original of Ἰάω, frequently found in Greek authors and in magical texts as the name of the God of the Jews <sic. Israelites>.² See a collection and critical estimate of this evidence by Zimmern, Die Keilinschriften und das Alte Testament, 465 sqq.] …

Now in this final paragraph, the authors exhibit the fact that they are ignorant of Syrian history, where it is clear in the historical books of Scripture that from the time of David, the children of Israel and Judah had been in control of Damascus and the coasts of Syria for at least a great portion of the time from David until the time of Jeroboam II, and on to the Assyrian conquest of Israel. So we should expect to see Israelites with such names among the governors of Hamath and various other places in Syria, which serves to prove that the historical books of Scripture are true.

But in some of their statement in this final paragraph, the authors did correctly indicate that charges which are also made by the detractors of Christian Identity, that Yahweh is really the name of an ancient Canaanite deity, are also wrong. That is a subject for another time.

Now we begin to conclude our presentation:

CONCLUSION NOTES BY WILLIAM FINCK

One thing the commentators fail to see in attempting to find the meaning of YHVH is the connection between the LXX’s ἐγώ εἰμί and the usage of that same phrase by Yahshua Christ in describing Himself, for which see Matt. 14:27 (Mark 6:50; John 6:20); Mark 14:62; John 4:26, (John 6:35, 41, 48), (John 8:12), John 8:18, 8:23-24, 8:28, 8:58, (9:9), 10:7-9, 11, 14, 11:25, 13:19, 14:6, (15:1, 5), 18:5, 6, 8; (Rev. 1:8, 17, 2:23, 22:16). Yahshua used this phrase often, and often it must have vexed the ‘Jews’, who surely must have realized His intention where He used it as a stand-alone phrase, in a manner that directly connects Him with the I AM of the Scriptures (i.e. Isaiah 43, and especially vv. 10-11).

Actually, to be more clear, this was noted in the article, but the authors denied the connection. I will try not to change the original language I used 17 or 18 years ago when I wrote this for Clifton, but at that time I had to condense this so that it would fit into the end of one of his pamphlets, which was often a challenge.

The opinions given concerning the derivation of the word YHVH from the verb hawah, matching the Aramaic, are surely correct. It would be arrogant to think that “Hebrew” as the Israelites used it was the original language of their forebears! Surely both Hebrew and Aramaic had an older, common dialect, to which the word YHVH belonged.

Here I must interject that I believe that Hebrew, as it is known in Scripture, probably developed along with the Hebrew alphabet as a derivative language of what the forefathers of the Israelites may have spoken in Haran, which was in Padan-Aram or Aram-Naharaim, in the far north of Mesopotamia above modern Syria, north of the Euphrates River in what is today a part of modern Turkey, or in Ur of the Chaldees, a city in ancient Sumer. Since the ancestors, cousins and uncles of Isaac and Jacob had been called Syrians, for example of Jacob in Deuteronomy 26:5 and of Laban his father-in-law and his mother’s brother, in Genesis 25:20, it is not such a stretch of the imagination to associate the name Yahweh with the Aramaic verb hawah. In the places in which Abraham had lived, men wrote in cuneiform characters, and not in Hebrew letters.

It is apparent to me that the name, which is rather more of a designation, of YHVH was surely known to the patriarchs before Abraham’s time, and – as your article [referring to the Britannica article] goes on to discuss – so it was found among the writings of other branches of our Genesis 10 race. It was only, and surely with His will, lost to the children of Isaac, and revealed anew to Moses and the Israelites of the Exodus. The word βαίτυλος, which has no evident Greek etymology, very much resembles the Hebrew Beth-el, βαιτ often being written for “Beth” as is evident in various LXX editions.

Rather than “children of Isaac” here, when I wrote these words 17 years ago I would have done better to wrote “Abraham and his fathers”. But otherwise, my thoughts on this today are along the same lines, with some variation. They are a subject for another day. Here it will suffice to say that there is evidence which seems to support the assertion that in more ancient times the name Yahweh, or some form thereof, was known to men. However that does not mean that the name had any specifically pagan origin. It may well have been known to the patriarchs, from Adam through at least Noah and his sons. Neither does that make the words of Moses in Exodus concerning the revelation of the name a lie, as those words would remain literally true.

If one may only “pass over” an attempt to connect Yahweh to the “Indo-European deity” Jove, it is only because one is attempting to uphold the falsehoods of ‘Jewish’ and Israelite Identity as generally understood. Paul of Tarsus knew better, for which see Romans 1:18 ff. Among the languages of Europe, the “v”, “w” and “u” were often interchanged with one another, and in Hebrew, Latin and Greek represented by the same letter. Also the “v” often became a “b” (hence Ιαυε, Ιαβε here). [There was no ‘v’ in Greek, and if the ‘u’ was pronounced as a ‘v’ in Latin, that is argued by scholars.] There was no “j” in these languages, the “j” being a recent innovation. It represents an “i” in the early languages. The Latin “v” being a “u”, Jove in Latin is Iove, the equivalent of the Greek Ιουε. Josephus, at Wars 5:5:7, tells us that the name of YHVH is in Greek spelled with four vowels, and he must have had Ιουε, Ιουη or Ιαυε in mind, any of these being a fair transliteration of Yahweh. Jove is plainly equivalent to Yahweh! It has been discussed (i.e. The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Classical World) that Jupiter is a contraction of the Latin “Jove, pater”, and so equivalent of “Yahweh, Father.”

It seems to me that the early Christian writers may have gone out of their way in avoiding Ιουε, or even Ιαυε, in a conscious attempt to avoid connecting Yahweh with Ιουε (Jove), and probably for fear of the Romans! This is evident in Clement of Alexandria’s Ιαουε, since he must have known of the testimony of Josephus, who distinctly states that the name could be spelled with four vowels (and not five!)

The notion that the name Yahweh was introduced to Christianity by Jews in the 19th or 20th centuries is a lie. The Jews have instead done all they could to suppress the name, and they become enraged when it is used by Christians. That is for one reason only: that jews are themselves of the devil, and they are devils, they want you to be devils like them.