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Re: YHWH

Daniel Hedrick asked about the common divine Names from the 
Hebrew and Greek Bibles in relation to the doctrine of Trinity.
Perhaps this will help:

You have discovered quite a bit about vocuablary
usage of the Greek Bible.  The NT mostly uses the
religious terms of the LXX (Septuagint) and other
early Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible.
By way of summary:
 
The usual divine word equivalents are:
 
HEBREW    GREEK     ENGLISH   FRENCH
Elohim    theos     God       Dieu
Yahweh*   kurios    Lord      Seigneur
Adonai    kurios    Lord      Seigneur
 
*Yah or Yoh are short forms of Yahweh which
occur mostly in combined names.  The existant
Hebrew mss never give the vowel marks for
Yahweh, substituting those of Elohim or Adonai.
 
Adonai and Yahweh are used in the Hebrew Bible
exclusively for the One True God.  Like Elohim,
Adonai is morphologically a plural which takes
a singular verb.  The singular form Adoni is
sometimes used for human a human lord.
 
The Christian Greek writings both adopted both the
vocabulary of the Greek translation of the Hebrew
Bible, and retained the use of kurios in place of
Yahweh.  Thus is somewhat amusing that some Christians
want to popularize the divine Name whilst their
scriptures show greater sensitivity to the Jewish
preference.
 
There is probably no convincing argument for a Trinity
based upon the orthography of the divine names in
either Hebrew or Greek.  That extra-biblical doctrine
is rather a theologian's abstraction which accounts
for the usage of the divine names and attributes as
clearly applied to Jesus of Nazareth in the Christian
Greek Scriptures.
 
Dr. GALEN CURRAH                      currah@iclnet93.iclnet.org
Western Seminary               Division of Intercultural Studies
5511 S.E. Hawthorne, Portland OR 97215 USA     Tel. 503-233-8561
Fax 503-234-1639 or 503-239-4216             Amateur radio N7SBB
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