The tribes of this region probably belonged to some branch of the great
Arab stock, and the name Yahweh has, accordingly, been connected with
the Arabic _hawa_, "the void" (between heaven and earth), "the
atmosphere," or with the verb _hawa_, cognate with Heb. _hawah_, "sink,
glide down" (through space); _hawwa_ "blow" (wind). "He rides through
the air, He blows" (Wellhausen), would be a fit name for a god of wind
and storm. There is, however, no certain evidence that the Israelites in
historical times had any consciousness of the primitive significance of
the name.
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,[23] 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 [Greek: Iaô], 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.[24] 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. 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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