George Foot Moore

“ 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 hawā, “the void” (between heaven and earth) , “the atmosphere,” or with the verb hawā, cognate with Heb. hāwāh, “sink, glide down” (through space) ; hawwā “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. ”

“ Scholars are now agreed that, so far as Yahu or Yah occurs in Babylonian texts, it is as the name of a foreign god.
Assuming that Yahweh was primitively a nature god, scholars in the 19th century discussed the question over what sphere of nature he originally presided. According to some he was the god of consuming fire; others saw in him the bright sky, or the heaven; still others recognized in him a storm god, a theory with which the derivation of the name from Heb. hāwāh or Arab. hawā well accords. The association of Yahweh with storm and fire is frequent in the Old Testament ”

“ This hypothesis is not intrinsically improbable—and in Aramaic, a language closely related to Hebrew, “to be” actually is hāwā—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. ”

“ 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 derivation of Yahweh from hāwāh 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 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. ”

“ Mic. vii. 3; Prov. x. 3. ↑ See Hebrew Religion. ↑ The 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 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. ”

“ Baudissin, “Der Ursprung des Gottesnamens Ἰάω,” in Studien zur semitischen Religionsgeschichte, I. (1876) , 179–254; Driver, “Recent Theories on the Origin and Nature of the Tetragrammaton,” in Studia Biblica, I. (1885) , 1–20 ”