To Be or Not to Be, That Is the Question: Yhwh and Ea

Abstract

Over one hundred years have past since Paul Haupt first proposed that the divine name Yhwh is an imperfect hiphil verbal form from the root *√hwy ("to be") that means "he causes to be > he creates." In this article, I propose that the Semitic concept of a *√hwy deity, a deity's whose name is formed from this root, began in the East when Enki, the Sumerian god of subterranean waters, acquired the Semitic name Ea. To this day Ea, written e2-a, is conjectured to derive from the Proto-Semitic root *√ḥyy ("to live"), a hypothesis founded on an old reading of the cuneiform sign e2 and its associative vocalic values that were, at the time, based on later Akkadian dialects. It is now known, however, that, prior to the Ur III period, e2 was read ͗a3 and reflects /ha/. With this refinement in hand it is now possible to show that Ea's name was pronounced either /haya/ and/or /haway/, a third person masculine singular stative or predicative construction of √hyy/hwy. It means "he is/exists." It is feasible, therefore, that the earliest articulation of the West's *√hwy deity was /yahway/, an imperfect yaqtal G-stem. Although this means that /yahwĕ(h)/ qua hiphil is a later development, the subsequent shift to a causative marks a fundamental theological change in the evolution of the Semitic perception of a *√hwy deity's true nature.