On Yahweh Sura U'Shera

Stephan wrote:

What's the literal meaning of Yahweh Sura U'Shera? (Irenaeus AH) I assume it has something to do with "leaven leavened" or the "body" or "flesh raised" until I hear from you.

Boid responds:

I’ve been looking at the cryptic words by Irenaeus SURA ASSER, together with the cryptic mention of the name Jesus just before. Before committing myself, I will have to look at a critical edition to see if the mss. are unanimous. Provisionally, here is my solution for the corruption in transmission. The solution to the meaning will have to wait. The editorial note connecting the three letters ישו with the initials of יהוה שמים וארץ can be kept. Then let us suppose that the Hebrew words were written with the Romanisation underneath, for the benefit of someone not knowing Hebrew. Let us suppose the Romanisation was on two lines, one line having the graphemic transcription (i.e. according to the letters) and the next line the phonetic transcription (i.e. according to the sound. Let’s suppose that the source was an edition of the whole Torah in Hebrew letters and Greek letters and Greek phonetic transcription. Such editions are mentioned in the Talmud. Bear in mind what was said earlier on, that meaningless sets of letters tend to get re-arranged so as to yield something pronounceable, and also to yield something that looks like a familiar combination of letters.

Step one. SURA is a re-arrangement of SRAU, itself a corruption of SSRAU. The letters follow the order of a graphemic transcription written right to left directly underneath a Hebrew word, each letter right under its equivalent.

Step two. USSER is a corruption of UARESS (The combination SS at the end of a word does not occur in Latin or Greek, but is common within a word).

Step three. Here is a sample of the original book. In the transcription system of the original book, S = Samech and probably Sin, and SS = Tsade. I assume there must have been some diacritical mark on the S representing Shin. The combination of words is from Genesis II: 4. I have used the Byzantine form C for a capital Sigma.

יהוה שמים וארץ
CCPAY MIMC EYEI_
YAPECC CAMEM [blank]
και γην ουρανον Κυριος

Now my reconstruction of the original statement. ”Moreover, IEUE (or IEU) [the Tetragrammaton], which is a word belonging to the proper tongue of the Hebrews [Hebrew, not Aramaic, but perhaps also meaning untranslatable], contains, as the learned among them declare, two [ordinary] letters [He and Vav] and a half [half-sized letter, Yod], and signifies that Lord [Greek Kyrios, the usual pronounceable equivalent for the Tetragrammaton] who contains both Heaven and Earth [Or who is manifested both in Heaven and on Earth. Remember what I’ve told you about the repetition יהוה יהוה The author of the inserted gloss has probably not understood this implicit argument, though I think Irenaeus understood it]. {{Now an inserted gloss by an ignorant copyist using a text of the Torah in Hebrew and Greek with phonetic equivalents}}. {{Omission of a sequence of letters by later copyists, i.e. later than the author of this gloss. Something like MIMS SAMEM has been left out}} in the ancient Hebrew language [Hebrew not Aramaic] means “Heaven”, while again “Earth” is expressed by SRAU UARESS. [Showing that he does not understand that there SEEM to be two words in the Hebrew because one is the graphemic transcription and one the phonetic transcription. He reads the graphemic transcriptions backwards. With this degree of ignorance, he MUST have had a fourth line in Greek before him to find the words he was after. This is probably not Irenaeus, but a pig-ignorant earlier author. Irenaeus was able to work out the dialect differences between his native language, Galatian [Galatia in SW Turkey], and Gaulish [most of France], both Celtic. He wrote in Greek. He must have had some linguistic ability]. The word, however, which contains both Heaven and Earth is just [one single word] IEU [or IEUE]”. [Because the third line was blank because no phonetic equivalent could be given for the Tetragrammaton]. {{End of incompetent guess at connecting the double significance of the Tetragrammaton with the name Jesus}}.

What follows brings these three words into connection with the name Jesus by pointing out that the three initial letters Yod-Shin-Vav spell Yeshu, showing how the name Yeshu hints at the double significance of the Tetragrammaton. Note the word “hint”. I don’t think Irenaeus thought it to be proof. To Irenaeus, that probably meant the name Yeshu hinted at the doctrine of the Incarnation, though I think he has misunderstood that doctrine in the same way as most theologians these days.

Now I have to think about the word Episêmon. That can be left till tomorrow.

Note that Sextus means sixth, not six. Six is sex (Specially in New Zealand. Ask me if this doesn’t seem to make sense).

This is a summary of my reading of the passage in Irenaeus.

Irenaeus: Moreover, IEU (IEUE), a uniquely Hebrew word, having two full letters (He [twice] and Vav) and one half-letter (Yod), and pronounceable as Kyrios (Lord), unites Heaven and Earth.

Misguided glossator: [Missing two words] in Hebrew means Heaven, and srau uaress means Earth, whereas the name for what unites Heaven and Earth, Ieu or the Tetragrammaton, is a single word.

The hint used (not a proof, but what the Talmud calls a remez) is easily memorable, because the verse Genesis II: 4 and its context are appropriate.

There is no point in trying to re-interpret the two transcribed Hebrew words, because what is said about them is not part of Irenaeus’s work, but merely a bad guess by a glossator on what Irenaeus said. The two words must be (a) a graphemic transcription of וארץ according to the standard system of the time, written from right to left because originally written letter by letter under the Hebrew OR IN PLACE OF HEBREW LETTERS; (b) a phonetic transcription of the same word, copied from a column in which it was written from left to right. The first word must be SSRAU and the second must be UARESS. I now see that I assumed too much when saying all this the first time round. I was thinking of a KNOWN DOCUMENT, the second column of Origen’s Hexapla. This is commonly cited in early Christian commentaries as ho Hebraios ο Εβραιος. It is always spoken of as if it were a single column, but it must in fact have been divided into two parts. Otherwise the first column must have been the Hebrew text in Greek letters, not Hebrew letters, according to a rigid graphemic transcription. Either way, there was both a graphemic and a phonetic transcription. (There must originally have been some diacritical mark distinguishing sigma representing samech from sigma representing shin. We see from this fragment that sigma representing tsade was written double). When ho Hebraios is quoted, it can be according to either system or BOTH. Thus the first word of Genesis is recorded with the graphemic (letter by letter) transcription ΒΡΑΣΙΘ and the phonetic (sound by sound) transcription ΒΑΡΗΣΕΙΘ. (Remember what was said earlier about transcription of the sound of the sheva by A; and note also that in Greek of this period EI represents a long I sound, and not the diphthong [ei] which it represented in earlier Greek). We are not told whether the columns of the Hexapla were vertical or horizontal. The surviving fragments all have vertical columns. I used an arrangement of horizontal columns for clarity of exposition.

A FEW DAYS LATER BOID WRITES AGAIN:

After a lot of thought, I have decided that the double SS in the corrupted form of the transcription is not original, but a concession to normal Latin spelling. [Remember this text is mostly preserved in Latin and Armenian translation]. My main reason for the decision is that in the numerous extant fragments of ho Hebraios there is no trace at all of any use of a doubled SS to show a distinction between tsade and samech. I therefore conclude that the distinction between tsade, shin, and samech was done by diacritical marks. My secondary reason is that the extant transcriptions distinguish between single and double consonants, so there could not have been any special use of a doubled SS, since it would have caused confusion. My final reconstruction is therefore SRAU UARES from a Greek transcription CPAOY OYAPEC


Irenaeus: This means their explanation of the Episêmon must be false etc.