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LECTURE III.
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might well be understood as a secondary development of Y(a)hw(e)h. 'In the eighth century, as the same scholar adds", the name of Jahveh was regarded by many, rightly or wrongly, as a derivative of the verb to be. It was explained as he is, and in it was seen the expression of the unchangeableness and faithfulness of the God to whose essence the name corresponded.' Professor Kuenen holds, in fact, that Moses was the first to call the god of the sons of Israel Jahveh”, instead of his old name El-Shaddai, and I only wonder that he did not mention that the name of Jahveh occurs for the first time in the name of the mother of Moses, Jochebed, she whose glory is Jehovah.' He leaves it open to explain Jahveh, either as He who is, or as He who alone is, while the other gods are not; but he inclines himself to take the root in a causal sense, and to take the name of Jahveh as meaning he who gives life, who causes everything to exist, the creator. This would make Jahveh almost a reproduction of the old Vedic Asura, the life-giver, from as, to breathe, to be, asu, breath, asura, the living and enlivening god, the Ahura of the Avesta, showing again how the same thoughts and the same names may crop up on Aryan and Semitic ground without necessitating in the least the admission of an actual contact during pre-historic periods of Aryans and Semites in Iran.
But whether for the present we include or exclude the name of Jehovah from the stock of divine names
1 Kuenen, Hibbert Lectures,' p. 311; Kuenen, 'Religion of Israel,' vol. i. p. 42.
2 Kuenen, 'Religion of Israel,' vol. i. p. 278. 3 Ibid. p. 254.
