Page 106 - Demo

102I have purposely written the original Hebrew words YaHWaH and Adon, in order to avoid any ambiguity and misunderstanding in the sense conveyed by them. Such sacred names written in religious Scripture should be left as they are, unless you can find a thoroughly equivalent word for them in the language into which you wish to translatethem.ThetetragramYhwhusedtobepronounced Yehovah (Jehovah), but now it is generally pronounced Yahwah. It is a proper name of God the Almighty, and it is held so holy by the Jews that when reading their Scriptures they never pronounce it, but read it “Adonī” instead.The other name, “Elohim,” is always pronounced, but Yahwah never. Why the Jews make this distinction between these two names ofthe same God is a question for itself, altogether outside the scope of our present subject. It may, however, in passing, be mentioned that Yahwah, unlike Elohim, is never used with pronominal suffixes, and seemsto be a special name in Hebrew for the Deity as the national God of the people of Israel. In fact, “Elohim” is the oldest name known to all Semites; and in order to give a special character to the conception of the true God, this tetragram is often conjointly with Elohim applied to Him. The Arabic form, Rabb Allah, corresponds to the Hebrew form, Yahwah Elohim.The other word, “Ādōn,” signifies a “Commander, Lord, and master,” or the same as the Arabic and Turkish nouns Amīr, sayyid, and Āghā. Ādōn stands as the opposite term of “soldier, slave, and property.” Consequently the first part of the distich is to be rendered as “God said to my Lord.”David (pbuh) , in his capacity of a monarch, was himself the Lord and Commander of every Israelite and the Master of the Kingdom. Whose “servant” was he, then? David (pbuh) , being a powerful sovereign, could not be, as a matter of fact, a slave or servant of any living human being whatsoever. Nor is it imaginable