Marya (Lord-God)

[gbausc]

Shlama Akhay,

The Massoretic practice of replacing 134 YHWH readings with Adonai apparently started before AD 100.

Here is part of my appendix to my 1st Century Aramaic-English Interlinear Bible-The Psalms

Information from the Massorahs indicating 134 places where the Sopherim (Hebrew Scribes) altered the Divine Name ???YHWH???
to ???Adonai??? -(???My Lord???); 49 are in the Psalms, which references I have highlighted in grey where The Peshitta has ayrm ???
???Marya??? (???Lord JAH???, the Aramaic version of ???YHWH???) in 36 of the 49 places. Apparently most of the alterations of the
Hebrew Bible were made after the Peshitta Psalms were written. Thirteen of them existed at the time. Compare those statistics with
the Hebrew Dead Sea Scrolls of the Psalms, in which 2 of the 7 places observable of the 49 Sopherim alterations have the original
???YHWH???. Assuming that the alterations were made over an extended time period, it looks like the Peshitta was written before the
Dead Dea Scrolls, before most (73%) of the changes were made to the text, and that the Dead Sea Scrolls were copied after most
of those changes had been made (71%).
The latest DSS Psalm scrolls are dated AD 68, and I suspect most of the Massoretic
alterations were made in the first century in response to the Christian faith in Yeshua The Messiah as YHWH incarnate. Yeshua
Himself had appealed to Psalm 110 as proof that The Messiah is YHWH (See 110:1,5) and inflicted a mortal blow to their false
doctrine by invoking scripture. Their response? Rewrite the Bible by substituting ???Adonai??? for YHWH in Psalm 110:5, so as to
obviate the Triniarian doctrine of YHWH Messiah seated at the right hand of YHWH. They also changed Genesis 18:3, in which
Abraham addresses three men as ???YHWH???.Can one wonder why they would change ???YHWH??? to the rather generic
title,???Adonai????
It was certainly an act of desperation when Massoretic guardians of the holy writings of YHWH actually deliberately changed the
Holy Name in 134 places. Of course, if Jerusalem had been destroyed when Psalm 74 was translated as the Peshitta, most of the
Psalms would not have been written before AD 68, so the dates are indefinite. Christians would likely have been aware of
Massoretic corruptions and would have avoided their manuscripts when translating the Peshitta. Hence the seeming earlier nature
of the manuscripts which they used, as compared to Dead Sea Scrolls, which would not necessarily escape or avoid the Massoretic
machinations.
What we can say with confidence is that the Peshitta was produced before the Massoretic Hebrew Bible that we have today was
standardized.The Peshitta OT overwhelmingly supports the pre Massoretic readings of the Divine Name specified above.

The examples Jeremy gives of "Marya" translating "Adonai" really amount to 5 examples. All the others have either YAH or YHWH in the Hebrew text,
whether 1st or 2nd of two Hebrew words assigned to the Deity, so it is not really fair to assign another Hebrew word to "Marya" in those places.
5 examples out of 6800 occurrences of YHWH in the Hebrew Bible is 0.07%, and we have little possibility of knowing that the Hebrew reading being translated
in those cases was not YHWH, in those mss. 2000 years ago.
99.93% of the Hebrew readings behind "Marya" in the Peshitta O.T. are "YHWH". That does not really support a diversity of translations of "YHWH" into Aramaic.

Blessings,

Dave Bauscher