Wikipedia:Peer review/Names of God in Judaism/archive1

Names of God in Judaism

I have worked on this article for a while now, and I kindly request assistance in getting this article into a good shape so that it could be considered for a featured article status. User:Gary_D accepted to copyedit the article and gave me some good pointers. Any other help will be most welcome. --Zappaz 02:57, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The article speaks of the ineffablity of "Yahweh," but it fails to account for that of Elohim nor mention Elokim. From the Centralized Dictionary for the Hebrew Language (p. 266):

Yehova, Yhova,

The original writing for the name of the God of Israel in the Mikra, pronounced "Adonai" or "Hashem" or "Adoshem" if its vowelization/punctuation is "Yhova," or "Elohim," "Elokim" if its vowelization/punctuation is "Yehova," since it is forbidden to utter the name in its letters.

Speaking of "Yehvoa / Yhova" viz. "Yahweh" as an important example, the article fails to correctly depict some Hebrew words –in their most common use form– phonetically. What the article calls "Yahweh," then (and yes, I have read the qualifications in the Tetrag. article), is incorrect in this sense: the word is pronounced "Yehova" or "Yhova" (Ye-ho-va: Ye as in ¥ yen, ho as in holy, and va as in value) not Ya-h-veh. Maybe philologically, but there is no "heh" (that is, the sound, phonetically, not the letter "hey") in modern use.

Some other examples of failing to convey words phonetically in favour of a more formal translation (an approach I urge the respective editors to reconsider), has to do with the choice of letters: a "w" instead of a "v" for "Yehova," a "b" for "Abraham / Abram" versus "Avraham / Avram," etc., so again, I am in favour of making clear phonetic qualifications for these. Perhaps it was pronounced "Yahweh" but it generally isn't in modern Hebrew, and I think that this should be noted clearly in the article.

Also, the meaning of Yehova as "He Causes to Become" (or, I would say, "He brings to being") that is mentioned in the Tetrag. article, is one which this article fails to mention, thus failing to bring to its logical conclusion its respective introduction: "the third person singular imperfect of the verb 'to be,'" an introduction which I do find superior to the one in the Tetrag. article.

Lastly, I think it's superfleous to have a References and Bibliography section, I would suggest that the two sources cited in Ref. be moved to the Bib. one which then could be named Ref., or left as Bib. (dosen't matter), either way, I think there should only be one. Hope this helps. Best of luck with the article. El_C

Thank you for the comments. Feel free to come around and do some edits as per the above. Just please keep the Ref and Biblio separated as it is customary (Refs are that: referred in the article, Biblio is generic stuff that is supportive of the text.) --Zappaz 06:01, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Hmmm... the generic stuff should be in further reading then, I think. - Ta bu shi da yu 04:47, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Hi, sorry for the delay. Feel free to employ any of the suggestions I listed above in the article, and to solicit my opinion on these (or anything). I, myself, only use Ref. as encompassing both the generic material and sources used in the article itself – the odd times I may resort to footnote, but I do not do so often because the code for it is somewhat buggy at this point; in fact, I think I only used footnoting once (in The Destruction of the European Jews). At any rate, what is customary varies, unless I'm missing some MoS policy to that effect, and my comment on that front was only a suggestion. Instead of the above, I tend to highlight sources used directly by denoting these at around the top of the Ref. list. It isn't, though, a point I would press on when there is opinion to the contrary, at least not in articles I made no contributions to. More on your talk page. El_C

I've done a bit of tidying up of the article. It needs some thorough copyed and linking if anyone's up to it. Gareth Hughes 23:56, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)