The relationship between אדני and
יהוה in 1QIsaᵃ deserves special attention because of the context in which the
scroll was produced. The scribe who copied 1QIsaᵃ was also the copyist of the yahad
composition Rule of the Community (1QS). The material evidence of
scribal editing, therefore, needs careful consideration. Most scholars agree
that the Tetragrammaton was read as אדני, but written by the 1QS scribe as יהוה,
except where he confused the two designations when they occurred near each
other. This situation is well illustrated by the example of 1QIsaᵃ 3.24–26 (Isa
3:17–18). In line 24, the scribe cancels אדני and inserts יהוה, but in line 25
the scribe cancels יהוה and inserts אדני; this seems to be a contradiction. For
the sectarian scribe copying 1QIsaᵃ, writing the Tetragrammaton itself is not a
problem. Skehan provided one possible explanation for this situation, although
his theory depends almost entirely on a hypothetical scenario in which the
reader of the scroll warned the copyist everytime he was about to encounter the
Tetragrammaton in the biblical source text. Skehan describes the process as
follows:
. . . both he and his reader
pronounce Adonay for both יהוה and אדני. When he hears Adonay, unless somehow
warned, he automatically writes יהוה...[the copyist] has no problem with the
name Yhwh as such, which he writes in his ordinary script. He always has a
problem with the name אדני, and when that name occurs in close conjunction with
Yhwh, a secondary problem arises for the tetragrammaton. (Skehan, “The Divine
Name,” 41 n. 14)
In particular, regarding the
seemingly contradictory corrections in 1QIsaᵃ 3.24–26, Skehan writes:
There are false corrections;
unfortunately for readers’ impressions, the first, in 3:17, is the most
botched. Warned that אדני occurred in the verse ... the scribe wrote it
correctly, then within the same verse and the same line of script, where יהוה
should occur, he wrote אדני [see image above: second from the last word in the
first line]. Learning (from the 2 אדני in one verse) that he had made an error,
he “corrected” the first אדני by writing יהוה above it and placing 5 dots below
it. He thus left both names wrong. (Skehan, “The Divine Name,” 41 n. 14)
The best way to account for the
mistakes or corrections that entered this manuscript is to assume that אדני was
read for the Tetragrammaton. And to this extent, we can agree that the divine
name was avoided in speech. We should take caution, however, with the degree to
which this scenario becomes a model to understand divine name variants more
broadly. It is no surprise that the divine name was avoided in the production
of this text, at the hands of the same scribe of 1QS. But how do we make sense
of the textual evidence itself, the contradiction of writing and cancelling the
divine name? (Anthony R. Meyer, Naming God in Early Judaism: Aramaic,
Hebrew, and Greek [Studies in Cultural Contexts of the Bible 2; Leiden:
Brill, 2022], 139-40)
