Iao

[Kendall K. Down]

There is much debate concerning the name of God, represented in Hebrew
by the Tetragrammaton YHWH. The alleged rationale for the name, "I am
that I am" would point to a variant of the Hebrew verb to be, yh or hyh.
However the evidence from Elephantine and other sources would point to a
pronunciation like "Yaho" or "Yahu". Certainly the name fragment "yah"
occurs all over the place - names such as "Jeremi-yah" (Jeremiah) are
familir to us all.

In Diodorus' first book, chapter 94, he describes the origin of law in
Egypt (which was widely regarded as the respository of great wisdom).

==========
We must speak also of the lawgivers who have arisen in Egypt and who
instituted customs unusual and strange. After the establishment of
settled life in Egypt in early times, which took place, according to the
mythical account, in the period of the gods and heroes, the first, they
say, to persuade the multitudes to use written laws was Mneves, a man
not only great of soul but also in his life the most public-spirited of
all lawgivers whose names are recorded. According to the tradition he
claimed that Hermes had given the laws to him, with the assurance that
they would be the cause of great blessings, just as among the Greeks,
they say, Minos did in Crete and Lycurgus among the Lacedaemonians, the
former saying that he received his laws from Zeus and the latter his
from Apollo. Also among several other peoples tradition says that this
kind of a device was used and was the cause of much good to such as
believed it. Thus it is recorded that among the Arians Zathraustes
claimed that the Good Spirit gave him his laws, among the people known
as the Getae who represent themselves to be immortal Zalmoxis asserted
the same of their common goddess Hestia, and among the Jews Moyses
referred his laws to the god who is invoked as Iao. They all did this
either because they believed that a conception which would help humanity
was marvellous and wholly divine, or because they held that the common
crowd would be more likely to obey the laws if their gaze were directed
towards the majesty and power of those to whom their laws were ascribed.
=========

Of course his mangling of the name Zarathustra (which itself is probably
a mangling of the Persian original) may not give us great confidence in
his pronunciation of the God of Israel. At the same time, the evidence
cited in my first paragraph does not support the traditional "Yahweh"
(and, of course, the even more traditional "Jehovah" is right out of the
question.)

God bless,
Kendall K. Down