Heh in Yah and Eloah

In Chapter 5 we set two words side by side: the personal name Yeshua, with no heh at the end, and the word yeshuah יְשׁוּעָה yesh-oo'-aw, “salvation,” which ends with the letter heh ה. In Chapter 9 we said where this study parts from the standard lexicons. They classify yeshuah as a feminine noun and its final heh as a feminine ending. This study reads that heh as a mark of honor that points to God.

A claim like that cannot rest on a feeling. It stands against every standard lexicon, and so it has to be checked against the Hebrew text itself. This study did that by going through all 23,213 verses of the Hebrew Bible in the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible (OSHB, version 2.2), which tags every word with its grammar. In this chapter we lay the groundwork: what a heh at the end of a word can be, and where the same letter stands in the name of God.

Not One Thing, but Six

The first point is not a matter of dispute. Every Hebrew grammar agrees that a heh at the end of a word is not always the same thing. It can do at least six different jobs.

Of these six, only two have to do with the feminine. Three have nothing to do with gender at all, and one points to a man.

The heh of direction shows this plainly. When Scripture says that someone went down “to Egypt,” Hebrew often writes Mitzraymah, the name of Egypt with a heh added.

Genesis 12:10 And there was a famine in the land; and Abram went down to Egypt to sojourn there, for the famine was heavy in the land.

“Abram went down to Egypt.” The heh on Mitzraymah does not make Egypt feminine. It means “toward.” It marks direction, and it has nothing to do with gender. OSHB gives this heh its own tag, and it records it 1,079 times in the Hebrew text.

The “his” ending is just as clear. In Genesis 9:21, Noah “uncovered himself within his tent,” and the word for “his tent” is written oholoh, ending in a heh that means “his” (the Masoretes read it with the more common ending, oholo). Here the final heh points to a man.

The added heh, the last in the table, will matter later in this book. Grammars name it but do not agree on what it does, and we will come back to it.

When the Ending Does Mark the Feminine

The opposite must also be checked. Does the ending -ah truly decide whether a word is feminine, or does a word become feminine because of what it means? The word Torah makes a good test.

Torah ends in -ah, and OSHB tags all 219 of its occurrences as a feminine noun. The words around it agree. Isaiah says, “For out of Zion shall go forth Torah” (Isaiah 2:3), and the Hebrew verb for “shall go forth,” tetze, is a feminine form. The psalm says, “The Torah of the LORD is perfect” (YLV Psalm 19:8, Masoretic verse order), and the Hebrew word for “perfect,” temimah, is feminine too. Nowhere is Torah treated as masculine. In Torah, the ending, the words that agree with it, and the way it is spoken of all point the same way.

Is Torah feminine, then, because words for writings are feminine? No. The word sepher, “book” or “scroll,” has no -ah ending, and it is a masculine noun. Two words for “statute” share one root: choq חֹק khoke, without the ending, is masculine in all 126 of its occurrences, while chuqqah חֻקָּה khook-kaw', with the ending, is its feminine form and occurs 105 times. In the phrase “the book of the Torah,” sepher ha-Torah, “book” is masculine and “Torah” is feminine, side by side in one phrase.

So grammatical gender in Hebrew follows the form of the word, not the kind of thing it names. The ending is a true mark of grammatical gender, but it tells us nothing about whether the thing named is male or female. A scroll has no gender. The ending alone cannot settle what a final heh is doing. That has to be decided together with how the word is used in the text. Torah, where everything agrees, is the normal case, and only against a normal case like Torah can we see how unusual the word yeshuah is.

Yah: God’s Name Ends in Heh

Now comes the fact that turns the question around. The very letter that the lexicons call a feminine ending is also one of the letters of the name of God. That is not an interpretation. It is how the text is written.

The shortest form of the divine name is Yah (יָהּ), Strong’s H3050. It appears 50 times in the Old Testament. It is made of two letters, yod and heh: the divine name drawn together into two consonants. Its final heh carries a mappiq, a dot inside the letter which shows that the heh is not silent but is truly sounded.

Psalm 150:6 Let everything that has breath (neshamah נְשָׁמָה nesh-aw-maw') praise Yah. Praise Yah.

“Praise Yah.” In Hebrew this is hallelu-Yah, the word Christians sing as “Hallelujah,” and its last letter is this sounded heh. No lexicon calls Yah feminine, and OSHB tags all 50 occurrences as a proper name.

Eloah: A Masculine Name Ending in Heh

The second divine name settles the matter. Eloah (אֱלוֹהַּ) means “God,” and it too ends with a sounded heh. It appears 59 times in the Old Testament.

Deuteronomy 32:15 And Jeshurun grew fat and kicked — you grew fat, you grew thick, you became gross — and he abandoned God who made him, and he treated as foolish the Rock of his salvation (yeshuah).

“God who made him” is Eloah. What decides the argument is how this word is classified. Even though its last letter is a heh, OSHB classifies Eloah as a masculine noun, and among its 59 occurrences not one is classified as feminine.

A masculine name of God ending in a sounded heh, then, stands in the text 56 times; the other three of its 59 occurrences are plural forms, which end differently. The mere fact that a word ends in heh is no ground for calling it feminine. Eloah is the counter-example, and it sits inside the standard lexicons’ own classification.

Where This Leaves Us

Here is the ground we have covered. A final heh can do at least six different things. The ending marks grammatical gender by form, not by the nature of the thing. And the letter heh ends the name Yah, and it ends Eloah, a name of God that is masculine every time it appears. None of this proves by itself what the heh of yeshuah means. It only shows that the label “feminine ending” does not close the question.

The question is opened by what comes next. In three verses of the Old Testament, the name Yah and the word yeshuah stand in the same sentence, each ending with the same letter, and the sentence says that the one has become the other.