THEM: Why do you say “Ya’ohdah” and not Yahawadah, Yahudah, or Yehudah, or Judah? Where do you get “Ya’ohdah” from?
ME: Because Ya’ohdah is how our ancient ancestors pronounced it and this is proved by the fact that Ya’ohdah is how other nations wrote the word after they heard us say it. The ancient Akkadian scribes in the 8th century BC were not looking into the distant future and trying to help a Ravenous Bird.
People want to say that I make this stuff up. The truth is that the majority of the people who don’t want to agree with me simply don’t have access to sources. And because they don’t have access to sources they think they don’t exist. But they do exist. It’s not my fault that your teacher or your camp is out there spreading mis-information and looking stupid because they cannot read or speak Hebrew and because they do not have access to scholarly sources.
The name “Judah” fuses the deity name YA’OH with the passive of the causative form of the verb YDH (“to praise”). In other words, the name is:
Y (deity name reduced to its initial letter) + HWDH (passive verb) = “YA’OH is praised.”
The name is correctly pronounced Ya-oh-dah and every other pronunciation you’ve heard is wrong.