adonai

The lexica are unanimous that this is a single lexeme functioning as the divine title "(my) Lord," formed on the common noun 'adon and reserved for God, in contrast to the roughly 215 secular uses of 'adon for human superiors and its roughly 30 uses of God in the plain singular. Eissfeldt's TDOT article is the standard treatment and is explicit that the long qamets before the final yod is unexplained: he catalogues a weakened first-person suffix on a majestic plural (the line taken by GKC sections 87g and 135q, following Dalman's 1889 monograph), an archaic emphatic afformative that he himself reconstructed from four Ugaritic cases of an unexplained -y, and an artificial lengthening introduced to mark divine reference; some grammarians fold the third into a permanent pausal-type vocalization. Waltke-O'Connor section 7.4.3 and Joüon and Muraoka sections 136d-e classify the type as a plural of majesty or excellence construed with singular agreement, while a minority rejects that category as an imposition. Distribution is uneven and theologically weighted: Eissfeldt counts 449 divine occurrences (a widely repeated popular figure is 434), of which 315 stand in fixed combination with the Tetragrammaton (310 preceding, 5 following) and 134 alone; the compound is overwhelmingly Ezekielian, with 217 occurrences there against 103 in the rest of the canon, clustered in the messenger and divine-saying formulas. Because Greek Ezekiel often renders the double designation with a single kyrios, Zimmerli's Hermeneia commentary treats many of the 'adonay elements as secondary, whereas Hamilton's dissertation argues the title is integral to Ezekiel's theology of sovereign kingship. Two Masoretic phenomena must be kept apart: the qere perpetuum, by which the Tetragrammaton is pointed with this word's vowels (6,518 times per BDB, against 305 pointed for 'elohim), and Ginsburg's separate list of 134 places (Massorah section 115) where the consonantal text reads 'adonay but the Masorah reports an earlier Tetragrammaton; neither is the tiqqune sopherim, on which Tov and McCarthy judge only a few of the eighteen to be genuine. The Qumran evidence shows plural avoidance strategies rather than one practice, with written 'adonai comparatively rare (73 instances against 323 for the Tetragrammaton), and the question of whether kyrios stood in the original Septuagint (Pietersma, Wevers, Roesel) or replaced a Hebrew, paleo-Hebrew, or IAO writing of the Name (Kahle, Howard, Skehan, Shaw) remains a live controversy turning on Papyrus Fouad 266, 8HevXII gr, 4Q120, and P. Oxy. 3522. None of this touches the semantics: what the word denotes is not in doubt.