Jehovah?

 

The pronunciation (sounds) of names normally should not change from language to language when translating.  For instance, one can listen to foreign broadcasts and readily recognize the names of world leaders and cities, regardless of the language being spoken.  When translating, names are normally not translated but “transliterated” which means giving the same sound by employing equivalent letters of a given alphabet.  Almost all names in the Old Testament scriptures have been carefully transliterated, bringing over into English similar sounds as found in the Hebrew texts.  Interestingly, there are two notable exceptions where names were not transliterat­ed but completely changed: the personal name of the living God and the name of the Messiah. 

Anyone can readily discover with a little effort and research that the actual sacred name of the Heavenly Father was deliberately removed from the text of the Bible.  Original­ly, this was done due to the misguided desire by scribes to preserve the Sacred Name from desecration.  In the oldest texts of the Bible, the ancient Hebrew script, the Sacred Name is represented by the four Hebrew consonants.  These four letters are collectively referred to as the Tetragram­maton, appearing in English as YHWH.  The ancient Hebrew alphabet had no vowels.  To indicate vowels, scribes or copyists added "diacritical" marks or points above or below the letters.  Jewish law experts decided to hide the Sacred Name of God to make certain it would not be taken in vain or blasphemed.  Therefore, when the four letters of the Tetragrammaton appeared in the text, scribes "pointed" it with substitution vowels for the Hebrew word "Adonai" (meaning Lord which of course is not a name at all but rather a title).   As a result, the scribes through a misappli­cation of the third command­ment, beginning about the year 300 B.C.E. insisted that the term Adonai, meaning "My Great Lord or Sovereign" in Hebrew, be read because they considered it less holy than the Sacred Name.  By adding these vowel points to the Tetragramma­ton, the Sacred Name YAHWEH should not be pronounced and so the reader would know to say Adonai rather than YAHWEH, thus making sure that they avoided any possibility of breaking the third command­ment as they interpreted it.  To further protect the misuse of the Scared Name, the scribes made the first vowel "a" corre­spond to our short letter "e" as in "met," lest anyone reading the Hebrew would inadvertent­ly blurt out the first part of the Sacred Name "YAH."  This later led to the "e" in Yehovah.

The English word "Jehovah" resulted when Peter Galatin in 1520 published this form for the first time.  Evidently, he did not under­stand what the scribes had done in applying vowel points to the Tetragrammaton so that the reader would pronounce "Adonai" instead of YAHWEH as explained in the Talmud (Sanhedrim 10:1) which states that the Name of the Al­mighty would normally be pronounced YAH (poetic short form of the Name), but when the reader saw the vowel marks, they knew to pronounce the word Adonai. 

 

Doctor J.B. Rotherham in his introduction to the Emphasized Bible had this to say about the form Jehovah: 

"The pronunciation Jehovah was unknown until 1520, when it was introduced by Galati­n; but was contested by Le Mercier, J. Drusius, and L. Capell­us, as against grammatical and historical propriety.  Erron­eously written and pronounced Jehovah, which is merely a combination of the sacred Tetragra­mmaton and the vowels in the Hebrew word Adonai, substituted by the Jews for JHVH, because they shrank from pronounc­ing The Name, owing to an old misconception of the two passages in Ex. 20:7 and Lev. 24:16.  To give the Name JHVH the vowels of the word for Adonai and pronounce it Jehovah, is about as hybrid a combination as it would be to spell the name Germany with the vowels in the name Portugal (Gormuna).  The monstrous combination Jehovah is not older than about 1520 A.D.  The Jewish scribes are not responsible for the hybrid combina­tion.  They intentionally wrote alien vowels, not for combination with the sacred consonants, but for the purpose of cautioning the Jewish reader to enunciate a totally different word."

 

For almost two centuries the name YAHWEH has grown in acceptance, now being commonly used in theology.  The Encyclope­dia Judaica, Vol. 7, page 680 states:

 

"The personal name of the God of Israel is written in the Hebrew Bible with the four consonants YHWH and is referred to as the "Tetragrammaton." At least until the destruc­tion of the First Temple in 586 B.C.E. this name was regular­ly pronounced with its proper vowels, as is clear from the Lachish Let­ters, written shortly before that date.  But at least by the third century BCE the pronun­ciation of the name YHWH was avoided, and Adonai, "the Lord," was substituted for it, as evidenced by the use of the Greek word Kyrios, "Lord," for YHWH in the Septuagint, the transla­tion of the Hebrew Scrip­tures that was done by Greek-speaking Jews in that century.  Where the combined form "Adonai YHWH" occurs in the Bible, this was read as Adonai Elohim, "Lord God."  In the early Middle Ages, when the consonantal text of the Bible was supplied with vowel points to fa­cilitate its correct traditional reading, the vowel points for Adonai with one variation - a sheva with the first yod of YHWH instead of the hataf-patah under the aleph of 'Adonai -- were used for YHWH.  When Christian scholars of Europe first began to study Hebrew, they did not under­stand what this really meant, and they introduced the hybrid name "Jehovah."  In order to avoid pronouncing even the sacred name Adonai for YHWH, the custom was later introduced of saying simply in Hebrew ha-Shem (or Aramaic Shema', "the Name") even in such an expression as "Blessed be he that cometh in the name of YHWH" (Ps. 118:26).  The avoi­dance of pronouncing the name YHWH is gener­ally ascribed to a sense of reverence.  More precisely, it was caused by the misunder­standing of the Third Commandment (Ex. 20:7; Deut. 5:11) as meaning "Thou shalt not take the name of YHWH thy God in vain," whereas it really means "You shall not swear falsely by the name of YHWH your God" (JPS)."

 

The true pronunciation of the name YHWH was never lost.  Several early Greek writers of the Christian Church testify that the name was pronounced "YAHWEH."  This is confirmed, at least for the vowel of the first syllable of the name, by the shorter form YAH, which is some­times used in poetry (e.g., Ex. 15:2) and the yahu or yah that serves as the final syllable in very many Hebrew names.  Some obvious examples are Isaiah (IsaYAH); Jeremiah (Jerem­YA­H); Zephaniah (ZephanYA­H); Nehemiah (NehemYA­H).  We also know the true pronounceation of the Tetragrammaton from the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Old Testament made in the third century B.C.

The 1901 American Standard Version of the English bible attempted to transliterate the Heavenly Father's Name.  Those who produced the American Standard Version relied upon the term "Jehovah" which was quite familiar to many people.  They recog­niz­ed the fact that it is impor­tant to have the reader personally realize that the Tetragr­ammaton is of vital importance if one is to comprehend the distinc­tive flavor of the original text and minimize confusion concern­ing the various titles such as God or Lord substituted for the Biblical name of the living God of Israel. 

Interestingly, even the Jehovah's Witnesses acknowledge that the name Jehovah is improper.  Their book, "Let Your Name Be Sanctified" freely admits on pages 16 and 18 that YAHWEH is the superior translation (transliteration) of the Tetragrammaton.  In "The Kingdom Interlinear Translation of the Greek Scriptures," on page 23 is the following admission:  "While inclining to view the pronuncia­tion Yahweh as the more correct way, we have retained the form 'Jehovah' because of people's familiarity with it since the 14th century."

YAH is the poetic or short form of the Biblical Sacred Name found to have survived translators in Psalm 68:4 of the King James Version.  It is the prefix of the name Jehovah as found in Strong's Exhaustive Concordance which is most interesting and shows the fallacy of the name Jehovah.  YAH means "I exist," "I am," "I create," or "I will be or bring into existence."  One of the most widely known words in the world is "halleluYah," an imperative meaning "Praise you Yah."  The short or poetic form is Yah and is not spelled Yeh.  As already noted, the first part of the sacred Name YAHWEH was changed from Yah to Yeh or Jeh as the "J" developed and the "a" was replaced with an "e" to further hide the Name.  Amazing as it may seem, Hebrew had no "J" sound and there was no "J" in the English alphabet prior to the 1500's.