Jehovah who?

I will begin by stating that yes, I'm a Christian, and no, I'm not trying to start a fight. So, I've already ruined the traditional Christmas story for people, and now you're thinking I'm going to ruin something else too! Well, maybe. The topic for this post occurred to me while I was sitting backstage during our Christmas musical practice. (For those that attend my church, I'm Joseph, and that's why I'm "trying" to grow a beard!) In our Christmas musical many of the actors on stage use the name Jehovah when referring to God during their character's lines. Well, this is really interesting because Jehovah is not the name of God. (I hear your remarks....is this guy a heretic?...the name Jehovah occurs four times in my King James Bible!?) In order for me to explain this properly, the rest of this post is going to be a bit technical. That's my warning. If you don't like or don't think you can handle the technical parts, my advice is to stop reading and forget everything else that you've read so far. That being stated, I will continue.

As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, the Hebrew people had great reverence for the actual name of God. They revered it so much that they would not even speak the name because they were afraid that they would blaspheme the name. The name that we speak of is the name that was given to Moses when he asked God the question, when the children of Israel ask who has sent me what will I tell them. God replies by stating "I AM WHO I AM." God's name...I AM.

For those that don't know, there are no true vowels in the Hebrew language, only consonants. The language does have vowel points that look like dots and slashes; however, when the original Hebrew portion of the Bible was written, it was written without the vowel points. Thus in the original Hebrew portion the name of God would have been spelled with just the four Hebrew consonants.

This is the name of God written as it would have looked like in the original Hebrew portion of the Bible. Notice the four characters, they are the four consonants that compose the word. You may have seen the consonants transliterated by the symbols YHWH.

As generations passed, the Hebrew people added vowel points to the words in the Bible so that they wouldn't mispronounce them. Again, this partly goes back to their reverence for not only the name of God but the entire Word of God that was given. They had so much respect and reverence for the Word of God they didn't even want themselves or other generation to mispronounce the words.

What I did not mention earlier was that when the Jewish people were reading the Scriptures, and they came to the name of God, they typically replaced it by saying the word adonai. This word means "lord" in a common sense such as, "he is lord over this castle." As they began to put the vowel points in the words, in order to remind themselves not to say the actual name of God, they replaced the true vowel points of the name of God with the vowel points of the word adonai.

<---This is what the name of God looks like with the vowel points added. Remember these vowel points are the vowel points that actually go with the word adonai. The Jews did this because the word as it is in Hebrew, doesn't make grammatical sense. It was basically a safeguard, so they would see the nonsense word and remember....oh yeah I'm supposed to say "Adonai." The word with those vowel points is nonsensical. For instance, if I'm spelling the word "done" and I write it "deno" it's completely nonsense. There is no such word in the English dictionary as "deno." The consonants are in the right place, but the wrong placement of the vowels makes this word completely off and illogical. That's what has happened with the Hebrew name of God. The consonants are still in the same place, but the new vowel points make this word basically gibberish.

OK, so now you're wondering, what does this all have to do with Jehovah. Well, as translators began to translate the Hebrew scriptures, this "hybrid" Hebrew word for the name of God was translated "yehowah" because that's what it looks like pronounced out. Then as the word became anglo-sized it was changed to "Jehovah." Soooo.....when we use the word Jehovah, it actually comes from a gibberish nonsense word, and that is why it's not the name of God. Most modern translations (which I think this true for all translations outside of the KJV) do not use the word Jehovah at all in the Bible. For most all translations, when the name of God appears in the text it is written LORD with all capital letters. This signifies that the word translated was the actual name of God. If the text renders the word "Lord", then the word translated was the actual word adonai.

So your probably asking, well, what is the correct translation or pronunciation for the actual name of God. There has been great debate over it, but most of the scholar consensus is that the correct vocalization of the name is Yahweh.

The question then arises, how do you think God feels when so many people are not calling His name right? I don't know!? I can say with most certainty that God is probably not up in heaven upset that we are calling Him by the wrong name...."I can't believe those idiots, don't they know that's not my name!" I also highly doubt that if we say Jehovah, He doesn't know we're talking to Him. Take my name for example. My name is Jordan, and there have been many times that I have been conversing with people and they refer to me as Jason or Jonathan, and I don't question that they're talking to me. I also don't think they're idiots either. Needless to say, I doubt God is offended by calling Him, Jehovah, but now that you know it's gibberish, why not just refer to Him as Yahweh! (I do know this would change a lot of songs, in fact one of my favorite songs is "There's No God Like Jehovah." However, I have found that usually Yahweh makes a fine substitute.)

May we never think that God is offended or perturbed by the use of Jehovah, but may we get in the habit of using the name Yahweh.