God's name

God’s Name—More Thoughts

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I have further thoughts on whether we should refer to God as YHWH, or a pseudonym, such as LORD or ‘The Name’ or ‘Jehovah’. Here are some interesting considerations.

For example, what should Bible translators write when translating parts of the New Testament that include direct speech and are quotations of the Old Testament? In New Testament times, they would have quoted the Hebrew version—which uses YHWH as the name of God. However, whilst they would have thought the Hebrew word, they would not have spoken it. Since the time of Amos, speaking God’s name had almost superstitious repercussions, so when speaking, even when reading aloud, they would always substitute ‘Adonai’ or ‘Elohim’ in place of YHWH.[1] Of course, the New Testament was written in Greek, so they simply used the Greek word for ‘Lord.’ What therefore, should modern translators write? You understand my question? Should they write what the people would have actually said, or should they write the words of the Hebrew passage being quoted? If you look at Bibles from different ages, they have not all agreed on this, and there are differences. I guess it doesn’t affect the meaning of the passages, but I find it interesting.

This leads to a consideration of why New Testament writers didn’t find a Greek equivalent for YHWH, and instead used ‘Lord’ (κυρίου). Should we follow this example, and no longer use the name of God? Everyone is a product of their times, even if we choose to reject our culture, we are affected by it. Did the early church continue the embargo on saying God’s name? I don’t have any evidence either way, but certainly was what written implies they continued to substitute a pseudonym.

Whilst this is interesting for Christians, for modern Jews it is more inflammatory. Apparently, the 1985 version of The New Jerusalem Bible used the name YHWH, but in 2019, the chief Rabbi of Rome spoke to Pope Benedict XVI and asked for this to be changed, as saying God’s name is offensive to Jews.[2] This then, is another consideration. As Jews find the spoken form of YHWH ‘offensive’ should we, due to respect, also not say God’s name? We do not, as a rule, adapt our religion for other faiths—and certainly I wouldn’t suggest that we stopped talking about Jesus because some find our belief offensive—but is this a little different? Is it seen as overtly confrontational? I do not, myself, follow the teachings of Islam, but nor would I write or draw something about their faith which would be insulting. Not on purpose. But to what extent should we accommodate other beliefs? Where do we draw the line, what is ‘respectful’ and what is acquiescing to something which we do not believe?

I suppose it depends on whether we feel we should use God’s name. Did God give the name YHWH because it is personal and represents a personal relationship? Or is it merely a label, given for ease of reference, because God is so much bigger than anything we can comprehend and a ‘name’ is a human invention. In Exodus 3:14, it seems clear: ‘This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.’ (זֶה־שְּׁמִ֣י לְעֹלָ֔ם וְזֶ֥ה זִכְרִ֖י לְדֹ֥ר דֹּֽר ) I would interpret this as meaning that God’s name, YHWH, should be remembered forever. However, the form of the name, ‘I will be’ (אֶֽהְיֶ֑ה) might be significant—perhaps God was saying that his ‘name’ (as in, how he is to be known/understood) is in what he has done (that is, having been the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob) and therefore this, these past actions, are his ‘name’ and this is what should be remembered forever.

If we pay heed to how the people in the ancient Near East thought, then something only existed if it had a name and a function.[3] Therefore ‘naming’ gods was important, as was knowing what they did. Is this the problem that God is addressing? Does he understand that Moses, as part of his ancient thinking, needed God to have a name and a function. This is certainly what God gives him in the Exodus passage.

Perhaps this giving of names is less important to our modern minds. Many people admit to believing in ‘something’ but they are happy to keep it vague. I have friends who admit to believing in ‘something’ but nothing more specific than that. There can be ‘some kind of God,’ something beyond our human world, but they don’t need a name. Personally, I’m not sure whether I need a name or not, but I do need evidence of action, I do need to remember what God has done for me, I do need to know that he is a reality. Maybe this is what Exodus 3:14 is saying.

I will continue to grapple with this. If you read anything relevant, let me know. In my next post, I will consider how God’s name should be pronounced–because that’s not clear either!

Thanks for reading. Have a great day, and take care.
Love, Anne x

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[1] Andrew Case, Pronouncing and Translating the Divine Name (Amazon: Self-published, 2020).

[2] Dom Henry Wansbrough, The Revised New Jerusalem Bible (New York: Penguin Random House, 2019) see Forward.

[3] John H. Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2018)

Does God Have a Name? And Should We Say It?

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When I started to learn Hebrew, I was introduced to ‘ketiv qere’ in ancient scripts. As I have explained before, Hebrew words have a basic 3-letter root, and a group of people (the Masoretes) added dots and dashes to represent verbs, so people remembered how to say them. However, some words were written (ketiv) one way, but should be said (qere) differently—so they added the wrong verbs. Therefore, God’s name, written YAHWEH,[1] has the verbs for ADONAI, so when people saw the word, the would say ‘Adonai’ even though the letters are YWH. As my Hebrew lessons continue, whenever we read YHWH, we say ‘Adonai,’ as a sign of respect. But should we?

In most English Bibles, whenever Yahweh is translated, they write LORD, all in capitals. So we continue the tradition even in Christian churches; the name of God is rarely said.

Where did this idea originate, and should it continue? I have been reading a book on the subject by Andrew Case,[2] and I will give you a brief summary. He begins by quoting Clines, who states that, ‘The personal name of God is Yahweh. It is a foreign name, quite un-English […]’ and he suggests that perhaps for that reason alone ‘[…] the name Yahweh must be preserved—lest it should ever be imagined that God is an Englishman. He is a foreigner now to every race on earth. The very awkwardness of addressing a God whose name is not native to one’s language in itself alerts us to the alienness of Yahweh to every god created in our own image.’[3]

To begin with, Yahweh is introduced by God,[4] and is used by the Old Testament writers. All the early books use the name freely,[5] sometimes it was even used as part of a greeting,[6] and it was used in oaths.[7]

This changed in the book of Amos. There was a terrible punishment, many people died, and they declared that they ‘must not mention the name of the LORD!’[8] However, this was not a new ‘rule’ it was more that they were so traumatised, so worried the same thing might happen, that they dared not approach God or even say his name.[9] Case suggests that due to this fear (which sounds a bit superstitious I think) they started to use alternative names for God, avoiding saying Yahweh.

The use of Yahweh in oaths/contracts was also banned in the Talmud. (The Talmud is the written form of all the verbal laws the Jews had, with added explanations so they were clear.) The Rabbis disliked that a written contract would one day be rubbish, and therefore banned the use of Yahweh on written contracts.[10] Case notes that this, and a later ban by the Essenes (who probably wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls) does not give a reason—they don’t say it is out of reverence for God’s name. However, it seems likely to me that this is the reason, as unlike in the Amos example, no other reason seems logical.

The Essenes then began to eliminate the name from their copies of manuscripts, sometimes putting symbols or dots in place of the letters. As I have written before, we don’t have any original manuscripts for our Bible, we have used various manuscripts (copies of copies of copies…) which means anything ‘corrupted’ by the Essenes (an early sect of ‘manuscript copiers’) continues today.

This continued to when the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament) was written. Case (who is himself a Bible translator, so speaks with authority) suggests that when the Septuagint was written, they were so indoctrinated with the idea that they must not say the name of God, that it influenced their translations. Therefore, for example, the passage in Leviticus that says: ‘The one who blasphemes the name of Yahweh will surely be put to death.’[11] was translated in the Greek as: ‘The one who names the name of the Lord will surely be put to death.’ There seems to be no other reason for the change, as all the copies we have of the Hebrew use ‘blaspheme’ so it appears to be a deliberate change by the translators. (My understanding is that this happens a lot with translations—there is rarely a word-for-word equivalent with different languages, there is always a choice as to which word best fits the meaning. If translators hold a particular belief, it would be natural for them to use a word that upholds that.)

Case suggests that the Masoretes (who wrote the Hebrew version that I use) copied the convention of the Septuagint, and so added the vowels of Adonai to YWH. He also discusses how, over time, people would have begun to read this substitution as a name. Therefore, although people read ‘kurios’ meaning ‘the Lord’ in their Greek versions, after a while they would think of ‘Lord’ as a name, not a title. (Which probably most English speakers do today, when they pray to ‘Lord’ they are possibly not thinking of it as a generic title, but as a term specifically for God.

This is interesting, because his next point refers to the church in New Testament times—did they return to using Yahweh to address God? Well, no. Case says this is probably because in mixed Jewish/Greek congregations, the disciples were challenging all sorts of traditional thoughts, and challenging the idea of not using God’s name was probably a step too far. (Which to me, suggests that perhaps it is not important.) However, he does make an interesting point when he refers to the bit that says Jesus has ‘the name that is above every name’.[12] This ‘name’ suggests Case, would have been understood to be Yahweh. He thinks Paul was quoting from Isaiah 45:23, which uses ‘Yahweh’ but Paul has changed it to ‘Lord’ because that is the Greek custom. Case also points out that ‘Jesus’ in Hebrew is from ‘Joshua’ meaning: Yahweh is salvation.

There is further evidence that ‘Lord’ was substituted for Yahweh when Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 6:5 in Mark 12:30. He changes ‘You shall love Yahweh your God’ to ‘You shall love the Lord your God’ and he also adds ‘with all your mind’. Case thinks this is because the ancient Hebrews thought that everything was decided by the heart, whereas in Greek thought, there was a disconnect between heart and mind (so loving Yahweh with all your heart was insufficient, they needed to engage the mind too). Jesus therefore ‘tweaks’ a quotation, so the people understand the meaning of the quote. Thus ‘Lord’ is a substitute for ‘Yahweh’. Every time the early church read ‘Jesus is Lord’, they were really reading ‘Jesus is Yahweh’ which was completely radical!

My main concern when reading Case’s argument, is that he refers to ‘the personal name’ of God. Yet the name that was given, Yahweh, was NOT really a ‘personal name’. It’s a verb. The verb ‘to be’ which in the tense given means that God told Moses: ‘I will be whatever I will be.’ This, I feel, is more of an evasion than a name, more a telling humans that they cannot sum up God in a name, they cannot label him. The Old Testament writers took this verb and used it as a name. Should we copy their example? I guess the difference is that they were Hebrew speakers, so although they used the verb as a name, they would ever be aware that it was really a verb. We, however, see the word only as a name. Which potentially has dangers, but I’m not sure. Maybe it only has power. Maybe it has both.

[1] In case you missed my earlier blog: When the German theologians wanted to write this (Yahweh written with Adonai vowels) they ended up writing ‘Jehovah’ because ‘Y’ sound is written ‘J’ in some languages. Therefore, when you see the name ‘Jehovah’ you are reading a German attempt to write a wrongly-written Hebrew word, not a name that ever appeared in any Bible!

[2] Andrew Case, Pronouncing and Translating the Divine Name יהוה (UK: Independently Published, 2020). Although self-published, Case references his sources appropriately, and therefore is considered reliable to cite.

[3] David Clines, Yahweh and the God of Christian Theology: Theology Volume 83 (Sage, 1980)

< https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0040571X8008300503&gt; p.324.

[4] Exodus 3:15.

[5] Psalm 135:13.

[6] Ruth 2:4.

[7] 1 Samuel 14:45.

[8] Amos 6:10.

[9] Suggested by Douglas Stuart, Hosea – Jonah: World Biblical Commentary (Dallas: Word Incorporated, 1987) p.364.

[10] Michael L. Rodkinson, The Babylonian Talmud: Original Text, Edited, Corrected, Formulated and Translated into English (Boston: The Talmud Society, 1918).

[11] Leviticus 24:16.

[12] Philippians 2:9 -11.

Do Names Matter?

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What’s in a Name?

You might remember that I told you that ancient Hebrew did not have vowels (this seems to have been a thing with ancient languages—not sure why). The vowel signs were written later, a few in the 6th century BC, and then more in about the 9th century AD, when Hebrew was not spoken outside of the religious text and people were worried that everyone would forget how words should properly be pronounced. A group of scholars (the Masoretes) added little symbols below the letters, to show where the vowel sounds should be made.

The personal name of God was considered very special. I have no idea why Christians don’t also consider God’s name to be special, but we don’t tend to limit how/when we use it. If the Queen came to visit, we would refer to her as “Ma’am” or “Your Majesty” and only a person with no respect for the monarchy would talk about “Elizabeth coming to visit,” far less, “I’m going to see Liz.” The Jews give this same respect to God’s name, and they avoid saying it.

Now, here’s the interesting bit. When they added the vowels to the personal name of God, they used the vowels that actually corresponded to one of the titles for God, not his actual name. This reminded people not to read the name, but instead say ‘Adonai’ which is a title. The term for this would translate in English to ‘written-read’ because although something is written you read something different.

If we were to do this with the Queen, we would take the vowels from Majesty: a e and add them to the consonants of her personal name: LaZBeTH. LaZBeTH is not an actual name, people reading it would see the oddly-placed vowels, and remember to read: “Majesty.”

As I said, Christians don’t seem to have this same form of respect for God’s name. (Though to be fair, when God’s name appears in the Bible, it has been translated as LORD all in capitals.) Christians today mostly are not aware of this. In fact, they even have songs that combine both the personal name, and the ‘made-up’ name (Jehovah) and they sing them—sometimes I suspect thoughtlessly—without even being aware that the term ‘Jehovah’ is a sort of non-word created by the Jews to avoid saying God’s personal name. The J at the beginning of Jehovah is because that is how a ‘y’ sound was translated in the original German, and the word first appeared during the time of the Protestant Reformation and simply shows that they didn’t understand much Hebrew. ‘Jehovah’ is not a word.

I wonder what a Jew, listening to Christians being so casual with the name of God, would think about that. I wonder what God thinks about that.

What do you think about that? I’m sure that some people would say that God is more concerned with how we show our respect for him through what we say and do, than how we address him, and perhaps that is correct. But I’m not so sure. As I am learning Hebrew, and listening to my lecturer and various scholars online, I am noticing that most of them avoid using the personal name of God, and when they reached the word יְהוָה they tend to read ‘Adonai.’ I don’t know whether this is a sign of respect to the Jews whose language is being spoken, or to God. Perhaps the two reasons are the same.

Thank you for reading.

Anne E. Thompson
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