A major challenge for a Bible
translator is how to render God’s name. God does not have multiple names, as a lot of supposedly religious articles love to claim. But He does have one.
In literally thousands of old
Hebrew documents, God’s name is spelled YHWH. What is the correct English
translation of that? If you’ve read bible-related articles on the web, you’ve
come across the spelling “Yahweh”. Some Bible “scholars” will tell you that
this is closer to the Hebrew spelling than “Jehovah”.
For example, Wikipedia says
that “Yahweh is now accepted almost universally” as the closest-to-correct
pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton, YHWH. It is said to be a Hebrew form of
the word. Is that true?
Absolutely not.
As discussed in an earlier column, way back when the first translations of YHWH were being made from Hebrew into Greek for the Septuagint, it was sometimes not translated. Some of the translators simply inserted the four Hebrew characters in the middle of the Greek, leaving it to the reader to pronounce how they wished. In some copies of the Septuagint, it was rendered with the Latin letters IAO or even, mistakenly, the Greek letters equivalent to PIPI (because of the resemblance to the four Hebrew letters) but, so far, no Septuagint manuscript has been found with even a vague similarity to the modern Greek form of God’s name, Iechóva.
Gutenberg’s first printed
Bible in 1455 was a direct, letter-for-letter copy of Jerome’s Latin Vulgate
which, as mentioned in previous columns, substituted Dominus, "Lord", for God’s name.
Soon after Gutenberg,
(roughly 1466, but the actual date is unknown) a Bible was translated from the
Latin Vulgate into German by Johann Mentelin and printed in Strasbourg. In
German it told readers that God’s name was “Adonai.”
In 1516 Erasmus was one of
the first translators to skip Jerome’s Latin Vulgate and go back to the oldest
Greek manuscripts he could find. He produced a new Greek text that attempted to unify all the variants in the old Greek manuscripts; and from that he produced a new Latin text of the
New Testament. Among many other corrections, he found that passages had been
added which were not in the original Bible. One example is the account in Mark
of the woman supposedly caught in adultery, with the popularly vague quote of
Jesus, ‘let he that is sinless cast the first stone’. Erasmus, since he was focused on the
Greek rather than the Hebrew, did not deal with a name for God.
In 1522 a massive work was
completed, commonly called the Complutensian Polyglot. Its principal translator
was Alfonso de Zamora, a Jewish scholar who had perhaps been forced to convert
to Catholicism. The Polyglot featured a corrected Hebrew version in one column
(which was liberally sprinkled with YHWH), a new Latin version in another column, a
Greek Septuagint/Latin interlinear in still another, and an Aramaic version and
explanatory notes at the bottom. In a marginal note attached to his interlinear
of Genesis, Zamora explained that YHWH in the Hebrew text should be rendered in
Latin as “jehovah”, even though he didn’t do so. This is one of the earliest renderings
of God’s name in print in a modern language.
Zamora may have had access to
a copy of a work from 1270 called “Pugio Fidei” (literally, “Dagger of Faith”,
but he might have meant something like ‘Defending the faith’) handwritten by a
monk in Spain named Raymondus Martini. When that work was finally printed, in
1651, it looked like this:
Note that Martini wrote God’s
name in three syllables, not two. And the vowels he chose, e-o-a, don’t match
either ‘adonai’ or ‘elohim’. So the argument that those vowels were mashed into
YHWH simply doesn't hold water. Three other manuscripts by Martini are known, and two of them
use God’s name – one spelled “Yehova” and one “Yohova”.
A Latin manuscript handwritten
in 1303 called Victoria Porcheti Hebraeos (Victory over the Jews) rendered
God’s name variously as “Iohouah”, “Iohoua”, and “Ihouah”.
In 1518, Petrus
Galatinus published a work entitled De
arcanis catholicae veritatis (Concerning Secrets of the Universal Truth) in
which he spells God’s name “Iehoua”.
Bearing in mind that i/y/j
were interchangeable in those days, as were v/u, Jehovah’s name was clearly
being solidified.
In 1524 because of threats
against anyone wanting to render the Bible into English, William Tyndale fled
England for Germany. His goal was to translate the Bible from its original
languages into English. His Bible, published in 1530, used the spelling “Jehouah” in 7 places. Here’s what that
looked like:
A marginal note in his Bible
reads: “Iehovah is God’s name.” Again, note the i/j and u/v interchangeability.
People weren’t too fussy about spelling back then.
“Commentary on the Pentateuch”,
1531, written by a cardinal Thomas de Vio Cajetanus used “Iehoua Elohim” in connection
with Genesis 2:4, and “Iehouah Elohe” at Exodus 6:3.
Martin Luther’s German Bible
of 1534, like the Latin Vulgate, omitted Jehovah’s name. He inserted “HERR” wherever
the Hebrew had YHWH. In his other writings, however, such as his “Commentary on Genesis”, he used God’s
name spelled “Jehova”. In one of his sermons printed in 1527, the printer
spelled it “Jehovah”.
John Calvin, too, used “Yehovah”
throughout his "Commentary on Psalms",(1557), when explaining Hebrew
words for his readers. Yet the French Bible he had helped produce in 1535, commonly
called Olivetan, in nearly every place where the Hebrew had YHWH, substituted a French phrase that means, ‘The Eternal’.
It did, however, use the
spelling “Jehouah” at Exodus 6:3.
After what they viewed as a
betrayal by Luther, the Church commissioned a new German translation from a
Catholic professor of Theology, Johann Eck. Published in 1537, he, too, used
“Adonai” for God’s name, but in the margin of Exodus 6:3 he added a note that
read “Jehoua.”
The Taverner Bible, published
in English in 1539 included an explanation at Exodus that “Jehouah is the name
of God.”
In 1557, “Jehova” was included
in a Latin dictionary of Hebrew words.
In 1569, translator Casiodoro
de Reina not only translated YHWH into ‘Iehovah’ in every instance in his Spanish edition, he defended the decision in
the prologue:
“We have retained the name
(Iehovah), not without serious reasons. First of all, because wherever it will
be found in our version, it is in the Hebrew text, and it seemed to us that we
could not leave it, nor change it for another without infidelity and singular
sacrilege against the law of God…”
A. R. Cevallerius published a
book in Italian called (roughly) Basics of the Hebrew
Language in 1559. He used “Jehovah” throughout his work.
Tremmelius (Cevallerius' father-in-law) produced a Latin translation
of the Hebrew Bible, released in 1575, that used “Jehova” throughout.
A Swedish coin from 1608 with
God’s name in both tetragrammaton and spelled as “Iehovah” shows that the name was becoming well known:
The original printing of the
King James Version in 1611 spelled God’s name “Iehouah”. It was revised in 1629. One of these revisions
settled the spelling of God’s name on Jehovah.
The Bay Psalm book,
printed in America in 1640, used the spelling “Iehovah” in many places
throughout.
Gutenberg’s press, once
invented, needed feeding. The proliferation of books had the same effect on
scholarship that the internet had 550 years later: scholars and “scholars”
began arguing about how to spell and pronounce God’s name. Those who had done
the work of translating and rendered God’s name as Iehoua, Yehoua, Jehoua,
Iehova, Iehovah, Yehova, and finally Jehovah, were all roundly dismissed by
armchair theologians claiming that none of those could possibly be correct.
Some even ignored all the scholarship and claimed that the name was pagan in origin,
that Jehovah was actually descended from Jove, the Roman god Jupiter. The truth is the other way around.
So where did “Yahweh” come
from?
It first appeared in
print in a few translation-related articles in the late 1800s. The first Bible
to use it was J.B.Rotherham’s Emphasized
Bible in 1902. In 1911, however, Rotherham retracted it and reverted to “Jehovah” in
his Studies in
the Psalms, explaining that ‘Jehovah is
more easily recognized.’ But the barn door had been left open, and the horses were
out.
Through
the first half of the twentieth century Jehovah remained the preferred spelling. Some scholars and archaeologists started using ‘Yahweh’
because it seemed closer to Hebrew – Hebrew, after all has no words that begin
with J, but dozens that begin with Y. Never mind the fact that all those Y-words are spelled with a j in English. Open any Bible dictionary to the Y section. The only name you'll find there is Yahweh. Nevertheless, if you want to be taken seriously as a
bible scholar, it seems you have to use Yahweh.
After
1931, when the International Bible Students Association changed their name to
Jehovah’s Witnesses, but particularly when the New World Translation came out
in the 1950s, no self-respecting ‘scholar’ wanted to use the name “Jehovah”. They wouldn’t
want anyone thinking they were one of those weird Witnesses, would they?
Still, how can we say
for certain that "Jehovah" is closer to God’s name than "Yahweh"?
Count the syllables. Ask any Facebook Hebrew scholar to name a Hebrew word other than 'Yahweh' that is spelled with 4 Hebrew characters, but pronounced in just two syllables.
Not surprisingly Israelites liked including God's name as part of their children's names. Names that include a reference to God are called "Theophoric". You are no doubt familiar with Bible names that contain -jah, short for Jehovah – Elijah, for example, means ‘My God is Jah’ or 'My God is Jehovah'.
But there are other
theophoric names that borrow two syllables from Jehovah. Check these out:
Jehosophat
Jehoaddin
Jehoahaz
Jehohanan
Jehoiachin
Jehoiada
Jehoikim
Jehoiarib
Jehonadab
Jehonathan
Jehoram
Jehoshabeath
Jehosheba
Jehoshua
(Which became Jesus in the Greek scriptures)
Jehozabad
Jehozadak
Clearly, -ho- is the second of three syllables of God's name, however you choose to pronounce it.
If the proper pronunciation of YHWH is Yahweh, none
of those names would exist. Jehosophat’s name would be something like Jasophat. Jehozadak would be Jazadak.
But none of those supposed
experts are clamoring to change Jehosophat to Jasophat.
Ultimately, you are free to
use whatever name for God you are comfortable with in your language as long as
it conveys the right thought to yourself and those around you about your relationship with God. If your primary language is
English, “Jehovah” is the most accepted name for the almighty.
If, for some reason, that
word seems to get stuck in your throat; if you rationalize that “the Good Lord
knows who I’m praying to”; or if, in a pinch, when a name is really needed, you
can say Yahweh but just can’t bring yourself to utter Jehovah, You might want to seriously
ponder why that is.
Feel free to leave a polite comment. To read another of my columns on a similar subject, click here.
Bill K. Underwood is the author of several novels and one non-fiction
self-help book, all available
at Amazon.com. You can help support this site by purchasing one of his books.
