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.
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.
