Bible Translation Part 4: Jehovah or Yahweh?

 

A major problem for a Bible translator is how to render God’s name. God does not have multiple names, as a lot of supposedly religious articles now 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 already mentioned, 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 unified all the variants in the old Greek manuscripts, and from that 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 Penteteuch”, 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", published in 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 Italians 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, you need 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 characters but pronounced in just two syllables.

Not surprisingly Israelites liked including God's name as part of their child's name. 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 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.

Bible Translation, Part Two: From Septuagint to Syriac to Masoretic

 

In Part One we talked about the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures – the ‘old’ testament – that began while the Bible was still being written. Within a few generations of Babylon’s destruction of Jerusalem in 607 B.C.E., many Jews living outside of Israel could no longer read or even understand Hebrew. It seems likely that some bilingual Jews may have rewritten the Hebrew Scriptures into other languages their fellow exiles could read, though the rabbis disapproved and so far no ancient examples have been found.

The job of metergaman, translator, came into existence. These men would stand and read from the Hebrew scrolls, giving an on-the-spot oral translation of the reading into Aramaic. Where his reading was still not clearly understood the metergaman would add his own commentary to try to clarify it. Their explanatory speeches were called targums. Initially, the rabbis of those days frowned on writing down targums. Some time after the Jewish rabbis reluctantly gave in to Ptolemy’s edict that the Hebrew Scriptures be officially translated into Greek (the Septuagint), the targums with all their (uninspired) commentary also began to be written down, in Aramaic.

In some cases the commentary helped. In other cases, it added details that may (or may not) be true. 

For example, the Hebrew descriptions of the Ark of the Covenant in the Most Holy compartment of the tabernacle, and later in Solomon’s temple, include a Hebrew word that could be transliterated ‘shekinah’.

The targums explained shekinah as a miraculous light above the ark that illuminated the Most Holy so the high priest could see what he was doing. But the word actually means simply ‘dwelling’ or ‘presence’; it has no connection with “light”. So most accurate Bibles render it, for example, “I will present myself to you there and speak with you from above the cover. From between the two cherubs that are on the ark…” (Exodus 25:22)

 So was there a miraculous light in the Most Holy? Perhaps. But the bible doesn’t explicitly say so.

An eastern dialect of Aramaic was called Syriac. It came into wide use a couple hundred years after Christianity began. The Syriac Peshitta (an Aramaic word meaning “plain” or “simple”) text was the next translation project after the Greek Septuagint. Syriac Peshitta translations were whole Bibles, not merely the Hebrew Scriptures. They were created by Christian translators. Most of the oldest complete ones found so far date back to about the 5^th century, but there is extensive evidence that there were earlier ones. The Old Testament portion was translated directly from Hebrew, no doubt annoying some of the rabbis. Some manuscripts give evidence that their translators also consulted the Greek Septuagint. The New Testament portion of the Peshitta was translated from Greek copies of the originals; then, later, from Latin translations.

Starting in the sixth century, Jewish copyists of the Hebrew Scriptures began implementing a series of standards that came to be called Masora, from a word meaning ‘preserving tradition.’ The Masoretes were a school of men who scrupulously copied ancient Hebrew scrolls. The oldest Masoretic text found so far is the Leningrad codex, dating from around 1100 C.E.

The Masoretes developed grammatical rules. They also invented signs and marks to be written under and around the Hebrew characters to explain pronunciation. They made mathematical notations in the margins to make sure their copies were exact replicas of the originals, marking the center line on a page, even the center letter in a line. They made note of where the text had been altered by earlier copyists. Some of the most common of these errors were where earlier copyists believed this or that phrase that contained Jehovah’s name was somehow disrespectful of Jehovah – and the earlier copyists had replaced ‘Jehovah’ with ‘Lord’, or had even changed the meaning of the sentence to throw a more positive light on Jehovah. The Masoretes carefully noted these changes. 

However, by the time of the Masoretes, the rabbis had already begun spreading the unscriptural tradition of never speaking Jehovah’s name. So the Masoretes may have used vowel symbols from the pronunciation of either Adonai (Lord) or Elohim (God) to remind anyone reading aloud to say the alternate word rather than Jehovah.

A very early all-Greek Bible known as the Codex Alexandrinus was removed (from Alexandria, Egypt) by the patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church and gifted to the king of England in the early 1600s. Unfortunately, it arrived about a dozen years after the King James was completed. The Alexandrinus dates to the early 400s C.E.

In 1846 a scholar named von Tischendorf discovered in a monastery in Egypt a complete Greek New Testament that has been dated to around 350 C.E. More recent finds of Greek manuscripts predate even that, with the earliest so far found being a fragment of John 18 that may date to 150 C.E. or even earlier, a mere 50 years after John wrote the original!

In 1892 twin sisters Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson trekked by camel to a monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai. They weren’t simply tourists. Between them, the ladies knew 12 languages! They had heard there was an extensive ancient library at the monastery. Ultimately, they found a Syriac book that dated to the late 4^th century. It contained the four gospels. Today it is called the Sinaitic Syriac.

In 1933 archaeologists found a Greek manuscript that proved to be a ‘harmony’ of the four gospels. It is positively dated to earlier than 256 C.E., since it was buried in the debris of the Syrian city they were excavating that was destroyed in that year.

The value of Syriac Peshittas and other early manuscripts is seen in passages such as 1 John 5:7. Many Bibles translated later from Latin render that, “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.” The older Syriac versions that have been found prove these words were not in the original: they were added by later Bible translators to bolster their false belief in the trinity. The discoveries of older manuscripts, particularly after the great surge in biblical research that began in the 1800s, made spurious texts stand out like a sore thumb.

After or alongside Greek, Syriac and Latin, the Bible was quickly translated into other languages. 

“Wherever Christianity spread, translations of the Hebrew Scriptures were made based on the Septuagint. Thus, it became the basis for translations made into Arabic, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopic, Georgian, Old Latin, and Old Church Slavonic,”  according to Hebrew scholar Emanuel Tov, head of the Dead Sea Scrolls publication team.

An English Bible was actually pretty late to the game. We’ll get to that in Part Three. 

Feel free to leave a polite comment. To read Part One, 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 page by purchasing one of his books.

The Complex History of Bible Translation

 

“The only real Bible is the King James!”

People have strong opinions about Bible translation. Many have a favorite. Some practically worship one translation over another. Others hold that translating the Bible at all is wrong.

When some Mormon boys came to my door – without Bibles – I handed them one of mine to answer my question about the scriptural foundation of their work. They refused, until I gave them a KJV.

“Why only that one?” I asked.

“Because it’s authorized!” one of the boys replied. And he was serious… (Just to be clear, the King James is also called the Authorized Version. But it was "authorized" by King James. Pretty sure he wasn't a Mormon.)

There is no question that there are some bad translations of the Bible. But there are plenty of good ones. There's no ‘perfect’ translation of the Bible in English. Some are better than others, but none is perfect.

Whether you believe the Bible or not, at one time mankind all spoke the same language. (You can read more about that in the column I wrote about the history of language, here.) In the Bible account, the job of Translator became a necessity about 4,000 years ago, shortly after God himself confused people’s languages to force their compliance when they rebelled against his order to spread out. (Genesis 11:1-9)

When Abraham entered the land of Canaan, there’s no mention of a language barrier; hundreds of years later, when the spies sent to check out the Promised Land interacted with Rahab in Jericho there was likewise no communication problem – perhaps her Canaanite people had adopted the Semitic language of the locals when they moved in.

When God brought his chosen people, Israel, out of Egypt, most if not all had kept their native Hebrew language, so that a Psalmist centuries later could say that the Israelites considered Egyptian a “foreign language”. (Psalm 114:1) The Israelites used Hebrew among themselves, but most also had to have spoken Egyptian to communicate with their masters. When the family of Israel became the nation of Israel, Jehovah’s warning to them about obedience included language: ‘God will raise against you a distant nation, whose language you will not understand.’ (Deuteronomy 28:49) 

The language of the “distant nation” turned out to be the Chaldean language of Babylon. For Daniel and the other young Israelite men who were taken captive there, learning Chaldean was one of their first tasks. (Daniel 1:4) Aramaic was also spoken there, a holdover from the previous world power, Assyria.

In about 538 B.C.E., the account about Daniel surviving the lion’s den says that King Darius of Babylon, “wrote to all the peoples, nations, and language groups dwelling throughout the earth: “… in every domain of my kingdom, people are to tremble in fear before the God of Daniel. For he is the living God and he endures forever. His kingdom will never be destroyed, and his rulership is eternal.” (Daniel 6:25, 26) Darius thus became one of the first to spread a message about Jehovah in multiple languages.

A generation after Daniel, when Nehemiah directed that the Scriptures be read publicly in Hebrew, (Nehemiah 8:8) the account says the Levite readers, ‘explained and put meaning into them.’ That included explaining the more complex texts; but that also likely meant paraphrasing the passages in Aramaic for those listeners who struggled with the Hebrew language.

Fast forward another century and Alexander the Great was blitzing across the known world, quickly making Greek the most common language. Jewish historian Josephus told this story about Alexander the Great’s visit to Jerusalem: 

“When the book of Daniel was shown to him, in which he had declared that one of the Greeks would destroy the empire of the Persians, he believed himself to be the one indicated.”

It’s unlikely Alexander read Hebrew. The Jews would have had to read it to him, translating it into Greek so he could understand it.

After Alexander died suddenly the kingdom of Greece was split into four parts, each part going to one of his four generals, just as the prophecy said. (Daniel 11:2-4)

Ptolemy II, the son of one of those generals described in Daniel 11, inherited the throne of pharaoh in Egypt. He built the greatest library the world had ever seen in Alexandria, the seaport built by Alexander. It was said to have housed up to 400,000 papyrus scrolls, and drew the greatest scholars in the world. Every scroll on every ship that pulled into harbor was seized, no matter the subject - even scrolls in languages unknown to the copyists. They were copied, and the copy was returned to the ship. The original became part of the library. Alexandria became the hub of copying and translating in the ancient world.

Alexandria was a city of over half a million people, a third of whom were Jewish, descendants of those Jews who fled there when Babylon destroyed Jerusalem. (Jeremiah 43:6,7; Acts 6:9)

Ptolemy II commissioned a Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures. He brought 72 Jewish scholars – six from each tribe, according to legend – to Alexandria for the translation project.  The finished product is called the Septuagint, based on the word for “seventy”.

One important word that appeared in the Hebrew text nearly 7,000 times had to be dealt with: God’s name, in Hebrew, consists of the four letters, YHWH.  It's called the tetragrammaton. Hebrew reads right-to-left, so if transliterated it looked more like יהוה (HWHY).

Contrary to popular belief those Jewish scholars had no superstitions about God's name. That didn't come along until several hundred years later. So far, more than 10 early Greek Septuagint manuscripts and fragments have been found which have the Hebrew characters יהוה in the Greek text wherever the Hebrew original had Jehovah. Some use the more familiar squarish-Hebrew characters shown above, from the alphabet the Jews evidently borrowed from Babylon. Others insert the tetragrammaton in the older paleo-Hebrew (Canaanite) alphabet that looks like this:

Some of the Greek texts leave a blank space where the tetragrammaton should be. It isn't known today whether the intention was for a different scholar to fill in the blank, or whether it was intended to stay blank. There are even some examples of something the Latin translator Jerome commented on in a letter to someone named Marcella. In a letter written at Rome, 384 C.E., Jerome relates that, when coming upon these Hebrew letters of the Tetragrammaton (יהוה) in copies of the Septuagint:

"certain ignorant ones, because of the similarity of the characters…were accustomed to pronounce Pi Pi, mistaking them for the Greek characters." (πιπι)

Jerome did the world a huge disservice: He knew God’s name; He could read Hebrew; He had access to Hebrew Scrolls of the Old Testament in which he saw יהוה nearly 7000 times. But he didn't come up with an adequate Latin translation of the tetragrammaton. It's true that by his day the Jewish rabbis had begun spreading the superstition about not saying God's name out loud, but why should that have bothered Jerome? He wasn't Jewish. 

There had to have been Jews who could have told him the most common way Hebrew-speaking people pronounced יהוה

There likewise had to have been bilingual Hebrew/Greek speakers who had come up with ways to pronounce God's name in Greek. Yet, when Jerome wrote his Latin Vulgate version, he chose to translate יהוה as "Dominus", Lord, or "Deus", Latin for 'God', little different from words applied to all the hundreds of Roman gods, who all had distinctive names.

Perhaps it never occurred to him that Bible scholars would still be relying on his text a thousand years later.

Ultimately, what difference does it make? We’ll get to that in Part Two.

Click here to read another of my columns on Bible translation. 

 Feel free to leave a polite comment. 

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.