HaShem - Yahweh or Jehovah?

baseless assumption, and logically unsound.would you argue that psalm 53 is a COPY of psalm 14?then the person who put it in the bible was a "COPYIST" was he not?similar, compare the books of chronicles and samuel/kings. parts are COPIED.the logic of my original argument relies on the fact that at least one psalm had to be copied. what i am trying to demonstrate is that the bible we have today is not the original texts, but a compilation of various copies. would you agree? you're operating under a fundamental misunderstanding: that the bible we have today is an original source, all written and not copied or edited since, or before it's compilation. this very psalm demonstrates that this cannot be the case. no, it's not. look up the word "inspired" sometime for me.

i was inducting a conclusion from your premise. continuing the generalization. if we attribute validity to age, and only use the oldest forms of names, we'd all spell names like we do in the original hebrew. god would YHWH and not jehovah.similarly, i know your point is also wrong. my name is an old spelling, the second oldest form of the name, dating to the 1400's. and it confuses people to no end, because they're used to spelling it the modern way.also, let's take a look at the oldest english translation, at the first appearance of the name of the lord.

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Genesis 2:4, Wycliffe

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in the day wherynne the Lord God made heuene and erthe

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so, by your own rule, it's still "Lord" and not "Jehovah." sorry, you lose. ok, i'll award it half points for the footnote. the version i found online didn't have footnotes. but still, it favors the dogmatic translation over the literal. if anything, the dogma should be in the footnotes, not in place of the words of the bible.i have yet to find a bible that passes all three tests, btw. but i haven't looked at too many. it's an added word, even if it's in brackets. it's the insertion of dogma into the text. my "half points for footnotes" are out of sheer generosity. in reality, footnotes and emmendations are bad, in my opinion. Jewish Publication Society. So far, their translation is the best i've read, even if the ben'elohym translations irk me. it's done by hebrew scholars and rabbis, all within the last 50 years or so, so the english is very current and easy to understand. it flows very well, and the poetry is broken up right almost everywhere, even if it doesn't read as poetically as the kjv does.the translation is from the masoretic text, with the occasional comparison to the septuagint and other translations for references and disputed words. overall, it tends to be very fair and literal except in instances where the intent of the verse would not translate into english literally.

The NWT is a poisoned well. It fails far more than two tests. While JWs may point out a scripture in a KJV version for comparison with the same in the NWT, they never tell you of the many key scriptures they have tampered with. In spite of the blurb inside the covers about consulting many bibles, it`s still the old dogma. Since the Governing Council says it`s God-guided, why then so many footnotes?

well, those are just the three i apply to EVERY version. like i said, i'd have to actually read it to catch other problems and formulate a real opinion. but as it stands, it didn't pass the easy ones. i find the same thing with MANY bibles.

Dear Arachnophilia;Those of us who believe in the Bible, believe that God guided what was included and what was not included. Which is why we have terms like apocryphal, we have enough information available to weed out what was added by man and not by God. Many things are repeated in the Bible, that is how it was put together. God has seen to it that his word has survived intact.

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i know your point is also wrong. my name is an old spelling, the second oldest form of the name, dating to the 1400's. and it confuses people to no end, because they're used to spelling it the modern way.

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No, your name merely supports what I was saying. Your name had been the accepted form, but it has been supplanted by a more recent spelling that has become the accepted form. It is the same with the name "Jehovah" it is the oldest and still is the most accepted form, we will have to wait and see if Yahweh" becomes more wildly accepted by the general population. Like your name, it doesn't matter how many scholars or history buffs know it, what counts is general usage. So far "Jehovah" has a big lead in that area.On reviewing the NWT, here a couple of more in-depth reviews.hector3000.future.easyspace.com is no longer available
hector3000.future.easyspace.com is no longer available "What Is The Best New Testament"Sincerely Yours; Wm Scott Anderson

really? my bible's missing a few books. namely the apocrypha, which you mentioned. before you go off on how it's not inspired, please remember that the catholic church considers it canon.which book of jeremiah does your bible have? there are two -- mostly the same text, but one is arranged differently. that means that probably close to half of the bible in the word contain a rather large edit. even more interesting, is that a bunch of verses are missing from one version. we don't know which came first, either. no, my name, like "jehovah" is a version of the name that comes somewhere in the middle. it is not the oldest spelling, and only went out of common usage 100 years ago. it's a direct parallel, here. especially since people always want to spell my name with a j, when it has no j in it. i've consistently demonstrated that IT IS NOT THE OLDEST FORM. hebrew has no j, and the earliest english bibles DO NOT render the name of the lord, a point you've chosen to ignore. nor is it the most accepted. maybe at your church, but that's not suprising is it?

Hi wmscott I know, and have no dispute that "Jehovah" appears in the KJV. As per Arachophilia's opening post, this translation of the Tetragrammaton is not the only one.(Arachnophilia's) True, so I guess discussion about when a translation includes the translator's bias is peripheral to the topic, so I'll try to keep it short. This is the issue on which we can't seem to agree. Whether or not you can "imagine" Jesus not using the name, IF IT IS NOT IN THE ORIGINAL IT SHOULD NOT BE IN THE TRANSLATION. This looks like an appeal to authority, and I'm not knowledgeable enough in this area to evaluate and/or dispute the material in your links. I have read enough on the web, however, to know that your quote above is not a universally held position. It becomes difficult for me to separate authors which have problems with the NWT based on scholarship to those whose issues are based on their personal beliefs.
So, thanks for your replies and I'll just keep lurking and hopefully, keep learning.Thank you also, Nighttrain and especially Arachnophilia!

(diablo advocati) define "original?"the quotes (and probably much of the story) in matthew, mark, and luke were all copied from the same source. would this source have contained the name of the lord? was this source greek, or was it aramaic? i don't know, and i suspect that no one does.however, the point is that even if the original-original contains the name, as many of the hebrew verses quoted from the tanakh do, the people who copied these quotes and translated them from hebrew all read the vowels from adonay without the consonants from yahweh. i was considering calling it propaganda, but i haven't researched the site extensively. and this is besides the fact that the nwt only passes one of my standard three tests, and incorrectly renders the name of the lord. i would give reading some extended passages a shot, but seeing the name of god incorrectly rendered in english, knowing full well beyond a shadow of a doubt that it based of a simple mistake, well it irks me to no end. hey, no problem. this stuff is fun.

Although I've read with great interest the suggestions that Matthew, Mark and Luke had a single source (called Q for Quelle, is that right?), in this case the original would be the document so identified by the translators of the NWT (who I understand are themselves not identified!) This site quotes the Forward of the 1950 version NWT as follows:"The original writings of the Christian Greek Scriptures, commonly called the New Testament, were inspired. No translation of these Sacred writings into another language, is inspired... The Greek text that we have used as a basis of our NW translation is the widely accepted Wescott and Hort text (1881) by reason of its admitted excellence. But we have also taken in to consideration other texts including that prepared by D. Eberhard Nestle and that compiled by the Spanish Jesuit scholar Jose Maria Bover and that by the other Jesuit scholar A. Merk.."So unless the Greek text contained something that can be correctly translated as "Jehovah", the word should not appear in the NT of the NWT. If course, it is possible that a "Q" document with the Tetragrammaton will be discovered some day, but in the meantime there is no basis for the "restoration" except belief. I understand. As a business analyst, I am often tempted to embellish a communication between sales management and IT with something I KNOW should be included. But it would be dishonest, implying it came from someone other than me. And seeing this done, and JUSTIFIED, with something as important as the Bible, that's what got me going!

Dear Firebird;

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the name, IF IT IS NOT IN THE ORIGINAL IT SHOULD NOT BE IN THE TRANSLATION.

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That is just it, we don't have the original, we can 'reconstruct' them by comparing different copies we do have and weeding out errors by the pattern of appearance. One way of spotting such, is those that appear in later copies, but not earlier manuscripts. In short, there are a number of ways of figuring out what the original verse was. One of those methods is when the NT quotes from the OT, the wording of the NT verse should read like the OT. When God's name was used in that verse in the OT, then it was undoubtably in the NT verse. God's name was systematically removed from the NT a few centuries after the NT was written, unfortunately we do not have any copies that predate that time. Picture Matthew sitting there writing his gospel in Hebrew, using a Hebrew copy of the OT with the Tetragrammaton in a verse that he is quoting from, do you think he replaced God's name with a title?

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As per Arachophilia's opening post, . . . "Yahweh" which is the way hebrew speakers today pronounce the name . . . the English translation of "Jehovah" is based on errors

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Yes the English translation of YHWH is Jehovah and the Hebrew translation is Yahweh. What every it is based on, Jehovah is an English translation, Yahweh is a foreign word that had been taken into the English language. As to whether it will replace 'Jehovah' time will only tell. As for the logic that 'Yahweh' is the only acceptable why of pronouncing God's name, I would point out two holes in this argument,1. then all names in the Bible should be pronounced in Hebrew or Greek,2. Yahweh is probably not the correct pronunciation anyway, it is not certain it is correct and there is evidence pointing towards the Divine Name having three syllables rather than two like Yahweh.All things considered, that is why I favor Jehovah over Yahweh, if someday in the future Yahweh or some other form of the Divine name is more common, then I will use that. Some people miss the point that it is not so important how you pronounce something, as it is that people understand what you say.Sincerely Yours; Wm Scott Anderson

Dear Arachnophilia;

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my bible's missing a few books. namely the apocrypha, which you mentioned. before you go off on how it's not inspired, please remember that the catholic church considers it canon.

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Oh, please, let us not waste time with dumb games, you already know this so there is no point in telling you what you already know.

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which book of jeremiah does your bible have? there are two -- mostly the same text, but one is arranged differently. . . . a bunch of verses are missing from one version. we don't know which came first, either.

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What are you talking about? Do you have the name of the right book? I can't find any reference to a major controversy about there being two difference versions of the book of Jeremiah.

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i've consistently demonstrated that IT IS NOT THE OLDEST FORM. hebrew has no j, and the earliest english bibles DO NOT render the name of the lord, a point you've chosen to ignore.

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Jehovah is the earliest transliteration of the Divine Name in English. "Lord" is not a transliteration of YHWH, it is a title and is not even a name. So let me state it clearly for you, "The earliest transliteration of YHWH into English, that is still in common usage today, is 'Jehovah'. 'Lord' and 'God' are titles and are not personal names, and while many Bible translations use them as a substitute for YHWH, they are not a transliteration of YHWH." Sincerely Yours; Wm Scott Anderson

That it was the earliest transliteration of the divine name, doesn't make it in any sense correct. Lots of things when transliterated into another alphabetical system can go wrong.If you look at what the Gnostics tried, they came up with, amongst other things, IAO, understandable because the Greeks didn't do too well with the /h/ sound (the "he" in Hebrew). Note two things from this, 1) nothing to support the English pronounced "j", but rather the "y", and 2) the vowel after the "I" being an "A". The "O" is a transliteration for the Hebrew letter "waw". So, let's re-insert the /h/s into the transliteration and we get YaHWH.The "j" of "Jehovah" is simply a problem of passing from one orthography to another without compensating. It obviously should be "y". The "v" is another simple problem: it doesn't represent the sound in the original, but the way the sound changed from Hebrew into German influenced Yiddish.Having been around for a long time is no argument for justifying the obviously mistaken English form Jehovah. Amongst other things the second vowel is not justified by Hebrew morphology. Why is the middle vowel there at all? It's unexpected from the Hebrew original. "Jehovah" is just a series of mistakes.English speakers are not renowned for their linguistic ability. This is how we ended up with some awful forms from other languages: Peking, Ceylon, Munich, the Poonjab (as they pronounced it), etc. One normally corrects the errors of the past.But why is there a debate over the pronunciation of the name of God, when those in whose culture the name appeared, long ago stopped pronouncing it, as it was too sacred to say? The Jews, as you know, referred to their god as ha-Shem ("the name") and everyone who adhered to the religion knew exactly what was meant. In ancient manuscripts it was written in Palaeo-Hebrew script to set it apart from the other words, to warn the reader not to pronounce it.The traditional substitution when the Hebrew bible was translated was kurios ("lord") in Greek, dominus ("lord") in Latin, and of course "Lord" in English. Substitution has been the tradition since the second temple period. "Jehovah" is an aberration from that tradition, which doesn't even reflect the original orthographic representation of the name in Hebrew. It does reflect English difficulties in the field of linguistics.The form "Yahweh" is supported by the gnostic evidence; it doesn't make any deviant substitutions for letters in the original consonantal form; and has a much better chance of reflecting a hypothetical original pronunciation.

no, you either misunderstood or you're playing a game of semantics. "original" that sentance meant the source we are translating. and if we don't have a source -- well... do you add "jehovah" to psalm 53?do you add it to all the other references to god as well? what's to stop from drastic reinterpretation of the text, if we're not sticking to strict translation? and yet, in every instance, it does not. i'm not talking just the name of god, read any of matthew's prophetic quotes. non of them line up exactly -- and we shouldn't expect them to. we're translating a greek rendering.and still, the oldest text of the old testament does not contain the name of the lord ANYWHERE. how do you know it wasn't added later, by revisionists just prior to ad 300?you don't really, because you can't. the idea i presented above is equally as valid. if matthew is quoting a bible that just doesn't have god's name in it, we shouldn't expect matthew to either. maybe the name was ADDED centuries after the writing of the nt. let me break this down into two parts.did matthew write in hebrew? matthew was written in GREEK, not hebrew. there is no evidence for it being a translation, although his source material may have been in hebrew.do i think matthew replaced god's name with the title? actually, it would not suprise me. during the time of matthew's writing, the lords name was forbidden to be used except in one specific instance -- copying the tanakh. whether or not matthew thought he was writing a holy book (and i suspect not) it was not a copy of the tanakh, and if matthew was jewish, he wouldn't have used it.however, i doubt matthew was jewish. but he seems have had enough respect for judaic traditions that he would not have used the name of the lord. so, no, i don't think the original matthew would have had god's name in it.

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the English translation of "Jehovah" is based on errors

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mistake. error. it's wrong. yes, and INCORRECTLY. the vowels are wrong, and the first letter is pronounced wrong. listen to yourself the next time you sing hallelujah. how do you say the last syllable? spell it with a j if you like, but that j sounds like a y. i'm ok with that. this is probably true, but it is not reason to choose a LESS CORRECT version. if i had make an uneducated guess at the original version of god's name, the extra syllable would be a "ha" like the one added to abram's name. no, you won't, because you're not now. whatever you say, wham-scoot.This message has been edited by Arachnophilia, 12-16-2004 04:14 AM

it's not a dumb game. different churches use different books. the ethiopian orthodoxy has jubilees in their bible. do you?do you have macabbees? where's the chanukah story?which version of jeremiah does your bible have?people do not all agree on this stuff. because it's not something fundamentalists like to talk about, and the fact that you can't even FIND anything on it really says something about how in the dark you must be about this sort of thing.here's a link that i found in about as long is took me type jeremiah septuagint and masoretic into google. The Skeptical Review » Internet Infidelsthere are two majorly different versions of the text. i think that link neglects to mention that they're also in very different orders. semmantics again. you're point could be stronger, you know. "Jahovah" (with an a) is the ONLY transliteration of way the name is written. there isn't another way to do it.the problem arises in that, as i have said innumerable times in this thread, IT WAS NEVER MEANT TO BE TRANSLITERATED. "Jahovah," although a faithful rendering, is not correct, because the vowels do not belong to the name, they are notation for the title.so, if we want to get away from impersonal titles, we have to discard those letters, and look at the origin of the word (the exodus passage) and the implied vowels of each consonant. the -a-o-a- vowels are the title "LORD" and are not right.but, as i've also clearly shown, the earliest rendering of the name in english is, in fact, lord. now, granted, wycliffe was translating the latin vulgate - which was a translation of the septuagint, which was a translation of some hebrew vorlage.i think the case is that earliest english translation of the masoretic text (one with YHWH in it) is the KJV. of the 6519 times YHWH appears in the text, it translates it "LORD" 6510 times. what does that mean? what are they translating: the whole word, or just the vowels?"jehovah" is an aberation, and occurs in exactly .06% of the instances of YHWH in the kjv text. point-oh-six percent. that's far short of any reasonable margin of error. if i were render the word adonay wrong ONCE that would a 0.2% margin of error, more than 3 times that of yahweh. heck, the kvj renders YHWH as "God" equally as many times, and even you will say that's wrong.so the case for it being a MISTAKE is pretty good. why not render it that way the other 6515 times? why are they translating it "LORD"? could it have anything to do with the vowels of adonay?

Hi, Arach, help me out here. If the Tetragrammaton is too sacred to pronounce, why are so many Jewish names and expressions using the short form 'Yah'? E.g. Elijah, Nehemiah,Netanyahu, Jehosaphat?