What is the personal Name of God himself according to the Jewish scriptures? The answer to this
question is fascinating and we can explore in detail in this great book The Bible: A Historical
and Literary Introduction by Bart Ehrman. This is as I said before many times probably the best
single work on the market in English that can give you a good academic introduction to the historical
and literary aspects of the Bible rather than seeing it as a devotional work, the word
of God. It sees it as an historical text. I’m just trying to understand it in its context.
So, I’m just going to read a bit from this which explains the personal Name of God and then
offer a few comments on the translations today that we have and the problems they've
experienced quite recently in getting this quite right. So, Bart Ehrman says on page 54
God is called by many names in the Bible including Lord, God, Lord God, God almighty, God the king
and lord God of hosts but there is one term used of God that appears to have been thought of by
ancient Israelites as his actual personal name in English this is often given as Yahweh Y A H W E H
based on the Hebrew word Y H W H. Ancient Hebrew like ancient Arabic did not have vowels
only consonants and so we do not actually know how the word was pronounced though Yahweh is a good
guess so this is a guess. We don't know actually how the word was pronounced anymore because this
special name of God consists of four letters it is sometimes referred to as the tetragrammaton.
It's a Greek word meaning literally the four letters tetra meaning for grammatical meaning word
because God himself was thought to be so holy it eventually came to be considered improper or even
blasphemous to call him by his personal name and so, when ancient Jews read the scriptures out loud
and came to the tetragrammaton instead of pronouncing it
they would say instead the word Adonai a a-d-o-n-a-i which is a Hebrew word for LORD.
That is why even today English translations as a rule, do not give the personal name of
God as Yahweh when it occurs as it does thousands of times in the Hebrew Bible.
But instead translate it as LORD with big capital letters to differentiate it from the
translation of Adonai as lord. Now this is slightly inaccurate. There are modern translations that do
translate as Yahweh and I’ll come to that in a minute there's a fascinating story behind this .
By the 7th or 8th century BC Jewish scribes added vowels to the text of the Hebrew Bible much as
people added vowels to the Arabic text of the Quran, actually that's me not by Ehrman by the
Way, in part to make it easier to read in both cases but to make sure that the ancient readers
of the biblical text did not inadvertently say the name Yahweh. When they came to it, they provided it
with the vowels that went instead with the word Adonai. This combination of consonants
and vowels was very difficult to pronounce and so readers would be alerted to the divine name
and would simply speak it as Adonai. It was this strange conglomeration of consonants and vowels
keeping the consonants of the tetragrammaton but using the vowels of the word Adonai
that led to the invention of a new word in English Jehovah. Jehovah because j h v h is the
English equivalent of y h w h and of course then we have Jehovah’s witnesses and this is a new word .
It's not found in any biblical text. It is an English word invented by this conglomeration of Yahweh
and Adonai so it's not an authentic original religious term at all. So coming back to Yahweh now
virtually all modern translations do not use the word Yahweh. This is true but some
do and the most famous of all is this one this is the New Jerusalem Bible and it's an official
production of the Roman Catholic church itself. So, this is not just any old translation this is
the official translation. It's a study Bible and has lots of wonderful notes at the bottom.
Just to give you an example in Psalm 23 the famous you know “the Lord is my shepherd” Psalm here
In this translation it says “Yahweh is my shepherd I lack nothing. In grassy meadows he lets me lie”
Yahweh is my shepherd. So, this does have, if you can see that, this does have Yahweh in it. In this
highly prestigious and academically excellent translation. So what's the problem with that? Well
this translation was revised recently, the last year or two. This is the Revised
New Jerusalem Bible, exactly the same publisher. It's the official publication of the Catholic church
and in the forward to this it says something fascinating.
It talks about some of the changes that have been made to the translation
and it says this soon after his election as Pope, Benedict XVI who is still alive of course but he's
Emeritus, he's retired. He was approached by the Chief Rabbi of Rome who said that the
use of a possible vocalization of the divine name was offensive to the Jews. Pope Benedict
submitted the matter to the Pontifical Biblical Commission and they recommended the use of LORD
with small capitals for Yahweh, a suggestion which the pope accepted, so they've dropped the use of
this word now in their translation and if we look at Psalm 23 the same Psalm, I read just now
it says: “The LORD is my shepherd. There is nothing I shall want”. So, this is exactly the same translation
but there now which you probably can't see, maybe you can, instead of Yahweh, they've translated it
as LORD because the Chief Rabbi of Rome protested to the pope himself that this word Yahweh was
offensive because it is a blasphemy for them to hear this word just used all the time, even though
it is actually in the in the Hebrew scripture itself. So, the Revised Jerusalem Bible has
backed down and no longer has the word Yahweh. So, there really are very, very few just very
small little translations that aren't really the mainstream ones that might have that. You can
look it up on Google but this is this according to the Jewish Bible is the personal name of God.
Jews don't utter it anymore. We don't really know how it's pronounced because it's fallen out of use
ages ago. Probably a couple of thousand years ago, it fell out
of use but I thought that was an interesting story. I just wanted to share that with you. Till next time.