Lord, Language, & Liturgy
Jeff Meyers
In our liturgy we read "Yahweh" when the Hebrew text uses the Tetragrammaton YHWH to refer to God. Most of our English translations continue to translate YHWH as LORD, distinguishing it from the Hebrew word adonay ("lord") by the use of small or large caps formatting. I am convinced that this perpetuates a very unhealthy tradition and makes for a muddled reading of Scripture. It's time to break that tradition and restore the divine covenantal name given to Israel to the public reading of Scripture.
It is better for us to read Yahweh rather than LORD in our translations, Scripture reading, and preaching for these reasons:
1. Yahweh was given to Israel as God's "memorial name" (Exod. 3:15). This personal name of God was revealed to Israel so that they might use it in prayer and thus remind God of his covenant so he would act for them. God's personal name for Israel was not "Lord" but "Yahweh." As Psalm 20 says, "Some trust in chariots and some in horses but we will memorialize the name of Yahweh our God." The name of the God of Israel was not "Lord" or "LORD" but Yahweh.
2. "Lord" is a title not a name. You can make the word "Lord" into all caps, italicize it, bold it, or whatever, but that doesn't change the fact that it means "Master" or "Sir" and is not a name, certainly not God's revealed personal name. So when one translates passages like "Let them praise the name of Yahweh" as "Let them praise the name of the LORD" you muck up the meaning badly. His name is not "Lord" or "LORD" but YHWH.
3. The abbreviation YAH is not replaced with LORD in our English translations. We still say and sing "hallelujah," which means "praise Yah[weh]." Why don't we sing "hallelu-LORD"? Silly, you say? Just as silly as replacing YHWH with Lord. If saying the whole name is so spiritually hazardous, why isn't saying part of the name just as dangerous? But YAH was not even replaced by superstitious Jews who refused to say the whole name for fear of judgment. In addition to Hallelujah we still have all the proper names that include Yahweh in them, like Joshua (Heb: Yah-shua - "Yahweh saves"). The best we can say is this is inconsistent; the worst is that it's evidence of how stupid this superstitious avoidance of the name Yahweh really is.
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4. Later Jews superstitiously refused to vocalize the name. I'll get to when this happened in a moment. But the practice of replacing Yahweh with Lord was an act of rebellion. God gave this name for the Jews to use in memorial prayers, Psalms, and worship. Not using it means that they thought they were wiser than God. This is part and parcel with the Pharisaical "fencing of the law." In order to avoid transgressing the 3rd Word ("taking the name of Yahweh in vain") the wily Pharisaical Jews decided to just avoid the word altogether. And we want to follow that tradition?
5. What modern Jews think about what we do in our translations is irrelevant. This is a red herring anyway because we have enough in our Bibles to madden the Jews as it is. But more importantly, we need to remember that post AD 70 Judaism is a different religion than that practiced by OT believers before Christ. There are no simple "OT believers" around today. Adding Yahweh to our translations wouldn't make a difference at all. The superstitious avoidance of the vocalization of Yahweh didn't become "official" until after the first century AD, probably in response to the Christian argument that Jesus is Yahweh. Even so, why should we coddle them in their superstitious rebellion anyway? It seems to me that the real offense would be to Evangelicals who THINK the Jews would be offended. I doubt very much if most Jews would even bother to sigh.
6. Bible publishers want to make money and making such a widespread change in the way the OT is translated would mean loss of profit because it would be too much of a departure from KJV tradition. Follow the money trail. Bibles are the most profitable product for publishers. Above all, publishers want to make money on their new translations. It's not about accuracy but adding up currency.
7. Isn't it fascinating to learn that the KJV translators had the sense to know that YHWH absolutely needed its own translation in at least four places in the OT.
Ex. 6.3 - "And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name of God Almighty, but by my name JEHOVAH was I not known to them."
Psa. 83.18 - "That men may know that thou, whose name alone is JEHOVAH, art the most high over all the earth."
Is. 12.2 - "Behold, God is my salvation; I will trust, and not be afraid: for the LORD JEHOVAH is my strength and my song; he also is become my salvation."
Is. 26.4 - "Trust ye in the LORD for ever: for in the LORD JEHOVAH is everlasting strength."
Interesting, huh? In Isa. 12:2 and 26:4 they are evidently trying to get the reader to link LORD and JEHOVAH since the Hebrew text has only YHWH and not adonay. Even though that's an odd way to translate these verses, they at least recognized here that one had to alert the reader to the presence of YHWH for a proper understanding of the text. I would argue the same for just about every occurrence of YHWH in the text. What's the difference between these five passages and all the passages in the Psalms that say, "Praise the name of Yahweh"? If you don't put the actually name of Israel's God where it belongs, you end up with a translation that makes a completely different statement than the original.
8. Now here's something you may not know. The old Calvinistic Standard, the 1901 American Standard Version (ASV), is the only version to consistently translate YHWH as Jehovah throughout the entire OT. Check it out. I differ, of course, about the vocalization of Yahweh. It's not "Jehovah," but I would take that any day over the LORD/Lord lunacy we have now. Check out the ASV sometime:
http://www.bible-researcher.com/asv.html
9. The fact that we don't know the precise vocalization doesn't matter. How can this be used as an argument? Just as we say "Jesus" in English instead of the Greek "Iesous," there is no reason not to say Jehovah, Yahweh, Jahve, or something else similar. Getting the exact vocalization right is immaterial. The important thing is that we hear and see the personal, covenantal name of God in the text. From Hebrew, it seems clear that it was sometimes vocalized "yeho" or "yehu" from the names of the kings. So I don't think tonal precision to ancient Hebrew usage has any importance.
10. So what do we do with the fact that "the Jews did not pronounce the name YHWH"? When I read statements like that I ask, "Which Jews?" Too often, when these kinds of statements are made people think of the Jews living during the time of the OT. But there is very little evidence to suggest that Isrealites and later Jews living before the inter-Testamental period consistently practiced this superstition. In fact, there's lots of solid evidence to contradict such speculation.
Doing a little research on this uncovers the fact that the Jews were still pronouncing YHWH at the end of the OT period. Indeed, there is no solid evidence to suggest that the Jews did not pronounce this name at the time of Jesus. Most evidence points to the conclusion that the development of this superstitious avoidance of vocalizing the name of Yahweh comes after the destruction of the Temple. That doesn't mean that nobody was doing it before this time. But the practice doesn't appear to be the official policy of Judaism until after the destruction of the Temple. The superstitious avoidance of Yahweh is associated with the transformation of Judaism into a new religion after the NT period, an extension and intensification of apostate, Pharisaical Judaism.
And what about the Septuagint (LXX) translators? Well, it appears that the writers of the LXX were not yet under the spell of this stupid superstition.
The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology notes: ""Recent textual discoveries cast doubt on the idea that the compilers of the LXX translated the etragrammaton YHWH by kyrios. The oldest LXX MSS (fragments) now available to us have the tetragrammaton written in Heb. characters in the Gk. text. This custom was retained by later Jewish translators of the OT in the first centuries A.D. One LXX MS from Qumram even represents the tetragrammaton by IAO. these instances have given support to the theory that the thorough-going use of kyrios for the tetragrammaton in the text of the LXX was primarily the work of Christian scribes. . . On the other hand, the Jews would have already replaced the tetragrammaton by kyrios in the oral transmission of the Gk. OT text (Vol. 2, p. 512).
"In pre-Christian Greek [manuscripts] of the OT, the divine name was not rendered by 'kyrios' as has often been thought. Usually the Tetragram was written out in Aramaic or in paleo-Hebrew letters. . . . At a later time, surrogates such as 'theos' [God] and 'kyrios' replaced the Tetragram . . . There is good reason to believe that a similar pattern evolved in the NT, i.e. the divine name was originally written in the NT quotations of and allusions to the OT, but in the course of time it was replaced by surrogates" (New Testament Abstracts, March 1977, p. 306).
This, then, raises the question of whether the NT writers really were accommodating themselves to the Jews when they translated YHWH as kyrios. They must have had some other reason for doing it. What might that have been?
Notice that the divine name YHWH was given to Israel. The name of God used by non-Israelite believers was most often "God Most High" or the "Most High God." Just do a concordance search and you'll see this, from Melchizedek in Gen. 14 to King Nebuchadnezzar in Dan. 4. With the exile, however, God does a new thing in the world. He sent the Jews (short for Judahites) into the whole world to be witness for him. They no longer have their own Davidic King. Now they are subject, by God's own decree, to the world emperors of Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome.
This new world order is different than the old tribal and kingdom arrangement of the past. Now God begins a new work of international significance. Of course, this culminates in the work of Jesus and his apostles. I don't have time to go into all the details here. But interestingly, at this time God begins to speak in tongues (non-Hebrew languages), specifically Aramaic. And the name Yahweh is not used in the Aramaic sections of the OT.
It seems best to understand that the name YHWH was given specifically to Israel and the Jews and is particularly associated with the Mosaic and kingdom phases of their history. God is for the Israelites peculiarly Yahweh. The name YHWH is not used in the Aramaic and later in the Greek Scriptures because YHWH is for Israel and the Jews. Yahweh is "the name of the God of Israel" (Ezra 5:1, in Aramaic).
Even if the evidence seems to indicate that the people of God did not use the name Yahweh as much in the exilic and post-exilic period - a time when the kingdom of God expanded to include the world emperors as guardians of his seed people - that does not imply that they refused to say the name Yahweh anymore at all. Writing new things for a new situation is one thing, reading the received Scriptures is something else. In other words, when they read the Torah in their assembly they read Yahweh, but when they wrote and spoke to their Gentile neighbors in the wider world they used more generic titles for the true God.
If the NT writers, continuing the trajectory of the new covenantal arrangement after the exile, did not use the name Yahweh in their translation of OT texts, this does not necessarily imply that they refused to vocalize the world when they read the Scriptures publicly in their services. The revelation of God's name corresponded with the increasing revelation of his character and purposes so that finally God is revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and the specific "memorial name" for worship and prayer is now the name of God incarnate, Jesus.
This does not mean, however, that we should just go back and erase all the previous names of God and put Jesus or Lord in their place. Even if we don't use the name of Yahweh in the same way as the Israelites did, we need to be able to read the Scriptures in such a way that we can learn how that name functioned for them. After all, these things were written for our instruction. If hearers of the Scripture cannot discern the difference between God's personal name and the title "Master/Lord," then they will miss an important dimension of instruction concerning how the people relate to their covenant God.
The bottom line is the LORD/Lord business in English is confusing, especially when heard/sung in church and not simply in one's private reading. Even by making that distinction (LORD/Lord) the translators are conceding the battle. Why even do this? It just raises questions. When people read this odd translation they will look in the margin or in the explanation in front of their Bibles and see "Yahweh" anyway, so why not go the whole nine yards?
Moreover, the distinction is completely lost when the text is publicly read out loud and not just "studied." You see, for liturgical use the modern way of translation utterly fails. Hearers will have no idea when LORD or Lord is being used. Well, this is just par for the course. Not many in our tradition think about corporate/liturgical use when they do these translations. It's all about private reading and study. If we insist on not vocalizing YHWH, then we must at least do something to make the distinction audible in public reading - maybe if we use "Lord" for Yahweh, then "Master" should be used for adonay. At least the distinction could be heard. But again, why go through such linguistic contortions? Why not rather translate the text faithfully and allow God's people to hear and thereby understand the proper difference between the title Lord and the name Yahweh?
In conclusion, for reading the text in Church and for use in study Yahweh should be used. It is, after all, the unique name God revealed to Israel, and to say "by my name LORD I was not known by them" (Ex. 3:15) is grotesque and dangerously misleading.
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