Question by Fr. Sebastian Oppong:
My Lord, the Jehovah’s Witnesses claim that the real name of God is Jehovah and will not accept anything else as the name of God. Please what is the real name of God? Is it Jehovah?
Answer by Bishop Joseph Osei-Bonsu:
Exodus 3:13-15 is the first biblical passage in which God reveals his name. We read in Exodus 3:15, “God also said to Moses, ‘Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’: This is my name forever, and this my title for all generations”. The word translated “LORD” in this passage is YHWH in Hebrew. It is found in other places including Exod 14:21, 24,30;15:1. It is rendered “Yahweh” by some translators including the New Jerusalem Bible. According to Exod 3:15 then, this is the name by which God has chosen to be remembered throughout all generations.
We notice that this name YHWH is made up of four consonants; there is no vowel in it. It is referred to by biblical scholars as the tetragrammaton. This long and intimidating word which comes from Greek simply means “the (divine) name in four letters”. Why does the name not have any vowels and how was it pronounced? We should note that in ancient Hebrew, only the consonants of a text were written, and the vowels were supplied by the fluent reader. The oldest copies of the Hebrew Bible, such as those found in the Dead Sea Scrolls and ancient Hebrew inscriptions, have no markings to indicate the proper pronunciation. God’s name was simply written as YHWH.
After the Babylonian Exile (6th century bce), and especially from the 3rd century bce on, Jews ceased to use the name YHWH for two reasons. First, as Judaism became a universal rather than merely local religion, the more common noun Elohim, meaning “God”, tended to replace YHWH to demonstrate the universal sovereignty of Israel’s God over all others. Second, shortly before the first century A.D., it became common for Jews to avoid saying the divine name for fear of misusing it and breaking the second commandment (“You shall not take the name of the Lord, your God, in vain”, Dt 5:11). Whenever they read Scripture aloud and came across the divine name (YHWH), they substituted another Hebrew word, Adonai (which means “Lord” or “my Lord”), in its place. The word Elohim, “God”, was substituted in cases where Adonai and YHWH were combined in the Old Testament. Though the consonants remained, the original pronunciation was eventually lost.
When manuscript copyists added vowel “points” to the Hebrew text around 900 A.D., the same vowels selected for Adonai (Lord), namely a, o, and ai were given to YHWH. About the 13th century the term “Jehovah” appeared when Christian scholars took the consonants of YHWH and pronounced it with the vowels of Adonai. This resulted in the sound “Yahowah”, which has a Latinized spelling of “Jehovah”. The first recorded use of this spelling was made by a Spanish Dominican monk, Raymundus Martini, in 1270 a.d. This form was disseminated widely by Petrus Galatinus, confessor to Pope Leo X in 1518 a.d. Thus, Latin-speaking Christian scholars substituted the Y (which does not exist in Latin) with an I or a J (the latter of which exists in Latin as a variant form of I). Thus, the divine name YHWH became the artificial Latinized name Jehovah (JeHoWaH).
Interestingly, this fact is admitted in Jehovah’s Witness literature, such as their Aid to Bible Understanding (p. 885). This is surprising because Jehovah’s Witnesses dislike the Catholic Church and have done everything in their power to strip their church of traces of Catholicism. Despite this, their group’s very name contains a Catholic “invention”, the name “Jehovah”.
Although Christian scholars after the Renaissance and Reformation periods used the term Jehovah for YHWH, in the 19th and 20th centuries biblical scholars again began to use the form Yahweh. Indeed, modern Hebrew scholars point to old Greek versions of YHWH which are written as Iabe, Iaoue, Iaouai – all of which push us towards the conclusion that those four Hebrew letters were originally pronounced as Yahweh rather than Jehovah. Early Christian writers, such as St. Clement of Alexandria in the 2nd century, had used a form like Yahweh. The name Iaoue appears in Clement who died about the year 215 A.D. Thus, this pronunciation of the divine name as Yahweh was never really lost. Most English translations now render the divine name as “Lord”, and the conventional pronunciation of YHWH is typically “Yahweh”.
While the hybrid form Jehovah has met much resistance, and is universally regarded as an ungrammatical aberration, it nonetheless passed from Latin into English and other European languages and has been hallowed by usage in hymns and the American Standard Version; it is used only a few times in the King James Version and not at all in the Revised Standard Version.
In this connection, I would like to draw attention to a letter issued by Pope Benedict on 10 August 2008. It is entitled “Letter to the Bishops’ Conferences on the ‘Name of God’” (Prot. N. 213/08/L). It should be noted that the Letter refers to only Yahweh and not Jehovah. The letter states:
1. In liturgical celebrations, in songs and prayers the name of God in the form of the tetragrammaton YHWH is neither to be used or pronounced.
2. For the translation of the Biblical text in modern languages, destined for liturgical usage of the Church, what is already prescribed by n. 41 of the Instruction Liturgiam authenticam is to be followed; that is, the divine tetragrammaton is to be rendered by the equivalent of Adonai/Kyrios: “Lord”, “Signore”, “Seigneur”, “Herr”, “Señor”, etc.
3. In translating, in the liturgical context, texts in which are present, one after the other, either the Hebrew term Adonai or the tetragrammaton YHWH, Adonai is to be translated “Lord” and the form “God” is to be used for the tetragrammaton YHWH, similar to what happens in the Greek translation of the Septuagint and in the Latin translation of the Vulgate.
In conclusion, we can say that the name of God as revealed in the Old Testament is YHWH which is better rendered as Yahweh rather than Jehovah. In terms of the Catholic Church’s liturgical practice, the name Yahweh is not to be used or pronounced. Yahweh is to be rendered by the equivalent of Adonai (Hebrew) or Kyrios (Greek). In English the equivalent will be “Lord”. In those instances where both Adonai and the tetragrammaton YHWH occur one after the other, Adonai is to be translated as “Lord” and YHWH as “God”.
| For further explanations or enquiries, you may contact the author, Most Rev. Joseph Osei-Bonsu, Catholic Bishop of Konongo-Mampong, on this number: 0244488904, or on WhatsApp (with the same number). |