Jehovah () is a Latinization of the Hebrew , one vocalization of the Tetragrammaton (YHWH), the proper name of the God of Israel in the Hebrew BibleOld Testament.The Imperial Bible-Dictionary, Volume 1, p. 856. "Jehovah, on the other hand, the personality of the Supreme is more distinctly expressed. It is every where a proper name, denoting the personal God and him only; whereas Elohim partakes more of the character of a common noun, denoting usually, indeed, but not necessarily nor uniformly, the Supreme. Elohim may be grammatically defined by the article, or by having a suffix attached to it, or by being in construction with a following noun. The Hebrew may say the Elohim, the true God, in opposition to all false gods; but he never says the Jehovah, for Jehovah is the name of the true God only. He says again and again my God; but never my Jehovah, for when he says my God, he means Jehovah. He speaks of the God of Israel, but never of the Jehovah of Israel, for there is no other Jehovah. He speaks of the living God, but never of the living Jehovah, for he cannot conceive of Jehovah as other than living. It is obvious, therefore, that the name Elohim is the name of more general import, seeing that it admits of definition and limitation in these various ways; whereas Jehovah is the more specific and personal name, altogether incapable of limitation." The Tetragrammaton is considered one of the seven names of God in Judaism and a form of God's name in Christianity.
The consensus among scholars is that the historical vocalization of the Tetragrammaton at the time of the redaction of the Torah (6th century BCE) is most likely Yahweh. The historical vocalization was lost because in Second Temple Judaism, during the 3rd to 2nd centuries BCE, the pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton came to be avoided, being substituted with ('my Lord'). The Hebrew vowel points of were added to the Tetragrammaton by the Masoretes, and the resulting form was transliterated around the 12th century CE as Yehowah. The derived form Iehovah first appeared in the 16th century. The form Jehovah began to be printed following a 17th-century development leading J to become a separate letter for printing the consonantal I.
William Tyndale first introduced the vocalization Jehovah for the Tetragrammaton in his translation of Exodus 6:3, and it appears in some other early English translations including the Matthew Bible, the Great Bible, the Bishop's Bible, the Geneva Bible and the King James Version.In the 7th paragraph of Introduction to the Old Testament of the New English Bible, Sir Godfrey Driver wrote, "The early translators generally substituted 'Lord' for [YHWH].[...] The Reformers preferred Jehovah, which first appeared as Iehouah in 1530 A.D., in Tyndale's translation of the Pentateuch (Exodus 6.3), from which it passed into other Protestant Bibles." The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops states that to pronounce the Tetragrammaton "it is necessary to introduce vowels that alter the written and spoken forms of the name (i.e. 'Yahweh' or 'Jehovah')." Jehovah appears in the Old Testament of some widely used translations including the American Standard Version (1901) and Young's Literal Translation (1862, 1899); the New World Translation (1961, 2013) uses Jehovah in both the Old and New Testaments. Jehovah does not appear in most mainstream English translations, some of which use Yahweh but most continue to use "Lord" or "" to represent the Tetragrammaton.
Pronunciation
Most scholars believe the name Jehovah (also transliterated as Yehowah)GOD, NAMES OF – 5. Yahweh (Yahweh) in New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, Vol. XII: Trench – Zwingli Retrieved 19 November 2014. to be a hybrid form derived by combining the Hebrew letters (, later rendered in the Latin alphabet as JHVH) with the vowels of . Some hold that there is evidence that a form of the Tetragrammaton similar to Jehovah may have been in use in Semitic and Greek phonetic texts and artifacts from Late Antiquity.Roy Kotansky, Jeffrey Spier, "The 'Horned Hunter' on a Lost Gnostic Gem", The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 88, No. 3 (July, 1995), p. 318. Quote: "Although most scholars believe "Jehovah" to be a late (c. 1100 CE) hybrid form derived by combining the Latin letters JHVH with the vowels of Adonai (the traditionally pronounced version of יהוה), many magical texts in Semitic and Greek establish an early pronunciation of the divine name as both Yehovah and Yahweh." Others say that it is the pronunciation Yahweh that is testified in both Christian and pagan texts of the early Christian era.Jarl Fossum and Brian Glazer in their article Seth in the Magical Texts (Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphie, 100 (1994), p. 86–92, reproduced here . , give the name "Yahweh" as the source of a number of names found in pagan magical texts: Ἰάβας (p. 88), Iaō (described as "a Greek form of the name of the Biblical God, Yahweh", on p. 89), Iaba, Iaē, Iaēo, Iaō, Iaēō (p. 89). On page 92, they call "Iaō" "the divine name".Kristin De Troyer The Names of God, Their Pronunciation and Their Translation, – lectio difficilior 2/2005. Quote: "IAO can be seen as a transliteration of YAHU, the three-letter form of the Name of God" (p. 6).
Some Karaite Jews, as proponents of the rendering Jehovah, state that although the original pronunciation of has been obscured by disuse of the spoken name according to oral Rabbinic law, well-established English transliterations of other Hebrew personal names are accepted in normal usage, such as Joshua, Jeremiah, Isaiah or Jesus, for which the original pronunciations may be unknown.Dennio, Francis B., "On the Use of the Word Jehovah in Translating the Old Testament", Journal of Biblical Literature 46, (1927), pages 147–148. Dennio wrote: "Jehovah misrepresents Yahweh no more than Jeremiah misrepresents Yirmeyahu. The settled connotations of Isaiah and Jeremiah forbid questioning their right. Usage has given them the connotation proper for designating the personalities with which these words represent. Much the same is true of Jehovah. It is not a barbarism. It has already many of the connotations needed for the proper name of the Covenant God of Israel. There is no word which can faintly compare with it. For centuries it has been gathering these connotations. No other word approaches this name in the fullness [sic] of associations required. The use of any other word falls far short of the proper ideas that it is a serious blemish in a translation." They also point out that "the English form Jehovah is an Anglicized form of Yhovah," and preserves the four Hebrew consonants "YHVH" (with the introduction of the "J" sound in English known as the voiced postalveolar affricate).Carl D. Franklin – Debunking the Myths of Sacred Namers יהוה – Christian Biblical Church of God – December 9, 1997 – Retrieved 25 August 2011. Some argue that Jehovah is preferable to Yahweh, based on their conclusion that the Tetragrammaton was likely tri-syllabic originally, and that modern forms should therefore also have three syllables.George Wesley Buchanan, "How God's Name Was Pronounced," Biblical Archaeology Review, 21.2 (March–April 1995), pp. 31–32.
In an article he wrote in the Journal of Biblical Literature, Biblical scholar Francis B. Dennio said: "Jehovah misrepresents Yahweh no more than Jeremiah misrepresents Yirmeyahu. The settled connotations of Isaiah and Jeremiah forbid questioning their right." Dennio argued that the form Jehovah is not a barbarism, but is the best English form available, being that it has for centuries gathered the necessary connotations and associations for valid use in English.
According to a Jewish tradition developed during the 3rd to 2nd centuries BCE, the Tetragrammaton is written but not pronounced. When read, substitute terms replace the divine name where () appears in the text. It is widely assumed, as proposed by the 19th-century Hebrew scholar Wilhelm Gesenius, that the vowels of the substitutes of the name— (Lord) and (God)—were inserted by the Masoretes to indicate that these substitutes were to be used. When precedes or follows , the Masoretes placed the vowel points of into the Tetragrammaton, producing a different vocalization of the Tetragrammaton (), which was read as .For example, , (second instance), (second instance), Based on this reasoning, the form () has been characterized by some as a "hybrid form",R. Laird Harris, "The Pronunciation of the Tetragram," in John H. Skilton (ed.), The Law and the Prophets: Old Testament Studies Prepared in Honor of Oswald Thompson Allis (Presbyterian and Reformed, 1974), p. 224. and even "a philological impossibility".
Early modern translators disregarded the practice of reading (or its equivalents in Greek and Latin, and ) in place of the Tetragrammaton and instead combined the four Hebrew letters of the Tetragrammaton with the vowel points that, except in synagogue scrolls, accompanied them, resulting in the form Jehovah. This form, which first took effect in works dated 1278 and 1303, was adopted in Tyndale's and some other Protestant translations of the Bible.In the 7th paragraph of Introduction to the Old Testament of the New English Bible, Sir Godfrey Driver wrote of the combination of the vowels of Adonai and Elohim with the consonants of the divine name, that it "did not become effective until Yehova or Jehova or Johova appeared in two Latin works dated in A.D. 1278 and A.D. 1303; the shortened Jova (declined like a Latin noun) came into use in the sixteenth century. The Reformers preferred Jehovah, which first appeared as Iehouah in 1530 A.D., in Tyndale's translation of the Pentateuch (Exodus 6.3), from which it passed into other Protestant Bibles." In the 1560 Geneva Bible, the Tetragrammaton is translated as Jehovah six times, four as the proper name, and two as place-names.The Geneva Bible uses the form "Jehovah" in Exodus 6:3, Psalm 83:18, Jeremiah 16:21, Jeremiah 32:18, Genesis 22:14, and Exodus 17:15. In the 1611 King James Version, Jehovah occurred seven times.At Genesis 22:14; Exodus 6:3; 17:15; Judges 6:24; Psalm 83:18, Isaiah 12:2; 26:4. Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (Iowa Falls: Word, 1994), p. 722. In the 1885 English Revised Version, the form Jehovah occurs twelve times. In the 1901 American Standard Version the form "Je-ho'vah" became the regular English rendering of the Hebrew , all throughout, in preference to the previously dominant "the ", which is generally used in the King James Version. It is also used in Christian hymns such as the 1771 hymn, "Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah".The original hymn, without "Jehovah", was composed in Welsh in 1745; the English translation, with "Jehovah", was composed in 1771 (Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah ).
Development The most widespread theory is that the Hebrew term has the vowel points of ().Paul Joüon and T. Muraoka. A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew (Subsidia Biblica). Part One: Orthography and Phonetics. Rome: Editrice Pontificio Istituto Biblio, 1996. . Quote from Section 16(f)(1) "The Qre is יְהֹוָה the Lord, whilst the Ktiv is probably(1) יַהְוֶה (according to ancient witnesses)." "Note 1: In our translations, we have used Yahweh, a form widely accepted by scholars, instead of the traditional Jehovah." Using the vowels of , the composite () under the guttural () becomes a () under the (), the () is placed over the first (), and the () is placed under the (), giving (). When the two names, and , occur together, the former is pointed with a () under the () and a () under the second (), giving , to indicate that it is to be read as in order to avoid being repeated.