HaShem - Yahweh or Jehovah?

it is a fact in some respect. the hebrew tanakh has ALWAYS had the name of the lord in it. the hebrew copies of the bible at the time, the ones jesus would have read, certainly did contain the name. but did the septuagint? i doubt it. the aramaic targums? i don't know, but i think so. i actually agree with the JW on a few points, which i was supprised to notice. i just think the name is wrong.

well, textually we KNOW that original version of psalm 53 did indeed contain the name of god. this is one of those cases in biblical literature that comes very close to being hard fact. we know this because we have psalm 14.my argument is simply that they originated from the same exact poem, but one was altered prior to it's inclusion in that particular book of psalms. that's not an outrageous claim, is it?

i disagree. why bother studying the bible at all if that your view? as human beings, we try to make progress, and come closer to understanding god. new insights into the bible are constantly being made. if we were stuck to understanding only what came before, and only used the oldest translations... well. we wouldn't be using translations at all.we'd all just have to learn hebrew. and then NONE of us would say "Jehovah," we'd all say "adonai." i mean, that IS the oldest and most accepted translation. is that a problem? the y/j problem is by far the most pronounced discrepency (pun intended). you say "Isaac" i say "Yitszak." not a big difference. abraham or ibrahim? nehemiah or nachemyah? jacob or ya'aqov? the unimportant names are really just pronounciations issues. we can let those slide, i think.but jehovah for yahweh? and jesus for yehowshua? those are pretty big distortions, especially considering that they are the two most important figures in the bible. should saying their names right matter? i can. it depends on his particular religious orientation, and how defiant he was of church. suppose i went into your nwt, and switched all the instances of "jehovah" with "yahweh" under the guise of restortion? that is after all what jesus would have been saying, right? and the original authors? why not restore it?the duty of a translator is to accurately render the text's literal meaning, and to properly convey its intent. we can't just go about replacing various godly titles with the name of god. if it's not what the text wrote, don't translate it. you're destroy evidence in support the idea that jesus would not have used god's name. the gospel authors are copying or quoting a document that contains oral quotations by jesus. had he been of the belief that god's name was not to be spoken, we would have said "adonai" in place of it, or the aramaic equivalent, when quoting scripture that contained the name. this would have been recorded, and translated into greek as "kurios." which is what the text says. it's not proof positive that jesus avoided the name, but does support the idea.follow my logic?if that's what happened, than saying jesus spoke the name of god is NOT accurately recording what happened, even if he was quoting scripture. judging from what i've read on here so far, it's not.but here are my impartial translation tests, which i've devised personally to test any copy of the bible i pick up for literal rendering capabilities in spite of dogma: (forgiving the "Jehovah" rendering for a minute)

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Exodus 10:19

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Then Jehovah made a shift to a very stiff west wind, and it carried the locusts away and drove them into the Red Sea.

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literal rendering: sea of reeds. failed.

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Genesis 6:2

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then the sons of the [true] God began to notice the daughters of men, that they were good-looking; and they went taking wives for themselves, namely, all whom they chose.

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literal rendering: sons of gods, or the gods. close, but fails on the insertion of the a word for dogmatic reasons. (haven't seen that one before!)

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Leviticus 16:8

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And Aaron must draw lots over the two goats, the one lot for Jehovah and the other lot for Azazel.

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interesting. passed. (most translate as "scapegoat" incorrectly)now, i haven't read this translation, but those are just the three passages i flip to first to test a translation at a glance. after that, i read the rendering of psalm 23 to get a sense of how it handles poetry (does it put it verse, etc), and the nwt does alright at that. a real opinion can only be gathered by reading large sections at that and seeing how it renders ideas in modern english, but it did fail two of my tests, which alone is enough to make me think twice about it. to be fair, my current favourite edition (JPS) fails one of those, the sons of gods test. but it gets half points for the footnote.in summary, the NWT fails two tests, correctly renders the name of Azazel, understands hebrew poetry, but still incorrectly renders the name of god. so i would say that at first glance, it is a mediocre translation at best.

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.

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.

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?

(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.

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?

lol netanyahu, hadn't tought of that one.if i had to venture a guess, i'd say it's because the names pre-date the tradition of avoiding in the name. every evidence in the bible points to the earlier hebrews having no problems using the name of god, so long as they didn't frivolously throw it around (using the name in vain).it also might have something to with ONLY the name itself being sacred, and not derivitaves of it, like nicknames (ie: yah).

actually, most modern translations use both sources. even my jps masoretic text will use something from the septuagint here and there. i wasn't posting that as a trusted source, i was posting it as a demonstration of what could be found on google in about two seconds. aside from glossing over some things, it failed to mention another fact -- BOTH versions of jeremiah were found at qumran. "whose name is lord" would work too, since names evoke power. you're misunderstanding the point.the name YHWH occurs 6519 times in the masoretic text.
the KVJ translates it "LORD" 6510 times.
the KJV translates it "Jehovah" 4 times.
the KJV translates it "God" 4 times.
the KJV translates it as something else 1 time.i'd tell you what the other one was, but it would take sorting through 5521 verses.

so the nt is imperfect? then i pose the original question again: shouldn't the name matter?

3068 and 3069 are not different words, exactly. remember the original had no vowels, so vowel differences are added by later editors, to avoid repitition. 3068 has the vowels for adonay and 3069 the vowels for elohym, so that when the text says "yhwh yhwh" they would say "lord god" just like when it says "yhwh elhym"both are actually the same name.but i do suppose i made a goof in the stats, by just looking up the strong's reference. however, the idea still stands:the name YHWH occurs 6824 times in the masoretic text.
the KVJ translates it "LORD" 6511 times.
the KJV translates it "Jehovah" 4 times.
the KJV translates it "God" 308 times.
the KJV translates it as something else 1 time.in fact this means that jehovah is statistically a smaller average: .058% instead of .061%. even "god" a literally innaccurate rendering, occurs 4.5% of the time, and we know this one is technically wrong.

yes, it's still statisticaly very small. and still doesn't occur once in my JPS text.