Jehovah, the Divine Name in the Bible Text and Canon

Introduction

The personal name of God stands at the centre of the Hebrew Scriptures. Written with the four Hebrew consonants יהוה (YHWH), and therefore known to scholars as the Tetragrammaton, it occurs in the Hebrew text nearly 7,000 times, far more often than any title such as "God" or "Lord".¹ In English the name has been rendered for more than four centuries as "Jehovah". This article traces the place of the divine name in the Bible from its first appearances in the text, through its preservation in Hebrew manuscripts and in the earliest copies of the Greek Septuagint, to the later custom of replacing it with titles, the emergence of the form "Jehovah" in Latin and English, and the modern discussion of whether the name belongs in translations of the Greek Scriptures. The account is written from the standpoint of this site, which regards the Bible as the inspired word of God and uses the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures as its principal translation.²

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The Name in the Hebrew Scriptures

Frequency and Distribution

Every book of the Hebrew Scriptures contains the divine name except Ecclesiastes, Esther and the Song of Solomon, and even the Song of Solomon contains the shortened form "Jah" in many manuscripts at Song of Solomon 8:6.¹ The name is especially frequent in the Psalms, in the prophetic books and in the narrative of the Pentateuch. Printed critical editions based on the Leningrad Codex count about 6,800 occurrences of the full form, and the shortened form "Jah" (יה) appears about fifty times more, including in the familiar expression of praise "Hallelujah", which means "Praise Jah".¹³ The appendix to the New World Translation observes that the name appears some 700 times in the book of Psalms alone, a book of poetic writings that were to be sung and recited by God's people.¹

These figures matter because they show how deeply the name is embedded in the text. It is not confined to a few solemn passages. It appears in ordinary narrative, in law, in prayer and in prophecy. Abraham calls on it (Genesis 12:8), Moses hears it explained (Exodus 3:15), Israel is commanded not to treat it in a worthless way (Exodus 20:7), the psalmist declares that God alone bears it (Psalm 83:18), and the prophets repeatedly attach it to their messages with the formula "This is what Jehovah says".¹ By comparison, the Hebrew title ʼElohim ("God") occurs about 2,600 times and the title ʼAdhohn or ʼAdhonai ("Lord") a few hundred times, so the personal name is used more frequently than all the titles of God combined.⁴

A Name Rather Than a Title

The writers of the Hebrew Scriptures used the name as a proper noun, in the same way as they used the names of people and places. Titles describe a position or a quality; a name identifies a person. The distinction is clear in passages that place the two side by side. At Isaiah 42:8, God says, "I am Jehovah. That is my name; I give my glory to no one else." The prophet Jeremiah records the promise that the nations "will have to know that my name is Jehovah" (Jeremiah 16:21). The repeated phrase in Ezekiel, "and you will have to know that I am Jehovah", occurs more than fifty times, and its purpose is to connect the events foretold with the God who announces them.⁴

For this reason Jehovah's Witnesses, together with many scholars of different backgrounds, regard the presence of the name as part of the message of the Bible rather than as a detail of wording. The appendix to the New World Translation points out that, while the inspired writers refer to God by many titles and descriptive terms, such as "Almighty", "Most High" and "Lord", the Tetragrammaton is the only personal name they use to identify him.¹ Removing it from a translation obscures the distinction between the true God and the many gods and lords of the ancient world. The text itself encourages this relationship: "Those who know your name will trust in you" (Psalm 9:10), and "Everyone who calls on the name of Jehovah will be saved" (Joel 2:32).

Ancient Witnesses outside the Bible

Archaeology confirms that the name was in common use in ancient Israel and was known to Israel's neighbours. The Mesha Stele, also called the Moabite Stone, was set up about 840 BCE by Mesha, king of Moab, whose rebellion against Israel is described at 2 Kings 3:4–5. In line 18 of its inscription Mesha boasts that he took "the vessels of YHWH" from the Israelite town of Nebo and dragged them before his god Chemosh. The stone is now in the Louvre and is regarded as the earliest certain reference to the Tetragrammaton outside the Bible.⁵ This site has discussed the inscription in more detail in its article on the Mesha Stele and the Moabite Stone.

The name also appears in letters written on potsherds. The Lachish letters, written in the early sixth century BCE when Babylonian forces were advancing on Judah, use oaths such as "As YHWH lives" and greetings such as "May YHWH cause my lord to hear tidings of peace".⁶ The Arad ostraca from the southern frontier of Judah contain similar blessings. Personal names compounded with the divine name, such as those ending in -yahu, are found on seals and seal impressions of the same period. Taken together, these finds show that the name was not a secret word reserved for priests but part of everyday speech and correspondence.

The two small silver scrolls found in 1979 at Ketef Hinnom, just outside the Old City of Jerusalem, are of special importance for the history of the Bible text. Dated to the late seventh or early sixth century BCE, they contain a form of the priestly blessing recorded at Numbers 6:24–26, with the name YHWH clearly incised: "May YHWH bless you and keep you; may YHWH make his face shine upon you." They are the oldest known objects bearing words that also appear in the Hebrew Scriptures, and they show the name at the heart of a biblical text centuries before the Dead Sea Scrolls.⁷ A fuller account appears in this site's article on the Ketef Hinnom scrolls.

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The Meaning of the Name

The Revelation to Moses

The most extended explanation of the name in the Bible occurs at Exodus 3:13–15. Moses, commissioned to return to Egypt and lead Israel out of slavery, asks what he should answer if the people ask the name of the God who sent him. God replies, in the rendering of the New World Translation, "I Will Become What I Choose to Become", and adds, "This is what you are to say to the Israelites, 'I Will Become has sent me to you.'" He then says, "This is what you are to say to the Israelites, 'Jehovah the God of your forefathers, 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 is how I am to be remembered from generation to generation."⁸

The Hebrew expression in verse 14, ʼehyeh ʼasher ʼehyeh, has been translated in several ways. Older English versions such as the King James Version render it "I AM THAT I AM", following the Greek Septuagint, which translated it egō eimi ho ōn, "I am the one who is". Many modern scholars point out that the Hebrew verb hayah describes not abstract existence but becoming, happening or proving to be, and that the imperfect form used here naturally refers to continuing or future action. The New World Translation therefore renders the phrase "I Will Become What I Choose to Become", and its appendix explains that the words reveal an aspect of God's personality, "showing that he becomes what is needed in each circumstance to fulfill his purpose."⁸¹

Verse 15 connects this explanation with the name itself. The phrase "I Will Become" (ʼehyeh) is the first person of the verb, God speaking about himself, while the name YHWH is generally understood as a related form of the same root, the way the name would be expressed by others speaking about him. The verse closes with the statement that this is God's name "forever" and his "memorial" or way of being remembered "from generation to generation". The wording leaves no suggestion that the name was intended to fall out of use.

He Causes to Become

Scholars have long debated the precise grammatical form of the Tetragrammaton. One widely held view, discussed in the appendix to the New World Translation, is that the name is a causative form of the verb hawah (an older form of hayah), meaning "He Causes to Become". Understood in this way, the name presents Jehovah not only as the Creator who brought all things into being but as the one who causes his purposes to come about and who becomes, or causes his creation to become, whatever is required to accomplish them.¹ Whichever grammatical analysis is preferred, the scriptural setting of Exodus 3 links the name with God's faithfulness to his promises. He had made promises to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and now he would fulfil them by delivering their descendants.

Knowing the Name

A related passage, Exodus 6:2–3, has sometimes been read as saying that the patriarchs did not know the name at all. Yet Genesis records that Abraham used it, and that it was known as early as the days of Enosh (Genesis 4:26). The New World Translation renders the second half of verse 3, "but with regard to my name Jehovah I did not make myself fully known to them." The point is that the patriarchs knew the name but had not yet seen the full meaning of it demonstrated in the great acts of deliverance that followed at the Exodus.⁸ In biblical usage, to know a name often means to know the person and his reputation, and the events of the Exodus gave the name a new depth of meaning for Israel (Exodus 9:16).

The Pronunciation of the Name

Because ancient Hebrew was written without vowels, the exact pronunciation of YHWH cannot be established with certainty. Many scholars favour "Yahweh", a reconstruction based partly on Greek transcriptions in some early Christian writers and partly on the short form "Jah" and on names such as Jehoshaphat and Jehonathan, which begin with Yeho- or Yo-. Others note that such reconstructions are themselves uncertain.⁹ The appendix to the New World Translation explains that "Jehovah" has been retained because it is the form long established in English, in the same way that English speakers say "Jesus" rather than Yeshua, the form his Jewish disciples probably used. It quotes the scholar A. F. Kirkpatrick, who wrote in 1930 that "JEHOVAH seems firmly rooted in the English language, and the really important point is not the exact pronunciation, but the recognition that it is a Proper Name, not merely an appellative title like 'Lord.'"¹ The more important question, from the standpoint of the Bible writers, is not the precise sound of each syllable but whether the name is used and honoured at all.

The Name in Hebrew Personal Names

The importance of the divine name in ancient Israel can also be seen in the personal names that parents gave their children. Many Hebrew names contain a shortened form of the name, either at the beginning as Yeho- or Yo-, or at the end as -yah or -yahu. Scholars call such names theophoric, meaning that they carry the name of a god within them.¹⁰ Jehoshaphat means "Jehovah Has Judged", Jonathan means "Jehovah Has Given", Isaiah means "Salvation of Jehovah", and Elijah means "My God Is Jehovah". The name Jesus itself is the Greek form of the Hebrew Jeshua or Joshua, which means "Jehovah Is Salvation" (Matthew 1:21).¹⁰

Such names were not empty labels. They were often statements of faith, and the Scriptures sometimes draw attention to their meaning. When Moses renamed Hoshea the son of Nun, he called him Joshua, adding the short form of the divine name to a name that meant "salvation" (Numbers 13:16). The prophet Elijah, whose name declared that Jehovah was his God, stood on Mount Carmel and challenged the people to decide whether Jehovah or Baal was the true God (1 Kings 18:21, 1 Kings 18:39). The account gives a vivid picture of a man whose name and message were the same.

Theophoric names also supply historical evidence. Hebrew seals, seal impressions and inscriptions from the period of the kings contain large numbers of names ending in -yahu, and the Lachish letters from the early sixth century BCE contain several such names alongside the divine name itself.¹¹ The pattern shows that the name was familiar to ordinary people and was used in daily life, not only in temple worship or in sacred writings. It also helps scholars in discussing how the name was pronounced, since the short forms preserved in personal names show the vowels that were in common use.¹²

The same evidence highlights a contrast with the later period. As the custom of avoiding the name grew, new compositions stopped using it, yet the old names that contained it continued to be given and read. A Jew of the first century who would not pronounce the divine name could still be called John, which means "Jehovah Has Shown Favour", or Zechariah, which means "Jehovah Has Remembered" (Luke 1:13). In this way the name continued to be heard in a hidden form even when it had disappeared from ordinary speech.

The Name in the Psalms and Prophets

The divine name is especially frequent in the books used in worship and in prophecy. The Psalms, which were sung by the people of Israel, contain the name hundreds of times, and many psalms call on worshippers to praise it directly. The expression "Hallelujah", which survives in many languages, is a call to "Praise Jah", using the short form of the name (Psalm 104:35, Revelation 19:1).¹³ Psalm 83:18 states that the name belongs to the Most High over all the earth (Psalm 83:18).

The prophets used the name in the expression "This is what Jehovah says", which introduces their messages again and again. The expression stressed that the words were not the prophets' own but came from the God who had made himself known to Israel by name (Jeremiah 2:2). In the book of Ezekiel, the phrase "you will have to know that I am Jehovah" appears dozens of times, presenting the fulfilment of prophecy as the means by which people would come to know the person behind the name (Ezekiel 38:23). The prophets thus treated the name not as a word to be hidden but as the centre of their message.

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The Name in the Dead Sea Scrolls

The Discoveries at Qumran

Between 1947 and 1956, the caves near Khirbet Qumran on the north-western shore of the Dead Sea yielded the remains of some nine hundred scrolls, about a quarter of them copies of books of the Hebrew Scriptures. Most were written between the third century BCE and the first century CE, and they are therefore more than a thousand years older than the medieval codices on which printed Hebrew Bibles had previously depended.¹⁴ The scrolls are a direct witness to how Jewish scribes of the Second Temple period treated the divine name, and the evidence shows both reverence and variety.

Square Script and Paleo-Hebrew

In most biblical scrolls from Qumran the Tetragrammaton is written in the same square Aramaic script, the ancestor of modern Hebrew letters, as the rest of the text. The Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaᵃ), copied in the second century BCE, writes the name hundreds of times in this way and occasionally shows scribal corrections in which the name has been added above the line or substituted for a title.¹⁵ Such corrections indicate that scribes were attentive to the name and sought to preserve it where it belonged.

In a number of other manuscripts, however, the scribes wrote the divine name in the older paleo-Hebrew alphabet, the angular script used in Israel and Judah before the Babylonian exile, while writing the surrounding text in the square script. The best-known example is the Psalms Scroll from Cave 11 (11QPsᵃ), in which the name stands out clearly in its archaic letters throughout the columns.¹⁶ The Habakkuk Commentary (1QpHab) does the same when quoting the biblical text, and the practice occurs in several other Qumran manuscripts, both biblical and non-biblical.¹⁷ Emanuel Tov, the editor-in-chief of the Dead Sea Scrolls publication project, lists some two dozen texts that write the name in paleo-Hebrew letters and observes that the practice was intended to set the name apart and to protect it from erasure.¹⁸

The use of the old script was a mark of respect, not a sign that the name was being hidden. The name remained in the text, in its own letters, where every reader of the scroll would see it. In some non-biblical compositions written by the Qumran community itself, the scribes went further and replaced the name with four dots, or with a title such as ʼEl, which suggests that a growing reluctance to write the name in new compositions coexisted with careful preservation of the name in copies of the inspired books.¹⁸

What the Scrolls Show

The scrolls therefore provide clear evidence that, in the period when the Greek Scriptures were being written, Jewish copies of the Hebrew Scriptures contained the divine name. Readers in the synagogues of Judea, and Jesus himself when he read from the scroll of Isaiah at Nazareth (Luke 4:16–21), would have seen the name in the text before them. The passage Jesus read, Isaiah 61:1–2, contains the name twice: "The spirit of the Sovereign Lord Jehovah is upon me, because Jehovah anointed me."¹⁹ Whatever the custom of pronunciation at the time, the written word that Jesus and his disciples regarded as Scripture included the name.

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The Name in the Early Greek Septuagint

The Origin of the Septuagint

The Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures begun in Alexandria in the third century BCE for the large Greek-speaking Jewish community of Egypt. According to the tradition preserved in the Letter of Aristeas, the Pentateuch was translated first, and the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures followed over the next two centuries.²⁰ The Septuagint became the Bible of Greek-speaking Jews and later of the early Christian congregations, and many quotations of the Hebrew Scriptures in the Greek Scriptures agree with its wording. This site's article on the Septuagint and the Letter of Aristeas describes its origins.

For centuries scholars assumed, on the basis of the great Christian codices of the fourth and fifth centuries, that the Septuagint had always rendered the divine name with the Greek word Kyrios ("Lord"). Discoveries of the twentieth century challenged that assumption. The appendix to the New World Translation notes that the surviving Greek manuscripts copied by Jews before the end of the first century CE, where they preserve a place at which the name occurred, show the name itself in some form rather than Kyrios.¹²¹

Papyrus Fouad 266

The most striking example is Papyrus Fouad Inventory 266, a collection of fragments of a papyrus scroll of Genesis and Deuteronomy found in Egypt and dated to the first century BCE. The fragments of Deuteronomy, catalogued as Rahlfs 848, are among the oldest surviving manuscripts of the Septuagint.²² In the middle of the Greek text, at every place where the Hebrew original has the divine name, the scribe wrote the Tetragrammaton in square Hebrew letters: יהוה. The name occurs more than thirty times in the surviving fragments, from Deuteronomy 18 onwards, and is visible in the fragment of Deuteronomy 31:28–30 and Deuteronomy 32:3.²²

Close study of the papyrus has shown that the original Greek scribe left blank spaces where the name was to stand, marked with a raised dot on each side, and that the Hebrew letters were added afterwards, apparently by a second scribe who was competent to write them.¹⁸²² Some scholars, notably Albert Pietersma, argued that the Hebrew letters were part of a revision bringing the Greek closer to the Hebrew, and that the earliest Septuagint translators had used Kyrios.²³ Others, including Paul Kahle and Patrick Skehan, argued that the use of the Hebrew name in Greek manuscripts reflects the original practice of Jewish translators, and that Kyrios was a later substitution.²¹²⁴ For the purposes of this article the essential point is beyond dispute: in the generation before Jesus, Jewish copies of the Greek Septuagint wrote the divine name itself.

The Nahal Hever Twelve Prophets Scroll

A second key witness was found in 1952 in the Cave of Horror in Nahal Hever, a canyon in the Judean Desert south of Qumran. The scroll, designated 8HevXIIgr, is a Greek translation of the twelve minor prophets, copied in the late first century BCE or early first century CE.²⁵ Its text represents a revision of the Septuagint toward the Hebrew, known to scholars as the kaige recension. In this scroll the divine name is written not in square Hebrew letters but in paleo-Hebrew, within the Greek text, in the surviving portions of Jonah, Micah, Habakkuk, Zephaniah and Zechariah.²⁵ Two different scribes worked on the scroll, and both wrote the name in the archaic letters. This site has described the scroll in its article on the Nahal Hever Greek Minor Prophets scroll and the kaige recension.

Other Greek Fragments

Other early Greek manuscripts confirm the pattern. A Greek fragment of Leviticus from Qumran Cave 4 (4Q120) renders the name with the Greek letters ΙΑΩ (Iaō), a transcription of a short form of the name.¹⁸ A papyrus of Job from Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, P.Oxy. 3522, dated to the first century CE, preserves the Tetragrammaton in paleo-Hebrew letters at Job 42:11.²⁶ A papyrus of Genesis from Oxyrhynchus, P.Oxy. 1007, of the third century CE, represents the name with a doubled Hebrew yod, an abbreviation used in Jewish practice.²⁶ None of these manuscripts uses Kyrios for the name. The evidence of the earliest Jewish copies is uniform in its basic feature, even though the way of writing the name varied.

Aquila, Symmachus and the Hexapla

In the second century CE, Jewish translators produced new Greek versions of the Hebrew Scriptures. Aquila of Sinope, a proselyte to Judaism, made an extremely literal translation about 130 CE. Fragments of his version of Kings and Psalms, written on palimpsest leaves of the fifth or sixth century and recovered from the Cairo Genizah, were published by F. C. Burkitt in 1897 and C. Taylor in 1900. In them the divine name is written in paleo-Hebrew letters in the midst of the Greek text.²⁷ A fragment of the version of Symmachus, another second-century translator, preserved in Vienna, also writes the name in paleo-Hebrew characters.²⁶

The Christian scholar Origen of Alexandria compiled in the third century CE the Hexapla, a vast edition setting the Hebrew text beside several Greek versions in parallel columns. Later fragments of the Hexapla, including a palimpsest of the Psalms in Milan, show the Tetragrammaton in Hebrew letters in the Greek columns.²⁸ Origen himself remarked that in the most accurate manuscripts the name was written in Hebrew characters, and in the late fourth century Jerome stated in his preface to the books of Samuel and Kings that "we find the four-lettered name of God (that is, יהוה) in certain Greek volumes even to this day expressed in the ancient letters."²⁸²⁹ This site's article on the Hexapla of Origen gives further detail.

The Appearance of Kyrios

The great Christian codices of the Greek Bible, Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus of the fourth century and Codex Alexandrinus of the fifth, render the divine name with Kyrios or occasionally Theos ("God"), usually written in abbreviated form as one of the nomina sacra, a system of contracted sacred names marked with a line above the letters.³⁰ By the time these manuscripts were made, the copying of the Greek Bible had passed largely into Christian hands, and the custom of replacing the name had become established. The contrast between these codices and the earlier Jewish manuscripts suggests that the replacement of the name in Greek copies came about during the second and third centuries CE.

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From Pronunciation to Substitution

The Growth of a Custom

The Hebrew Scriptures themselves contain no command forbidding the pronunciation of the divine name. On the contrary, they record faithful servants of God using it freely in speech, in greetings and in oaths. Boaz greets his harvest workers with the words "Jehovah be with you", and they answer, "Jehovah bless you" (Ruth 2:4). The command at Exodus 20:7 not to "take up the name of Jehovah your God in a worthless way" prohibits misuse of the name, not its use.¹

At some point during the Second Temple period, however, a custom arose among Jews of avoiding the pronunciation of the name outside the temple. The reasons are not fully documented, but they appear to have included a desire to avoid any possibility of misusing the name, and perhaps the influence of Greek philosophical ideas that God was nameless and beyond human description. The Mishnah, compiled about 200 CE, reports the view of Abba Saul that one who "pronounces the name according to its letters" has no share in the world to come (Sanhedrin 10:1), and it describes the high priest pronouncing the name on the Day of Atonement while the people fell on their faces (Yoma 6:2).³¹ By the early centuries of the Common Era, therefore, it had become customary when reading the Scriptures aloud to say ʼAdonai ("Lord") where the text had YHWH, or ʼElohim ("God") where ʼAdonai stood next to the name.

Written but Not Spoken

It is important to distinguish the custom of reading from the history of the written text. Jewish scribes did not remove the Tetragrammaton from the Hebrew Scriptures. They continued to copy it with exceptional care, and the laws for writing a Torah scroll treated the divine names with special rules: a scribe was to sanctify himself before writing the name, was not to interrupt the writing of the name once begun, and could not erase it if he made an error.³² The rules collected in the tractate Soferim and in medieval works such as the one described in this site's article on Meiri's Kiryat Sefer and the laws of writing a Torah scroll show the seriousness with which this duty was taken.

Jewish tradition also records that the early scribes, the Soferim, altered the text in a small number of places. Masoretic notes list 134 places where the scribes are said to have changed YHWH to ʼAdonai, and translators who wish to follow the original text closely have taken these lists into account.³³ The related tradition of the tiqqune soferim, the eighteen "corrections of the scribes", is discussed in this site's article on the tiqqune soferim.

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The Masoretes and the Vowel Points

The Work of the Masoretes

Between about the sixth and tenth centuries CE, groups of Jewish scholars known as the Masoretes, working chiefly in Tiberias in Galilee and in Babylonia, developed systems of signs to record the traditional pronunciation and cantillation of the Hebrew text. Until then the text had consisted of consonants only, and the correct reading had been passed on orally. The Masoretes added vowel points, accents and an extensive body of marginal notes, the Masorah, that counted words and letters and recorded unusual forms.³⁴ Their work culminated in the great codices of the Ben Asher school, including the Aleppo Codex of about 930 CE and the Leningrad Codex of 1008 or 1009 CE, the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Scriptures and the basis of most modern printed editions.

A Perpetual Qere

The Masoretes faced a difficulty with the Tetragrammaton. They would not alter the consonants of the sacred text, yet the reading tradition they were recording did not pronounce the name. Their solution was to treat the name as a special case of the system known as ketiv and qere, "what is written" and "what is read". Ordinarily, where the reading tradition differed from the written text, the Masoretes left the consonants unchanged, placed the vowels of the word to be read under them, and wrote the consonants of the reading in the margin. For the divine name, which occurred so often, no marginal note was needed. The vowel signs placed with the consonants YHWH were a reminder to the reader to say ʼAdonai or, where appropriate, ʼElohim. Scholars call this a "perpetual qere".³⁵

In practice the vowels do not reproduce ʼAdonai exactly. In the Leningrad Codex the name is most often pointed Yehwah, with a vocal shewa under the first letter and qamets under the third, and less often Yehowah, with a holem above the second letter, the form that most closely resembles "Jehovah". Where the name follows ʼAdonai, it is pointed with the vowels of ʼElohim.³⁵⁹ The variation shows that the vowel points were not intended as a record of the pronunciation of the name itself. They were a signal attached to an unaltered set of consonants.

What Was Preserved

The result of the Masoretes' work, from the standpoint of the history of the text, was that the divine name survived intact in every copy of the Hebrew Scriptures. Readers in the synagogue said "Lord", but the written text continued to declare, nearly seven thousand times, the personal name of God. When Christian scholars of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance began to study Hebrew, the name lay before them in the manuscripts and the printed editions, and it was from those pointed texts that the form "Jehovah" arose. This site's article on the vowel-point controversy describes the later debate over the age and authority of the points.

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The Form Jehovah

Raymundus Martini and the Pugio Fidei

The earliest known written attestation of a form corresponding to "Jehovah" in a Latin work appears in the Pugio Fidei ("Dagger of Faith"), completed in 1270 by Raymundus Martini, a Spanish Dominican friar with an unusual knowledge of Hebrew and rabbinic literature. In discussing the Hebrew name, Martini transcribed it in Latin as Yohoua, reflecting the vowel points of the pointed Hebrew text.³⁶³⁷ His work circulated in manuscript and was later printed in Paris in 1651.

In the early sixteenth century the Italian Franciscan Petrus Galatinus used the form Iehoua in his De Arcanis Catholicae Veritatis of 1518, and he is often credited with popularising it among Christian scholars.³⁷ At that time Latin did not distinguish between the letters I and J, or U and V, so Iehoua would later be written Jehova. The form passed into Protestant scholarship and Bible translation, and in the following centuries "Jehovah" became the standard English form of the name.

Tyndale's Iehouah

The first English Bible translator to use the name was William Tyndale. His translation of the Pentateuch, printed at Antwerp in 1530, contains the form "Iehouah" at Genesis 15:2, Exodus 6:3 and a few other verses. In a note "unto the reader" Tyndale explained, "Iehovah is God's name... Moreover, as oft as thou seest LORD in great letters (except there be any error in the printing) it is in Hebrew Iehovah."³⁸ Tyndale thus established two English traditions at once: the form "Jehovah" in a handful of verses, and the use of "LORD" in capital letters to mark the places where the Hebrew had the name. Later English translators modernised the spelling. In 1612 Henry Ainsworth used "Iehovah" throughout his translation of the Psalms, and when the work was revised and printed with the Pentateuch in 1639 the form "Jehovah" appeared.¹ This site's article on the English Bibles between Tyndale and 1611 follows his influence on later versions.

The King James Version

The translators of the King James Version of 1611 followed Tyndale's precedent. They used "Jehovah" in four verses where the name seemed especially emphasised, namely Exodus 6:3, Psalm 83:18, Isaiah 12:2 and Isaiah 26:4, and in three place names that contain it, at Genesis 22:14, Exodus 17:15 and Judges 6:24. Elsewhere they used "LORD" or "GOD" in small capitals.³⁹ Psalm 83:18 reads in the King James Version, "That men may know that thou, whose name alone is JEHOVAH, art the most high over all the earth." Through the influence of the King James Version, the name became familiar to English-speaking readers, appeared in hymns and in literature, and was understood as the proper name of the God of the Bible even though the translation itself used it rarely.

The American Standard Version of 1901

In the nineteenth century, scholars in Britain and the United States undertook a revision of the King James Version. The English Revised Version of 1881 to 1885 retained the practice of the King James Version. The American committee, however, had proposed that the name be used consistently, and when its own edition, the American Standard Version, appeared in 1901, it rendered the Tetragrammaton as "Jehovah" throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, nearly seven thousand times.⁴⁰ The preface explained the decision: "The American Revisers, after a careful consideration, were brought to the unanimous conviction that a Jewish superstition, which regarded the Divine Name as too sacred to be uttered, ought no longer to dominate in the English or any other version of the Old Testament... This personal name, with its wealth of sacred associations, is now restored to the place in the sacred text to which it has an unquestionable claim."⁴⁰

The American Standard Version was widely used in seminaries and churches in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. Other English versions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries also used a form of the name, among them Robert Young's Literal Translation of 1862, John Nelson Darby's translation and the Emphasised Bible of Joseph Bryant Rotherham, who preferred "Yahweh". In the twentieth century the Roman Catholic Jerusalem Bible of 1966 used "Yahweh" throughout the Hebrew Scriptures.⁴¹

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The Name in the Greek Scriptures

The Question

The Christian Greek Scriptures, written in the first century CE, quote and allude to the Hebrew Scriptures hundreds of times. Many of those quotations come from passages that contain the divine name. Yet none of the more than five thousand surviving Greek manuscripts of the Greek Scriptures, the earliest of which date from the second and third centuries, contains the Tetragrammaton. In these manuscripts, as in the Christian codices of the Septuagint, the name is represented by Kyrios or Theos, usually abbreviated as a nomen sacrum.⁴² Translators must therefore decide whether to follow the wording of the surviving manuscripts or to restore the name in places where there is reason to believe the original writers used it.

Evidence from the Text Itself

Several features of the Greek Scriptures bear on the question. First, Jesus emphasised the name of his Father. He taught his disciples to pray, "Our Father in the heavens, let your name be sanctified" (Matthew 6:9). In prayer to his Father on the night before his death he said, "I have made your name known to the men you gave me out of the world" and "I have made your name known to them and will make it known" (John 17:6, John 17:26). He also said, "I have come in the name of my Father," and stressed that his works were done in his "Father's name" (John 5:43; John 10:25). The appendix to the New World Translation reasons that, since the Christian Greek Scriptures were an inspired addition to the Hebrew Scriptures, "the sudden disappearance of Jehovah's name from the text would seem inconsistent."⁴³

Secondly, the short form of the name appears in the Greek Scriptures themselves. The expression "Hallelujah", meaning "Praise Jah", occurs four times in Revelation 19:1–6, and the Greek text preserves it as hallēlouia.⁴³ Thirdly, a number of personal names in the Greek Scriptures contain the divine name, including John (Yehohanan, "Jehovah Has Shown Favour") and Jesus (Yeshua, a short form of Yehoshua, "Jehovah Is Salvation").

Fourthly, the writers often quote Hebrew Scriptures that contain the name in contexts where the identity of the one called "Lord" matters. At Acts 2:34, Peter quotes Psalm 110:1, "Jehovah said to my Lord", where two different persons are in view. If Kyrios stood in both places, the distinction that the Hebrew makes clear would be harder to see. At Romans 10:13, Paul quotes Joel 2:32, "Everyone who calls on the name of Jehovah will be saved." At Acts 15:14, James says that God "turned his attention to the nations to take out of them a people for his name", and in verse 17 he quotes Amos 9:11–12, which contains the name.⁴³

Finally, as already described, the Jewish copies of the Septuagint that were in circulation during the first century wrote the name itself in Hebrew letters or a Greek transcription. Because the writers of the Greek Scriptures frequently quoted the Septuagint, many scholars consider it likely that the copies they used contained the name in that form.

George Howard's Proposal

In 1977, George Howard, professor of religion at the University of Georgia, published an article in the Journal of Biblical Literature entitled "The Tetragram and the New Testament". He argued that the Tetragrammaton was probably written in the original texts of the Greek Scriptures in places where the Hebrew Scriptures were quoted or alluded to, and that it was replaced with Kyrios and Theos as the practice of the Christian scribes changed in the second century. He suggested that the change may have contributed to later theological confusion between God and Christ, since passages that originally distinguished the two came to use the same title for both.⁴⁴ Howard's proposal has not been universally accepted, and many textual critics hold that the original writers themselves wrote Kyrios. Howard himself wrote, "Since the Tetragram was still written in the copies of the Greek Bible which made up the Scriptures of the early church, it is reasonable to believe that the N[ew] T[estament] writers, when quoting from Scripture, preserved the Tetragram within the biblical text."⁴³ Similarly, The Anchor Bible Dictionary states under the heading "Tetragrammaton in the New Testament" that "there is some evidence that the Tetragrammaton, the Divine Name, Yahweh, appeared in some or all of the O[ld] T[estament] quotations in the N[ew] T[estament] when the NT documents were first penned."⁴³ The debate nevertheless illustrates that the question is a serious one in academic scholarship and is not confined to a single religious tradition.

Hebrew Translations of the Greek Scriptures

Another body of evidence comes from translations of the Greek Scriptures into Hebrew. From the sixteenth century onwards, scholars who rendered the Greek Scriptures into Hebrew, whether for missionary work among Jews or for the study of the original background of the text, frequently used the Tetragrammaton where they judged that the Greek Kyrios represented the divine name. They include the polyglot edition of Elias Hutter, published at Nuremberg in 1599, and the Hebrew version of Franz Delitzsch, first published in 1877 and revised in many later editions.⁴³ The New World Translation lists such Hebrew versions, designated with the letter "J" in its reference material, as supporting evidence for the restoration of the name in particular verses. These translations are not ancient manuscripts, but they show how translators who knew both languages understood the passages concerned.

The Approach of the New World Translation

The New World Translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures was first published in English in 1950 by the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society. Its translation committee concluded that the name should be restored where there was a clear basis for doing so, and it adopted careful criteria. The appendix to the current revision explains that the translators weighed two facts, that the Greek manuscripts available today are not the originals, most having been made at least two centuries after the books were composed, and that by that time copyists had either replaced the Tetragrammaton with Kyrios or copied from manuscripts in which this had already been done.⁴³ In general the name has been restored where the Greek Scriptures quote a passage of the Hebrew Scriptures that contains it, or where the context indicates that the writer was referring to Jehovah rather than to Jesus. In the 2013 revision the name appears 237 times in the Greek Scriptures.

The appendix states the conclusion in these words: "Without a doubt, there is a clear basis for restoring the divine name, Jehovah, in the Christian Greek Scriptures. That is exactly what the translators of the New World Translation have done. They have a deep respect for the divine name and a healthy fear of removing anything that appeared in the original text."⁴³ It also cites early Jewish testimony. The Tosefta, a collection of oral laws completed about 300 CE, refers to Christian writings that were burned on the Sabbath, "they and the references to the Divine Name which are in them", which suggests that some early Jewish Christians wrote the name in their books.⁴³

Earlier Translators

The New World Translation was not the first version to use the name in the Greek Scriptures. The appendix lists among its predecessors Herman Heinfetter's Literal Translation of the New Testament (1863), Benjamin Wilson's Emphatic Diaglott (1864), George Barker Stevens's Epistles of Paul in Modern English (1898), W. G. Rutherford's translation of Romans (1900) and The New Testament Letters of J. W. C. Wand, Bishop of London (1946). In German alone at least eleven versions use "Jehovah" or "Yahweh" in the Greek Scriptures, and translations in more than three hundred languages and dialects contain the divine name there, including the Rotuman Bible of 1999 and the Toba Batak version of 1989.⁴³

The decision has been criticised by some scholars on the ground that it departs from the wording of every surviving Greek manuscript. Defenders respond that every translation must make judgments about the original text, and that in this case the historical evidence of the Septuagint manuscripts, the teaching of Jesus and the nature of the quotations provide reasonable grounds for restoration. Readers of this site will find the same reasoning applied consistently in its articles on the Greek Scriptures, which quote the New World Translation throughout.

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Translations That Use the Name

The Range of Practice

Translations of the Bible have taken several approaches to the divine name. Most widely used English versions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including the Revised Standard Version, the New International Version and the English Standard Version, follow the practice of the King James Version and print "LORD" in small capitals. Their prefaces generally acknowledge that this represents the Tetragrammaton. The preface to the Revised Standard Version of 1952 explained that its translators had returned to "the more familiar usage of the King James Version" because the use of any proper name for the one and only God was "entirely inappropriate for the universal faith of the Christian Church", a reason that has itself been the subject of comment, since it acknowledges that the original text uses a proper name.⁴⁵

Other translations have used the name in some form. Besides the American Standard Version and the Jerusalem Bible, already mentioned, these include the New Jerusalem Bible of 1985, the Bible in Basic English in a few places, the Holman Christian Standard Bible of 2004, which used "Yahweh" in several hundred places.⁴¹ A number of translations in other languages, particularly in the Pacific, in Africa and in Latin America, have used forms of the name, and missionary translators of the nineteenth century frequently adopted a form of "Jehovah" when rendering the Hebrew Scriptures into local languages. The Hawaiian Bible, for example, uses Iehova, the Cherokee Yihowa and the Zulu Jehova, and many Bibles in the languages of Africa and Oceania use corresponding forms.⁴³⁴⁶

The New World Translation

The complete New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures was published in English in 1961, after the Hebrew Scriptures had appeared in volumes between 1953 and 1960. A thorough revision of the English edition was released in 2013. It uses the name Jehovah wherever the Tetragrammaton occurs in the Hebrew Scriptures and 237 times in the Greek Scriptures.¹⁴³ The New World Translation is now available, in whole or in part, in more than two hundred languages, and in each language the translators have sought to use a form of the name that is natural and recognisable to the speakers of that language.²

The translators' foreword explains that the restoration of the name is a matter of faithfulness to the original text. Because the Tetragrammaton is written in the Hebrew Scriptures, the translation uses the name wherever it is found there, and because the name can be shown with good reason to have been used by Jesus and his disciples, it restores it in the Greek Scriptures where the criteria described above are met. For Jehovah's Witnesses this practice is not a mark of distinction for its own sake but an expression of the conviction expressed at Psalm 83:18 and Isaiah 12:4 that God's name should be known among the nations.

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The Name and the Canon

The Name in the Formation of the Canon

The word "canon" refers to the collection of books recognised as inspired Scripture. The Hebrew Scriptures, as accepted by the Jews of the first century and by Jesus, comprise the thirty-nine books found in modern Protestant Bibles and in the New World Translation, arranged in the Jewish tradition as the Law, the Prophets and the Writings (Luke 24:44).⁴⁷ The divine name is a thread that runs through the whole of that collection. It appears in the first account of creation in which God is named personally (Genesis 2:4), in the closing book of the Prophets (Malachi 4:5), and in every major section between them.

The presence of the name has sometimes been used in discussions of the boundaries of the canon. The books outside the Hebrew canon that were later included in some Christian Bibles, such as Tobit, Judith and the books of the Maccabees, survive mainly in Greek, and they do not use the divine name in the way the inspired Hebrew books do. First Maccabees, for example, a historical work of the late second century BCE, avoids naming God altogether and refers instead to "Heaven".⁴⁸ Their pattern reflects the period in which they were written, when Jewish writers had begun to avoid both pronouncing and writing the name in new compositions. The contrast does not by itself define the canon, which was recognised on other grounds, but it underlines how distinctive the abundant use of the name is in the books that Jesus and the apostles accepted as the word of God.

Esther, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon

The three books in which the full name does not appear have occasionally been questioned for that reason. The rabbinic sources record debates about whether the Song of Solomon and Ecclesiastes "defile the hands", the expression used for sacred writings, and Esther's place in the canon was discussed both among Jews and among some early Christian writers.⁴⁷ Yet all three were accepted in the Jewish canon of the first century, and all three bear witness to God's guidance in other ways. The book of Esther, which describes the deliverance of the Jews in Persia, shows divine providence at work without naming God. The Song of Solomon, as already noted, contains the short form "Jah" at Song of Solomon 8:6, where love is described as "the flame of Jah". Ecclesiastes refers to God by the title ʼElohim throughout, and closes with the exhortation to "fear the true God and keep his commandments" (Ecclesiastes 12:13).

The Name in the Greek Scriptures Canon

The twenty-seven books of the Greek Scriptures were recognised by the Christian congregations during the second to fourth centuries, a process reflected in early lists such as the Muratorian Fragment. By the time those lists were drawn up, the copies of the books in circulation already used Kyrios for the name. The inclusion of the name in translations of those books is therefore a question of textual history rather than of canon, but the two subjects are related. The writers of the Greek Scriptures understood themselves to be continuing the revelation recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures, and they quoted those Scriptures as the authoritative word of God (2 Timothy 3:16). The God whose name is declared in the earlier books is the same God whose purposes are described in the later ones.

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The Name in the Ancient Versions

Aramaic, Syriac and Latin

The practice of substitution affected not only the Greek Bible but the other ancient translations as well. The Aramaic Targums, the paraphrases read in the synagogues of Palestine and Babylonia, usually represented the name with an abbreviation, such as a doubled or tripled yod, rather than spelling it out.⁴⁹ This site's articles on Targum Onkelos and on the Targums of the Prophets and Writings describe these translations.

The Syriac Peshitta, translated from Hebrew probably in the second century CE, used Marya, the Syriac word for "Lord". In the Latin West, the early Latin versions and Jerome's Vulgate, completed about 405 CE, used Dominus.⁵⁰ Jerome knew the Tetragrammaton well. In a letter to Marcella he listed the ten Hebrew names of God and described the name as "ineffable", noting that some Greek readers, unfamiliar with Hebrew letters, had misread יהוה as the Greek letters ΠΙΠΙ (pipi), which look similar.²⁹ His comment confirms that Greek copies of the Hebrew Scriptures with the name written in Hebrew letters were still in use in the late fourth century, even though his own translation did not use the name.

The Influence of the Vulgate

Because the Vulgate became the standard Bible of Western Christianity for more than a thousand years, the use of Dominus passed into the medieval vernacular translations based on it. The Wycliffite Bible of the late fourteenth century, the first complete Bible in English, translated from the Latin and therefore used "Lord" throughout. This site's article on the Wycliffite Bible discusses that translation. Only when translators returned to the Hebrew text in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries did the name re-enter Christian Bibles, first in scholarly works such as those of Martini and Galatinus and then in Tyndale's English Pentateuch.

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Why the Name Matters

Honouring the Author

From the standpoint of the Bible writers, the name of God is not a matter of indifference. The third of the Ten Commandments concerns the right use of the name (Exodus 20:7). The psalmists praise it repeatedly (Psalm 148:13). The prophets foretell a time when it will be honoured throughout the earth (Malachi 1:11), and Jesus places the sanctification of the name first in his model prayer (Matthew 6:9). A translation that removes the name, however reverent its motive, alters the way in which the Author of the Bible chose to identify himself.

The appendix to the New World Translation raises the question in these terms, with reference to translations that print "LORD" in capitals: "Why have these translators felt free to substitute or remove God's name from the Bible when they acknowledge that it is found in the Bible text thousands of times? Who do they believe gave them authority to make such a change?"¹ The same reasoning underlies the work of the American Standard Version committee in 1901 and of many other translators who have chosen to use the name.

Knowing God as a Person

The Bible presents knowledge of God's name as more than knowledge of a word. When Jehovah proclaimed his name to Moses on Mount Sinai, he described his qualities: "Jehovah, Jehovah, a God merciful and compassionate, slow to anger and abundant in loyal love and truth" (Exodus 34:5–7). The name is associated with God's reputation, his character and his purpose. To know the name, in the biblical sense, is to know the one who bears it, to trust him and to obey him (Psalm 9:10; Proverbs 18:10). For Jehovah's Witnesses, whose very name is drawn from Isaiah 43:10–12, this understanding is central to their worship and to their reading of the Bible.²

A Name Preserved

The history traced in this article shows that the divine name survived in the written text of the Hebrew Scriptures throughout the centuries, even when it was not spoken. It was carved on stone in Moab, incised on silver in Jerusalem, written in archaic letters in the Dead Sea Scrolls, inserted in Hebrew characters into Greek scrolls in Egypt, and retained by the Masoretes in every copy of the Hebrew text. When the name was replaced in the copying of the Greek Bible and in the Latin translations derived from it, its letters remained in the Hebrew manuscripts, and from there it re-entered Christian Bibles in the late Middle Ages and the Reformation. In the twentieth century it was restored throughout the Hebrew Scriptures in the American Standard Version and in the Greek Scriptures in the New World Translation.

The survival of the name is part of the larger history of the preservation of the Bible text, a subject treated in this site's article on God's determination to preserve his inspired word. The two subjects belong together. The God who declared, "This is my name forever, and this is how I am to be remembered from generation to generation" (Exodus 3:15), is also the God of whom the prophet wrote, "The green grass dries up, the blossom withers, but the word of our God endures forever" (Isaiah 40:8).

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Notes

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