Yahweh, Jehovah, I Am, Or God?

[bobinator]

JWs believe that the proper name of God is Jehovah (Yahweh). They say that the name of God was removed from the bible because the Jews were superstitious and thought that the name was too sacred. Any thoughts?

[faithcecelia]

About 3yrs ago the Pope said that Y....h is no longer to be used in public worship and should be replaced by the Lord (in print usually [size=2]THE LORD [size=4]to mark it as the Holy Name). Personally I like using Y....h and feel that a God who, as Christ, invites us to call him Daddy would not be upset by it. However the Church says no, so I stick with what she tells me.[/size][/size]

[Archaeology cat]

Jehovah kinda make me cringe a bit. It's a misreading of the Tetragrammaton. The Jews considered the Name of God to be too holy to pronounce (and not saying it also ensured they couldn't take His Name in vain). So instead of pronouncing the Tetragrammaton, they'd say "Adonai", which means "Lord". When the vowels were later noted, they put the vowels for Adonai in the Tetragrammaton as a reminder for the reader to say Adonai instead. I don't know if we even know the actual vowels (and thus pronunciation) for the Tetragrammaton. The word "Jehovah", though, is a transliteration of the Tetragrammaton with the vowels for Adonai, and therefore is not the actual Name of God or even a Hebrew word. Not to mention that the J would be a German J and thus pronounced like an English Y, since it denotes the Hebrew yodh.

[Luigi]

AC - I've heard that Jehovah is a mistranslation, but I heard that it was a mistranslation of YHWH. As you say, the Y was replaced with a J, and the rest of the story is that the W was replaced with a V.

Whether the mistranslation came through German or not, I'm not sure but it does make a lot of sense. In many languages, or in the connections between languages, there's a general confusion about I-J-Y; and German does have a W but it's actually pronounced as V (the V being pronounced as F, and the F being pronounced as an aspirated F - "Volkswagen" is pronounced more like "Folks Vagen" = "the people's wagon").

At any rate, Jehovah is certainly not Hebrew. I guess you could call it badly Anglicized Hebrew or something.

[Basilisa Marie]

I've also heard that part of the reason why we're no longer supposed to pronounce the Tetragrammaton is because it's pretty disrespectful to Jews. But yeah, Jehovah is a bad misreading of the sacred name.

[Selah]

I have heard people throw the name YHWH around so casually and flippantly, like they were talking about their buddy. It's utterly disrespectful, and I think removing YHWH from public worship was a great move on Pope Benedict's part. Reverance to His name needs to be re-established.

And Jehovah is a horrible translation.

[MithLuin]

Jehovah-jireh is right out.

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUXW6DB_S6k[/media]

YHWH = I am Who am. Do we not know how to say that in Hebrew? I mean, I know no Jew would say this name because it's considered disrespectful, but...don't we at least know what the words would be?

Certainly in the gospel of John, the evangelist uses 'I AM' as Jesus' declaration that he is God (and thus, blasphemy).

[Archaeology cat]

[quote name='Luigi' timestamp='1319114920' post='2324164']
AC - I've heard that Jehovah is a mistranslation, but I heard that it was a mistranslation of YHWH. As you say, the Y was replaced with a J, and the rest of the story is that the W was replaced with a V.
[/quote]
That's what I said. YHVH = the Tetragrammaton. While I only had a little Hebrew, I quickly got out of the habit of writing out or trying to pronounce the Tetragrammaton (in part because the Jews in the class would've been quite offended)

[Vincent Vega]

[url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetragrammaton"]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetragrammaton[/url]
Pretty accurate.
(In case you're one of those paleolithic anti-technology-kool-aid-drinking progressophobes, you can always just follow the citations at the end of the article to get to [i]"reputable"[/i] sources.)

[Basilisa Marie]

[quote name='MithLuin' timestamp='1319138795' post='2324326']
YHWH = I am Who am. Do we not know how to say that in Hebrew? I mean, I know no Jew would say this name because it's considered disrespectful, but...don't we at least know what the words would be?
[/quote]

Not really, because the original Hebrew lacks the vowels (and punctuation...and capital letters...and "to be"...), different rabbis could interpret it different ways, and one wouldn't be better than another, because the ambiguity is part of the divinely inspired text. Sure, they know that YHWH is the sacred name, but only the high priest would pronounce it once a year in the Holy of Holies. So even though we don't [i]really [/i]know how it's supposed to be pronounced, I think the mere pronouncing of it is what is disrespectful/etc.