The name “Jehovah”

Since I haven’t written about Jehovah Witnesses in a while, I thought that today I would address the origin of one of this group’s distinctive practices – exclusive use of the name “Jehovah”.

If you ever come across Jehovah’s Witnesses, either on the street or if they come to your door, it’s not unusual for them to emphasize that God’s name is “Jehovah” and the only appropriate name to be used in reference to Him. They might even go further and claim that other Christian groups have “hidden” the name of God despite, as we will see, that this word was first invented inside the Catholic Church.

Missing vowels

We must begin by recognizing that in the Hebrew Scriptures, God’s name is revealed as “YHWH”, known to theologians as the Tetragrammaton:

Ancient Hebrew did not use vowels, making it a little difficult to know how they would have pronounced that word. However, Ancient Greek does have vowels and there we have records with the indication that this word have been pronounced “Yahweh”.

Holy is the name of the Lord

If you know any modern-day Jews, you might have noticed that they take great care over the name of God, even favouring to write “G-d” rather than “God”. This care over the divine name has a long pedigree, stemming from the Second Command “You shall not take the name of the Lord, your God, in vain” (Deuteronomy 5:11).

In the time leading up to the advent of Christ, when the Jews read Scripture out aloud, they wouldn’t say the divine name. Instead, they would substitute it with “Adonai”, the Hebrew word for “Lord”:

You see many Christian Bibles today following a similar practice, rendering the Tetragrammaton in English as “THE LORD”, all in capitals but in a smaller font.

YHWH Consonants and Adonai Vowels

Hebrew eventually developed a system of vowel markings which appeared above or below the consonants. In the Sixth and Seventh Century, Jewish scribes started writing the “Adonai” vowel markings on the “YHWH” consonants to remind their readers to say “Adonai” rather than “Yahweh”:

However, in the 13th Century, we find a Spanish Dominican monk take these consonants and vowels from two different words and combining them into a single word which, when rendered with the Latin alphabet, came out as…”Jehovah”.

This is all rather ironic then that Jehovah’s Witnesses accuse Christians of “hiding” God’s true name, yet the very name which they use is a synthetic construction which came about through Scribes attempting to protect the Divine Name!