Today, John Piper’s devotional entry is called “10 Things “Yahweh” Means”. I feel the need to write about understanding the meaning of Yahweh or Jehovah. It would be interesting to know that Jehovah is the Latinized form of Yahweh. I don’t want to argue too much about which is right. Jehovah is translated as LORD–all in capital letters. The KJV uses Jehovah in some areas of the Old Testament for some reason.
Here’s an interesting excerpt from Got Questions on the name Jehovah:
The vast majority of Jewish and Christian biblical scholars and linguists do not believe “Jehovah” to be the proper pronunciation of YHWH. There was no true J sound in ancient Hebrew. Even the Hebrew letter vav, which is transliterated as the W in YHWH is said to have originally had a pronunciation closer to W than the V of Jehovah. Jehovah is essentially a Germanic pronunciation of the Latinized transliteration of the Hebrew YHWH. It is the letters of the tetragrammaton, Latinized into JHVH, with vowels inserted. “Yahweh” or “Yehowah” is far more likely to be the correct pronunciation.
The KJV rendition of Isaiah 12:2 and 26:4 interesting spells it all in capital letters, “LORD JEHOVAH”. The Strong’s Concordance has LORD defined as Jah or Yah and JEHOVAH as Yehovah which we get the name Yahweh or Yahowah. Right now, I think the more preferred word for me is Jehovah–a word that appears seven times in the Old Testament of the King James Version (KJV). Modern translations simply rendered it as LORD which is also correct.
Meanwhile, Got Questions also has to to say about the transliteration of Yahweh:
Contrary to what some believe, Jehovah is not the Divine Name revealed to Israel. The name Jehovah is a product of mixing different words and different alphabets of different languages. Due to a fear of accidentally taking God’s name in vain (Leviticus 24:16), the Jews basically quit saying it out loud altogether. Instead, when reading Scripture aloud, the Jews substituted the tetragrammaton YHWH with the word Adonai (“Lord”). Even in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament), the translators substituted Kurios (“Lord”) for the Divine Name. Eventually, the vowels from Adonai (“Lord”) or Elohim (“God”) found their way in between the consonants of YHWH, thus forming YaHWeH. But this interpolation of vowels does not mean that was how God’s name was originally pronounced. In fact, we aren’t entirely sure if YHWH should have two syllables or three.
Any number of vowel sounds can be inserted within YHWH, and Jewish scholars are as uncertain of the real pronunciation as Christian scholars are. Jehovah is actually a much later (probably 16th-century) variant. The word Jehovah comes from a three-syllable version of YHWH, YeHoWeH. The Y was replaced with a J (although Hebrew does not even have a J sound) and the W with a V, plus the extra vowel in the middle, resulting in JeHoVaH. These vowels are the abbreviated forms of the imperfect tense, the participial form, and the perfect tense of the Hebrew being verb (English is)—thus the meaning of Jehovah could be understood as “He who will be, is, and has been.”
Jewish scribes had to be so careful in writing down Yahweh or Jehovah in the Hebrew letters. They would not even dare utter his name. To do so in writing Yahweh in Hebrew–they wipe their pen and wash their bodies every time they wrote it. It’s even forbidden to say his name unless one wants to be charged with using the name of the LORD in vain.
The very attributes of God are going to be considered. Yahweh or Jehovah is also defined as “the existing One”. Now, for what Piper’s devotional says about the attributes of God and what Yahweh or Jehovah means:
1. He never had a beginning. Every child asks, “Who made God?” And every wise parent says, “Nobody made God. God simply is. And always was. No beginning.”
2. God will never end. If he did not come into being he cannot go out of being, because he is being.
3. God is absolute reality. There is no reality before him. There is no reality outside of him unless he wills it and makes it. He is all that was eternally. No space, no universe, no emptiness. Only God.
4. God is utterly independent. He depends on nothing to bring him into being or support him or counsel him or make him what he is.
5. Everything that is not God depends totally on God. The entire universe is utterly secondary. It came into being by God and stays in being moment by moment on God’s decision to keep it in being.
6. All the universe is by comparison to God as nothing. Contingent, dependent reality is to absolute, independent reality as a shadow to substance. As an echo to a thunderclap. All that we are amazed by in the world and in the galaxies is, compared to God, as nothing.
7. God is constant. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He cannot be improved. He is not becoming anything. He is who he is.
8. God is the absolute standard of truth and goodness and beauty. There is no law-book to which he looks to know what is right. No almanac to establish facts. No guild to determine what is excellent or beautiful. He himself is the standard of what is right, what is true, what is beautiful.
9. God does whatever he pleases and it is always right and always beautiful and always in accord with truth. All reality that is outside of him he created and designed and governs as the absolute reality. So he is utterly free from any constraints that don’t originate from the counsel of his own will.
10. God is the most important and most valuable reality and person in the universe. He is more worthy of interest and attention and admiration and enjoyment than all other realities, including the entire universe.
We think of God as eternal and constant. I remembered reading the late Dennis James Kennedy’s book Why I Believe though I’m stuck with the outdated edition. Some of the many things I remembered from his book are about the law of the conservation of energy and mass. It’s something learned in chemistry and physics. I find it boggling that anybody claims to be scientific yet refuses to believe in God because He can’t be seen. Yet, science has proven the existence of the invisible. We don’t see the air, atoms, molecules, energy, force, etc. However, their invisibility will never discount their existence. God can self-exist because energy and mass are neither created nor destroyed.
As I study science, I also think of the very eternal nature of God. Clearly, everything is made by God. Yet, Romans 1 also tells us of the stubbornness of man. Sinful mankind isn’t keen on accepting God. They tend to say that there’s no God and worship other gods or focus on themselves. Yet, God in His eternal state as a self-existing being clearly has His handwork written in His creation.
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