The Name of God - Jehovah vs Yahweh

In starting this blog site I was faced with the conundrum of what to name it. I have a deep thirst for knowledge of God, but ‘Thirsting for God’ doesn’t really have a nice ring to it. ‘Yahweh’ was a logical choice, a name for God that is in common use, and certainly has a great ring to it. The other logical option was ‘Jehovah’, but because of it’s close association in peoples minds to the Christian group called ‘Jehovah’s Witness’, I initially decided against using it.

So ‘Yahweh’ it was! But I thought I would do a little bit of research on the name before making it the title of the Blog. I quickly realised that Yahweh was a bad choice for a number of reasons, and that Jehovah is almost certainly the most accurate translation of the name of God.

Below is just some of the reasons why Yahweh didn’t make the cut:

1) Historically the name of God was always translated as ‘Jehovah’, as in the older KJV, AV and ASV. The trend to call God by the name of ‘Yahweh’ is only a recent phenomenon.

2) Many modern Bible scholars consider the name ‘Yahweh’ to have been a petty ‘storm god’ from other religions of antiquity, which the Israelites later stole to be their own god.

This idea is based on the fact that many descriptions of God in the Old Testament describe Him in association with thunder, lightening and storm clouds, which is similar to other ancient pagan gods who were storm deities, some of which was called something like Yaho, Ya-hu, or Yave.

3) The English use of ‘Yahweh’ is a mistranslation anyway. If one wanted to use this name, then Yahweh should be spelt with a ‘v’ not ‘w’, which makes the name ‘Yahveh’.

This error came about due to the misreading of German Hebrew grammars, which use W for the English V (note: the German V is pronounced like the English F). ‘Yahweh’ with a ‘w’ is more of an Arabic word, as opposed to the more correct Hebrew ‘Yahveh’, with a ‘v’.

4) Yahweh should never be spelt with a ‘y’ in the first place. In every case of a name in Hebrew that begins with a yod (Y) it is pronounced with the appropriate phoneme for that language. Y becomes a J in every name in English, French, and Spanish. In English the J is pronounced like J in Japan, while in French it is pronounced like S in pleasure, in Spanish it is pronounced like an H, in German it is pronounced like Y.
This means that Jahweh would be more correct.

 

For a more detailed explanation of why Yahweh is just plain wrong, see this article on my other Blog.