Jehovah
Jehovah is a Latinization of the Hebrew , one vocalization of the Tetragrammaton , the proper name of the God of Israel in the Hebrew BibleOld Testament. The Tetragrammaton is considered one of the seven names of God in Judaism and a form of God's name in Christianity.
The consensus among scholars is that the historical vocalization of the Tetragrammaton at the time of the redaction of the Torah is most likely Yahweh. The historical vocalization was lost because in Second Temple Judaism, during the 3rd to 2nd centuries BCE, the pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton came to be avoided, being substituted with . The Hebrew vowel points of were added to the Tetragrammaton by the Masoretes, and the resulting form was transliterated around the 12th century CE as Yehowah. The derived form Iehovah first appeared in the 16th century. The form Jehovah began to printed following a 17th-century development leading J to become a separate letter for printing the consonantal I.
William Tyndale first introduced the vocalization Jehovah for the Tetragrammaton in his translation of Exodus 6:3, and it appears in some other early English translations including the Matthew Bible, the Great Bible, the Bishop's Bible, the Geneva Bible and the King James Version. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops states that to pronounce the Tetragrammaton "it is necessary to introduce vowels that alter the written and spoken forms of the name." Jehovah appears in the Old Testament of some widely used translations including the American Standard Version and Young's Literal Translation ; the New World Translation uses Jehovah in both the Old and New Testaments. Jehovah does not appear in most mainstream English translations, some of which use Yahweh but most continue to use "Lord" or "" to represent the Tetragrammaton.
Pronunciation
Most scholars believe the name Jehovah to be a hybrid form derived by combining the Hebrew letters יהוה with the vowels of. Some hold that there is evidence that a form of the Tetragrammaton similar to Jehovah may have been in use in Semitic and Greek phonetic texts and artifacts from Late Antiquity. Others say that it is the pronunciation Yahweh that is testified in both Christian and pagan texts of the early Christian era.Some Karaite Jews, as proponents of the rendering Jehovah, state that although the original pronunciation of יהוה has been obscured by disuse of the spoken name according to oral Rabbinic law, well-established English transliterations of other Hebrew personal names are accepted in normal usage, such as Joshua, Jeremiah, Isaiah or Jesus, for which the original pronunciations may be unknown. They also point out that "the English form Jehovah is an Anglicized form of Yhovah," and preserves the four Hebrew consonants "YHVH". Some argue that Jehovah is preferable to Yahweh, based on their conclusion that the Tetragrammaton was likely tri-syllabic originally, and that modern forms should therefore also have three syllables.
In an article he wrote in the Journal of Biblical Literature, Biblical scholar Francis B. Dennio said: "Jehovah misrepresents Yahweh no more than Jeremiah misrepresents Yirmeyahu. The settled connotations of Isaiah and Jeremiah forbid questioning their right." Dennio argued that the form Jehovah is not a barbarism, but is the best English form available, being that it has for centuries gathered the necessary connotations and associations for valid use in English.
According to a Jewish tradition developed during the 3rd to 2nd centuries BCE, the Tetragrammaton is written but not pronounced. When read, substitute terms replace the divine name where appears in the text. It is widely assumed, as proposed by the 19th-century Hebrew scholar Wilhelm Gesenius, that the vowels of the substitutes of the name— and —were inserted by the Masoretes to indicate that these substitutes were to be used. When יהוה precedes or follows, the Masoretes placed the vowel points of into the Tetragrammaton, producing a different vocalization of the Tetragrammaton , which was read as. Based on this reasoning, the form has been characterized by some as a "hybrid form", and even "a philological impossibility".
Early modern translators disregarded the practice of reading in place of the Tetragrammaton and instead combined the four Hebrew letters of the Tetragrammaton with the vowel points that, except in synagogue scrolls, accompanied them, resulting in the form Jehovah. This form, which first took effect in works dated 1278 and 1303, was adopted in Tyndale's and some other Protestant translations of the Bible. In the 1560 Geneva Bible, the Tetragrammaton is translated as Jehovah six times, four as the proper name, and two as place-names. In the 1611 King James Version, Jehovah occurred seven times. In the 1885 English Revised Version, the form Jehovah occurs twelve times. In the 1901 American Standard Version the form "Je-ho'vah" became the regular English rendering of the Hebrew יהוה, all throughout, in preference to the previously dominant "the ", which is generally used in the King James Version. It is also used in Christian hymns such as the 1771 hymn, "Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah".
Development
The most widespread theory is that the Hebrew term has the vowel points of . Using the vowels of, the composite under the guttural becomes a under the , the is placed over the first , and the is placed under the , giving . When the two names, and, occur together, the former is pointed with a under the and a under the second , giving, to indicate that it is to be read as in order to avoid being repeated.Taking the spellings at face value may have been as a result of not knowing about the Q're perpetuum, resulting in the transliteration Yehowah and derived variants. Emil G. Hirsch was among the modern scholars that recognized "Jehovah" to be "grammatically impossible". Scholar Marvin Pope describes the spelling "Jehovah" as "a morphological monstrosity with no claim to legitimacy except the several centuries of misguided usage."
appears 6,518 times in the traditional Masoretic Text, in addition to 305 instances of . The pronunciation Jehovah is believed to have arisen through the introduction of vowels of the —the marginal notation used by the Masoretes. In places where the consonants of the text to be read differed from the consonants of the written text, they wrote the in the margin to indicate that the was read using the vowels of the. For a few very frequent words the marginal note was omitted, referred to as q're perpetuum. One of these frequent cases was God's name, which was not to be pronounced in fear of profaning the "ineffable name". Instead, wherever appears in the of the biblical and liturgical books, it was to be read as , or as if appears next to it. This combination produces and respectively. is also written, or even, and read .
Scholars are not in total agreement as to why does not have precisely the same vowel points as. The use of the composite in cases where the name is to be read, has led to the opinion that the composite ought to have been used to indicate the reading. It has been argued conversely that the disuse of the is consistent with the Babylonian system, in which the composite is uncommon.
Vowel points of and
The table below shows the vowel points of and, indicating the simple in in contrast to the in. As indicated to the right, the vowel points used when the Tetragrammaton is intended to be pronounced as are slightly different to those used in itself.The difference between the vowel points of and is explained by the rules of Hebrew morphology and phonetics. and were allophones of the same phoneme used in different situations: on glottal consonants including , and simple on other consonants.
Introduction into English
The earliest available Latin text to use a vocalization similar to Jehovah dates from the 13th century. The Brown-Driver-Briggs Lexicon suggested that the pronunciation Jehovah was unknown until 1520 when it was introduced by Galatinus, who defended its use.In English it appeared in William Tyndale's translation of the Pentateuch published in 1530 in Germany, where Tyndale had studied since 1524, possibly in one or more of the universities at Wittenberg, Worms and Marburg, where Hebrew was taught. The spelling used by Tyndale was "Iehouah"; at that time, "I" was not distinguished from J, and U was not distinguished from V. The original 1611 printing of the Authorized King James Version used "IEHOVA". Tyndale wrote about the divine name: "IEHOUAH , is God's name; neither is any creature so called; and it is as much to say as, One that is of himself, and dependeth of nothing. Moreover, as oft as thou seest in great letters, it is in Hebrew Iehouah, Thou that art; or, He that is." The name is also found in a 1651 edition of Ramón Martí's Pugio fidei.
The name Jehovah appeared in all early Protestant Bibles in English, except Coverdale's translation in 1535. The Roman Catholic Douay–Rheims Bible used "the Lord", corresponding to the Latin Vulgate's use of Dominus to represent the Tetragrammaton. The Authorized King James Version, which used "" in a few places, most frequently gave "the " as the equivalent of the Tetragrammaton. The form Iehouah appeared in John Rogers' Matthew Bible in 1537, the Great Bible of 1539, the Geneva Bible of 1560, Bishop's Bible of 1568 and the King James Version of 1611. More recently, Jehovah has been used in the Revised Version of 1885, the American Standard Version in 1901, and the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures of Jehovah's Witnesses in 1961.
At Exodus 6:3–6, where the King James Version has Jehovah, the Revised Standard Version, the New American Standard Bible, the New International Version, the New King James Version, the New Revised Standard Version, the New Century Version, and the Contemporary English Version give "" or "Lord" as their rendering of the Tetragrammaton, while the Jerusalem Bible,, New Jerusalem Bible, the Amplified Bible, the New Living Translation, and the Holman Christian Standard Bible, the Legacy Standard Bible,, and the Lexham English Bible, use the form Yahweh.