Taken from the book edited by Alvin F. Kimel, Jr. (editor) This Is My Name Forever: The Trinity & Gender Language for God (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2001). See page 26:
"The notion that God has a proper name and can be differentiated from other deities with proper names is absolutely clear in the Old Testament. Other gods (ELOHIM) lay claims on humanity, but Israel is to have no god (ELOHIM) before or beside YHWH (Ex 20:3). Moreover, the character of the name is itself a matter of reverence, since the name really coheres with the God it names (20:7). One cannot therefore malign the name or substitute for the name another name, and somehow leave untouched the deity with whom the name is attached . . . Not taking the name of YHWH in vain implies, at a minimum, understanding that YHWH is not an 'accident' [non-essential property] detachable from a deeper 'substance,' that is, 'God himself.'"
Contrast the early church fathers, who believed God did not have a proper name or did not need to be distinguished from other entities since he is SUI GENERIS.
Here is another quote taken from a work titled Guide for the Perplexed which is written by the medieval thinker Maimonides. In 1.61 of that work, he writes:
"It is well known that all the names of God occurring in Scripture are derived from His actions, except one, namely, the Tetragrammaton, which consists of the letters yod, hé, vau [or vav, waw] and hé. This name is applied exclusively to God, and is on that account called Shem ha-meforash, 'The nomen proprium.' It is the distinct and exclusive designation of the Divine Being; whilst His other names are common nouns, and are derived from actions, to which some of our own are similar, as we have already explained."
Best regards,
Edgar
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Thoughts on the Tetragrammaton
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The writings of the Watchtower consistently muddle the legitimate demand to indicate in the translations at the appropriate places in the Old Testament that it is Yahweh or Jehovah - and your demand, plucked from thin air, to attempt this also in the New Testament, at the two hundred or so places they determined, despite the fact that here, the faintest semblance of manuscript and historical evidence is entirely lacking.
These insertions are labeled as "easier to understand" only by the Watchtower. In reality, it's a sectarian stamp: the branding iron, fired up by the "discreet slave" and pressed on the body of their congregation, of the desire to be different at all costs. The brazen disregard of the Greek text we have at hand. Double standards. Because they do the same thing as the "great harlot" they condemn, while they, in principle, are willing to renounce their custom and issue many translations abundant in the name Jehovah / Yahweh, the Watchtower is not willing to do the opposite.
The fact that the New Testament refers to the Old Testament at certain places does not turn into a fact, a text, a data, their underlying assumption that in the original, apostolic-evangelistic text YHWH stood there. And yet, they say in their writings (although they can no longer defend it in a factual debate), that the apostate copyists left out the Name etc. But they cannot produce a single New Testament manuscript that would support them here. The hypothesis of the "apostate copyists" is good for everything and good for nothing. With this method, they could even prove that reincarnation was in the Bible, only those pesky apostate copyists left it out.
Don't forget: the New Testament writers often quote the Septuagint, not the Masoretic Hebrew text. And despite the few manuscripts they have unearthed, the Septuagint contains a tendency (and not just on the side, but as a mainstream, and well before the writing of the New Testament), to represent the name YHWH with the word Lord. JWs can argue with this tendency, and qualify its cause as superstitious - but it seems, the New Testament authors did not consider it superstitious or offensive to God, because whenever they quote the Old Testament, they do not transcribe the tetragrammaton with Greek letters, but call it Lord. In this regard, therefore, they approved the Jewish custom they call superstitious. And at least in this, they testify against them that the name YHWH would be so important and indispensable in the New Testament that without its proclamation, the church itself would collapse.
In response to the question that if it is allowed to rewrite the name YHWH in our translations of the Old Testament, then why aren't you allowed to "rewrite" it in the New Testament, I answer this: JWs are ignoring a very important aspect. We are free to consistently write out the name YHYH as Yahweh or Jehovah in our translations (like J. N. Darby), and the mainstream churches don't bite the head off of anyone who might circumlocute the Name out of excessive fear due to the "do not take in vain" commandment or for some other reason (e.g. because they don't want to pronounce it incorrectly). Therefore, we have freedom: the (non)pronunciation, the (non)translation of the name YHWH is not a matter of faith for us. Moreover, newer translations also distinguish between Lord (Adonai) and LORD (YHWH), so anyone who wishes can reconstruct the original for themselves by looking through the usual substitution. This is what many Bible translations do.
You cannot use our freedom to justify how they falsify the New Testament Greek manuscripts, which deal with the Tetragrammaton in a similarly cool manner and translate it as freely into Lord as we do. Moreover, JWs blaspheme as apostate everyone who removed the name YHWH from both covenant documents. But it has become certain that this accusation of them first hits the apostles. For if they had taken it as a matter of faith, as they do, they would have avoided the Septuagint like the plague.
No one said "YHWH is not the name of God." Just that it is not the only name of God, and not an indispensable name for him. Learn to understand their opponents' statements in the sense they represent, and do not project onto their place some concocted, albeit obviously easier to attack, nonsense. And do not expect me to defend this nonsense on behalf of everyone. No: here their schizoid, either-or logic has misled them, which shouts into their ear that God can only have one true and indispensable name (YHWH), and whoever denies this also denies that YHWH is the name of God.
Has God changed? The answer is a definite no. God did not change either when he said that his name YHWH was not yet known to the patriarchs. Nor did he start to change when he declared himself in Jesus as the Father (as the Father of Jesus Christ and our Father). This would lead to another thread of argument, so I will not elaborate further here.
The ancient Israelites lived in a polytheistic, pagan environment and were, in some respects, a rather undeveloped civilization. In such an environment, monotheism was a revolutionary idea on the one hand, and on the other hand, they were constantly exposed to the constant temptation from paganism. In fact, as we know, the common Israelites often fell into the sin of idolatry. (This also shows that the common man was never a high-level theologian in any era, and it would be pointless to ever expect this.) The role, meaning, purpose, and significance of the name "I AM" (Yahweh) can only be understood in this environment. But why?
For an ancient common man, for whom the existence of multiple gods was as evident as the cellphone is for us today, if you had been living in the Near East during the Egyptian captivity, it would have been evident to you that every nation has its own god, with its temples and priests. People talk about it, sacrifice animals to it, etc. No one questioned its existence. The various nations didn't say that our "gods" exist and yours are the products of religious fantasy and mythology, but rather said things like our gods are stronger than yours. In such an environment, saying that these so-called gods do not exist at all would have caused considerable confusion. "What, Osiris doesn't exist? But there is his temple, my neighbor regularly sacrifices to him, how could he not exist?". And God chose a brilliant way in the cultural environment to communicate the basic religious truth about Himself to His chosen people.
Because whenever a Jew pronounced the word God as YAHWEH, they thereby professed that He alone is "The One Who IS" (therefore, other "gods" do not exist). The name YAHWEH clearly refers to God as the absolute being, whose real characteristic and essence is that He IS, He exists: He is the Eternal. Compared to Him, other deities are nothing, non-existent, see Is. 42,8. When God in the Bible emphatically declared several times, "I am Yahweh", He essentially said, "understand that I alone am the existing God, no other god exists besides me". Therefore, this Name had a pedagogical aim and role, somewhat like telling a small child that the "name" of the plug is "Don'tStickYourFingerInIt". It is perfectly clear that this "name" is not a name in the sense of, say, Carl, but serves the purpose of reminding the person, when recalling this "name", of the most important thing they should think of first in relation to this matter. So the purpose of the name Yahweh was to remind Jews in a fundamentally polytheistic environment that their God is the only true God, they can only believe in Him, only worship Him, etc. - while the many "gods" of other peoples do not actually exist.
The Holy Tetragrammaton is both a revelation and a rejection of the Name. The essence of God, His existence, is fundamentally different from this world, so we cannot "essentially" know God - we can only say, "what is not He".
From this it follows that the name YAHWEH fulfilled its role when monotheism was still on weak legs - even among Jews! - , when the religious development of the Israelite people was not high. God, therefore, in this matter as well, gradually led the people carrying the revelation to a higher religious standpoint. He did not anticipate the normal intellectual development as a Deus ex machina, but involved his revelations in its individual phases. Therefore, the naming of God as Yahweh is an early stage of the development of monotheism.
From this it follows clearly that later, when monotheism was strong, the oneness of God had largely become evident to the Jews, there was no longer a need for this "crutch" for God. Just as the side wheels are only needed on a bicycle until the child is too small to balance on two wheels, after which there is no longer a need for them. We will not perceive the removal of the side wheels as a negative or a lack, on the contrary. The same was true here.
This is confirmed by the fact that the name Yahweh fell out of common use. We all know that God punished the Jewish people by sending them into Babylonian captivity. Well, this punishment was quite effective, as we all know how effective a religious reform Ezra carried out among the Israelites who returned to their land. His basic act was regular Torah study, so the "theological" knowledge of the average people also increased a lot. Monotheism was no longer questionable, other kinds of "dangers" (such as those later condemned by Jesus among the hair-splitting, Pharisaic interpretations of the Torah) were of course threatening, but that is another story.
There was no longer a need for the name Yahweh to maintain monotheism, so when God providentially led his people to a new level, there was not only no longer a need for any nominator, but it was specifically a hindrance - just as the side wheels used to learn to ride a child's bike can later function as a hindrance. God's Providence is ultimately behind the Name's exclusion from common use.
The ancient gods could be invoked at any time by their names. Hence, the knowledge of a god's name in some sense encompassed the belief that a human could possess its power, or in some sense rule over it. In this sense, the Name became a kind of speakable magic spell. Traces of this can be found in certain Semitic, Arab legends, where to use the power of the djinn, one must know its name. Although in the Bible the use of the Name YHWH is free from such misuse, nevertheless – if we tie God to a specific "Name" this in some sense carries the danger of the emergence of this phenomenon (even if it is not consciously functioning).
What are we talking about? The Name becomes objectified, which is treated as a kind of property. Like the medieval mystical Jewish rabbis who used the Tetragrammaton as a kind of magic spell. They wrote it on the golem, and it came to life. They can essentially misuse it as magical automatism and as a guarantee of salvation. Indeed, the use, the utterance of the word "Jehovah" does not guide anyone, and it does not cause any additional salvation, because the Bible does not aim for us to "use" the Tetragrammaton, a Hebrew word, zealously for salvation, like some magic key, but to know the person of God, to love him, and to become His children.
The Old Testament Jews gradually understood that there is no name, word, or phrase in human language that could describe the essence of God. "The divine is unnameable", says Theologian St. Gregory. "Not only does reason show this, but so do the oldest and wisest Jews. Those who respected the Divine by writing His name with special signs, and did not allow God's name and creatures to be written with the same letters... could they ever have dared to pronounce the Name of the indestructible and unique nature in a fleeting voice? Just as no one could ever take in all the air, so reason could not fully embrace, and words could not encompass the essence of God."
By not pronouncing the name of God, the old Jews showed that contact with God is possible not so much through words and expressions, but rather through devotion and humble silence. So the real reason is that this is a mystery, not because it's taboo. The reality of God surpasses the world. Compared to Him, we do not even exist. The pure linguistic version of the Holy Tetragrammaton was also used by other Semitic peoples, and by the Jews before Moses. However, this embodiment into a purely human word was a prefiguration of the embodiment into Jesus, just as the burning bush was a prefiguration of the transfiguration on Mount Tabor. If we deny the incarnation of Christ, this leads to the denial of the Holy Tetragrammaton. The "namers" just pronounce a generally used Semitic designation of divinity, moreover in the Latin reading (Jehovah => Latin reading of the Holy Tetragrammaton), so they just do what someone would do if they were scrutinizing the human nature of Jesus, which is possible, as he was truly human. However, they do not reach the essence of the Holy Tetragrammaton, only its "garment", and never pronounce it as heretics, because they cannot "possess" the knowledge of the Name, they can only defile it.
Since it is undeniable that the name YHWH does not appear in the existing manuscripts of the New Testament, except for the four Hallelujahs, only the transcription of Kyrios (Lord), what prevents us from keeping these in the New Testament translations? Precisely this entitles us to do so, if the New Testament writers (following the Septuagint) mentioned the names of Jeremiah and Jesus in Greek, why shouldn't we accept from their mouths the Greekization of the name YHWH to "Kyrios"? And it cannot be an argument against this that "apostate copyists left out the name YHWH from the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament," because 1. there is no evidence for this, 2. why couldn't anyone say about this that "then let's re-Hebraize the names of Jeremiah and Jesus in the New Testament!"?
I see the storm with which Jehovah's Witnesses force the name YHWH on the New Testament as quite novel and contrived. How the Septuagint and today's translations were handled, I do not consider a matter of salvation in any way, and I read Darby as gladly as King James. I don't know if this is laid down as a program for them, but I feel that they were the first to make this a matter of salvation. And if the debate has reached this point (that one party is accusing the other of heresy and apostasy on the basis (also) that it wants to translate the name YHWH as Kyrios, LORD, Eternal), then he who has so far considered his practice to be free and innocent is quite helpless if he wants to maintain it as a custom. Because we admit that among us this is not a law, not a question of salvation, and in principle can be changed at any time (of course, rewriting translations does not happen overnight, especially if there is no compelling reason) - but they are pressing us, and they blame us for everything because of this.
The question is how this writing of YHWH in the LXX (which was not universal among Jews either, as we know from various sources) could have made its way into the New Testament in such a way that not a single copy of it has survived. One of the Bodmer papyri (p66) contains the section Johnn 1:1-6:11, in its entirety, including for example Jn 1:23. According to WTS, the tetragram should be here. Well, this papyrus is from the 2nd century, and we hardly have longer New Testament sources from before that time. I haven't looked into what kind of textual witnesses are available for the places in question, but you already have to place the action of the "apostate copyists" team without gaps at a very early time.
Jesus declared: "I came in my Father's name." He also emphasized that what he does, he does "in his Father's name." - Indeed, and he did not say that he came in the name of Yahweh or Jehovah. This proves that the Father is not just a title, but also a name. (As is, I might add, the Son and the Holy Spirit, for in this triune name is baptism.)
"In the Greek Scriptures, God's name appears in abbreviated form. In Revelation 19:1, 3, 4, 6, God's name is part of the expressions "alleluia" or "hallelujah"." - According to this, those "apostate copyists" were not vigilant enough to root this out as well. These four examples rather weaken JW's case, because in a fixed liturgical formula it preserves the name Yah in the New Testament. Therefore, the copyists could not have been led by superstition or pagan prejudice, as JWs are prone to assume as a reason.
"Is the New World Translation the only translation in which God's name has been restored to its place in the Greek Scriptures? No" - In fact, it is not even "the only one," because there is no such translation. The ones they mention did not "restore" but, on a speculative basis, contrary to the evidence of the manuscripts, inserted the name Yahweh (Jehovah) into their translations. But this does not make JW's position more secure, but theirs more shaky. I am only reacting to one of the missing sources, but it is enough to prove their bad faith.
The Watchtower is sitting on the horns of a dilemma here. Because if that mass of Greek manuscripts, on which he is forced to base the authenticity of God's word in other respects, fell victim to the tendentious "apostate copyists" at this point, then what prevented them from forging whole doctrines into the Scripture elsewhere so that they uniformly appear in all surviving copies? And then WTS is forced to make itself the measure of authenticity not only in terms of the occurrence of the JHWH name in the New Testament, but also in many other textual and theological questions.
Stafford, for instance, wants to justify the insertion of "Jehovah" into the New Testament Watchtower by suggesting that it was probably not the apostles who began to abbreviate holy names, but the generation that followed them, while the apostles followed the practice of the Old Testament copyists who inserted Hebrew into the Greek text. In this demonstration, he relies on the hypothesis of a Hebrew original Matthew derived from Papias and Jerome as a fact. However, research has already refuted this insofar as it has shown that the Matthew we have is not a translation, but was originally written in Greek. The hypothesis of a Hebrew Matthew might have originated from those early Syriac translations which, as later works, corrected the tangled Hebraisms in Matthew. The author is also mistaken in suggesting that Matthew consistently quoted from the Hebrew text, because there are many places where he follows the Septuagint (e.g., 1:23, 3:3, 4:4, or 15:8-9).
Then he argues for the insertion of Jehovah in 1 Cor 2:16 ("For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ"), asserting that there are data for the reading of "Lord" instead of Christ, and in this case the name Jehovah would naturally have stood first. The problem with this argument is that an undeniably later textual tradition attests to the "Lord" standing second (Vaticanus etc.) rather than "Christ" (p46, Alef etc.). The latter are much more numerous, so it is more likely that some copyists standardized the usage, rather than that it was originally there and the copyists replaced it with Christ (fearing the strange coincidence) when the Lord allegedly replaced Jehovah in the first place. Because this coincidence was by no means strange if one bears in mind that the authors often applied to Jesus Old Testament verses that spoke of Yahweh. (Such as Hebrews 1:10.)
Stafford's work doesn't really answer the main question, namely, why doesn't the New World Translation translate literal, even though it puffs itself up in the preface with all sorts of self-praise, promising to do just that, and even promises concordance where possible. (Some of its defenders boastfully mention this in relation to the gnosis-epignosis.)
For example, let's look at Romans 4:3. You often seem to take pride in the idea that you have corrected the "error" of "apostate copyists" who allegedly removed the tetragrammaton from the Greek texts. Well, in the Hebrew text, the name Yahweh indeed appears, but Paul does not quote the verse according to this, but according to the Septuagint. This change and reversion now backfires on you strongly, because it turns out that the apostle gave his seal of approval to the translation of the Tetragrammaton with the word "God". I assume he did this because he realized that the appearance of the name YHWH in this context, although common in the Hebrew text, is strictly speaking an anachronism (i.e., a mode of expression reflecting the subsequent knowledge and vocabulary of Moses, who wrote down the events), since we know that God had not yet revealed the name YHWH to the patriarchs.
Therefore, Paul's inspired word, following the Septuagint (and sanctifying it even against the Hebrew text at this point), returned to the contextual reading of the verse, taking into account the above statement, while you rip the word out of his mouth and drop the name Jehovah in its place, which is simply an anachronism in the Hebrew text at the said place. Who do you think you are?
Daniel already associates the name of God with the word "heaven" and substitutes it twice. Following this, Matthew says "kingdom of heaven" instead of "kingdom of God". Since the Jews started vocalizing their manuscripts, they have been supplying the tetragrammaton with the vowels of the word "Lord" (Adonai), indicating what should be read there. The Septuagint did not leave it in (in some manuscripts) for it to be pronounced: one camp pronounced it, another did not. But even those who pronounced it could not be sure that they were saying it correctly.
That the apostles, when quoting the Septuagint, did not write Jehovah is clear from the large mass of manuscripts. The p46 (one of the Ryland papyri from around 200 AD; one of the earliest papyri containing longer text) writes Kyrios in Rom 9:29, just like the great codices. ("Unless the Lord of Hosts had left us offspring" etc.) Interestingly, Paul did not want to translate the "sabaoth", which is translated as "hosts", into Greek, from which we can deduce that he had before him or in his memory a Greek Old Testament text in which, out of respect for the name of Yahweh, the Tetragrammaton was replaced with Kyrios, but the Sabaoth was just transcribed in Greek letters.
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