The Name of God

It's nice to be back from the great WHITE north. My internet access there was limited, so it's nice to be back in the saddle as far as that goes.

I've been reading about the name of God. When conversing with Moses, God said, "Tell them that I AM sent you." Moses was the first to know this name of God - it was a privileged information. Translated, it could also mean "I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE". Don't you just love that? That is something that only GOD could say. That is HIS Name.

Now in the Hebrew, it translates into the tetragrammaton, or the "Four Letters": YHWH. Yood, Hey, Vav, Hey are the letters that in the English, we pronounce respectfully as Yahweh.

To the Jewish people, this is the 'unpronounceable' name of God, and they did NOT pronounce it. Many still do not. Instead, they substituted the name for good sir or Lord in Hebrew: Adonai. Here is where it gets more interesting.

The Hebrew typically does not show written vowels. Instead, they have a method of placing dots under the words (consonant strings) that give direction on how to pronounce the word. So the YHWH would have dots underneath it IF it were written correctly.

What the scribes did was write the Hebrew for Yahweh but place the pronunciation dots for Adonai, since that was what was pronounced when scriptures were read. This created a great problem for those who translated from Hebrew to Greek and then Latin and then... English. When you take Yahweh but pronounce it with vowels from the word Adonai, you get the word 'Jehovah'.

In case you ever wondered... I thought this fascinating.