Follow ewatchman on Twitter

Friday, June 17, 2011

Question #23

What is the correct spelling of God's proper name, "Yahweh" or "Jehovah"? If Jehovah's Witnesses maintain that "Yahweh" is more proper, why do they misspell it "Jehovah"? If the name of God is so important, then should you not only pronounce it correctly, but spell it correctly too?

_____________________
The correct spelling of God's name depends upon the language into which it is being translated. There are literally thousands of different languages and dialects spoken by mankind around the globe. 

The language of the Bible was originally Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. God's personal appeared in the ancient text thousands of times as YHWH. Due to the fact that Hebrew was written without vowels the exact spelling of the YHWH is uncertain. But because so many proper Hebrew names were derived from variations of YHWH, we can be fairly certain YHWH was pronounced with three syllables, not two as in Yah-weh. Most likely it was pronounced Ye-ho-wah. 

But Yeh-ho-wah is a foreign word in English.When Hebrew names are translated into English the "Y" is dropped in favor of "J." Also, the "W" is translated using the letter "V." So, the construction of the name Jehovah follows the same rules as is applied to all other Hebrew names that are translated into English. 


No comments:

Post a Comment