History of the Name
Not too long after meeting God at the burning bush, Moses met him again on Mount Sinai and received the Ten Commandments. The third one was 'Do not take the name of YHWH your God in vain'.
I will return to the meaning of this later, but will first consider the effect this commandment had on the Jews. At face value there is one safe way of never saying the name of YHWH, or any other name, in vain, and that is not to say it at all. This is their practice to this day. Whenever Jews read the Bible and come to YHWH, they read it as Adonai meaning Lord or ha-shem meaning the Name.
It is a strange 'co-incidence' that Hebrew was originally written without vowels. This means that, as the name YHWH was neither spoken nor fully written, no one can possibly know its original pronunciation. The word Jehovah was formed by taking the vowels from Adonai and putting them into YHWH. It first appears in a fourteenth century manuscript and certainly has no ancient origin.
After the first dispersion of the Jews to Babylon and Egypt they began to feel a need of translating the Old Testament scriptures into Greek. The result was the Septuagint version, translated by seventy scholars in Egypt in the third century BC. We might have hoped that this Greek version would give us some clue how YHWH should be pronounced.
Alas, reverence for the name prevented this. Other names are transliterated from Hebrew into Greek, but YHWH is replaced throughout by Kurios, the Greek for Lord. When the New Testament quotes the Old Testament, it generally uses the Septuagint. This means that we find Kurios rather than YHWH there as well. Many English translations of the Bible follow this tradition by translating YHWH as LORD with capital letters.
It is interesting to note further that Greek has no equivalent for the Hebrew letters H and W (or V). Only Y, the first letter of YHWH can be transliterated into Greek (by iota). This made it almost impossible to write the name in Greek.
We may sum this up by saying that God gave the name YHWH to Moses as a temporary measure. When it had served its purpose, he obliterated its memory in three steps:
1. He allowed the Jews to have a spurious reverence for it, so that they did not dare pronounce it.
2. He caused Hebrew to be written without vowels, with the result that its pronunciation was not fully recorded.
3. He did not allow it to be transliterated into Greek or any other language while its pronunciation was still known.
The Third Commandment
We must now return to the third commandment. 'Do not take the name of YHWH your God in vain'. Almost everyone interprets this commandment as meaning 'Do not blaspheme'.
This interpretation has many centuries of tradition behind it, but I would venture to suggest that at least it may not be the primary meaning. The ten commandments are prefaced with the statement 'I am YHWH, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery'.
What does it mean to 'take a name'? The Hebrew word nasa primarily means to take, carry or bear. Just as a son takes his father's name, the Israelites were to take and carry the name of their God, the God who had adopted them, and brought them out of the land of Egypt. They were to be his representatives and bear his name. They were not to do so in vain.
Jesus suffered and died that he might bring us out of the spiritual land of Egypt. He wants us now to bear his name. Perhaps it is because we so often bear it in vain, that the world so often blasphemes it.
Next Part The Name of Jesus