Jehovah is the sov’reign God,
The universal King.
"Jehovah" is used, as the name of God, here in 34b St. Thomas (the same words also appear in 169 Dartmouth with an additional verse) and with eight other tunes in the 91 revision.
These are words by Isaac Watts. "Jehovah" appears first in the 16th century, in latin and spelled then "Ihouah" This is the form that appears in the Geneva Bible; the King James has shifted the spelling to "Jehovah."
And it's all a mistake.
So here's the deal -- the Hebrew Bible gives us the consonants for the name of God, usually transliterated as YHWH. This is the sacred 'tetragrammaton' -- so sacred that ultra-orthodox Jews would never type it into a computer because anyone reading this and hitting the delete button would violate a duty to preserve every writing of this name. But it's only the consonants. For many centuries Hebrew writing only recorded consonants, not vowels. Later, a system of 'pointing,' small marks added around the consonants, was devised to record the vowels. But long before this, the name of God had become far too sacred to pronounce out loud. Instead, one would substitute the word adonai (lord). So... to remind readers of this, the vowels for adonai were put with the letters of the sacred name.
Jerome, translating scripture into Latin (the Vulgate) understood this and put in Adonai, but then later, western Christian scholars didn't get it, and assumed the vowels belonged to the name of God. Reading them together produced the name "Jehovah" (the J standing in for Latin I representing the Hebrew sound of Y).
Today, most scholars accept the conjecture that the name of God would have been something like "Yahweh" Some of us old sticks-in-the-mud still prefer to say "Adonai."
The universal King.
"Jehovah" is used, as the name of God, here in 34b St. Thomas (the same words also appear in 169 Dartmouth with an additional verse) and with eight other tunes in the 91 revision.
These are words by Isaac Watts. "Jehovah" appears first in the 16th century, in latin and spelled then "Ihouah" This is the form that appears in the Geneva Bible; the King James has shifted the spelling to "Jehovah."
And it's all a mistake.
So here's the deal -- the Hebrew Bible gives us the consonants for the name of God, usually transliterated as YHWH. This is the sacred 'tetragrammaton' -- so sacred that ultra-orthodox Jews would never type it into a computer because anyone reading this and hitting the delete button would violate a duty to preserve every writing of this name. But it's only the consonants. For many centuries Hebrew writing only recorded consonants, not vowels. Later, a system of 'pointing,' small marks added around the consonants, was devised to record the vowels. But long before this, the name of God had become far too sacred to pronounce out loud. Instead, one would substitute the word adonai (lord). So... to remind readers of this, the vowels for adonai were put with the letters of the sacred name.
Jerome, translating scripture into Latin (the Vulgate) understood this and put in Adonai, but then later, western Christian scholars didn't get it, and assumed the vowels belonged to the name of God. Reading them together produced the name "Jehovah" (the J standing in for Latin I representing the Hebrew sound of Y).
Today, most scholars accept the conjecture that the name of God would have been something like "Yahweh" Some of us old sticks-in-the-mud still prefer to say "Adonai."
1 comment:
Your blog keeps getting better and better! Your older articles are not as good as newer ones you have a lot more creativity and originality now keep it up!
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