The reason for the name

[Gentleman007]

Why have Jehovah’s Witnesses chosen the name “Jehovah” when that is known to derive from a hybrid of the vowels for Adonai on the Tetragrammaton YHWH?

“Because that form of the divine name has a long history in the English language.”[1] This is shown in two examples:

[1] Explaining why he used “Jehovah” instead of “Yahweh” in his 1911 work Studies in the Psalms, respected Bible scholar Joseph Bryant Rotherham said that he wanted to employ a “form of the name more familiar (while perfectly acceptable) to the general Bible-reading public.” [2] In 1930 scholar A. F. Kirkpatrick made a similar point regarding the use of the form “Jehovah.” He said: “Modern grammarians argue that it ought to be read Yahveh … but JEHOVAH seems firmly rooted in the English language, and the really important point is not the exact pronunciation, but the recognition that it is a Proper Name, not merely an appellative title like ‘Lord.’” (brackets, ellipsis and underscore added)[2]

Thus, the fact that “Jehovah” was not the original pronunciation is irrelevant. (By way of comparison, “Jesus” is also not the original pronunciation.) Additionally, the indication that YHWH was originally disyllabic is relevant on a historical level, but it does not inform the reason for choosing the name Jehovah. The reason for choosing “Jehovah” was stated succinctly above, because of its “long history in the English language.”

In fact, Jehovah’s Witnesses have even made known the origins of “Jehovah” and the likely disyllabic pronunciation of YHWH. This is seen in the Insight books under “Jehovah.” Under “Correct Pronunciation of the Divine Name,” it states:

“Jehovah” is the best known English pronunciation of the divine name, although “Yahweh” is favored by most Hebrew scholars.

Then, after asking “What is the proper pronunciation of God’s name?,” it states:

In the second half of the first millennium C.E., Jewish scholars introduced a system of points to represent the missing vowels in the consonantal Hebrew text. When it came to God’s name, instead of inserting the proper vowel signs for it, they put other vowel signs to remind the reader that he should say ʼAdho·naiʹ (meaning “Sovereign Lord”) or ʼElo·himʹ (meaning “God”). … Hebrew scholars generally favor “Yahweh” as the most likely pronunciation. They point out that the abbreviated form of the name is Yah (Jah in the Latinized form), as at You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now. and in the expression Ha·lelu-Yahʹ (meaning “Praise Jah, you people!”). (You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now.; You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now., You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now.) Also, the forms Yehohʹ, Yoh, Yah, and Yaʹhu, found in the Hebrew spelling of the names Jehoshaphat, Joshaphat, Shephatiah, and others, can all be derived from Yahweh.[3]

Thus, when the scribes confronted YHWH, they would place the vowels of Adonai on it. (See below.) If read with those vowels, you get the hybrid trisyllabic vocalization of “Yehowah.” When the scribes confronted Adonai YHWH however, they then placed the vowels of Elohim on YHWH, producing a different hybrid trisyllabic vocalization.

Now, when the scribes placed the vowels of Adonai on YHWH, they ran into a grammatical conflict and had to alter the first vowel point: the compound shewa on the aleph (A) of Adonai became a simple shewa because of the yodh (Y) of YHWH. See Figure 1[4]:

Figure 1


I think it’s kind of funny that the scribes ran into a grammatical problem when they tampered with the sacred Tetragrammaton, don’t you?

Additional Information
For additional reading and information, please see:

• These concise explanations by Dr. Michael Heiser:
  • YHWH, along with his scholarly compilation linked to in his footnote 1.
  • His video presentation: youtu.@be/vdpIyD7MXH4
• These concise explanations by Dr. William Barrick:
  • youtu.@be/my0RoAG1g68
  • youtu.@be/__kKmweZGMk
  • Here he discusses vowel displacment in front of his class: youtu.@be/Mb9lRzd4zK0
• This video by The Bible Project: youtu.@be/eLrGM26pmM0
• An explanation of the compound shewa preferring gutturals: youtu.@be/0f3Z1FbsQ28

(remove @)

A Word of Advice
Some insist that YHWH was originally trisyllabic in an effort to defend “Jehovah.” This is unnecessary. We can accept the explanations above. As Geoffrey Jackson warned, we could get “side-tracked” over the original pronunciation of YHWH, even turning this into a toxic issue.[5] There is even a meme in circulation on social media where YHW, the first three letters of YHWH, are in a box labeled “Yeho,” with the final W labeled as “wah” to support “Yehowah.” The problem with this is “Yeho” is an assumption, for the first syllable is more appropriately “Yah” (YH), with WH forming the last syllable. Thus, for that meme to work, there would have to be another W, YHWWH!

Lastly, it is notable that YHWH is abbreviated as Yah or Jah, YH. We know this pronunciation without any controversy or question. Jah is also notably connected to YHWH in You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now. and You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now., making the first syllable YH of YHWH naturally follow.

This emphasizes that we do not demand one pronunciation over another, and we do not oppose Yahweh either. Doing any of these is a mistake.

Conclusion
Why do Jehovah’s Witnesses use “Jehovah”? Due to its long, established popularity in ENGLISH.

The end.

Footnotes:
[1] New World Translation, 2013. Appendix A4: The Divine Name in the Hebrew Scriptures You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now.
See also the June 2015 JW Broadcast You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now.
[2] ibid.
[3] You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now.
[4] From “The Yehovah Deception” by the Yahweh’s Restoration Ministry, a Sacred Name movement. You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now.
[5] June 2015 JW Broadcast at the 9:36 and 15:25 minute marks. You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now.

Appendix

1. The Feb. 1 1999 Watchtower article “Jehovah” or “Yahweh”?
2. The Reference Bible explanation
3. As pronounced in Akkadian
4. How to respond to this common objection
5. Tetragrammania

The Feb. 1 1999 Watchtower article “Jehovah” or “Yahweh”?
In this blog post “Jehovah” or “Yahweh”? I presented the text of that Feb. 1 1999 Watchtower article, and respectfully closed with the following disclaimer:

Please note that this is considered to be out-of-date, as expressed in the You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now. under the subheading Why does the New World Translation use the form “Jehovah”? and in the You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now.. Supporting Appendix A4 is this article The Tetragrammaton by Jason Hare: You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now. (currently a work in progress). Preview:

He also wrote this article with the above 1999 Watchtower article in mind: How Could Yahweh Have Become Yeho- in Theophoric Names? You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now.

See also the video series on the Tetragrammaton by Hebrew Gospels: (YøùTùbé channel).

The information presented in these two sources is more technical than what appeared in the above 1982 and 1999 Watchtowers, correcting the quoted scholars, as well as correcting scholar Nehemia Gordon and the scholars that agree with him.

Jehovah’s Witnesses are not opposed to the technical reconstruction of Yahweh.

That w99 article is an outlier, being incongruent with what appeared before and after it. It has inadvertently caused a lot of confusion, and should be ignored.

The Reference Bible explanation
The New World Translation with References Appendix 1A The Divine Name in the Hebrew Scriptures presents the following:

[The] Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, Vol. 1, Chicago (1980), p. 13, says: “To avoid the risk of taking God’s name (YHWH) in vain, devout Jews began to substitute the word ʼǎdōnā for the proper name itself. Although the Masoretes left the four original consonants in the text, they added the vowels ē (in place of ǎ for other reasons) and ā to remind the reader to pronounce ʼǎdōnā regardless of the consonants. This feature occurs more than six thousand times in the Hebrew Bible. Most translations use all capital letters to make the title ‘LORD.’ Exceptions are the ASV [American Standard Version] and New World Translation which use ‘Jehovah,’ Amplified [Bible] which uses ‘Lord,’ and JB [The Jerusalem Bible] which uses ‘Yahweh.’ . . . In those places where ʼǎdōnā yhwh occurs the latter word is pointed with the vowels from ʼēlōhim, and the English renderings such as ‘Lord GOD’ arose (e.g. You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now.).”

This appendix left this quote as the final word without any further explanation. Its first point was that two vowels were added, the first and the last of ʼǎdōnā. A complication is that the middle vowel ō from ʼǎdōnā was not ubiquitously vowel-pointed to include it, the cholem. This explains why the Insight book under “Jehovah” says:

The Codex Leningrad B 19⁠A, of the 11th century C.E., vowel points the Tetragrammaton to read Yehwahʹ, Yehwihʹ, [for Elohim also lacking ō ] and Yeho·wahʹ. Ginsburg’s edition of the Masoretic text vowel points the divine name to read Yeho·wahʹ.

Thus, the vowel point cholem, which is a dot over the letter, was not consistently added, but it was still implicit as it was not consistently added for ʼǎdōnā either.

The second point is that ē was added “in place of ǎ.” The “other reasons” for this is due to the aleph of ʼǎdōnā being a guttural which prefers the compound shewa vowel-point. This would revert to the simple shewa when applied to the yodh of YHWH. (See Figure 1 above.)

The third point is that when confronted with ʼǎdōnā yhwh, the scribes would avoid saying “ʼǎdōnā” twice, and would apply the vowels of the trisyllabic ʼēlōhim on the Tetragrammaton instead.

Thus, as the same Insight book article says:

when in reading the Hebrew Scriptures in the original language, the Jewish reader substituted either ʼAdho·naiʹ (Sovereign Lord) or ʼElo·himʹ (God) rather than pronounce the divine name represented by the Tetragrammaton. This is seen from the fact that when vowel pointing came into use in the second half of the first millennium C.E., the Jewish copyists inserted the vowel points for either ʼAdho·naiʹ or ʼElo·himʹ into the Tetragrammaton, evidently to warn the reader to say those words in place of pronouncing the divine name. … When it came to God’s name, instead of inserting the proper vowel signs for it, they put other vowel signs to remind the reader that he should say ʼAdho·naiʹ (meaning “Sovereign Lord”) or ʼElo·himʹ (meaning “God”).

If someone did read the Tetragrammaton with the “dummy vowels” of ʼAdho·naiʹ, they would read Yeho·wahʹ, which would be an artificial and unintended pronunciation. The Aid to Bible Understanding book added:

By combining the vowel signs of ʼAdho·nayʹ and ʼElo·himʹ with the four consonants of the Tetragrammaton the pronunciations Yeho·wahʹ and Yeho·wihʹ were formed. The first of these provided the basis for the Latinized form “Jehova(h).” The first recorded use of this form dates from the thirteenth century C.E. Raymundus Martini, a Spanish monk of the Dominican Order, used it in his book Pugeo Fidei of the year 1270.

Thus, “Jehovah” derives from misreading the Tetragrammaton with the vowels of ʼAdho·nayʹ . It then became a very popular English pronunciation. In other words, Moses did not call his God “Jehovah.” We only do it due to its established familiarity in English.

As pronounced in Akkadian
As one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, Rolf Furuli stated: “The [Akkadian] cuneiform evidence shows the theophoric syllables ye-hō at the beginning of a name and the syllables ya-hū at the end of a name. This confirms the Masoretic pointing in the Hebrew Scriptures.” (The Tetragram—its history, its use in the New Testament, and its pronunciation. 213) He then used this evidence to support a trisyllabic name. However, notice the following presentation by the YRM (see footnote 4), which has published the following research in its Restoration Study Bible, 4th edition, page 924:

Ancient Akkadian Tablets Testify to “Yah”
Between 1888 and 1900 a collection of tablets, known as the Murashu Archive, was discovered at Nippur, a site in ancient Mesopotamia. Today, it’s located in southern Iraq near the town of Ad-Dīwānīyah. In all, the excavation team unearthed 330 whole tablets and approximately 400 more that were fragmented. The tablets were written in Akkadian cuneiform, a language cognate to Hebrew.

The term Murashu comes from the chief member of a single family. The actual tablets provide mostly legal business records pertaining to the occupants of the land, including Judean exiles that came out of Babylon, dating to the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid periods, 572-477 BCE.

One of the most significant finds is Judean names with the prefix “Yah” and “Yahu.” Examples of such names include: Yahadil, Yahitu, Yahmuzu, Yahuazar, Yahuazza, and Yahuhin. Interestingly, based on Professors Laurie E. Pierce and Cornelia Wunsch’s reference work, You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now., there is no evidence in this period of names beginning with “ye,” as often seen in Masoretic and modern Hebrew, suggesting a linguistic shift from “Yah” to “Ye” within the prefixes of Jewish names between these periods.

Yahweh’s Restoration Ministry contacted several professors specializing in ancient Akkadian. Not only did they confirm the prefix “Yah,” but also that this rendering was the consensus among scholars. Professor Ran Zadok from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who specializes in Mesopotamia, Iranian and Judaic Studies, verified, “It seems to me that the cuneiform spellings render approximately *Ya(h)w.”

Professor Martin Worthington from Cambridge, who specializes in Mesopotamian languages and literature, states, “…scholarly consensus has it that Yahwistic names are well attested in first-millennium Babylonia. As several scholars have observed, there is a strong tendency (though not an absolute rule) for the form to be yahu at the beginning of the name.”

The online booklet The Yehovah Deception (see footnote 4) makes the same points.

This contradicts “the theophoric syllables ye-hō at the beginning of a name.” In any case, the Insight book quoted above says: “the forms Yehohʹ, Yoh, Yah, and Yaʹhu, found in the Hebrew spelling of the names Jehoshaphat, Joshaphat, Shephatiah, and others, can all be derived from Yahweh.” It appears then that looking to Akkadian to support a trisyllabic pronunciation is not that accommodating.

How to respond to this common objection


This is how to respond to the following common objection:

“God’s name was not Jehovah.”

“Yes, we know that Jehovah derives from the vowels of Adonai on the Tetragrammaton. We use Jehovah due to its established popularity and familiarity in English.” Then perhaps add: “We acknowledge the scholarly reconstruction of Yahweh as preserved in theophoric names.”

Tetragrammania
A concern I have, and share with others, is becoming obsessed with the pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton. This goes beyond being “side-tracked.” This obsession turns into an elaborate conspiracy theory that rejects the solid explanation of vowel displacement and rejects Yahweh as a valid reconstruction from the contracted theophoric elements in theophoric names. By rejecting Hebrew scholarship and rejecting the explanation of the Jewish scribal practice of vowel displacement, one enters into a “mania” of trying to go through a different route to “Jehovah.” Hence my neologism of “Tetragrammania.” This results in the ailments of cognitive dissonance and delusion. If one of Jehovah’s Witnesses falls for this, he will also reject the New World Translation appendices, the Aid and Insight books, as well as the ones responsible for these, not to mention mainstream solid Hebrew scholarship. This is not the path to go down. “Ponder the path of your feet,” says You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now. AKJV, “and let all your ways be established.” The NET Bible footnote explains that this applies to the “ways for the moral sense in life.” A moral sense in life is needed here. Our fight is not against Yahweh, but against false doctrines that alienate people from Jehovah. Tetragrammania may also alienate you from Jehovah.



Credits:

• Opening graphic from JW.org with colors reversed.
• Discussion graphic from JW.org.