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The last revision was just plain inacurate. "Jehovah" was an incurate tranliteration of YHWH used in the middle-ages. The KJV uses the convention "LORD" in small caps throught. - Asa

whoops! I wonder why I thought it was so? Dimness strikes.

--MichaelTinkler

It wasn't you, Michael--I copy-pasted ...

From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913):

     Yahweh \Yah"weh\, Yahwe \Yah"we\, n. Also Jahveh \Jah"veh\, Jahve \Jah"ve\, etc.

     A modern transliteration of the Hebrew word translated

     Jehovah in the Bible; -- used by some critics to

     discriminate the tribal god of the ancient Hebrews from the

     Christian Jehovah. Yahweh or Yahwe is the spelling now

     generally adopted by scholars.

The NIV preface states:

In regard to the divine name YHWH, commonly referred to as the Tetragrammaton, the translators adopted the device used in most English versions of rendering that name as "LORD" in capital letters to distinguish it from Adonai, another Hebrew word rendered "Lord", for which small letters are used.

Yet another Bible Dictionary I have states regarding "Jehovah":

The original pronunciation of this name has possibly been lost, as the Jews, in reading, never mentioned it, but substituted one of the other names of God, usually Adonai. Probably it was pronounced Jahveh, or Yahveh. In the KJV, the Jewish custom has been followed, and the name is generally denoted by LORD or GOD, printed in small capitals.

Any ideas what is most accurate and least misleading?

--Dlugar?

My understanding is that "Yahweh" and "Jehovah" are alternate English transliterations of the Hebrew word written with the so-called tetragrammaton, "YHVH" (actually, its equivalent in the Hebrew alphabet), which was the proper name for God among the ancient Hebrews. The existence of multiple transliterations for a single foreign word is not unusual; consider "Peking", "Peiping", "Beijing", which are alternate transliterations of the Chinese word which names the capital of modern China. The problem in this case is complicated by the fact that the ancient Hebrew alphabet didn't include letters for vowels, and by the time vowel marks were introduced the sacred name was not spoken for religious reasons (the word "Adonai" meaning "Lord" was substituted). Evidently the vowel marks for "Adonai" were used with the tetragrammaton, which led to the transliteration "Jehovah". This obviously was a mistake. The modern transliteration "Yahweh" is generally believed by scholars to reflect the actual pronunciation. - Hank Ramsey

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