Here is a short Hebrew lesson designed to make some peace in the world. For most people these details won’t matter. For those who like detail, buckle up for some technicalities. The purpose of this short essay is to help educate the detail lovers in the world and prevent a “quarrel about words, which does no good, but only ruins the hearers” (2 Timothy 2:14). It’s always risky to write about these kinds of things. It proves Proverbs 26:4-5 is correct which seems to say you can’t really win when you address folly. Either you don’t correct folly and fools continue on being foolish, or you do correct and you just look like a fool yourself for getting involved. This essay is also a response to an actual conversation that took place today. Many know that when we read the word LORD in the Old Testament, it is coming from the Hebrew letters for the personal name of God first revealed to Moses. There are some who are very passionate about a certain spelling of it, and I would like to ease some of those concerns.
In Hebrew, certain letters can be transliterated into more than one letter in English. For example,
ב (Bet) can be B or V,
כ / ך (Kaf) can be K or Ch.
פ / ף (Pe) can be P or F and
ח (Chet) is often Ch or H.
Similarly, צ (Tsadi) can be Ts or Tz, and sometimes just S in modern usage.
Regarding the use of “Yahweh,” this is a common transliteration used by many scholars to represent the Tetragrammaton (YHWH), the sacred name of God in the Hebrew Scriptures, which had no vowels. And it’s correct that the Hebrew consonant “Vav” is often transliterated as a “V” sound in modern Hebrew. However, historically, it has been rendered as a “W” sound in ancient dialects of Hebrew. Here are some sources confirming this:
- WAW, waw (ו): The sixth letter of the Heb alphabet; transliterated in this Encyclopaedia w (or v). It came also to be used for the number 6. James Orr et al., eds., “Waw,” The International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia (Chicago: The Howard-Severance Company, 1915), 3075.
- “WAW. The sixth letter of the Hebrew alphabet.” David Noel Freedman, ed., “Waw,” The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 893.
- “WAW (Väv) Sixth letter in the Hebrew alphabet.” Chad Brand et al., eds., “Waw,” Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2003), 1661.
There are no true English letter equivalents to Hebrew, so both YHWH and YHVH are not even quite right. Those are simply ways of symbolizing the Hebrew language. To represent these more accurately, we ought to write the name in Hebrew. However, even in that case, the name was written by Moses in more than one way. Look at these two examples, both representing the name of God:
יְהֹוָה – Genesis 2:7 – This is when Moses began writing the name of God when he wrote Genesis, most commonly translated LORD.
אֶֽהְיֶה – Exodus 3:14 – This is the name of God, given by God, that Moses wrote down when he first asked God for his name
The differences are partly due to the fact that God’s name means something (that is, something to the effect of, “I AM THAT I AM”). Also it can be seen above that in addition to the consonants, the Jewish Masorites added diacritical marks to help us form vowels to aid in pronunciation. This explains why some scholars and traditions use “Yahweh” in English with vowels. My point in sharing all of this, is that while we can certainly have reverence for God and His holy name, we also don’t need to fret if we see it spelled in different ways in different languages. English is not the only language attempting to communicate ancient Hebrew. Here is יְהֹוָה in Russian: ЙХВХ, Here it is in Mandarin: 耶和华, Here it is in Greek: ΙΗΒΕ, Here it is in Arabic: يهْوَه All of those will sound very different depending on the person speaking. The use of language as symbols to represent speech is an imperfect tool in the hands of imperfect people. We can all probably agree that what’s important is not the exactness of the letters or the accents we use as much as we know the Lord Himself, that is the real purpose of reading and writing His name. We can probably also agree that as long as we read and write and speak with love and care for Him and others, He is pleased. For this reason, under normal circumstances, it may be best to do as the Israelites did and simply speak and write about God and His name as adonai, the “Lord.” In summary, from one detail lover to another: Details really are important, but they serve a higher purpose: love. “And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.” (1 Corinthians 13:2)
Adorn the Gospel 