Bible Geek T-shirt Contest Winner

Jonah Bailey is the official winner of the Bible Geek T-shirt contest and will receive an original handmade t-shirt. His equation "YHWH + Lord (Adonai) = Jehovah" is a correct literal translation of the Hebrew symbols and below is an explaniation of why.

The Name of God

"At some point along the way-It's hard to be sure historically when exactly this happened- the ancient Israelites came to know their God by a special name.

This name was regarded as so special, so holy, that by the time of Jesus, and perhaps for some centuries before that, they were not allowed to say it out loud. (One exception was made: the high priest, once a year, would pronounce God's special name in a place called the Holy of Holies at the heart of the Temple.) Since Hebrew script only used consonants, we can't even be sure how the name was meant to be pronounced: the consonants are YHWH, and the best guess we have at how the were pronounced is "Yahweh." Orthodox Jews to this day won't speak this name; they often refer to God simply as "the Name," HaShem. Neither will they write it. Sometimes they write even the generic word "God" as "G-d," to make the same point.

Like most ancient names, YHWH had a meaning. It seems to have meant "I am who I am" or "I will be who I will be." This God, the name suggests, can't be defined in terms of anything or anyonelse. It isn't the case that there is such a thing as "divinity" and that he's simply another example, even the supreme one, of this category. Nor is it the case that all things that exist, including God, share in something we might call "being" or "existence," so that God would then be the supremely existing being. Rather, he is who he is. He is his own category, not part of a larger one. That is why we can't expect to mount a ladder of arguments from our world and end up in his, anymore than we might expect to mount a ladder of moral achievement and end up making ourselves good enough to stand in his presence.

With God's name the is another confusion which we must sort out. Because God's personal name was not to be spoken, the ancient Israelites developed a technique for avoiding doing so when reading their scriptures. When they came to the word YHWH, they would say ADONAI (which means "my LORD") instead. As a way of reminding themselves that this was what they had to do, they would sometimes write the consonants of YHWH with the vowels of ADONAI. This confused some later readers, who tried to say the two words together. With a bit of a stretch (and because some letters were interchangeable, including Y with J and W with V), they created the hybrid JEHOVAH. No ancient Israelite or early Christian would have recognized this word.

Almost all English translations of the Old Testament have continued the practice of discouraging people from pronouncing God's personal name. Instead, when the word occurs, it is normally translated "the Lord." Sometimes this is written in small capitals, as in "the LORD." This is doubly confusing, and anyonewho wants to understand what Judaism, let alone Christianity, believes about God had better get their mind around the problem.

From the very early times (indeed, according to the Gospels, since Jesus's own lifetime) Christians have referred to Jesus himselfas "the Lord." In early Christian speech this phrase carried at least three meanings: (a) "the master," "The one whose servants we are," "the one we've promised to obey"; (b) "the true Lord" (as opposed to Caesar, who claimed the same title); and (c) "the Lord"-that is, YHWH- as spoken of in the Old Testament. All these meanings are visible in Paul, the earliest Christian writer we have. The early Christians rejoiced inthis flexibility, but for us it has become a source of confusion.

Within contemporary Western culture, under the influence of Deism, the phrase "the Lord" has shiftedfrom referring either to Jesus specifically or to the YHWH of the Old Testament. It has become, instead, a way of reffering simply to a rather distant, generalized deity, who might conceivably have something to do with Jesus but equally well might not, and would probably not have much to do with YHWH either. Thus it has come about that ancient Israelite scruples, medieval mistranslation, and fuzzy eighteenth century thinking have combined to make it hard for us today to recapture the vital sense of what a first-century Jew would understand whenthinking of YHWH, what an early Christian would be saying when speaking of jesusor "the Lord," and how we might now properly reappropiate this whole tradition.

Still the effort has to be made. All language about God is ultimately mysterious, but that is no excuse for sloppy or woolly thinking. And since the title "Lord" was one of the favoriteearly Christian ways of speakingabout Jesus, it is vital that we get clear on the point."

Excerpt from Simply Christian, By NT Wright Pgs 67-9