So, is Jehovah "His" name?
It would seem that Watchtower is backing out of this statement also.
This is from the Watchtower Publication "The Divine Name that will Endure Forever" (1984). Page 20
"The word Jehovah does not accurately represent any form of the Name ever used in Hebrew".
Isn't ACCURACY one of the things they stress and claim to have?
Do you remember when you used "The Name" as your calling card in door-to-door work?
"Hey! Do you know God has a name?" (incidentally, how many of you are here because of that opening line grabbing your attention?
Were you aware of the admissions of inaccuracy by the tower when you advertised the name jehovah for the organization?
Did any of you feel that this was a retraction of what you had been previously taught? This is only one of several admissions of "vagueness" about the name. Do you feel deceived about this?
Do you realize that even though they are admitting it's "not exactly true that the Tower still continues to capitalize on it as a Truth? How do you feel about that?
just an excerpt: (sorry it goes red. I don't know how to change this)
Dr. J. B. Rotherham states in the preface of his Bible concerning Jehovah: "Erroneously written and pronounced Jehovah, which is merely a combination of the sacred Tetragrammon and the vowels in the Hebrew word for Lord, substituted by the Jews for JHVH, because they shrank from pronouncing The Name, owing to an old misconception of the two passages, Ex. 20:7 and Lev. 24:16...To give the name JHVH the vowels of the word for Lord [Heb. Adonai], is about as hybrid a combination as it would be to spell the name Germany with the vowels in the name Portugal - viz., Gormuna. The monstrous combination Jehovah is not older than about 1520 A.D." The Encyclopedia Britannica (Micropedia, vol. 10) says: "The Masoretes, Jewish biblical scholars of the Middle Ages, replaced the vowel signs that had appeared above or beneath the consonants of YHWH with the vowel signs of Adonai or of Elohim. Thus the artificial name Jehovah (YeHoWaH) came into being. Although Christian scholars after the Renaissance and Reformation periods used the term Jehovah for YHWH, in the 19th and 20th centuries biblical scholars again began to use the form Yahweh, thus this pronunciation of the Tetragrammon was never really lost. Greek transcriptions also indicate that YHWH should be pronounced Yahweh."
They view 'Yahweh' as the only correct way to spell and pronounce the divine name. They are completely ignoring the fact that the English letter 'w'--used in the name Yahweh--was invented two hundred years later than the first symbol for 'j'. In addition, the letters 'a' and 'h' were not invented until the 1500's. Thus the same argument that they use against the name Jehovah could be used even more strongly against 'Yahweh.' The spelling 'Yahweh' was impossible before 1500! This same argument could be used against 'yahshua' as well. Since lowercase 's' was not invented until the 1500's, and lowercase 'u' did not come into regular use as a vowel until the 1500's, the spelling 'yahshua' was also impossible before that time. The truth of the matter is that the invention of the letters of the English alphabet neither proves nor disproves the pronunciation of the Hebrew name (YHWH). Although some of the letters in the English alphabet were invented in later centuries, the sounds that they represent existed from the earliest times. Only the symbols used to represent the sounds changed. "The name Jehovah occurs a few times in the KJV Bible. But according to Harper's Bible Dictionary, this name is 'the result of the translators' ignorance of the Hebrew language and customs' (1985, p1036). The book of World Religions from Ancient History says 'The name Jehovah is a medieval misreading and does not occur in the Hebrew Bible' (p.386)."