As I was growing up I remember that we, as Jehovah's Witnesses, took great pride in showing people God's name in their own Bible. We were the only religion(or so I was told anyway) that used God's name. Our Bible, the New World Translation, put God's name back where it belonged. No other translation was faithful to using God's name as we were. We were Jehovah's Witnesses. We witnessed for the one, true God whose name is "Jehovah". It made you feel special to be part of such a group of people who knew God's name and used it the way it was meant to be used.
Occasionally though, the word Yahweh was mentioned. It was never used as "Jehovah" was used. I vaguely remember reading in our own publications that Yahweh may be a closer form of the divine name than Jehovah, but that Jehovah was the accepted modern day version. I never questioned it, I never looked into it. I took the Faithful and Discreet Slave's word for it. They were The Slave afterall. All "new light" came through them. If they said "Jehovah" was the correct name, it had to be.
As anyone who has experienced the realization that the JWs and the WTS have been lying to us and deceiving us, we yearn to help our family and friends realize that they are under someone else's control and are being mislead. We argue till were blue in the face about 607, 1914,1935, the UN, child abuse, Jesus as mediator, 144,000, etc, etc, etc.
Maybe we need to forget the scandals, the dates. Start at the beginning. The first thing that JWs want to share with people is that God's name is Jehovah. They are programmed to worship "Jehovah, Jehovah, Jehovah". This religion puts so much emphasis on God's name and how it should be used, but, is Jehovah the correct name for God?
I spent just a few minutes searching on the Internet on the words, "Jehovah" and "Yahweh". I got some interesting results:
Jehovah , name of the God of the Hebrew people as erroneously transliterated from the Masoretic Hebrew text. The word consists of the consonants JHVH or JHWH, with the vowels of a separate word, Adonai (Lord). What its original vowels were is a matter of speculation, for because of an interpretation of such texts as Exodus 20:7 and Leviticus 24:11, the name came to be regarded as too sacred for expression; the scribes, in reading aloud, substituted ?Lord? and therefore wrote the vowel markings for ?Lord? into the consonantal framework JHVH as a reminder to future readers aloud. The translators of the Hebrew, not realizing what the scribes had done, read the word as it was written down, taking the scribal vowel markings as intrinsic to the name of their God rather than as a mere reminder not to speak it. From this came the rendition Jehovah. The evidence of the Greek church fathers shows the forms Jabe and Jâo to be traditional, as well as the shortened Hebrew forms of the words Jah (see Psalms 68:4, for example) and Jahu (in proper names). It indicates that the name was originally spoken Jaweh or Yahwe (often spelled Yahweh in modern usage). Etymologically, it is a third person singular, imperfect, probably of the verb hawah (or hajah), signifying ?to be.? The older interpreters explain the verb in a metaphysical and abstract sense; the ?I am? of Scripture is ?He who is,? the absolutely existent.
The name by which God revealed himself to the ancient Hebrews (Ex. 6:2, 3). This name was spelled "hwhy" (the Hebrew equivalent of "YHWH") and is known as the Tetragrammaton (meaning "four letters"). Since it was considered too sacred to pronounce, the Jews would substitute the Sacred Name (Ha-Shem) with the word "Adonai."
To indicate this substitution in the Masoretic Text, the Masoretes added the vowel points from the word "Adonai" to the Sacred Name. Early Christian translators mistakenly combined the vowels of Adonai with the consonants of YHWH, producing the word "YaHoWaH." When the Scriptures were translated into German during the Reformation (16th century), the word was transliterated into the German way of pronouncing it: the "Y" as the English "J", and the "W" as the English "V" -- or "Jahovah." In the early 17th century, the Scriptures were translated into English and the word was again transliterated, as "Jehovah." This error has carried over into many modern (English) translations, but is now recognized as a translation error that was never used by the Jews.
A mispronunciation (introduced by Christian theologians, but almost entirely disregarded by the Jews) of the Hebrew "Yhwh," the (ineffable) name of God (the Tetragrammaton or "Shem ha-Meforash"). This pronunciation is grammatically impossible; it arose through pronouncing the vowels of the "ḳere" (marginal reading of the Masorites:
Jehovah, is a form of Yahweh, the sacred Hebrew name for God. God first revealed the name Yahweh to the Israelite leader Moses (Exod. 3:14). Jews thought the name Yahweh was too holy to pronounce. By the 200's B.C., they were using the word Adonai as a respectful substitute when reading from the scriptures. When Yahweh was preceded by Adonai, they said Elohim. When writing the word, Jewish scribes mixed the vowels of Adonai and Elohim with the consonants of YHWH, the traditional spelling of Yahweh. This mixing resulted in the Latin spelling, Jehovah, which carried over into English.
This next quote came from a religious site, but I found it interesting because they mention the Witnesses:
Names do not change from language to language. One can listen to a foreign broadcast and recognize names of world leaders such as Bush, Yeltsin, Kohl, and Mitterand. Names are transliterated ("given the same sound")by employing equivalent letters of a given alphabet. Yahweh's Name does not change from language to language.
Even though the Tetragrammaton appeared in the Latin texts as JHVH (the equivalent of YHWH in pronunciation) the Hebrew vowel pointing was for adonai. In addition, the Jews made the first vowel "a" correspond to our short letter "e" as in "met," lest anyone reading the Hebrew would inadvertently blurt out the first part of the Sacred Name "Yah." (Hence the "e" in Jehovah.)
The Tetragrammaton, with the vowel pointing of the erroneous adonai, is even today called the "ineffable (unpronounceable) name" by those familiar with the Hebrew. It cannot be pronounced with the "adonai" vowel pointing!
The translators, unaware of the Jewish tradition not to pronounce the Name as Yahweh, were influenced by the Jews and their substitution of the vowels of adonai. Therefore they ignorantly wrote "Jehovah."
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 Tetragrammaton 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:
"Yahweh-the personal name of the [El] of the Israelites ...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 20thcenturies biblical scholars again began to use the form Yahweh, thus this pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton was never really lost. Greek transcriptions also indicate that YHWH should be pronounced Yahweh."
Interestingly, even the Jehovah's Witnesses acknowledge that the name Jehovah is improper. Their book, "Let Your Name Be Sanctified" freely admits on pages 16 and 18 that Yahweh is the superior translation of the Tetragrammaton. This book has lately been withdrawn. However, in the preface of their "The Kingdom Interlinear Translation of the Greek Scriptures," we find on page 23 the following admission:
"While inclining to view the pronunciation 'Yahweh' as the more correct way, we have retained the form 'Jehovah' because of people's familiarity with it since the 14th century. Moreover, it preserves equally with other forms, the four letters of the Tetragrammaton JHVH."
According to the quotes above, the WTS is aware that Jehovah is not 100% correct, but of course a good, obeying Witness is going to accept that. However, similar information can be found at the WTS website, "the authoritative web site about the beliefs, teachings, and activities of Jehovah's Witnesses." The information is taken from the brouchure, "The Divine Name That Will Endure Forever":
How Is God's Name Pronounced?
The truth is, nobody knows for sure how the name of God was originally pronounced. (I find it ironic that a brochure called "The Divine Name That Will Endure Forever" admits that no one knows the pronounciation. Wouldn't that mean that the name did not endure?) Why not? Well, the first language used in writing the Bible was Hebrew, and when the Hebrew language was written down, the writers wrote only consonants?not vowels. Hence, when the inspired writers wrote God's name, they naturally did the same thing and wrote only the consonants.
While ancient Hebrew was an everyday spoken language, this presented no problem. The pronunciation of the Name was familiar to the Israelites and when they saw it in writing they supplied the vowels without thinking (just as, for an English reader, the abbreviation "Ltd." represents "Limited" and "bldg." represents "building").
Two things happened to change this situation. First, a superstitious idea arose among the Jews that it was wrong to say the divine name out loud; so when they came to it in their Bible reading they uttered the Hebrew word 'Adho·nai' ("Sovereign Lord"). Further, as time went by, the ancient Hebrew language itself ceased to be spoken in everyday conversation, and in this way the original Hebrew pronunciation of God's name was eventually forgotten.
In order to ensure that the pronunciation of the Hebrew language as a whole would not be lost, Jewish scholars of the second half of the first millennium C.E. invented a system of points to represent the missing vowels, and they placed these around the consonants in the Hebrew Bible. Thus, both vowels and consonants were written down, and the pronunciation as it was at that time was preserved.
When it came to God's name, instead of putting the proper vowel signs around it, in most cases they put other vowel signs to remind the reader that he should say 'Adho·nai'. From this came the spelling Iehouah, and, eventually, Jehovah became the accepted (by who?) pronunciation of the divine name in English. This retains the essential elements of God's name from the Hebrew original.
According to this brochure, Jehovah is a modern rendition of Adho-nai, not YHWH, making Jehovah not the divine name.
If Jehovah is not the divine name, if it is a mis-pronouncitian, why is it being used? Shouldn't the true followers of the true God want to use his real name and not a latinized title? Technically, using Jehovah is not much better than using Lord or God.
From the very git-go, the Witnesses mislead and cover the truth as they seek to gain converts and followers. If you know anyone who is studying with the witnesses or curious about the witnesses, use God's name as a basis to show them that maybe the Witnesses aren't as righteous and proper as they think they are.
