In the 80s, when I memorized this verse, the King James Version renders it as:
Behold, God is my salvation; I will trust, and not be afraid: for the LORD JEHOVAH is my strength and my song; He also is become my salvation.
In the Hebrew text, the Name יָהּ (or Jah) and the tetragrammatonיְהוָהwere used simultaneously.
The tetragrammaton יְהוָהthat we know and translated as LORD in our Bibles is based on the קְרֵי/ כְּתִיב tradition (i.e. the tetragrammaton is written as יְהוָה Jehovah/Yahweh, but read as אֲדֹנָי Adonai).
We must bear in mind that the Hebrew word אֲדֹנָיis a majestic plural used only for the LORD God, which literally means, "My great Lord." See the definition given in sefaria:
אֲדֹנָי m.n. pl. the Lord, God. [Lit.: ‘my Lord’, the pl. of majesty of אָדוֹן (= Lord), with the suff. of the first person. The spelling with Qamatz serves to distinguish it from אֲדוֹנַי (= my lords).
Someone asked, "What about יָהּ (or Jah)?" or the tetragrammaton יְהוָה ?"
As mentioned in my earlier post, I think it does not matter whether יָהּ (or Jah) or the tetragrammaton יְהוָה but that we know who we are referring to.
The name has been translated as Jehovah, Yehwah, Yahweh by different scholars. Going by the Hebrew nikud, the closest transliteration that we can get is, in fact, Jehovah (with the J pronounced as a Y) or as some prefer to put it, Yehwah or Yehowah. The Mandarin Bibles also use this name.
The Fallacy of 'Jehovah as God of wickedness'
It is a serious matter of blasphemy against the Holy Name of God when there are people who claim that the name is the 'god of the supremely evil,' 'god of calamnity' or 'god of wickedness.' May our LORD have mercy on them.
I have no intentions whatsoever to raise doubts about their teachings except to contend with these flawed teachings perpetuated by some people who claim to know Hebrew:
(1) Edlin Abraham:
This video clip is sufficient to caution us against such teachings.
(2) This same teaching is being perpetuated by another person Lily Khaw in her Zoom sessions.
I quote her verbatim: "Now, is Jehovah innocent, artificial, Latinised name? It is a harmless traditional hybrid name? Is that so?
"This is one question I want you to take a look at it. Now, I want to tell you here, as the mouthpiece of God, I want to tell you, it is not! It is not innocent. It is not harmless. It is not merely a hybrid name. It is not. It has a deeper meaning to it."
Then, taking the illustration of backmasking of casette tapes (a method of playing the cassette backwards to surface a hidden message), she claims that the Name Jehovah may appear harmless on the surface, but it is "not so innocent."
She then claims that the name Jehovah is a combination of two words, quoting from Strong's Concordance:
Yah (3050) = God
Hovah (1943) = ruin, calamnity, mischief, very wickedness
My simple response:
I do not dispute the meaning of these two words. However, you cannot get pineapple by marrying a pine tree with an apple tree.In some cases, words are a hybrid of two individual words (like "appleseed" or even Abraham's name being the "father of a multitude"), but not in this case the way she has made it up, then claiming that the Holy Name Jehovah is the "god of wickedness."
I quote her again verbatim: "If you combine the two words together, Yah-hovah or Jehovah, it is actually God of Wickedness." Any unsuspecting listener would have missed how she happily changes from Yah-hovah to Jehovah just to prove her point; there is, in fact, no basis for the swap of the a-vowel in Yah to the e-vowel-like in Jehovah as the tetragrammaton carries an e-vowel-like in the first syllable (יְהוָה).
She then repeated this three times, identifying Jehovah as the 'God of Wickedness,' which I think is a serious blasphemy of the Holy Name of God.
This is the folly of someone trying to combine two words that are totally unconnected and make the name Jehovah to "sound" like He is the "god of ruin, calamnity, mischief or wickedness."
I find her explanation strange and too simplistic when she responded to a faculty member of hers who asked, "What about the name Yehowah in Chinese Bibles?" She replied (quoted verbatim), "Yeah, there is one scripture that is full of Jehovah. You know the 'New World Translation.' Straightaway, he said, 'Ah, that's a cult!' (referring to Jehovah's Witnesses)."
To such a point, my question is: "Do we not have the word Elohim in the Hebrew text that can refer to either the God of Israel, or even the gods of the Canaanites?" This does not mean that the Elohim who created the world is the same as the Canaanite gods. Having the same names does not mean that everyone with the name John Smith is the same John Smith that I know. Therefore, we cannot equate Jehovah of the Bible with the Jehovah of the Jehovah's witnesses.
Her reason for persuading people to drop the name Jehovah is because she claims that the sound you make carries the meaning "God of wickedness" or "God of ruin". This is simply a lack of understanding of the etymology of the tetragrammaton יהוה.
If sound is what she claims to be the same as 'god of wickedness' or 'god of ruin', there are words that have similar sound in different languages. Going by her rationale, for those of us who know Cantonese, shouldn't both Malachi and Haggai immediately drop their names, since these names pronounced in Cantonese sound like, "skinny chicken" and "black chicken," respectively? To further illustrate my point, there is a word in Greek that is translated as 'I toil/ labour.' Now, if you go to the coffee shop and you shout out κοπιαω to tell everyone that you have been working very hard for the entire week, you will see a cup of kopi-o on your table. You just cannot equate a word from one language with word of another language. Words may sound alike, but they have totally different meanings. This is the fallacy of people who have been spreading rumours that the name Allah cannot be used just because there is a word in Hebrew אָלָ֔ה (Zech 5:3) that sounds the same, but meaning 'curse.' To these people, I said there is also a word in Greek αλλα which means 'but' and in Hebrew, we have a word in Genesis 1:1 בְרֵשִׁית which means 'beginning' and has nothing to do with the human or animal excretion.
Only those who have been brought up with the idea that the number four is a taboo for the Cantonese just because it sounds like "death" in Cantonese would come out with a theory that tries to relate God's Name as the 'god of destruction' or 'god of wickedness.' Why not suggest that all chapters four in the books of the Bible be changed to Chapters 3A just because four in Cantonese sounds almost the same as death.
I wish to reiterate that our Heavenly Father, our LORD Jehovah is not the god of wickedness and to say that He is the god of wickedness, it is nothing but a blasphemy of the Name of God.
If she were correct in her interpretation, millions of believers at a time when the KJV used the Holy Name of Jehovah would now be in Hell. Far be it! To say that the Holy Name of Jehovah is the 'god of the supremely evil' or the 'god of wickedness' is nothing but a blasphemy.
More Errors
She quoted the work of Emil Gustav Hirsch, a major Reform Movement (Jewish) Rabbi in the US, that it was "grammatically impossible to transliterate 'Jehovah' from YHWH." My question is, "Why not?"
יְהוָה
יְ- yә
ה
וָה- vâ or wa
According to Jewish biblical scholar, Nehemia Gordon, one of the actual pronunciation of the Name was intentionally hidden from the Gentiles. However, based on his research, Gordon found six Masoretic manuscripts where there were slip-ups in the copying process where the יהוה were copied with the full vowels for 'Jehovah' (fastforward the video below to 52:47 min). "The full vowels are never Yahweh," Gordon claims. Gordon reveals that he also found eleven rabbis who told him that the name is pronounced as Yehovah (listen to the video from 54:27 min onwards).
Now, for this lady to then claim that Jehovah is a mispronunciation caused by "Christian theologians," is simply irresponsible.
Her attempts to squeeze in the Hebrew vowels (or nikuds) from the word Adonai and Elohim into the tetragrammaton (יהוה) to give it a different קְרֵי/ כְּתִיב rendition to the same tetragrammaton is done to show why the name should not be pronounced as Yehovah or Jehovah.
There are also others who say that the Name Jehovah should not be used because it is used by the Jehovah Witnesses. This is ridiculous as the word Elohim is also used in the Bible to refer to the gods of the Canaanite. Does that mean we drop the Name Elohim from Genesis 1:1?
Dr Bill Barrick in his lecture (watch from time 15:00 min - 30:00 min) explained very well about the Name Jehovah. He explains how although he prefers the name Yahweh, the Name Jehovah was formed using the vowels in Adonai to the tetragrammaton. I agree with him on this.
In fact, Weingreen also explains it very well in his book, "A Practical Grammar for Classical Hebrew" (page 23). The name Jehovah or Yehovah, although impossible form of the tetragrammaton, is just a combination of the tetragrammaton with the vowels of Adonai.
Therefore, although I do not use the name or even Yahweh in my worship, whenever I sing the Scripture chorus, "Jehovah Jireh, My Provider" I have no problem using the name Jehovah. Just because the sound of the Name appears similar to something else, let us not bring God's Name to the point of blasphemy calling our God the god of wickedness. (Read until the end of this article and you will understand why).
Source: Weingreen, page 23
My response: This clearly shows her lack of understanding of the Hebrew language and how it works:
(A) It is more appropriate to say that a verb becomes a qal imperfect when the yod carries a segol as in the word יֶאֱהַב (meaning, 'he loves') in Prov 3:12.
(B) She has failed to convince me how the hiriq in Elohim makes the last syllable which is 'vih' or 'wih' to suddenly sound as 'him' (as in Elohim). Or, how qamats-hey in Adonai can become a qamats-hey. All except that this is a קְרֵי/ כְּתִיב rendition to the tetragrammaton; but everyone knows that in the standard Hebrew text words such as יֶהֹוִה simply do not exist!
Going a bit further, the name יְהוֹנָתָן (Yehonathan) means, 'God gives.' The first part of the name is, in fact, Yeho where the second syllable clearly carries the o-vowel. יְהוֹנָתָן (Yehonathan) is the Hebrew name for Jonathan in English/ German/Dutch/French/other European languages where the J is pronounced as a Y as in the case of Johann being pronounced as Yohann). The same with the name Jehozadak (יְהוֹצָדָק) and Jehozabad (יְהוֹזָבָד). If Yeho (or Jeho) can be accepted as 'God', there is no reason why the tetragrammaton cannot be read with the missing 'o-vowel' to it as Yehovah or Jehovah.
The קְרֵי/ כְּתִיב tradition simply means that whenever the Name Jehovah appears in the Scriptures, the Jews would read it as Adonai (Weingreen, 22). In my post here, I pointed out that all things Jewish may not necessarily be correct as the tetragrammaton can be prefixed with some inseparable prepositions! Wouldn't this be something unthinkable for the Jewish mindset but words such as לַיהוָה appears 580 times through the entire Old Testament).
At best, this is just her attempt to prove that the name Jehovah is not correct and to then conveniently link it to the 'god of destruction' or 'god of wickedness.'
Finally, I encourage us to watch this video by Jeff Benner which explains that the Name of God should not cause any unnecessary division in the church, especially when someone claims that the Name which has been used in the Bibles for centuries is, as both persons claim, the 'god of wickeness' and the 'god of the supremely evil.' This is divisive as it touches on the sensitivity of people who have been worshipping God and have identified Him as Jehovah Jireh, Jehovah Rapha, and so on. Millions of people have also been singing the Scripture choruses, "Jehovah Jireh, my Provider..."
While having my devotion, I stumbled upon Psalm 40: 5 which appears to have all the Nikud. This could possibly be due to the scribe who copied the manuscript:
In my discussion with this lady, I noticed that she is fond of saying, "God spoke to me." The danger of this is, of course, when two persons of opposing views come together and say that God revealed to them something. Which God is the right God or whom has God really spoken to?
It is okay for anyone who feels that he/she does not want to use the Name Jehovah, but to call Jehovah the God of Wickedness or the Name of the Supremely Evil is to blaspheme the Name of the LORD.
I pray for God's mercy upon all of us that such heresies will not spread and the blasphemies will not be uttered against the Name of our LORD God Jehovah, who alone is the אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה (I AM WHO I AM). Amen.
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