What do you do when faced with a faith tradition nearly universally honored and almost never questioned but you decide is kind of suspect?<\/p>\n\n\n
This is how it is with Bible translations substituting “LORD” for God’s proper name, “YHWH”, usually transliterated as “Yahweh”.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
“Yahweh” is specifically given first to Moses as God’s name all the way back at the burning bush. It then appears nearly 7,000 other times throughout Scripture.<\/p>\n\n\n
But somehow a few centuries before the birth of Christ, the Jews started substituting “Adonai” (which meant lord or master) for Yahweh in both the copying and the public reading of Scripture.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
The justification was this: We don’t want to risk breaking the 3rd commandment of “taking (Yahweh’s) name in vain”. And so, because it is so holy, we won’t say it or write it.<\/p>\n\n\n
Later, Christians followed suit and continued this tradition.<\/p>\n\n\n
But why did the scribes and teachers decide it was within their rights to make such a major change to Yahweh’s inspired word? Why would He offer His name in the first place – and tell Moses to use it with the Israelites when explaining Who sent him – if He didn’t want anyone to ever utter it?\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
To me, it’s not that it is inappropriate to refer to the Supreme Being of the Universe as “God” or as “Lord”, obviously, but either of those options creates quite a bit more distance than His personal name would.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Jesus’ use of “Father” brings a distant “God” or “Lord” much closer again, which is good. But how should a modern Christian preacher deal with “LORD” throughout the Old Testament?\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Just ignore the underlying reality? Or start reading it as “Yahweh”?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What do you do when faced with a faith tradition nearly universally honored and almost never questioned but you decide is kind of suspect? This is how it is with Bible translations substituting “LORD” for God’s proper name, “YHWH”, usually transliterated as “Yahweh”.\u00a0 “Yahweh” is specifically given first to Moses as God’s name all the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10546"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10546\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10547,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10546\/revisions\/10547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}