Jehovah

In certain quarters considerable stress is laid upon this word as the proper name by which the Almighty God should be known. It is not generally realised that this word does not date earlier than the sixteenth century, and had its origin in a misunderstanding of Hebrew pronunciation. The ancient Israelites had a reverential objection to uttering the name of God which to them, without its vowels, was represented by the letters Y H V H and if uttered at all would have been pronounced YAHVEH. In order to guard against inadvertent utterance of the sacred name it became usual in writing to substitute the vowels from the word Adonai (Lord). Through the ages even this vocalisation was lost and it was a sixteenth century scholar, Petrus Galatinus, who in 1518 published a work in which he coined the name Jehovah and applied it for the first time as the name of God. As a word, the term rests on no earlier authority and should not be regarded as anything more than a transliteration into English—and a bad transliteration at that—of the substitute word which the Jews reverentially used in place of the "incommunicable Name," the Name they would neither pronounce nor write down because it was the sacred name of God.

September October 1982