In the comments of my previous article, ‘What’s the big deal with translating Yahweh as LORD?’ a commenter named John raised the issue of how the New Testament translates יהוה (yhwh—“Yahweh”) from the Old.

He pointed out that the New Testament writers didn’t exclusively quote the LXX, which translates יהוה as κύριος (kurios—“Lord”). In fact, they sometimes made their own translations of the Hebrew Bible, and they themselves rendered יהוה as kurios, rather than transliterating it as a name.

This is rather like if we took the Greek word Ἰησοῦς (Iesous—“Jesus”) and rendered it as “the Christ”. As I argued, this is a poor, indeed illegitimate translation option, for obvious reasons.

So a question arises: since God, by his Spirit, used kurios to translate יהוה for Greek-speaking people, why isn’t it better for us to use the word Lord for English-speaking people, rather than Yahweh?

It’s a good question. I think if we reframe it slightly, we can start to see where the answer lies:

If it is illegitimate to translate Iesous as “the Christ” instead of as Jesus, because the translator’s job is to faithfully represent the text in the new language, then why did the New Testament writers consider it legitimate to translate יהוה as kurios instead of as the Greek equivalent of Yahweh?

A pragmatic reason dismissed

When the New Testament was written, the name Yahweh had already been lost. So if the NT writers had wanted to use Yahweh instead of kurios, they were pretty stuck. They probably couldn’t translate it as a name while still being understood by their audience. (We are in the opposite situation: the name Yahweh has been unlost.)

But it would be circular reasoning for me to say that they translated it as kurios only because they couldn’t translate it as Yahweh. I would be begging the question if I said that they wanted to translate it as Yahweh, and were only prevented by circumstance. I simply can’t know that from the mere facts of history. And indeed, I highly doubt this, because of the considerations below.

Translation versus theologizing

The key issue revolves around that question of why it is illegitimate to translate a name as a title. Why is it illegitimate to translate Iesous as “the Christ” rather than as Jesus, for example?

The answer, I’ve already said, is that the job of a translator is to faithfully represent the original text in the new language. So names are transliterated as names, and titles and translated as titles.

So here’s the crunch:

The job of the NT writers was not translation but teaching

This is critical. The NT writers deliberately conflated Jesus and Yahweh by using the term kurios, which could easily and naturally be applied to both. This is exactly what many Christians do in their prayers by addressing the Lord—they are directing their prayer to God, rather than to a specific person.

(That said, Jesus does instruct us to direct our prayers to the Father in Matthew 6:9-13.)

Using Lord or kurios in this way is completely legitimate as a theological interpolation. It is a basic example of theologizing the text. The New Testament writers did it because, under inspiration, they were emphasizing the deity of Jesus—just as Christians do it when praying because they are speaking to both Jesus and the Father (and, let us hope, the Spirit).

Theologizing is antithetical to “pure” translation

The job of a translator, however, is explicitly to not make theological interpolations like this. The job of a translator is purely to faithfully transmit what the text actually says.

We can easily see the dramatic importance of this by simply asking whether a translator can theologize other texts in the way that the New Testament writers do. Can they not only theologize יהוה as “Lord”, but also other parts of the Hebrew Bible according to the New Testament theologizations?

To take a concrete example, Hebrews 10:5 quotes Psalm 40:6 as saying “a body you have prepared for me”. Now, the Hebrew text of Psalm 40:6 actually says, “ears you have dug out for me”. Suppose I am creating a new translation of the Old Testament. Can I legitimately render the Hebrew, “ears you have dug,” as the English, “a body you have prepared”?

Surely not!

The Hebrew doesn’t say that. My job as a translator is not to interpolate NT theology onto the Hebrew text where it doesn’t actually exist. It is to faithfully represent what the Hebrew actually says.

But by the same token, “the LORD” is not a faithful representation of יהוה—any more than “the Christ” would be a faithful representation of Iesous.

Now, I have presented quite a stark sketch here. There are serious questions of nuance that you need to address when doing translation. For example, does God’s “digging out” of ears in Psalm 40:6 refer to metaphorically opening them, or is it a picture of drilling a hole in the ear of a slave? Either option will, to some extent, theologize the text—which is not ideal. But “ears you have dug out for me” is unhelpful in its own right, being something we would not say in English, and thus not easily understood—which is also not ideal.

These nuances are important, but they don’t bear on the basic question of whether we should translate names as names, and titles as titles. That goes without saying for just about any other example you can think of in any text at all.

 5 comments

Flora

Thank you for your article. I have become troubled by the term Lord since discovering that the number 1 false god Ba’al translates as ‘lord’. This, in effect, means that Satanists etc. Can happily say prayers like Psalm 23 without contradicting their principles.
You seem to be saying that Yahweh is Jesus, though, and much as I love Jesus and recognise him as our redeemer, being God was a claim he never made of himself.
Also, I wonder how the prophetic psalm that begins, ‘The LORD said to my Lord…’ should correctly be translated.
Yahweh bless!

Dominic Bnonn Tennant

I’m not sure why a Satanist would pray Psalm 23, especially given that they would know the Lord it was referring to wasn’t Ba’al, but Yahweh. Moreover, I’m not sure why the fact that a Satanist (or anyone else) can twist a particular translation should be counted as a reason against using that translation. It’s just a non sequitur.

With respect to Jesus, I’m afraid you are mistaken. The Old Testament clearly shows that Yahweh is not just one person, and the New Testament identifies the second person of Yahweh with Jesus in very clear terms. If I may, my series on overt Christology in the Old Testament will probably be both eye-opening and helpful to you, along with my article on whether Jesus really is God.

Henry Milewski

Hello Bnonn,

Hope you are well. I’ve appreciated this series of 3 articles on Yahweh, and am still stewing on it. You write on p184 ‘Spine of Scripture’:

‘…names; these should be transliterated since it is their sounds that function as tokens of identification, even when the meanings of these sounds are also of crucial value and should be footnoted. Hence my issue with “the LORD” in place of Yahweh.’

In contrast (?), wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration ) seems to suggest that whilst *translation* retains meaning, but not sound, and *transcription* retains sound, that *transliteration* converts one script into another by substituting letters in predictable ways. It is not primarily concerned with representing the sounds (or meaning), but rather the characters.

So, a few questions:

1. Do you think this is correct?

2. The Greek Iesous (‘yey-soos’ – Gk. transliteration of Hebrew Yeshua) appears to sound quite different from the Hebrew form (which was not Joshua, but a variant of it). This would seem to give divine warrant for quite a bit of flexibility in pronunciation when transliterating a name?

3. If so, then it seems that *sound* does not seem to be critical (‘yey-soos’ to the Greeks, ‘Yeshua’ to the Hebrews, ‘Jesus’ to the English). We should then conclude that the important point is rather the preservation of a personal name, in which there is (quite a bit of) flexibility on pronunciation depending on the language/era being worked with. An thus, similarly with Yahweh. (So continuing to sing ‘Guide us O Thou Great Jehovah’ is not bad).

Interested to hear your thoughts,

Dominic Bnonn Tennant

Henry, good to hear from you.

I guess I was really bundling transliteration and transcription together.

The goal of transliteration is to render the word as faithfully as possible in a way that makes sense in the target language. So yes, this will often end up with something that differs from the original, while still resembling it. I don’t see that as an issue.

Mind you, I do think we can do a lot better here. Very few names in Scripture are transliterated faithfully into English because their Roman forms came to us through Latin, which has notably different pronunciation. Hence Jesus rather than Yesus, or Isaiah rather than Yeshayahu. There’s really nothing preventing us saying the Hebrew words basically correctly in English; we just don’t know them because we inherited Latin transliterations instead, and tried to pronounce them as if they were English.

I dunno about Yeshayahu, but it would kind of bother me if that many people were mangling my name that badly on the reg. And let’s not even talk about what a raw deal James got…

Henry Milewski

Hello Bnonn,
The author a small recent book ‘The LSB and other unusual Bible Questions’ has kindly made the chapter on the Yahweh vs Jehovah question available online:

https://www.bpsglobal.org/uploads/2/9/3/0/29302395/jehovah_or_yahweh-res.pdf

To my mind, he makes a compelling argument that the traditional ‘Yehovah’ (‘J’ pronounced as ‘Y’, which was apparently the case in 1611 english) is indeed correct, and that the relatively recent move to Yahweh very poorly founded. He includes some recent evidence that has come to light that I had also seen elsewhere online. As a separate point he also argues that the best evidence suggests the origin of ‘Yahweh’ actually goes back to the name of a pagan god Jupiter. That would be quite shocking outcome for the LSB translators.

I thought you would be interested to see this, it is very helpful to have the arguments, including the recent evidence, pulled together in one place.

Perhaps a find+replace job for your Yahweh articles is in order?
p.s. I lost your email address when you left FB, hence the comment here. If you wouldn’t mind emailing it to me be I’d appreciate that.