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"My People Will Know My Name"
If someone who had fallen into a ditch shouted up to you, "Hey, Bud, would you help me out of here?", you would undoubtedly help him out, even if "Bud" wasn't your name, and think nothing of it. But what if, after you introduced yourself and you became close friends, he kept on calling you "Bud"? You'd find it strange and a bit irritating, wouldn't you? Yet this is exactly the way our Creator is often treated.
"Who has established all the ends of the earth? What is His name, and the name of His son? Tell me if you know!" (Prov. 30:4b)
How can you really love someone whose name you don't even know? This connection is directly highlighted in Scripture's parallel poetry:
"Because he has set his love on me, I will deliver him; I will set him on high because he has known My Name." (Psalm 91:14)
He is commonly known as "God" and "Lord", but these are just substitutes for the Hebrew titles Elohim and Adon or Adonai. At best, this is like calling Him "the Boss" or "Sir". That may be respectful enough in some situations; there is some Scriptural precedent. But when addressing Him directly, this could be as impersonal as calling Him "the man upstairs" or referring to your best friend as "that guy".
Even legitimate titles are not always specific enough. Elohim can also refer to other angelic or demonic beings, and even human judges. At root it means "mighty ones". But in modern times the Beatles' George Harrison used the generic term "Lord" to refer to Hare Krishna. Such ambiguity will certainly be part of the coming Counterfeit Messiah's smokescreen to deceive the masses, making it all the more urgent to be more specific.
The ten commandments are actually called the "Ten Declarations" in Hebrew. The first is, "I am YHWH your Elohim ". The very first thing He wanted to tell His people about Himself was His proper name. Why? Because it reveals much about who He is. Linguistically, Yahweh is a composite of several tenses of the Hebrew word "to be": Hayah, Hoveh, and Yihyeh—together meaning "the One who was, is, and will remain".
At the burning bush, He commanded Moses to
"Tell the children of Israel [that] YHWH... has sent you; this is My Name and how I am to be remembered for all generations." (Exodus 3:15)
Why, then, are foreign titles substituted for His Name when the Hebrew names of most others in Scripture like Avraham or David are closely transliterated? The third Commandment says:
“You shall not bring the name of Yahweh your Elohim to nothing.” (Exodus 20:7)
We can bring His name to nothing by claiming to be His people yet practically denying that He really has any power by relying on other securities. But we can also nullify it by failing to use it when we should. Of course we must never use His holy Name flippantly. We've seen what has been done to the name "God". He kept His true Name from widespread use until we stopped mixing true Hebraic worship with paganism. But the Psalms show that ideally He wants us to use His real name. It was used every day (yet respectfully) in ancient Israel. Boaz greets his fieldworkers with "May Yahweh be with you", and they reply, "YHWH bless you!" (Ruth 2:4)
"You shall not profane the Name of your Elohim. I am YHWH ." (Lev. 19:12)
Profaning His Name is more than just using it as a "swear word". It can also include substituting it with foreign names that were once used for pagan gods. What the verse misquoted on page 1 really says is:
"I am Yahweh; that is My Name, I will not give My glory to another, or My praise to graven images." (Isaiah 42:8)
If idols have no power, the only way His glory could go to them is by our giving other deities credit for what He has actually done! And you might even be doing this without realizing it or intending to.
What if your wife kept calling you by her former boyfriend's name? Yet that's what we do if we call our true Master by the name by which our old master was known! You see, "God" is not simply a neutral translation for YHWH 's Name or title. It actually came from a pagan source.
An unsettling verse links "forsaking YHWH " with "setting a table to that troop" or, better, "Fortune", a pagan deity. (Isaiah 65:11) In Hebrew it is Gad, pronounced exactly like "God"! Ba'al (best translated "Lord") was a category of pagan deities. One of them was named Ba'al-Gad--all too close to "Lord God"!
That they sound alike may not seem compelling enough. But there is no question that German Gott, from which we derive "God", was a particular pagan deity's name before being borrowed to communicate the Christian concept of the Most High. The Institute for Scripture Research (South Africa) traces it to the Indo-European Ghodh, which means "union" (with a sexual connotation, from which the Dutch/ German gade led to the English term "gad about").
Even mentioning the names of pagan deities is an abomination to Him. (Ex. 23:13; Joshua 23:7).
"My Name is continually blasphemed every day. Therefore My people will know My Name." (Isa. 52:6)
That was a high priority to Yeshua. When recounting to his Father in Gethsemane how He had finished the work He had given him to do, he prayed, "I have revealed Your Name to those whom You have given me." (John 17:6) If it needed to be "revealed" or "exposed", it must have been hidden. The religious leaders of His day had forbidden anyone to voice YHWH's Name. Yeshua disagreed with this practice, which stemmed from a Babylonian taboo of not speaking the names of their deities, since they did not want the "gods" to pay them too much attention.
There's some truth to that; YHWH says that when His people "call on My Name, I will respond to them..." (Zech. 13:9) Why wouldn't we want our Elohim, who desires to bless us, to pay attention to us? So the Maccabees reinstated the usage of the Name. It became so widely used that people were writing it even on business documents that ended up in the trash at times. So concerned leaders swung back to the other extreme and again forbade its use altogether, except by the High Priest on the Day of Atonement.
The Talmud (a Jewish commentary on the Scriptures) says the rabbinic leaders declared that everything possible had to be done to obscure the true pronunciation of the Name. The 8th-century Masoretic text added a system of points under the Hebrew consonants that comprise the original Scriptures, to make pronunciation easier for people who no longer spoke Hebrew every day. But in 134 cases they admittedly substituted the name Adonai where the sacred text actually said YHWH. Adonai is acceptable elsewhere, but adding to or taking away from His Holy Word is directly forbidden. (Deut. 4:2; Rev. 22:18)
"If we have forgotten the name of our Elohim, or spread out our hands to a strange god, won't Elohim search this out?" (Psalm 44:20-21)
So the only way to repair this situation is to cause the name of Yahweh our Elohim to be remembered." (Psalm 20:7; compare Jer. 23:27)
Orthodox Jews say that one reason His name was hidden was because Israel was in exile—a concept linked in the prophets with His hiding His face. But Rabbi Pinchas Winston affirms the tradition that when the Redemption takes place (both houses of Israel are brought home together) at the dawn of the Messianic era, the Sacred name will again be pronounced as it is written!
So now we have a more positive reason to use His real name: it means our exile is nearly over! Scripture bears this out completely:
"You will call me, "My husband" instead of "my Lord" [Ba'al], because I will take the names of the Ba'als out of her mouth." (Hosea 2:16-17)
"This time I will make them familiar with My ...power, and they will know that My Name is YHWH." (Jeremiah 16:21)
"They will be treating My Name as sacred." (Isaiah 29:23)
But if both Jews and the church stopped using the actual Name that is written with no vowels, how can we be sure we're saying it correctly?
It can't be "Jehovah", because there is no "J" sound in Hebrew. (This also rules out the possibility of a Hebrew Messiah's name being pronounced "Jesus".*) Strong arguments can be made for "Y'howah", however. We will not argue over that; the names that begin in "Y'ho" and end in "Yahu" suggest that there may just have been some variation in pronunciation; that is not the issue.
Others say it should be Yahveh because of modern Hebrew pronunciation.**
But transliterations into other languages from when ancient Hebrew was used daily all point to "Yahweh" being the way it was said in Biblical times.***
Then, like now, there were undoubtedly some variations in pronunciation, so while we must choose according to the best evidence, we should not fight over slight differences if they do not go so far afield as to sound like the names of other deities; that He forbids.
YHWH has overlooked our ignorance and responded because of our need even when we used the wrong name. But once we know the facts, we must immediately repent and leave past mistakes behind. (Acts 17:30) "To whom much is given, from him much is required." (Luke 12:48)
Where do you start? In a typical English Bible, wherever you see the word "LORD" (in all capitals) replace it with the correct name, YHWH. Where you see "God", begin pronouncing it as Elohim, and when you see "Lord" with only a capital "L", begin reading it as "Adonai", which simply means "Master". Read "Jesus" as "Yeshua" or possibly the longer version, "Y'hoshua".
This time, let's get it right, going to neither extreme of profaning His Name or "bringing it to nothing".
*This is actually a fifth-hand transliteration of the Hebrew name Y'hoshua. The Aramaic version was the Yeshua (as in Ezra and Nehemiah), rendered Iesous ("Yeh-soos") in Greek (since the "sh" sound does not exist in Greek and every masculine name in Greek ends in "s"). In German the same pronounciation was rendered "Jesus" since the German "J" has a "y" sound. We kept the spelling in English but changed the pronunciation.
**This results from the influence of German/ Yiddish, which has no "w" sound. The equivalent letter in Arabic (which is closely related to Hebrew but continued to be used every day, unlike Hebrew, which for a long time was used only in liturgy like Latin today) is pronounced like a "w".
***The historian Josephus, whose life overlapped with Yeshua's, said the Name was made up of 4 vowels. (Wars of the Jews, book 5, Chapter 5, Section 7) He was writing to a Roman audience whose lingua franca was Greek. Early "Church Fathers" like Clement of Alexandria did transliterate it into Greek as the equivalent of IAUE. Theodoret said Iaove was a variation used by the Samaritans. (Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 9, p. 161) The late Anson Rainey, a noted archaeologist and professor of Semitic Linguistics at Tel Aviv University, cites the best pronunciation from Greek papyri found in Egypt as "Iaouee". (London Papyri, xlvi, 446-483). The Oxford English dictionary gives IAHUE (Yahuweh) as another possibility, and all the names ending in -yahu make this quite likely.
