Bible Translation and God's Name

Bible Translation and God's Name

Let's begin this study be looking at a reason why we find "LORD" in our English bibles instead of YHWH, or, "Yahweh."

English translations of the Bible that use the word "LORD" (where all the letters of the word are capitalized) to represent the tetragrammaton, rather than trying to render the letters as a pronounceable word (which may be incorrect anyway), follow this tradition. But the word "LORD" is to be understood as representing the name that God gave for Himself (ebible.com)

However, it's uniformly agreed that the "tetragrammaton" can be represented "in English as YHWH, YHVH, JHWH, or JHVH." English speakers would use the vowels to get "Yahweh" or "Jehovah" respectively. My question is, Why take this away and replace it with LORD? Why take this away from readers? These letters "L-O-R-D" are the *furthest away* from anything the Hebrew would give. Why not either use Yahweh or Jehovah, or leave them as YHWH or JHVH?

The mere appearance of "Jehovah" in our English Bibles, where translators were trying to respect context, etc. is, in my opinion, a casualty. If they understood that YWHH or JHVH could be respectfully rendered Yahweh or Jehovah for the benefit of both preserving God's proper name, and helping English readers appreciate and use it, then why only a select few places and not all throughout the O.T.? 

All Bible translations that ignore this, and instead use LORD, fail to be true in actually conveying Hebrew thought--yes, even the beloved KJV.

If you're like me and grew up using the KJV and therefore prefer the KJV, but you also want to use the names Jehovah or Yahweh, and you want to read them in the text where they belong, then I suggest these Bibles, which I purchased and am very happy to use in my studies and teaching:


The former maintains the older style English "thees" and "thous" while the latter updates the language, keeps the structure, and uses the divine names Yahweh and Ya, and refers to his son as Yeshuah.

God's name is Yahweh. His son's name is Yeshuah. Honor them.