Is the word Yahweh forbidden in Catholic music?

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mkamoski1

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All -

Please help.

Is the word Yahweh forbidden in Catholic music?

I heard a rumor to that effect, that it was recently deprecated or banned or something.

I can think of one song that, somewhat conspicuously, is not longer heard in my parts, where the chorus goes (or used to go) something like “To you, Yahweh, I lift up my soul, oh my God”, etc.

Do you have any references as to whether or not the word Yahweh is banned or deprecated in Catholic music for the Mass?

Please advise.

Slave To The Sacred Heart Of Christ,
  • Mark Kamoski
 
mkamoski1 said:
All -

Please help.

Is the word Yahweh forbidden in Catholic music?

I heard a rumor to that effect, that it was recently deprecated or banned or something.

I can think of one song that, somewhat conspicuously, is not longer heard in my parts, where the chorus goes (or used to go) something like “To you, Yahweh, I lift up my soul, oh my God”, etc.

Do you have any references as to whether or not the word Yahweh is banned or deprecated in Catholic music for the Mass?

Please advise.

Slave To The Sacred Heart Of Christ,
  • Mark Kamoski
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Yes, it is prohibited in music used at Mass or in other liturgies of the Church, although the Church does not prohibit singing songs with the Divine Name on your own or in other contexts. This was ordered in 2008; you can read the directive here, and it’s brief and readable so I’ll let it speak for itself.
 
Wow. I never heard that. What an eye opener now that I look back on the hymns I sung at my old parish and how many times Yahweh is mentioned in that hymnal.
 
I think that using the name “Yahweh” in songs was one of the post Vatican II innovations.

I was always uncomfortable with it and am glad that the practiced has been banned.

To be honest I am not sure why I was uncomfortable using it.

P.S. Maybe it was simply that I don’t really like singing the song “Yehweh I Know”
 
MarkThompson said:
Yes, it is prohibited in music used at Mass or in other liturgies of the Church, although the Church does not prohibit singing songs with the Divine Name on your own or in other contexts. This was ordered in 2008; you can read the directive here, and it’s brief and readable so I’ll let it speak for itself.
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Okay good because I don’t want to stop singing the U2 song Yaweh 🙂
 
Thanks for making clear that this can be sung outside of Mass.
 
MarkThompson said:
Yes, it is prohibited in music used at Mass or in other liturgies of the Church, although the Church does not prohibit singing songs with the Divine Name on your own or in other contexts. This was ordered in 2008; you can read the directive here, and it’s brief and readable so I’ll let it speak for itself.
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Interesting. Thanks for posting this.
 
I’ve actually been to several masses where I have heard the word Yahweh mentioned in music. The band at my old parish, in fact, did it quite often. I had no idea about that at all. Interesting…
 
And why is that? You can’t praise God’s name in song (Aramaic Name)? Really???

May God Bless.

Ed
 
More and more the Catholic Church keeps pulling away from Biblical supported evidence of what is OK and what is not. I guess King David was wrong for praising his God in song.

Ed
 
ronin67 said:
More and more the Catholic Church keeps pulling away from Biblical supported evidence of what is OK and what is not. I guess King David was wrong for praising his God in song.
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Do these reasons from this 2008 article make sense to you?
The Tetragrammaton is YHWH, the four consonants of the ancient Hebrew name for God.
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“As an expression of the infinite greatness and majesty of God, it was held to be unpronounceable and hence was replaced during the reading of sacred Scripture by means of the use of an alternate name: ‘Adonai,’ which means ‘Lord,’” the Vatican letter said. Similarly, Greek translations of the Bible used the word “Kyrios” and Latin scholars translated it to “Dominus”; both also mean Lord.
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“Avoiding pronouncing the Tetragrammaton of the name of God on the part of the church has therefore its own grounds,” the letter said. “Apart from a motive of a purely philological order, there is also that of remaining faithful to the church’s tradition, from the beginning, that the sacred Tetragrammaton was never pronounced in the Christian context nor translated into any of the languages into which the Bible was translated.”
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The two Vatican officials noted that “Liturgiam Authenticam,” the congregation’s 2001 document on liturgical translations, stated that “the name of almighty God expressed by the Hebrew Tetragrammaton and rendered in Latin by the word ‘Dominus,’ is to be rendered into any given vernacular by a word equivalent in meaning.”
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“Notwithstanding such a clear norm, in recent years the practice has crept in of pronouncing the God of Israel’s proper name,” the letter said. “The practice of vocalizing it is met with both in the reading of biblical texts taken from the Lectionary as well as in prayers and hymns, and it occurs in diverse written and spoken forms,” including Yahweh, Jahweh and Yehovah.
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ronin67 said:
More and more the Catholic Church keeps pulling away from Biblical supported evidence of what is OK and what is not. I guess King David was wrong for praising his God in song.

Ed
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Where in the Bible is God referred to as Yahweh?
 
I was born a Jew and we do not use YHWH in any form. We use Lord or Adonai or G-d. Actually, Yahweh and Jehovah was never used by my ancestors. We know the term, because it was handed down to us by tradition. It was written, but never spoken.

Somehow, Jehovah made it into the King James edition. It does not belong in there, because it’s a mistranslation of Yahweh. One is never allowed to say that name.

It’s not Aramaic. It is Hebrew. It was probably never used by Jesus, because the Galileans did not speak Hebrew. They spoke Aramaic. They read the scriptures in Hebrew until the modern era when they have been translated into modern languages. There is no reason to assume that this is the Aramaic way of praising God. In fact, we Jews have no idea how the word is pronounced. It is written in consonants. YAHWEH is a Latinization when it was transcribed into the Latin alphabet as YHWH. In Hebrew it is written as four consonants without vowel indicators.

יהוה‎)

Notice that there are no dots. My ancestors deliberately leave these out so that the name could never be pronounced. The dots in the Hebrew alphabet indicate where the vowel sound goes. That’s how it was transcribed into the Latin alphabet as four consonants.

When we pray in Hebrew we say Adonai and when we pray in English we say Lord and G-d, leaving out the “o” from the written language.

The reason that we have many hymns and songs with YHWH written after 1970 is because it was not known that Christians were not supposed to say that name in worship. Many Christian songwriters innocently took verses from the Hebrew Scriptures and wrote songs around them. There was no bad intention. It simply was not a question that ever came up, because most Christian hymns written in the vernacular were in German or Spanish. There is no translation for YHWH in German and in Spanish, it’s YAHVEH or YHVH However, Spanish Catholics never used it in their hymns, because of the strong Jewish influence in Spanish Catholicism. The Sephardic and the Catholics were often from the same families. They grew up with many of the same customs. Not pronouncing YHWH in worship was one of those, among many others.

Fraternally,

Br. JR, OSF 🙂
 
The issue is very simple. Pope Benedict can think like a Jew, much easier than the man in the pew. He’s an Augustinian scholar and Bonaventurian. Both are very similar to Jews in their thinking. He understands that the Jewish writers would write YHWH, but would never say it, even when reading the scriptures aloud. They would replace it with Adonai. To understand why it would be in the scriptures and be the unmentionable name, one has to think as a Jew. There are certain things that only God can say. One of those is his name. To men like Augustine and Bonaventure, this was so logical that they never thought about it, other than to comment on it a few times in their several hundred books. It was not something to which they dedicated a great deal of time, because they assumed that everyone understood as they did. Pope Benedict realizes that we don’t understand as Augustine and Bonaventure did. He clarifies it for us once and for all.

Fraternally,

Br. JR, OSF 🙂
 
ronin67 said:
More and more the Catholic Church keeps pulling away from Biblical supported evidence of what is OK and what is not. I guess King David was wrong for praising his God in song.

Ed
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King David said “Adonai” (Lord); he did not say “Yahweh” which has always been forbidden by the Jews to pronounce out loud.
 
jmcrae said:
King David said “Adonai” (Lord); he did not say “Yahweh” which has always been forbidden by the Jews to pronounce out loud.
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You are 100% correct. No Jew would say YHWH. You can’t even say it, because it has no vowels. If you go back to the Hebrew spelling that I posted, you will notice that there are no indicators for vowel sounds. Y A H W E H. Is an intelligent guess by the Latin scribes. They took the first two vowels and inserted them between the consonants. For all we know, the early Israelites who first wrote it heard Y I H W O H. We don’t realy know how it was pronounced in ancient times. Yahweh is only about 2,000 years old. YHWH is much older than that.

David, being a good Jew, would have said Adonai or Elohim, though Elohim is less common.

Fraternally,

Br. JR, OSF 🙂
 
We had this discussion in our Parish awhile back, not as in-depth, thank you to all for posting on this matter I found it really interesting.
 
jmcrae said:
King David said “Adonai” (Lord); he did not say “Yahweh” which has always been forbidden by the Jews to pronounce out loud.
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JReducation said:
You are 100% correct. No Jew would say YHWH. You can’t even say it, because it has no vowels. If you go back to the Hebrew spelling that I posted, you will notice that there are no indicators for vowel sounds. Y A H W E H. Is an intelligent guess by the Latin scribes. They took the first two vowels and inserted them between the consonants. For all we know, the early Israelites who first wrote it heard Y I H W O H. We don’t realy know how it was pronounced in ancient times. Yahweh is only about 2,000 years old. YHWH is much older than that.

David, being a good Jew, would have said Adonai or Elohim, though Elohim is less common.

Fraternally,

Br. JR, OSF 🙂
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Sacred Scripture, specifically the Torah, makes it plain that the name was meant to be pronounced from the beginning. The replacement of “JHWH/YHVH” with “Adonai” took place after the return from exile, and it was the result of a decision of the Jewish leadership at the time, not a command from God.

And Br. JR, in the original none of the words in the OT had vowels. Are you saying that we can’t pronounce any of them? We can be sure that the “Yah” part is correct, because it shows up in “hallelujah” and as the last syllable of a whole bunch of Hebrew names. The “-veh” part is a guess, but it’s a good guess made by some very smart and educated people.

And if you’re going to pronounce it, remember that the h’s are consonants in their own right and should be pronounced. “Yaa-way” is wrong. On the other hand, I don’t really think God is concerned with mispronunciations. If He is, we’re all in trouble, because it’s a lo-o-ong way from “YESHua” to “DZHEE-zus.”
 
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